The Catholic World, Vol. 25, April 1877 to September 1877

by Various

JANE’S VOCATION.

“O amare! O ire! O sibi perire! O ad Deum pervenire.”—St. Augustine.

She sat upon an enormous sea-washed cliff of granite, in a flood of golden light from the stooping western sun behind her. Beneath her the sea-waves rippled lightly against the cliff. Far out before her the broad expanse of sea extended till it met the sky. But on neither sea nor sky were the girl’s eyes fastened. She was looking steadily across the narrow gulf that separated the high promontory where her home was from the fishing town on the mainland. Behind her was a farm-house with its prosaic surroundings, and a few huts for drying fish were close at hand. Not far beyond these the stage-road ran, and coming over the brow of the promontory was the lumbering stage.

She did not hear the wheels as they went rumbling by, and did not know how closely she was scanned. Next the driver a youth was sitting, whose face bespoke the artistic temperament as plainly as did the portfolio and hastily-traced sketch upon his knee. Like a flash he caught the loveliness of the picture—its glorious framework of nature’s beauties, its central point of that girlish figure in its graceful pose: the upraised head, the hands clasped round the knee as she sat bending slightly forward, the sense conveyed of absorbed, pathetic yearning for something more and higher than the farm life of her home.

“Who lives there?” asked the young man of the driver; and the driver made answer, glancing for very pleasure at the boyish, handsome face, stamped, in spite of its vanity, with the impress of a singularly clean and happy heart:

“Nobody much, mister: old Jake Escott and Marm Escott and Jane. That’s Jane sitting there. She’s their niece, and the best o’ the lot.”

“Jane!” repeated the youth to himself; but to the driver he said: “Do they take boarders there?”

The man chuckled, as if the very idea was absurd.

“Much as they can do to board themselves, I guess. Shiftless set. 'Tan’t so much lack of money, though, as of go-aheadativeness. ’Twould be too much trouble.”

“Think I’d be a trouble?”

The man laughed again. “Don’t know 'bout that. You’re as clever a chap and as taking a chap to talk with as I’ve seen this many a day. You’re a real true, good-hearted gentleman, you be, sir; but you’re city-bred for all that. Reckon you’d want white napkins every meal, and all sorts of finified stuff. Marm Escott couldn’t give you such. 'Cause why? She’s no idea what they are.”

“I’ll try it,” the traveller said, shutting his portfolio decisively and speaking like one who always had his way. “Can’t you stop at the turn—there’s a good fellow—and let me and my traps down?”

“Well, well! You never meant to come here; that’s certain. Where ye bound?”

“Nowhere.” Then, seeing the driver’s puzzled look, “Anywhere,” the youth added merrily. “I’m come to do what I please, and stop where I please, and stay as long as I please. This is the loveliest place I have seen yet, and I must sketch it. Why, surely you have carried passengers before who had no settled destination, but liked to stop where it suited them.”

“Ye—es,” was the doubtful response. “Yes, mister. But never one quite like you. You’re a wide-awake chap and a merry, but you look as dainty as any city lady I ever met.”

The words were evidently taken as a compliment, in whatever way they might have been meant. The youth slung his knapsack over his shoulder, concealing the long name which had puzzled the driver for the whole journey—Van Stuyvesant Van Doorm—leaped lightly down from the coach almost before it stopped, doffed his cap courteously, and with a gay farewell was on his way along a narrow path to the house.

A woman, remarkable for nothing except her curiously total lack of anything noticeable, opened the door, but into that dull face an actual sunny gleam of pleasure came as soon as she saw the blithe young face before her. The descendant of all the Vans doffed his cap courteously again, with an answering gleam in his very brilliant eyes. He had been used all his life to know that people admired him, but it is to be acknowledged that this oft-repeated fact had never lost its charm.

“Is this Mrs. Escott?” he asked.

“I be,” was the succinct reply.

No faintest shadow of a smile betrayed her hearer’s amusement. He knew himself master already of the field. “If you please, Mrs. Escott,” he said audaciously, in his most captivating tone and with his most pleading, obstinate look, “I’m come to board with you.”

Mrs. Escott stared as one taken by storm and unable to collect her scattered forces. “But—but,” she stammered, “we never take boarders, we don’t.”

“This exception will prove the rule, then,” quoth Van. “Oh! for shame, Mrs. Escott. You never would have the heart to turn me away from such a view as this. I want to sketch it, and I will give you a sketch of it, and pay you the highest board into the bargain.”

“But we an’t got nothing fit to board ye on.”

“Ah? No eggs, then, I suppose,” suggested Van mildly, pointing at the hens cackling in the yard. “No milk, either,” he added as the lowing of a cow sounded near by. “No berries to be had for love or money, eh? And of course there are no fish to be found in the sea.”

The woman actually laughed. “I’ll speak to Jake,” she said, then disappeared, and Van seated himself on the doorstep and waited her return without fear of disappointment.

“Jane and I can pick berries,” he said to himself; and then he trilled forth gaily, in a voice that was the envy and admiration of city circles:

“In the days when we went gipsying,

Long time ago.”

The melody pleased him; it chimed in well with the birds’ blithe song in the trees and the faint dash of the waves along the shore. He began the song and went through it all as blithely and carelessly as they.

“That’s handsome, now,” an uncouth voice behind him said when he stopped at last with a sense of buoyant delight in his own power. “That’s handsome, stranger. Sing like that, and you’re welcome here, and no mistake.”

This was “Jake,” then, shuffling, untidy, uncouth as his voice. A misgiving arose in Van’s mind. Would the house, the table, his room, be like Jake and Marm Escott? But he need stay no longer than he chose—no longer than one night; and it was now nearly six o’clock in the afternoon. So, all necessary arrangements being concluded, Jake trundled a dilapidated wheel-barrow, in some vague, slipshod fashion, to the road to “fetch the stranger’s traps,” and Mrs. Escott, going to the gate, called loudly, “Jane! Jane! I want ye, child.”

Van, waiting in the parlor for her coming, looked attentively about him. There was almost nothing in the room to show that any one ever came there who cared a whit more for beauty than Jacob Escott himself did. Rag mats of discordant hues covered squares and ovals and rectangular parallelograms of the pine floor; the walls were decorated with coarse prints of General Washington and of the prize ox of twenty years ago; on the table was a big family Bible and a Farmer’s Almanac illuminating the sombre cover with its sickly yellow, and on this was a half-knitted blue yarn stocking.

There was a cheap piano in one corner, but it looked as though it was never opened. The windows were not uncurtained, but, of all other things there, they set Van’s teeth on edge with their execrable attempts at some sort of a painted landscape; he seized the tassels vindictively, and pulled the curtains out of sight, thus letting in the superb view beyond.

Some one, he discovered then, had had taste enough to put flowers in the room. A great handful of daisies and clovers and delicate grasses stood on the sill of the window that looked out to where the narrow gulf separated the promontory from the mainland.

“Jane’s work,” said Van to himself; and as he thought it, he heard a slow, calm step coming through the entry, and Jane herself stood in the doorway.

Involuntarily he bent his head with such a reverence as he had never paid to woman before. He was the cynosure at home among all ladies, but none yet had won from him the reverent greeting of an utter self-forgetful absorption in another’s presence. The girl who stood there was not beautiful, though there was nothing in her features to displease the artist’s eye; indeed, the absence of mere material beauty made more marked the impression conveyed in movement and feature and face. Of all colors in the world—and Van was passionately fond of color—he loved best the gold that is sometimes seen in the western sky near where the sun is setting: a clear, fair hue that does not dazzle but rests the eyes that gaze upon it. Van thought of that color when he saw Jane’s face with its look of unclouded peace.

She lifted her eyes and glanced at him, at first with a tranquil, unmoved expression, as though it was quite indifferent to her who it was that she was meeting; then she gave a quicker, keener glance that thrilled Van with an uneasy sense that she was reading him through and through. What was it that she read? he wondered.

He tried to talk with her as she moved about the room, engaged in the very ordinary task of setting the supper-table. Her language showed some culture and refinement. He hazarded the question, “Are there good schools about here?”

“I do not know,” she said meditatively. “There is the district school.”

“Why does she not say, 'I went there’?” thought Van. “That would tell me something about herself.”

But more and more he found, as his talk went on, that Jane ignored herself. It did not appear to enter her mind that she was anybody to be thought of or talked about. He had at first to make conversation at the supper-table—the farm, the fisheries, the crops—but presently Jacob Escott made bold to ask: “What may be your occupation, sir?”

