"Harassed by an inward strife,
I find in the 'Imitation' a new life--
Book obscure, unhonored, like to potter's clay.
Yet rich in Gospel truths as flowers in May.
Where loftiest wisdom, human and Divine,
Peace to the troubled soul to speak, combine."
La Harpe, a dramatist as well as a critic, whose "Cours de Littérature" was a standard text-book for so long, was in prison and sadly in need of comfort and consolation when he began to appreciate the "Imitation." There is almost no limit to his praise of it, and praise under these circumstances must indeed be considered to come from the heart. He wrote: "Never before or since have I experienced emotion so violent and yet so unexpectedly sweet--the words, 'Behold I am here,' echoing unceasingly in my heart, awakening its faculties and moving it to the uttermost depths."
It is not surprising then to find that Dean Church says of it, "No book of human composition has been the companion of [{434}] so many serious hours, has been prized in widely different religious communions, has nerved and comforted so many and such different minds--preacher and soldier and solitary thinker--Christians, or even it may be those unable to believe." Dean Milman in his "Latin Christianity" declared "that this book supplies some imperious want in the Christianity of mankind, that it supplied it with a fulness and felicity which left nothing to be desired, its boundless popularity is the one unanswerable testimony." He even has some words of praise for a Kempis' style: "The style is ecclesiastical Latin, but the perfection of ecclesiastical Latin of pure and of sound construction." Dean Plumptre, whose studies of Dante and the great Greek poets gave him so good a right to judge of the place of books in the world's literature, is one of the worshippers at the shrine of the "Imitation." The Rev. Dr. Liddon, the great Greek lexicographer, called it "the very choicest of devotional works, the product of the highest Christian genius and one of the books that have touched the heart of the world."
More than this could scarcely be said of any book. Was there ever a chorus of praise quite so harmonious? Did praise ever come from men by whom one could more wish to be praised? Evidently, the "Imitation of Christ" is for all men at all times. It is the poem of our common human nature.
When Sir John Lubbock included the "Imitation" in his list of the hundred best books some people expressed surprise. The editor of the Pall Mall Gazette invited the opinions of his readers on the subject, and some of the most distinguished of English churchmen, as well as many English men of distinction, said their praise of it publicly. Archdeacon Farrar, whose sympathies with the fourth book of the "Imitation" would certainly be very slight and whose opposition to many Catholic doctrines that à Kempis received devoutly might possibly be expected to prejudice him somewhat against it, wrote that "If all the books in the world were in a blaze the first twelve I should snatch from the flames would be the Bible, 'The Imitation of Christ,' 'Homer,' 'AEschylus,' 'Thucydides,' 'Tacitus,' 'Virgil,' 'Marcus Aurelius,' 'Dante,' 'Shakespeare,' 'Milton' and 'Wordsworth.'" [{435}] The men with whom à Kempis is thus placed in association are among the accepted geniuses of literary history before as well as since his time. It would not be difficult to make a sheaf of quotations each one of them scarcely less laudatory than this of Archdeacon Farrar. They come from all manner of men, devout and undevout, bookish and practical, spiritual and worldly, men of wide experience in life, who have done things that the world will not soon forget, and who, if any, have the right to speak for the race as regards the significance of life and what any book can mean for direction and guidance in the living of it and consolation in its trials and difficulties.
Lamartine in his "Entretiens Familiers" called it "the poem of the soul," and declared that it "condensed into a few pages the practical philosophy of men of all climates and of all countries who have sought, have suffered, have studied and prayed in their tears ever since flesh suffered and the mind reflected."
To adopt his term, the "Imitation" is literally a great poem. It is a creation and it is a vision. The poet is the creator and the seer. The greater he is, the more capable he is of taking the ordinary materials of life and making great poetry of them. The greater the poet, the more of mankind he appeals to. It is the vision of the experiences of man and not of individual men that the poet sees. What all have seen and felt, but none so well expressed is the theme of poetry. The more one reads of the "Imitation," the more one realizes all the truth of this characterization of it as poetry. If one takes passages of it as they have been put into rhythmic sentences the feeling of the poetry in them is brought home very clearly. For instance, this from Chapter XXII of the third book:
"Why one has less, another more;
Not ours to question this, but Thine
With Whom each man's deserts are strictly watched.
Wherefore, Lord God, I think it a great blessing
Not to have much which outwardly seems worth
Praise or glory--as men judge of them."
Or if the ode--for such it really is--on Love from the fifth chapter of the third book be read alongside one of the great [{436}] choruses from the Greek tragedians, as above all some of those of Sophocles in "Antigone" or the "Oedipus at Colonos," the lofty poetic quality will be easier to grasp:
"A great thing is love,
A great good every way.
Making all burdens light,
Bearing all that is unequal,
Carrying a burden without feeling it.
Turning all bitterness to a sweet savor.
The noble love of Jesus
Impelleth men to good deeds
And exciteth them always
To desire that which is better.
Love will tend upwards
Nor be detained
By things of earth
It would be free.
Nothing is sweeter than love,
Nothing stronger, nothing higher.
Nothing fuller, nothing better
Nor more pleasant in heaven or earth.
For love is born of God
Nor can it rest
Except in Him
Above all things created.
Love is swift, sincere.
Pious, pleasant and delightsome.
Brave, patient, faithful,
Careful, long suffering, manly.
Never seeking its own good;
For where a man looks for himself
He falls away from love."