A Gentleman

by Maurice Francis Egan

To reclaim our heritage, we must know something of Calderon. There is no reason why our horizon should be limited to that which English Protestantism has uncovered for us. Calderon represents the literature of Catholic Spain at its highest point; and even the most narrow-minded man, having read a fair number of the pages of Calderon, can deny neither his ardent devotion to the Church nor his high genius, nor can he disprove that they existed together, free and untrammelled. We have been told that the outbreak of literary genius in the reign of Elizabeth was but the outcome of the liberty of the Reformation. How did it happen that Spain, in which there was no Reformation, produced Columbus, Calderon, Cervantes, and Italy illustrious names by the legion? Knowledge, after all, is the only antidote to the miasma of ignorance and arrogance which has clouded the judgment of so many writers on literature and art.

VIII. The Home Book-shelf.

It ought not to be so much our practice to denounce bad books as to point out good ones. To say that a book is immoral is to increase its sale. But the more good books we put into the hands of our boys, the greater preservative powers we give them against evil. Here is a bit from the Kansas City Star which expresses tersely what we have all been thinking:

“The truth is that it is not the boys who read ‘bad books’ who swell the roll of youthful criminality; it is the boys who do not read anything. Let any one look over the police court of a busy morning, and he will see that the style of youth gathered there have not fallen into evil ways through their depraved literary tendencies. They were not brought there by books, but more probably by ignorance of books combined with a genuine hatred of books of all kinds. There is not a more perfect picture of innocence in the world than a boy buried in his favorite book, oblivious to all earthly sights and sounds, scarcely breathing as he follows the fortunes of the heroes and heroines of the story.”

It depends, of course, on what kind of a story it is. A boy may be a picture of innocence; but we all know that many a canvas on which is a picture of innocence is much worm-eaten at the back. If the book be a good one, a boy is safe while he is reading it—he can be no safer. If it is a mere story of adventure, without any dangerous sentiment, a boy is not likely to get harm out of it. It is the sentimental—not the honest sentiment of Sir Walter or Thackeray—that does harm to the boy of a certain age, but more harm to the girl. A boy’s preoccupation with his book may not be always innocent. It is a father’s or mother’s duty to see that it is innocent, by supplying the boy with the right kind of books. This, in our atmosphere, is almost as much of a duty as the supplying him with bread and butter. A father may take the lowest view of his duties; he maybe content with having his son taught the Little Catechism and with feeding and clothing him. However sufficient this may be among the peasants of the Tyrol, it does not answer in our country. The boy who cares to read nothing except the daily paper or the theatrical poster has more chances against him than the devourer of books. The police courts show that.

The parish library, as a help to religious and moral education, comes next to the parish school; it supplements it; it amplifies its instruction: it carries its influence deeper; it cultivates both the logical powers and the imagination. Give a boy a taste for books, and he has a consolation which neither sickness nor poverty nor age itself can take from him. But he must not be left to ramble through a library at his own sweet will. There are probably no stricter Catholics among our acquaintance than were the parents of Alexander Pope, the “poet of common-sense” and bad philosophy; and yet their carelessness, or rather faith in books merely as books, led him into many an ethical error.

There is no use in trying to restrict the reading of a clever American boy to professedly Catholic books in the English language. He will ask for stories, and there are not enough stories of the right sort to last him very long. He will want stories with plenty of action in them—stirring stories, stories of adventure, stories of school life, of life in his own country; and we have too few of them. And it requires some discrimination to square his wants with what he ought to want. But that discrimination must be used by somebody, or there will be danger.

Nevertheless, the boy who rushes through Oliver Optic’s stories, and Henty’s and Bolderwood’s, is not likely to be injured. They are not ideal books, from our point of view. He may even read Charles Kingsley’s boisterous, stupid stuff; but if he is a well-instructed boy, he will be in a state of hot indignation all through “Hypatia” and the other underdone-roast-beefy things of that bigot. Kingsley, with all his prejudice, though, is better for a boy than Rider Haggard. There is a nasty trail over Haggard’s stories.

There is some comfort in the fact that the average boy is too eagerly intent on his story to mind the moralizing. What does he care for Lord Lytton’s talk about the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in “The Last Days of Pompeii”? He wants to know how everything “turns out.” And in Kingsley’s “Hypatia”—which is so often in Catholic libraries—he pays very little attention to the historical lies, for the sake of the action. Nevertheless, he should be guarded against the historical lies. Personally—I hope this intrusion of the ego will be forgiven—I had, when I was a boy and waded through all sorts of books, so strong a conviction that Catholics were always right and every one else wrong, that “Hypatia” and Bulwer’s “Harold” and the rest were mere incentives to zeal; I thought that if the Lady Abbess walled up Constance at the end of “Marmion,” that young person deserved her fate.

This state of mind, however, ought not to be generally cultivated; a discriminating taste for reading should. Do not let us cry out so loudly about bad books; let us seek out the good ones; and remember that it is not the reading boy that fills the criminal ranks, but the boy that lives in the streets and does not read.