And, nothing loath, Van launched upon one of his pet topics—art and artists. Even the plain farmer and his wife enjoyed it. How could they resist the fascination of the merry stories, the musical voice, the face that spoke as clearly as the words? But Jane hardly listened, and suddenly a thought struck Van: “This is mere surface-talk after all. Can it be that this farmer’s girl cares for anything deeper, or is it only that she has not depth enough to care?”

They rose from the table, and Van followed Jane to the door. She did not see or heed him. The tide was at the full; wave upon wave came heaving gently onward toward the land as a child, tired out with play, comes home to its mother’s arms to rest; through the twilight the dark, restless mass of water and its ceaseless murmuring alike woke a sense of mystery and awe; above, in the darkening skies, a pale half-moon was shining and a few great throbbing stars. And in the dim light Van saw Jane’s face, and it seemed to him as beautiful and as full of mystery as sea and sky. Such a look of hunger marked it! He thought of Niobe, and of Cassandra, and of Mariana in the moated grange, but she differed in some inexplicable fashion from them all, and then he heard her say below her breath: “My God! My God! My God!”

Over and over again—not what Van had ever fancied a prayer could be, and yet to his ear more full of intense personal pleading than any prayer he had ever heard. Faith, hope, love, expectation, keen desire, and suffering were all summed up in two words; and though he knew nothing of her trouble, yet when the aunt’s call for her came from the room within, Van started as if he had been struck. He could not bear to have her harried back into the dull life of her home.

“Just mend this, Janey, will you?” Mrs. Escott said, exhibiting a coarse blue shirt. “Your uncle wants it for to-morrow.”

The girl’s face was tranquil and happy again by some sudden transformation. She took the rough work—it was not clean work, either; it had evidently been worn once or twice, Van saw with mingled disgust and pity—and, sitting down contentedly in the dingy room, she began her mending. She puzzled Van greatly, she interested him intensely. As he talked to her uncle he watched with his artistically-trained eye each expression of her face. It varied now and then, though the strange, yearning look did not return to it. The peace was there, and an exquisite happiness.

“She is like a dove,” thought Van. “She is like an innocent baby. Oh! if one could take her away from this.”

But one clue to her character he was certain that he had found. He rose up before she finished her work, and he flung open the old piano and sat down before it. It was not so unfit for use as he had feared it would be, and he knew how to glide skilfully over the worst notes. And then he began to try Jane. First he sang ballads, “Robin Adair,” “John Anderson my jo, John,” “Oh! wert thou in the cauld blast.”

“That’s fine, Phœbe,” said Jacob, and Phœbe said “Yes” with an unwonted enthusiasm. But Jane worked steadily on, and if she heard or cared Van could not tell, though he fancied the sweet, dove-like look deepened upon her face.

“The brightest jewel in my crown

Wad be my queen, wad be my queen.”

The last tender notes of the song lingered under Van’s fingers, as a knock was heard at the kitchen door, and Jacob went to answer it, followed soon by Phœbe, who evidently recognized the voice of the new-comer. There was a scraping of chairs on the kitchen floor—the plain indication that somebody had come to stay awhile. Van leaned his head forward against the music-rack, and once again before his eyes was the scene he had witnessed in the twilight one hour before. Could the same person who sat quietly at her rough work now be she whom he had seen and heard then in that passion of prayer? And while he mused there rang through his brain echoes that always thrilled his music-loving, art-loving nature with an especial power, and that seemed now like fit mates for the darkly-heaving sea, the star-lit sky, the girl’s yearning face; and from the old ivory keys, that grew strangely full of power and sweetness beneath his magical touch, rang out Chopin’s grand funeral march.

The work dropped from Jane’s hands. He could not watch her face, for she turned it straight toward that eastern flower-decked window that looked out to gulf and sea; but he saw her fingers lock tightly into one another and her form become rigidly still. When he ended she rose quietly and went away, and he did not see her again that night.

But long that night he studied her, while an unwonted shame of himself and a keen admiration for her grew steadily in him, and what he inferred of her then was confirmed each day more and more.

“She does not know one-half the things that I know,” he said, “but she has it in her to care for the highest art and beauty. And she is so noble by nature that she couldn’t spend her thoughts on a thousand trifling things that I waste mine upon. Such a glorious creature imprisoned here! I’ll do my best for her.”

Never used to early rising, he came down stairs the next day to find his breakfast waiting for him and the morning of the family half over.

“Yes, we be early risers,” said Mrs. Escott. “Leastways, Jake and Jane be. I’m a poor hand at it myself. Why, Jane here, she’s across the gulf and home again afore six every day.”

“Across the gulf! Before six!” exclaimed Van.

“Certain sure, Mr. Van. These Catholics are queer creatures. Jane’s a Catholic, you know.”

Habitual courtesy quelled the words of surprise and of pain that rose to Van’s lips—surprise at finding a Catholic in this notedly Protestant fishing settlement, pain at hearing Jane’s deepest feelings thus lightly exposed to view. But Jane showed not the slightest shade of annoyance.

Now he thought he understood her better. One of the many marvellous spells of Catholicism had been woven about her—some vision of beauty had thus come into her hitherto blank life; he would strive the more now to teach her of what he blandly deemed the freer, nobler lights of art and science, but never should word or look from him throw scorn or jest or trifling speech of any kind on that which was dear to her.

Love at first sight—Van had always maintained that he believed in it; he was always falling in love with any pretty face that struck his fancy, and then just as easily falling out of love with an unwounded heart. But here love and pity and real reverence all awoke together and made of him their willing slave. “I’ll go with her to Mass to-morrow,” he said, and on the morrow he stood in the early sunrise on the beach.

So early was it that Jane herself was not yet there. He watched her coming towards her boat, her eyes cast down, and that hungry, longing look stamped plainly on her.

“May I go too?” he said, the gay, trifling manner gone, and that peculiarly distinct imprint of a clean heart shining in his eyes. Lifting her own sweet eyes, once again he felt that she read him through; then, saying nothing, she bowed assent and stepped into the boat. And still without a word she let him take the oars from her, and, drawing her rosary from her pocket, she began to tell her beads. Van thought she never would stop, and she did not till they reached the town. Still silent, she led the way from the shore through some dull, shell-paved paths to a small chapel, and, entering, forgot Van altogether and went with eager footsteps up the aisle. Van stationed himself where he could see her; she sank on her knees before the altar, and crossed herself, and lifted up her face. The lips were parted in a smile of ecstasy, the eyes were shining bright as though they saw unearthly loveliness.

What Van saw was this: a square, low-studded, dingy room, poor prints of religious subjects, mean tallow dips for candles, tawdry gilding and hangings, artificial tawdry flowers, a plain, small altar, a few squalid worshippers; presently an aged priest, who said Mass in a cracked and feeble voice.

“What spell is over her?” thought Van, marvelling. “Oh! if I could once take her out of it all, home to wealth and beauty and tenderness, and to our churches. No need to tell her that Catholics have beautiful ones somewhere.”

But on their way back to the farm she did not speak, and he could not venture to break the intense calm in which she was wrapped. Every evening he read or sang and played, or talked his best, in the parlor where the household gathered, but she never again was there alone with him, and in the daytime she was always busy just when he wanted her society most. Often he was conscious that what he said or read or did failed to make any impression at all upon her; often while he tried to interest her he found her gazing toward that eastern window, and knew that she did not heed him. He longed to say: “I cannot see what you find in that dull church to give your eyes and thoughts to,” but he could not say it.

Sometimes when he read, far oftener when he played grand music—often, too, when they watched the sky and sea and listened to the waves, the noble nature woke responsive to his call. But it stung him to the quick to feel his general powerlessness to move her except when he roused his best and highest powers; it stung him to see how little she cared for the comforts and luxuries and prettinesses, for knowledge even and the art, that were part of his daily existence, and which he deemed necessary to him; it stung him to find that the meanest occupation never made her discontented, but glad and bright instead; while what he considered suited to her condition or her needs was as nothing to her, and the yearning which he could not fathom seldom came into her face when at her daily labor, but often when he told himself she ought to be content and glad with him.

She talked very little to him; she never seemed to care whether he came or went, and he—all his thoughts became engrossed in her.

One afternoon, near the close of a sultry day, as the first mutterings of thunder and the first far-off flashes of lightning shone and sounded from the dark depths of low-lying clouds above the sea—when the winds were rising, and the poplars showed their leaves’ white faces, and the white-crested waves broke in ominously upon the shore; when Jane’s sensitive nature was awake and quivering in sympathy with the gathering storm—Jacob Escott came hurrying his cattle home to shelter, bringing with him a letter which the stage-driver had flung down to him as he raced his horses by to town. “For you, Mr. Van,” he said.

Van opened it carelessly, read it carefully, then came straight to where Jane stood, watching with keen delight the seething sea and storm-tossed sky.

“Jane,” he said, “listen to me. They have sent for me to go home at once. My father is very ill. Jane, I love you. Will you be my wife?”

She turned with great displeasure in her eyes. “You jest, sir,” she said. “Such jesting pains me much. Even my uncle understands that now.”

“I am not jesting,” he cried vehemently. “I speak the truth. I love you. None but you can ever be my wife. Give me your promise, Jane. I love you so.”

At first her look of rebuke waxed sterner; then for a moment her eyes met the pleading bright eyes fastened on her with the look peculiar to them, that bespoke a singularly clean heart. She smiled as one smiles at a child.

“It is impossible,” she said.

Tumultuously he hurried on: “No, no, not impossible. If I will promise to read, to study, to be a Catholic if I can—will you think of it then? Will you try me?”

“It is impossible,” she repeated. “You pain me.” And then, with an effort, as though she spoke of things too sacred for the common ear, “By the grace of God,” she said slowly, “when he makes the way plain before me, I am to be a nun.”

“No, no!” Van cried again. “No, no! Think—listen. Think it all over again. You do not understand. Your life has been cramped here in this poor, mean place. That is why you want to be a nun. Come away with me to a life that suits a soul like yours. I have seen your craving for higher things.”

The sudden, jagged lightning cleft the skies. By its glare he saw her face distinctly, and a noble scorn was on it, and a righteous indignation.

“Come away with you—from God!” she said, and in the pause that followed Van felt himself more mean than the dust from whence he came.

“Forgive me,” she said gently. “I forget. It is you who do not understand. I do not mind that this house is poor and mean; my Lord was born in a stable, and he died upon a cross. And if I suffer here and crave for higher things, it is a suffering which even the cloister can never cure—far less, then, you—for I crave to see the face of God! To love my God, to cease from sin, to come to my God and be for ever one with him in his high heaven—I hunger for it by night and by day.”

“And if this life suits you so well, and you must suffer anyhow,” Van said curiously, “why not stay here always? or why not come with me?”

“Mr. Van,” Jane answered, “to be a nun is my vocation. God himself calls me. I must do his will. Forgive me again, but I cannot talk any more to you about it. If you did not seem so young to me—so like a little innocent child, in spite of all your knowledge—I could not have said so much.” And the next minute she was gone, leaving Van abashed and utterly ignorant of the high meed of true praise which she had bestowed upon him.

He went home to watch for two long days and nights beside a couch of foolish delirium and lingering death; to see a mind of uncommon intellect and far-famed, exquisite taste reduced to folly; to see the eyes stare vacantly at picture and statue and familiar face alike; and then to follow the lifeless body to the grave, and hide it there, clay to its kindred clay. The young heir of enormous wealth and princely possessions paced alone in his father’s halls that night, and found no pleasure in the beauty that once had satisfied him. Even the memory of Jane’s face was a burden to him.

“She would have to die too,” Van muttered. “And, after all, one could as soon love a St. Catherine borne by angels as love her. I do not believe I ever did. And yet if I did not, I never really loved any woman.”

Wherein he spoke the truth.

Yet one look of hers haunted him—that look of settled, tranquil peace, like the undazzling gold of the western sky; and while it shone before him the steady, tranquil voice echoed through his memory, “To be a nun is my vocation. God himself calls me. I must do his will.”

“I wonder,” queried Van wistfully—“I wonder what my vocation is. I’m sure it has never made any difference to me. I have sketched, and played, and read, just as I fancied.”

And, with that great grace vouchsafed him, of which he was so ignorant, he said like a child: “O God! what shall I do?”

The answer did not come at once. He fretted and puzzled; by and by he began to wonder whether Jane’s religion had anything to do with her choice. Besides, if it was worth a man’s while to think of changing his religion because he fancied himself in love with a creature that some time must die, had he not reason to think seriously about it anyhow? What did she mean when she said she craved to see God’s face? What caused that woman of so few words to speak with such power when she spoke of that?

Van read and thought, but it was not the books that enlightened him. He went one evening where he seldom went by day, when curious eyes could watch him—to his father’s grave. It was a warm evening late in September. As he passed the rectory adjoining the church, which his father, and his father’s father, and all the Van Doorms of the region had religiously attended, gay voices and snatches of music caught his ear, and he looked up involuntarily.

It was a pretty sight. The gas had just been lighted, the curtains were still up. Lonely, sorrowful Van, forgetful of his wonted courtesy, stood still where he was and took in the whole picture with an added heartache.

In the pleasant parlor, not luxurious, but a home-room, the mother sat with her baby on her knee. Van remembered her when she came a bride to the parish, and he was only a child of five years old. It was one of his earliest memories—that being taken to church with the promise of seeing the new young minister’s new young wife, if he would be very good. That was twenty years ago, and there were lines of gray in Mrs. Charles’ hair, but her face wore the same kindly smile that had marked it then in the freshness of her nineteen years, and at the piano a girl of nineteen might have been taken for the bride brought back again in her youthful bloom. She was playing some familiar melody; five or six brothers and sisters clustered about her, sang blithely with her; a toddling child at the mother’s knee beat time with its chubby fingers on the younger baby’s chubby hand. Presently an inner door opened, and the pastor entered. There was a cry of “Father! father!” a general rush to meet him, frantic, merry embraces from the children, while the mother smiled contented, and the father stood tender and strong in the midst of his happy flock.

The picture lasted for a brief space only; with a pretty gesture of horror the eldest daughter sprang toward the window and drew down the shades, lest somebody should see, and Van stood alone outside in the gathering night.

He plodded on dreamily to the church-yard, and sat down near the new grave among many, many older graves where the men and women of his race lay buried.

“Wife and child,” said Van, with a long, hard, envious sigh, “father and mother, and happy home. And I—”

“Wife and child—father and mother.” The words repeated themselves in that curious, echo-like fashion which words have when they come to the mind as a part of a familiar saying, whose whole cannot be at once recalled, and which for a time we vainly strive to place.

“Wife and child—father and mother.” Ah! something else comes: “Houses and lands.” What is it? What is Van striving to get?

“Houses and lands.”

He has it.

“No man who hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or children, or lands for my sake and for the Gospel, who shall not receive an hundred times as much, now in this time: and in the world to come life everlasting.”

He does not see with his bodily eyes at all now, but the eyes of his soul are wide awake, and they see clear and true.

In which church—Catholic or Protestant—were the men who, not by tens or by hundreds, but by thousands upon thousands, and through centuries upon centuries, had carried out to the very letter the words of Christ, the Bible words? Which, except through some exceptions that only served to prove the rule, had by loud-voiced declamation, and an action that spoke more loudly still, set at naught the teaching of the Master—set at naught the example of Him who left all for them?

Van seemed to hear it once again—the missionary letters read from the pulpit and published in Protestant magazines; the pleadings for clothes for the missionary’s wife and children; the appeals for money, or a missionary must leave his important field because his family could not be supported there; the vaunted heroism of missionaries who endured to see their children suffer rather than desert their post. Where were the men whose heroism was such that they had no home, no family, no earthly tie, but stood ready like the angels—true messengers—to go or to stay, undeterred by any human consideration, where God and his church asked or needed them?

And so it came to pass that Van understood the mystery of Jane’s vocation; comprehended that men and women, young and old, rich and poor, ignorant and lettered, heard, as the wedded Peter and the unwedded John heard once the voice of Christ call to them, and literally, like them, left all and followed him. It came to pass also that he understood Jane’s suffering; knew that that call of God and the accompanying love of God were a hundred-fold more in this life than the earthly joys renounced, and yet that the promise of the everlasting life spoke of such ineffable bliss that the longing awakened for it could only be appeased in heaven.

Van found his vocation too. He threw himself, heart and soul, into true Christian art. His pictures were seldom seen on the walls of rich men’s houses, but churches and convents owned them free of price. That part of his work, however, was the smallest part. Money and time and strength were lavished nobly with and in aid of those who are successfully laboring in our day to show, by research in catacombs and ruined sacred buildings and among old missals and breviaries and parchments, that the Catholic Church of to-day is the church of the early Christians and martyrs.

In Italy he met and married some one very different from Jane—a very lovely and good and noble woman—and Jane to him became more and more a St. Catherine borne by angels, and more and more he wondered that he ever had presumed to think of offering her an earthly love.

“Had I been a Catholic then, I never could have done it,” he told his wife. “God had called her for himself, and set his seal upon her.”

And the happy wife said humbly: “Hers was the higher calling, dear.”

So when, one day, their only daughter came to them—a strong, high-spirited, brilliant girl, the sunshine of their home—and told them that God’s call had come to her to leave her home for Christ’s poverty, and all human love for his love alone, she found no weak resistance.

“Thank God,” they said, “for the honor he has done us! For him we gladly bid thee forget thine own people and thy father’s house.”

But of Jane they never heard, except that, when God’s time came, she left the farm beside the sea. What need to know more of her, who was where she longed to be—one of the great number who lose all to find All, and, having Him whom their soul loveth, need nothing more?

COUNT FREDERICK LEOPOLD STOLBERG[^[88]]

Count Stolberg, a well-known statesman and writer, a minister of the Duke of Oldenburg, the friend of Goethe, Schlegel, Klopstock, Lavater, Stein, John and Adam Müller, La Motte Fouqué, Körner, and others as distinguished, the correspondent of most of the German historians, philosophers, and savants of his day, became a Catholic, after seven years’ anxious seeking for truth, on the 1st of June, 1800, at Münster, in Westphalia, in the fifty-first year of his age. He immediately retired from public life, although circumstances afterwards brought him before Germany as a representative man; and his writings spread through all classes of his countrymen as a worthy and dignified exposition of a religion at that time much reviled, misunderstood, and in some cases persecuted. His example in home-life was as powerful in a smaller circle as his writings were in a wider one; and his relations with his wife and children (he had eighteen children by his two marriages) were such as to make it true of him that he was a model for all Christian heads of families. His own tastes were simple and domestic; he was fond of the country, and was a childlike companion even to his youngest children, while to all, as they grew up, he was a wise friend and teacher. All his children, except Mariagnes, his eldest daughter by his first marriage, became Catholics with him; those born after his conversion were of course brought up in the church. His second wife, Sophie, Countess von Redern, had shared his doubts and his experiences during those seven years of eager search after religious certainty, and became a Catholic also; but while he remained in intimate and sympathetic relations with his brothers and sisters, he never influenced any of them far enough to make them follow his footsteps. His brother Christian and his wife Luise were his most constant and intimate correspondents; with the former religion seemed to make no difference, as his admiration for, and sympathy with, Stolberg was proof against anything—indeed, Stolberg often called him his “other self”; and the latter, to judge by her letters, was a woman of more than common understanding, a student of science, an observer of the times, whose mind was open to receive any new impression that had the semblance of truth or real progress in it; an investigating and impartial searcher, better versed than most women in classic learning, and eager for knowledge in any shape. To give up constant intercourse with his own family and remove to a Catholic city was the hardest sacrifice Stolberg had to make on leaving the Lutheran communion; but he considered the change imperative for the proper education of his children. In a letter to Luise announcing this resolve he says: “There is no dilemma, but, even if there were, you will agree with me that a tender conscience, in a doubtful case, must always choose against its wishes—I mean its natural wishes, which are always suspicious to upright morals, let alone to Christianity.” To his friend Princess Gallitzin, the mother of the zealous missionary in America, Demetrius Gallitzin, he says: “It is an unspeakable joy to me that my brother and sister-in-law remain bound to me in the fullest and most unreserved love, and that not even the shadow of a misunderstanding has come between them and me, however painful to them is the separation from me, from Sophie, and from the children.”

He took a house in Münster and made it his home for thirteen years, living there through the winter and spending his summers at a country-house a few miles out of the city, at Lütjenbeck. His children’s studies were his first care. Greek being his favorite study, he made each of his sons a good Greek scholar, and kept up his own studies by a repeated round of all the great authors, read successively with each of his many boys. Ernest and Andrew, the sons of his first marriage, were his first pupils, and his own teaching was supplemented in languages and history by a French emigré, the Abbé Pierrard, and in philosophy by some professors resident in Münster. Stolberg did not neglect the physical education of his boys, and would no more dispense with the daily walk, ride, or swim than he would with the studies. His sons were good shots, too, and in the summer he and they spent most of their time in the open air. Their mother writes of them that they are “truthful, generous, and good-hearted,” and “that their tender respect for their great father increases day by day.” She was herself a patient and judicious teacher, and fully recognized how much harm is done to children, and the “quiet workings of God’s influence disturbed in them, by the expectation of hurried development and individuality.” Stolberg was already beginning his literary work in the interests of religion and education, and in 1801 was translating St. Augustine’s De Vera Religione. The early Fathers were his favorite spiritual reading; also the Greek Testament and the Hebrew version of the Old Testament. He wisely resolved to lead a retired life, and not enter into what is called society; but he gathered round him a circle of real friends, in intercourse with whom he spent many hours, especially in the evenings. Among these were Princess Gallitzin, to whom we owe the suggestion that produced Stolberg’s great work, The History of the Religion of Jesus Christ; Prince Fürstenberg, an old man of very exemplary life; Kellermann, his friend and pupil, and the tutor of his younger sons for sixteen years—a priest who was the model of his order; some of the cathedral chapter, learned and enlightened men; and many young people, friends of his children, among whom the latter afterwards found wives and husbands, in all cases happily acceptable to their parents. Whoever has read the real-life idyl of A Sister’s Story will see some likeness between the home of the La Ferronays and Stolberg’s happy home. Indeed, his friends were part of his family, and admission to his intimacy became the ambition of all such in Münster as had minds beyond the common run, and aspirations beyond those of fashion, politics, and frivolity. Stolberg’s dislike to the loss of time involved in ordinary visits and the inanities of society is thus described by himself in 1810:

“I am growing more unfit from year to year for large gatherings. Intercourse with friends, like the leaves of the Sibylline books, is more precious the less time it occupies and the less often it recurs. To hear social chatter for more than an hour affects me so that I feel much like a dead donkey.... How true are Lavater’s words: 'Even the circle of good souls seldom gives me a new impulse, and a thousand trivial pleasures rob me of true enjoyment. Only solitude can shadow and cool my spirit, thirsty and weary from the company even of loved ones; only solitude can give what no friend can offer—a new consciousness and new life, and a feeling that God loves me.’”

This country life which was such a relief and yearly joy to the whole family is charmingly described in Stolberg’s letters. His garden, his hay-field, his children’s play; his walks in the beech, oak, and maple woods; the squirrels in the trees, the favorite kid of his little girls, the nightingales, the blossoming fruit-trees that suggested to him the saying that the “apple-tree did not eat of the apple”; the grottos, rocks, valleys, castles, torrents of the neighborhood of Stolberg; the old family house which he had not seen for twenty-eight years, and upon which he prided himself as a possession that had been in the family for a thousand years; the beauties of the Erzgebirg, and the Bohemian hills that lean against it; the Scotch or Norwegian-like scenery, wild and grand, of these mountains with their narrow, fruitful valleys and green meadows, fringed with dark pine woods—are all described with that heartiness and enthusiasm which real lovers of the country know, but which, as Stolberg says, so many others pretend to, while in reality they see in nature nothing but a cold show, a theatre decoration. “They look complacently as into a peep-show at the sunrise and the heavens, but their heart does not swell within them nor their eyes grow dim.” He was as fond of childish games, especially of blowing soap-bubbles, as he was of beautiful scenery, and counted it a sign of soul-health when he was in the frame of mind to enjoy such games. And now that we have before us the picture of the man in his domestic life, who in his public, political, literary, and social life was of so much importance and had so wide an influence, we will keep mostly to his own letters, which give full vent to his opinions on the important events of the time, and show him forth as emphatically of the old school, a model Christian, a thorough gentleman, but a man of his own generation; impatient of novelty, a great admirer of the English constitution, but a scornful contemner of the mushroom constitutions of the Continent; a hot Légitimiste, but a patriotic German; an uncompromising and somewhat irrational foe of Napoleon, over and above his mere national antagonism against the great and successful warrior—for instance, he believed that “Napoleon’s greatness was kneaded out of the abjectness of Europe,” forgetting that a man’s greatness may lie precisely in the art of taking advantage of a weakness inherent in an adversary, and seizing the right moment to overwhelm small minds with his stronger one; a firm believer in the necessity of his own order, but an “aristocrat” with lofty and beautiful theories of what aristocracy consists in; in a word, a great Christian and a thorough man.

Besides his Greek and Hebrew studies, he was fond of English history and literature, and knew French and Italian well; Milton and Young were his favorite English poets, though he often quotes Shakspere too, and one of his works, second only to the History of Religion, was the Life of Alfred—a man whom he looked upon as a heroic model, and whose example he wished to dwell upon as a guide to his sons through life. He also translated the whole of Ossian. His letters relating to his home-life, his losses and those of his relations, the death of his sons and son-in-law, and of many dear friends, full as they are of Christian manliness and resignation, and of moral axioms that might be taken as mottoes, we will pass by, as they have less of individuality than his letters containing opinions on religion, politics, and literature, as well as expositions of theories of his own, all strongly and conscientiously held. He firmly contradicted a current misconception in his time—and, indeed, a not unfrequent one now—of the intolerance of the Catholic Church.

“Only for those who confess Catholic truth,” he writes, “and yet consciously keep aloof from the Catholic communion, is there no hope of salvation. Of others who err in all good faith, my church teaches me to believe that they are her members, though unknowingly. God allows many honest Protestants to remain in error, and to fancy that the Catholic Church, that truly merciful mother, is intolerant against those outside her pale. It is not the true spirit of that church to persecute, curse, or burn the erring. Infallible in her doctrine, as were also the teachers who sat in Moses’ seat, she still cannot preserve all her members free from imperfections in their acts—not even the pope, nor, in the old dispensation, the high-priest.”

In another letter he says:

“Far be it from me, as it is from every Catholic who knows the spirit of his church, to doubt that among Protestants also there are and have been holy souls—holy in the sense in which all true children of God are holy; ... but my church teaches me to look upon these as unconscious members of the true, though to them unknown, church.”

“Overberg, of whose rarely beautiful catechism thirty thousand copies have been sold, especially for schools and children, expresses himself very pleasingly on this subject. No well-instructed Catholic has any objection to make to this, but even no half-taught Catholic can, on the other hand, mistake other altars for that altar of sacrifice which Malachi prophesied of, and will hold all other altars only for such as they really are.... Among unlearned Protestants (and, as I said before, among a few learned ones) there are very many whom the spirit of Protestantism as such has not touched, who have never been disturbed, because they have found in Holy Scripture a full rest and contentment, and lean with heartfelt love on Jesus Christ, doing for love of him all they do, in fullest confidence, and what flesh and blood would never teach them to do. Plants that bear such fruit as this I can only hold to come from roots watered by the Heavenly Father himself. You believe [he is addressing Sulzer, of Constance] that the number of such souls is small; and such a belief grieves me, for I think that it drives many away and discourages them. And, indeed, such hard suppositions as you make and insist upon having categorically answered lead to embittering results. I speak from experience. For seven years did I seek for truth with an upright heart, after God first put it into my heart to seek. After seven years’ search was I led, through circumstances that God overruled, to know and confess the truth. Others have sought longer and more anxiously, and have not found what I did, but they serve God in the simplicity of their hearts better than I do, and will assuredly find the truth in the kingdom of light and truth....”

“You see,” he says to his brother, “that I am not intolerant. But I hope to God that I shall never be tolerant in the newest sense of the word—that is, indifferent, lukewarm, fit to be spat out of the mouth of Jesus Christ.”... “Do not let,” he says to his son Caius at Göttingen University, “yourself be led away from the rock-founded church by the many good and worthy Protestants you meet. Among all in error are many who are individually children of God, but they have no church, no sacrifice, no priesthood, no Eucharist. The helter-skelter union of both Protestant bodies (the Lutheran and the Calvinist) must give serious scandal to the earnest souls in both, and will, I hope, lead many into our church.”

Of the difference between feeling and truth he says:

“Certain sensations may be real to one person and unreal to another. Not so with facts and doctrine. It is the peculiar character of the true religion that as it must be the same in all ages, so must every man be equally able to understand and embrace it.... I could not believe in a true religion which it would not be possible for every human being to believe in.... He leads some through rough paths, others through smooth ones; some towards truth, some through error. The way of error, as such, is not His way, although he is always ready to unfold the truth, to be beforehand with, and to meet half way, the upright soul who in all simplicity holds an erring belief.”

Indeed, in Stolberg’s experience, the difference between lukewarm and conscientious Protestants was fully shown; for the former reviled him for his change of religion, while the latter approved of his following what he looked upon as truth. Other misconceptions of Catholic doctrine he also combated, and greatly enlightened many of his friends on the Catholic belief in the justifying merits of Christ. Holy Scripture was a source from which he considered spiritual light to come, but, as he observed, “the learned have not yet been able to see that the healthy eye, like the concave mirror, gathers into one point all the scattered rays, while they split and split until the last particle of light is lost in shadow.” Elsewhere he says:

“He who is careless of Holy Writ is careless of the life of the soul, and he is happy if he becomes conscious, were it only now and then, of the fact that the world, whether with its pleasures or its wisdom, offers him nothing but what is poisonous to the immortal spirit.”

His advice to his son Ernest, who left home in 1803 to join the Austrian army, is full of the true Christian spirit. He recommends him to practise every virtue that would make a man perfect, and goes into many details which, of course, we cannot follow here, but this sentence is almost a compendium of the whole:

“A true Christian cannot find true freedom nor true unsolicitude but in the possession of a good conscience. Where the conscience is tender and watchful it watches alike over every act; and the more we pay attention to it, so much the more does it become, notwithstanding the violence it at first does to nature, a principle of our life which puts us in harmony with ourselves, and therefore makes us truly free.”

Elsewhere he says, speaking to another youth, a friend of his sons:

“Lassitude and a want of courage increase the strength of the enemy; and discontent concerning the post to which God has appointed us is unseemly in any brave man, much more in a foremost fighter. Not the wish that 'everything were otherwise,’ but the resolve always to act well and bravely—or, as Holy Writ says, 'to walk before God and be perfect’—can make men of us. That wish unnerves us; this resolve strengthens us and gives us a might which remains with the weapons of the fighter even on the other side of the grave. He who has done and suffered much does not dream of soiling his crown with tears, while he who has as yet found no opportunity of doing or suffering has still less a right to weep.”

The melancholy which the French have aptly called “la maladie du siècle”[^[89]] was abhorrent to Stolberg—that unmanliness and cowardice of mind which became fashionable through the writings of atheists, and which in many phases has spread itself into our present literature as well as our practice. He also writes concerning the same thing:

“Every human being has his own history to work out, and that this should be thoroughly done does not depend upon the amount of talent he has, but upon the will which few bring to it unconditionally and in a cheerful spirit.”

Stolberg was of a healthier school and generation; he did not see the beauty and sentiment and romance of passion running riot, misunderstood natures, morbid hearts, vain strivings, and all the paraphernalia of a moral sick-bed. For instance, the baneful and unreal excitements of the theatre were very dangerous in his eyes, and the evil custom which even good and well-meaning people fell into of countenancing private theatricals, and letting even their young children take part in them, was a great sorrow to him. One of the evils he deprecated was the rousing of a false sympathy with imaginary woes, which ended by undermining true sympathy with our neighbor’s actual troubles; another, the vanity which play-acting fostered in young people, and the excitement which rendered them unfit for serious study and work. It also destroys the simplicity of the soul and that modesty which is the chief adornment of young souls, especially of a girl’s soul.

“Young girls,” he says, “when they have once overcome their shyness, long after the same excitement, and are always wishing to be playing a part. The truthfulness of their nature is soon lost; seeming overcomes being, every acted feeling destroys real feeling; the heart becomes cold for reality, and is only to be aroused by supposed passion.”

Public theatricals he looked upon as equally dangerous, and even wrote against them, praising Geneva for having, until it became French, refused to allow the erection of a theatre within the limits of its territory. “The special charm of the stage,” he says, “lies in its flattery of our lusts, our vanity, and our laziness.” We have often heard fine theories advanced as to the mission and morality of the drama, but as long as practice belies these theories it is impossible to look upon them otherwise than as a well-meaning Utopia. Stolberg saw the real harm done, and not the imaginary good which some high-minded and exceptional artists would fain do.

The atheistical and deist philosophy of the eighteenth century and early part of the nineteenth were naturally repugnant to such an upright mind as Stolberg. He hated the wilful groping in the dark after a truth which the “philosophers” might have found in the Gospels, had they had the fairness to admit these on an equality, at least, with other so-called “proofs.” He called Steffen and Schleiermacher at Halle the “new Gnostics,” and compared their systems to the vain effort of the fabled Danaides to pour the ocean through a sieve.

“The name of Gnostics sounds ominous,” he says, “and brings to mind the Gnostics of the first centuries, with many of whose beliefs, indeed, the wisdom of our newest sages astonishingly coincides. Under their treatment even realities dissolve themselves in shadow, while they give to shadows the form and appearance of realities.”

Jacobi was at that time a very prominent leader of philosophy in Germany, and Stolberg mentions him many times in his correspondence with various persons, evidently as a representative man. At one time this teacher, the friend of Goethe, a sort of Medici among his disciples near Düsseldorf, where he had a beautiful house, and still more beautiful garden—now the property of the town and the appropriate scene of artists’ banquets and popular fêtes—confessed himself, in the midst of his philosophy, “a very beggar” in the true learning of the Spirit. Stolberg often alluded to this, and, when the master’s pride had long distanced the frame of mind in which this acknowledgment had been made, wrote of him: “Poor Jacobi! he was richer indeed when he called himself poor as 'a beggar.’” In 1812 he writes:

“I have just read Jacobi’s last pamphlet. The one before the last On a Wise Saying of Lichtenberg, seems to me in the highest degree satisfactory. That on The Recension (Jacobi cannot help putting odd and often trivial titles to his works) has also excellent points, but the whole seems to me loose, and a windy toying with views which he borrows from Christianity, the whole system of which, however, he, as far as in him, the puny mortal, lies, seeks to weaken and annihilate. While he praises the god-like Plato, he seems to forget that this philosopher, or rather Socrates in his platonic Phædrus, evidently longs, as a hart after the fountains of waters, for a god-given revelation whose very possibility itself Jacobi, on the contrary, strives to reason away.”

Schelling’s answer to Jacobi, however, equally displeased Stolberg, and he accuses him of making Jacobi appear, “through certain wiles of speech, now an atheist, now a fanatical dreamer,” and of taking credit to himself for

“Having been the first clearly to prove the existence of God. His God has been from all eternity the greatest Force, which contained within itself, in potentia, but not in actu, that goodness and wisdom which it developed in later ages. He falls thus into Count Schmettau’s error, of a god who has raised himself from a lower state to the highest, which theory one might compare with the career of a field-marshal who has risen by degrees from the ranks.... Evidently Schelling is a man of much mind, but of overweening vanity. He speaks of Christianity with respect, and probably believes in the divine mission of Christ, whose system, however, it was reserved for him—Schelling—fully to explain. He sent this paper of his to Perthes (Stolberg’s publisher), and told him he wished me to read it, and that I should then have quite another idea of what his philosophy was, and discover that he did not hold the views I attributed to him.”

At another time he writes:

“The deplorable frivolity of these times is one of their worst signs. I find it the saddest of all. Would that one could hope,

“When the hurly-burly’s done,

When the night is past and gone,”

that things would come right again. But moral nights are not as physical ones. The latter bring us dreams which the dawn of day dispels. The moral nights are full of the feverish dreams of mankind, and they have no certain limit as to time. They go crescendo from error to folly, until the awakening at the end of a completed, comet-like course of misery.”

We have mentioned Stolberg’s warm love of his country. Prince Francis Fürstenberg said of him during the time of the humbling of Germany under the yoke of Napoleon: “I know, and have known in my long life, many of the noblest men in the nation, but I saw none surpass Stolberg in genuine love for the Fatherland. His German and imperial heart is pure as gold and shines like a diamond.” The epithet imperial sounds odd to our ears; it is an allusion to his belief that the Empire of Germany, such as it existed just before the Congress of Vienna, was the proper representative and bulwark of the nation. He blamed the Emperor Francis very strongly for laying down his time-honored dignity later on, and contenting himself with a local title which severed his interests materially from those of Germany at large. He also saw in this withdrawal of imperial authority and protection over non-Austrian countries a danger to the Catholic faith, and a possible interference of Protestant powers in the communications between Catholic German states and the Holy See. But concerning the ever-vexed question of the Rhine frontier his patriotism was quick and hot; he wished that in the new partition at the Congress Alsace and Lorraine should be given back to Germany, and lamented the injudicious behavior by which some of the German troops had spoilt the evidently favorable state of mind of the Alsatians during part of the disturbances on the frontier.

“Eighteen months ago,” he writes in 1815, “the Alsatians were very well disposed, came to meet our troops with flags and received them with ringing of joy-bells; then came the Bavarians, the Badeners, and so on, and behaved so as to make them hate us. We all talk of our wish to reunite our once torn-away brethren with Germany, but we have angered them instead and are burning their towns and villages. My hair stands on end and I could weep tears of blood at the thought.”

Early in the century, a few weeks after his conversion, Stolberg wrote thus to Princess Gallitzin:

“True patriotism embraces the highest good of the people in all things: the blessings of faith, those of law, of freedom, and of morals. It can never follow the path of forcible overthrows and of revolution, nor covenant with an outside enemy, nor lend itself to the service of injustice, even when a seeming and momentary advantage is to be gained by such service. What a disgrace for us Germans is the Franco-mania that reigns among us—the cap-in-hand alliance with the Corsican adventurer, who is spreading horror and desolation among us and knows no right but that of the sword. What undermines all our strength, and will sink us even lower and lower, is not only the jealousy and spirit of aggrandizement current among the German states against the empire and the emperor, the fawning on the French with the hope of getting their help to win new slices of territory, but far more the weakened character of the whole people, and their want of moral energy and good feeling—the result of the unbelieving philosophy and immoral literature that have unnerved the nation.”

Just as impartially he condemned in after-years, when German patriotism had spread with a sudden rush from the field into literature, the “coarse Teutonism” which rejected every refinement of foreign origin, maligned every foreign custom, and made patriotism ridiculous by enjoining upon it to be no less than rabid. He then defended all that was reasonable and applicable to German life, all the praise-worthy customs, books, and improvements that fashion had turned suddenly against. He had earned a good right to be independent; for four of his sons fought in the different German armies that overwhelmed Napoleon after the retreat from Moscow, and one, his son Christian, a brave boy of eighteen, died at the battle of Ligny. His two sons-in-law also, fathers of large families of young children, were in the national army, and the greatest enthusiasm was felt by all the members of the family, old and young, for the cause which Stolberg called “ours, God’s, Europe’s, mankind’s, and the right’s.”

In 1815 he wrote: “True German feeling it is to welcome all that is noble and good, out of all ages and nations, as our own. Every one now, with narrow minds, is Nibelungen-mad, barbaric-mad”; and concerning his Life of Alfred he says:

“Alfred belongs to us, and therefore do I wish to hold him up to the veneration and imitation, and for the teaching, of my children. But not only do Alfred and his people belong to us; we should also make our own all that is great and noble in the life of all nations, yet without losing thereby our own individuality.”

In 1805 the decree freeing the serfs in the Duchy of Holstein went into effect, and Stolberg congratulates his brother Christian on this happy event; naturally, the greater event of the abolition of negro slavery in the British West Indies was a great joy to him, and he rejoiced the more that the Illuminati, his special aversion, lost thereby their best weapon against England, and that the French Declaration of the Rights of Man could be unfavorably compared with the English constitution, on account of a contradictory law, at that time still in force, forbidding the liberation of the negroes in French colonies to be even mentioned before the legislature. The alliances, dictated by fear or by interest, of German sovereigns with Napoleon were a subject of great grief and indignation to him, and he looked upon England with almost exaggerated admiration because she withstood the conqueror. He said “Pitt would save England against Europe’s will,” and his confidence in the general policy of the English statesman was unbounded. He had, too, a kind of historical admiration, if we may so call it, for the English form of government, which alone he thought proper for freedom, but which he did not believe fit for the wants of every nation, indiscriminately, on the Continent. It strikes us, however, that the fact of the English constitution, in its then state, being nearly a hundred and fifty years old had somewhat blinded his mind to the facts—according to his theory, rather suspicious, to say the least—of the change of dynasty in 1688; for the Stuarts in England were surely as legitimate sovereigns, from his point of view, as the Bourbons in France, whose least advances, in the person of Louis XVIII., towards the modern spirit so incensed and disgusted Stolberg; and when he said that “England alone stood in the breach” against Napoleon, he forgot that she considered it her interest to withstand him, and that a deeply-rooted prejudice egged on the nation against him. If he had seen anything of the unreasoning panic which the threatened invasion caused among the English, he would have been less ready to jest at the falling through of the scheme, which he called “an expedition to gather mussels along the British shores.” It has often been so, we think, among Continental statesmen and thinkers: they look upon England with exceptionally favorable eyes and weigh her doings in special balances, forgetting the lawless and riotous disturbances that she experienced earlier than other countries, after which she settled into the solid, steady, conservative, law-abiding, slow-to-be-moved nation which she had been for over a hundred years when the French Revolution suddenly broke out. Stolberg, much as he praised England, almost refused to see any good in the chaos of new ideas that were seething pell-mell together; he saw nothing but the evident godlessness, selfishness, pride, and cruelty which marked that era; and, indeed, he, the man of another age, the lover of a lofty ideal which we shall mention presently—the man who said that “all politics hinged on the Fourth Commandment”—could hardly be expected to allow that out of such confusion God could glean anything worthy of being offered to himself.

Stolberg often called Germany the “heart of Europe,” and wrote an ode with that title; but he would not allow with the innovators that the “philosophy” of the age was the true source of the influence his country should have on the Continent. Allied to this false idea of many Germans was the affected custom, in the early part of the century, of using the French language instead of the mother-tongue, even in the nearest domestic intercourse—a fault which the Russians also fell into, but which at present they have seen the folly of and have nearly successfully remedied. Stolberg heartily hated and despised this foreign intrusion into German home-life.

“Even in my younger days,” he says with scorn, “I can remember hearing of a gifted German girl being reproached by German women with being 'affected’ enough to write 'German’ letters.... Germans now write to each other, brother to brother, husband to wife, in French.... Is that not to estrange one’s self from one’s nearest and dearest? nay, even from one’s self?”

His relations and correspondence with well-known people of his day furnish us with his opinions on many of the writers, savants, statesmen, and philosophers, the reigning and rising public men. Of the historian Johann Müller he says:

“No one ever seized the true spirit of history so early in life as he did.... His life is very interesting; it is true he showed a good deal of vanity, but also so much cheerful good-humor that one does not feel inclined to be hard upon him for the former. His plan of study, as he arranged it for himself, and the scrupulous way in which he followed it out, seem to me truly noteworthy.... What a comprehensive spirit, what feeling and sympathy for the true, the good, and the beautiful! How early, too, he broke loose from the unwisdom of the philosophy of the times, and how deep a religious spirit remained firm in him in the midst of many disturbances, since he so clearly understood the history of the world by the light of that Providence whose finger he was always tracing in it! He once said very beautifully that Christ was the key to the world s history.”

In 1807 he gives the following opinion of Alexander von Humboldt:

“I know Humboldt personally. He has much understanding, much liveliness, much industry. But is he not inclined to be too much enslaved by the German à priori tendency and by a love of the scientific form? Is he strong enough not to let himself be carried away by the method of modern criticism, which tends to violent disruption from all that has gone before, instead of tracing out the great analogies on the path of simple observation? Is he quite free from a delicate and imperceptible charlatanism? Years may have matured him, but such maturing seldom takes place when the quick strides of science make it difficult for wisdom to keep up with her.”

Of Frederick Schlegel’s poetry, and that of others in the Dichtergarten (or “Poet’s Garden,” a collection of fugitive songs by various poets), he writes:

“The rarer and the more beautiful is the noble, religious spirit that breathes through the Poet’s Garden, the more do I wish that its authors might put forth all their strength. And so it would be, if it were not for a particular theory which lies at the bottom of the poetry—a theory whose foundation I do not know, but whose evident peculiarity strikes the eye, bewilders the reader, forces the Muse, and in its purposed negligence of language goes so far as even to disfigure it. The Muse craves freedom above all things, if she is to express what comes from the innermost of our heart or our mind. Every trace of art lames poetry, and theory often misleads, because it is born of human philosophy, while poetry is something divine. Therefore poets always succeed best in rhythm where the inspiration is great and noble, and the quickly-passing images, thoughts, sensations only group themselves well and naturally when they are conjured up by an infallible, all-subduing inspiration, without the poet knowing how it happens.”

Of Niebuhr’s Roman history he writes, in 1812—not, perhaps, in the sense that most of the readers of that work will endorse:

“I marvel at the deep learning, and often at the penetration, of our friend; but who will read him? What a bulwark of tedious researches, the result of which is often nothing more than a learned outwork! It is strange that, with this fault of historical pedantry, he could not avoid the contrary one of reasoning à priori, so common to the German professors. There is much understanding in the book, and in a few places one is pleasantly surprised at its spirit; but this spirit is neither a joyful nor a certain one. He fails in simplicity. From this springs his heavy style, despite his choice use of words. He is too forward in making hypotheses and foregone conclusions; for instance, his open partisanship with the plebeians leads him to make false and hasty judgments. His pragmatical tendency makes him unjust even to Livy, and he has no appreciation of the noble amiability of Plutarch. Yet, with all these faults, he must ever remain a valuable historian—not a star of the first magnitude, but still too good to be a mere famulus,[^[90]] to gather material for great historians. Among other things, he lacks the art of managing his style so as to appear to be led by it and yet to make it convey exactly what the writer pleases. But concerning his principles, some of which, however, I do not endorse, his conscience always appears as it is, noble and tender, while his love of truth follows him even on his hobby—hypothesis.”

It may be interesting to give the opinion of some of the same men on Stolberg himself as a historian and writer. The History of Religion, which was his great work, and which he mainly attributed to the suggestion, encouragement, and interest of Princess Gallitzin, became a topic of discussion and interest all through Germany. Many were brought by it to the Catholic Church, and of these most wrote to him first, asking advice and making confidences, before they read further or asked instructions from a priest. It was a source of deep thankfulness to him that he had thus been the means of making others share in the same blessings and peace which he had won through the grace and leading of God. But his History was no controversial work; it was very comprehensive, and embraced the whole subject of true religion from the beginning of the world, tracing the connection between Judaism and Christianity; the fulfilment of the prophecies in Christ; the spirit of aloofness from the world, first symbolized in the national exclusiveness of the Hebrews, and then proved in the persecutions under the Roman emperors in the struggle between Christianity and heathendom; and, lastly, the gradual, onward sway which the truth at last won over error, and which, speaking in a certain sense, culminated in the conversion of Constantine. Here Stolberg ended his history, feeling that his life would not be spared much longer, and that he had done his work, so far as he felt called upon by God to witness to the truth that was in him. The unhappy struggles, rents, and abuses of later church history he left untouched; surely there were counterparts to them in earlier days, but no such embittering could come from a relation of the old heresies and divisions as would have sprung from even the most impartial discussion of recent and more local ones. Schlegel took the greatest interest in this work, and of the least important part he spoke thus admiringly:

“I am especially delighted at the strength and simple beauty of your style; whoso compares it with what is called nowadays the art of representing things will easily discover where is to be found the true source of even this beauty.”

Again, of the second part of the history (it was divided into fifteen parts) he says:

“I found myself much steadied and strengthened by the whole, and particularly enlightened by the exposition on the Hebrew belief in the immortality of the soul and on the Mosaic code. May you in the future of your work, as often as opportunity allows, return to and dwell upon the immortality of the soul. It seems to me the path by which mankind at present can best be led towards truth, better than by any other teaching regarding the Godhead.”

He then says that pantheism and a vague sentimentality had perverted everything distinctly Christian into an empty shadow-form, but that few were so absolutely dead to all higher feeling as not to distinguish between the “real personal immortality, and the mere metaphysical image of it, without a hereafter, and without a continuance of the memory.”

“Bring vividly before them the true personal immortality, and you will often find those whom you had thought most spiritually dead and careless to be palpably roused. To me the doctrine of the Trinity is the central point of Christianity, and therefore the foundation and source of all my convictions, views, and aspirations.... The unfolding and representation of this secret of love (the Trinity) I have found to permeate every doctrine, principle, and even custom or rubric of the Catholic Church; although even in her pale many good individuals are less impressed with the divine spirit of the whole than with some one or other literal regulation.”

Johann von Müller wrote thus of Stolberg’s work:

“It is not a lukewarm, sham impartial church history, in which one is uncertain what relation it bears to Jesus of Nazareth, but the work of a man who knows what he believes, and would fain move all men to believe as he does. Not a church history critically weighing the Messiahship of Jesus from the Old Testament against his Godhead from the New, but the work of a man who sees everywhere and at all times Him who was and is, and is to come, and to whom all power is given in heaven and on earth. Lastly, it is not a worldly representation of the deceits and time-serving devices through which Christianity crept into the world, and is still able to maintain herself, the humble handmaid of statecraft, in these our enlightened times, but the confession and outpouring of soul of a man to whom the whole world is nothing in comparison with the Saviour of the world. Of the latter he speaks so that whoever loves him must love this book, and he who knows nothing of him will learn from this book what Christians possess in him. Therefore, reader, if thou art a reed, driven before the learned wind of our modern writings, look to this rock, and see if it has not a foundation in the needs of mankind and the love of the Godhead; and thou who knowest not Christianity, come and see what it is, as thy forefathers felt it, as it is yet, mighty in every childlike heart; and thou who believest, come hear, and enjoy, and rejoice thy heart with the word of life.”

Claudius spoke of the book being read by thousands, and of its “undoubted influence in strengthening the Christian faith among the German people.” A person in comparatively private life, Major Bülow, a stanch Bible man, said that Stolberg’s History of Religion had been a “welcome surprise to him, although the style was not always clear to his understanding, and he was only fearful lest the author should not live long enough to finish it.”

Joseph de Maistre spoke thus of the work in his Recueil de Lettres, p. 23:

“New researches and discoveries, and the progress of the art of tracing all up to the first sources, may correct or supplement much in his history, may bring a new light to bear on many of his opinions—for the work, in spite of its foundation on, and buttressing by, much study of a high order, is not meant to be an exhaustive scientific work; but I doubt if any, in our century at least, will surpass the author of this history in pure love of God and mankind, love to Christ and his church, and in pure and truly creative spirit. How striking also are his observations on the circumstances of our time, his opinion on the persecution of the church by the spirit of this world, on false teachers, on the marriage tie, and the sanctity of oaths, and many like things!”

Stolberg was rejoiced by these commendations, but more encouraged than rejoiced. Mere vanity was far from him; he thanked God that he had been able to supply “what these oft-repeated praises of good and single-minded men proved to him to have been really a want.”

The ideal which we have alluded to, and which was a great characteristic of Stolberg’s mind, was that of the mission and duties of an aristocracy. He believed that, in the abstract, the existence and allowed influence of such a class was an instinct inborn in man, and that it was only when the aristocracy was false to its own principles that the people could grow antagonistic to it. His theories on the subject were beautiful, noble, poetic, but in his time there had been so much evil practice that such theories were nearly swamped under it. It was natural to his character, however, to lean more on the theory than the practice, and to consider the latter an excrescence and abuse which might be done away with, and the ideal thereby reinstated in its first dignity. At first sight his theory seems simply a feudal, mediæval, romantic one, the dream of a man proud of his own order, and nursed in prejudices such as no change in political relations de facto could uproot but if we look closer into it, it becomes a very different and far more worthy thing—namely, a belief in the essence of chivalry, a standard of conduct such as King Arthur’s, a translation into altered forms and circumstances of the Gospel rules of charity, courtesy, and patience. Here are some of his own sayings on the subject, on which he reasoned in a way so far removed from either fanaticism or vanity that we place his explanations here as something wholly special to himself, and quite different from the ordinary rhapsodies about the necessity of various grades of classes:

“The ideal of the aristocracy[^[91]] is not weakened through the unworthiness of many who are of noble birth. On the contrary, the just scorn which follows these men redounds to the honor of their class, of which one cannot become unworthy without being despised by all. Nature gives the aristocracy neither more understanding nor more physical strength than she does to other classes; it takes its worth wholly from an ideal, but not a mistaken ideal. This, like all that is great in mankind, is founded upon the sacrifice of all that is lower for the sake of attaining the highest.

“The aristocracy must give up every mercantile and lower traffic. Three things were entrusted to its keeping—agriculture, of which kings have not been ashamed, statesmanship, and the defence of the Fatherland.

“As an ennobled countryman the aristocrat can pursue the most necessary, the oldest, and the most innocent work with better results than the peasant, because he has more means, more insight, and can better afford the danger of an occasional failure. His experience and example teach and encourage the common countryman, whom it is the beautiful and holy duty of the nobleman to enlighten and to protect, and whose well-being, morals, and temporal and eternal good it is his duty to further by every means in his power. This business is one which, if he wishes to be respected as a nobleman, he has no right to evade or neglect; except temporarily, if he is chosen as a representative of his province—a business to which he has also a special call as a citizen of the state. He must and ought, however, to take part in the government, even if he be not chosen by his province; and either as a magistrate or only as a land-owner he can take a prominent part in it. The defence of his country devolves upon no one so strongly as upon the nobleman. This is a worthy and beautiful duty of knighthood. It is well for that state where the aristocracy, as such, is called to the defence of the Fatherland as leaders of their own country people, whose patrons they are in times of peace, whose heads, judges, mediators, example, and benefactors they should be at all times. The old, fair relations have been rent by false representations, but they are not effaced.... The aristocracy has an inner worth, no matter how unworthy are many of its members. Neither royal nor priestly anointing can preserve from moral corruption! Of how much less avail are mere human, outward means to preserve the spiritual existence! Indeed, they often soil it. Let every one who is of knightly standing strive to prove by his actions that the ideal of knighthood lives in him, in noble simplicity, in courteous behavior, in quick willingness to give blood and lands for the Fatherland. His example will not remain without fruit. He will be far from looking upon certain virtues as virtues of his condition, and neglecting to practise others or superciliously leave them to other classes. If we hold fast to our knightly calling, the essence of knighthood will remain to us. The shell of the thing renews itself from time to time.... Whatever is worthy of respect in knighthood has come from self-sacrifice.... In order to keep pace with the century, the nobleman must be the equal of the citizen in knowledge, whenever the two meet in the same field. If he neglects this, he will see the burgher reigning as a cabinet minister and himself reduced to the honor of waiting in the king’s ante-chamber by virtue of his birth. And even in war, the knight’s proper field, how can the nobleman boast of his superiority to one who knows more than he does of the science of war? If the knight covets intellectual superiority, he must not seek it in emulation so much as in brave and silent self-sacrifice. The life of his fathers must teach his heart this lesson: Be worthy of thy fathers, whether the world acknowledge thy worth or no.[^[92]] A thirst after approbation does not behove a knight, but steady reliance on his strength and his intentions.... The present hatred of the aristocracy is a fever which will soon be spent.... It remains for us, each in his own circle, to maintain a lofty ideal and to spread it abroad—that is, a true spirit of religion and that spirit of brave self-denial, of earnest courage, and discreet worth which should mark the aristocracy—and at the same time to encourage among ourselves a desire not to be behindhand in such knowledge and in such strivings as elevate the heart, adorn the mind, and make us fitter for the callings that specially beseem us.”

It will be readily understood from the foregoing quotations that Stolberg had not much sympathy with a scheme which some German noblemen had started—that of a new knight-union or society. He deprecated the publicity such a step would necessarily bring upon them, and saw in it only a hollow, childish plan of defiance, a foolish revival of old customs as powerless in practice as a return to the weapons of the ancient knights, a protest against firearms and the altered arts of warfare. His enthusiasm was always dignified and reasonable; it had no touch of sentimentality and “playing at” things. To the last his character remained the same. Forgiving and temperate as regarded any wrong done personally to him, he could not brook the distortion of truth, and was in the act of replying to a libellous pamphlet of Voss, of Heidelberg, destined to spread among the public distrust of Stolberg’s sincerity in his conversion, when his last sickness overtook him. He had just finished the Life of St. Vincent of Paul, which he had written instead of the autobiography that his friends strongly urged him to write. He had objected that he felt no call from God to do so, and that, unless one wrote with the view of God’s call, vanity and self were too apt to become the leading motive in the work. He commended St. Augustine’s Confessions because they were evidently inspired by love of God’s honor only, and a monument of thankfulness to the One who called such a sinner to repentance. In St. Vincent he saw a man of modern times whom one could hold up as a model not too exalted and extraordinary, yet thoroughly humble, perfect, and holy, to men of his and future generations.

Stolberg died December 5, 1819, at the age of seventy, at Sondermühlen, a country-house for which he had, four years before, exchanged his favorite Lütjenbeck, when French domination was in the ascendant and he had become an object of suspicion to the French spies in Münster.

What his death was to his family can be easily imagined; it was hardly less to a large circle of friends, acquaintances, and even strangers who knew him only by name and by his works, but whose reliance on his advice, example, and opinion had long been their best and surest standard of duty.

FROM THE HECUBA OF EURIPIDES.
A free translation.
BY AUBREY DE VERE.

[The Chorus of Trojan Women lament their Captivity.]

STROPHE I.

Breeze of the ocean, fresh and free!

Whither, O whither wilt thou bear

The Exile, and her great despair?

Thou speed’st, and I must speed with thee!

Say, must some Dorian haven be

The home of Troy’s unhappy daughters?

O unbelovèd home!—or where

The father of most lovely waters,

Apidanus, goes winding by

The fruitful meads of Thessaly?

ANTISTROPHE I.

Or 'mid those isles of old renown,

Haply bright Delos’ sea-born glades,

Where deathless palms and laurels spread

Above their own Latona’s head

Green boughs (commemoration holy

Of that twin-birth that lit their gloom):—

There must I weep a captive’s doom?

There sing, with gladsome native maids,

Extorted song and melancholy

To Dian’s silver bow and crown?

STROPHE II.

Perchance, a slave in Athens pining,

On tap’stried walls these hands must trace

Minerva’s awful steeds and car

Still radiant from the Ten Years’ war;

Or blazon there the Titan race

Beneath the Thunderer’s wrath oppressed,

And every godlike head declining

Upon the thunder-blasted breast.

ANTISTROPHE II.

Alas my people, and alas

My fathers, and my country’s shore!

And thou, O Troy—’tis Fate’s decree—

Farewell! I see thy face no more!

Alas for thee, alas for me!

Above thy head the plough shall pass:—

Worse fate is mine, o’er ocean’s wave,

The conqueror’s plaything, and his slave.