A Gentleman

by Maurice Francis Egan

“Callista” amounts to very little as a novel; it is valuable because Newman studied its color from authentic sources. But “The Dream of Gerontius” is only beginning in our country to receive the attention due to it. It was a text-book in classes at Oxford long before people here touched it at all, except in rare instances. It is a unique poem. There is nothing like it in all literature. It is the record of the experience of a soul during the instant it is liberated from the body. It touches the sublime; it is colorless—if a pure white light can be said to be colorless. It is the work of a great logician impelled to utter his thoughts through the most fitting medium, and this medium he finds to be verse. In Dante the symbols of earthly things represent to us the mystic life of the other world. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, chief of the Pre-Raphaelites, imitated the outer shell of the great Dante—the sensuous shell—but he got no further. Newman soars above, beyond earth; we are made to realize with awful force that the soul at death is at once divorced from the body. Dante does not make us feel this. The people that Virgil and he meet are not spirits, but men and women with bodies and souls in torment. No painter on earth could put “The Dream of Gerontius” into line and color. Flaxman, so exquisite in his interpretation of Dante, would seem vulgar, and Doré brutal. None of us should lack a knowledge of this truly wonderful poem, which must be studied, not read. Philosophy and theology have found no flaws in it; humanity may shiver in the whiteness of its light, and yet be consoled by the fact that the comfort it offers is not merely imaginative, or sentimental, or beautiful, but real.

It is impossible to suppress the love of the beautiful in human nature. The early New Englanders, to whom beauty was an offence and art and literature condemned things—who worshipped a God of their own invention, clothed in sulphurous clouds and holding victims over eternal fire, ready, with the ghastly pleasure described by their divines, to drop these victims into the flame—were not Christians. Christians have never accepted the Grecian dictum that earthly beauty is the good and that to be æsthetic is to be moral; but Christianity has always encouraged the love of beauty and led the way to its use in the worship of God.

Among Americans, Longfellow had a most devout love of the beautiful. And it was this love of beauty that drew him near to the Church. That eloquent writer Ruskin has little sympathy with men who are drawn towards the Church by the beauty she enshrines, and he constantly protests against the enticements of a Spouse the hem of whose garment he kisses. Still, judging from his ill-natured diatribe against Pugin, in the “Stones of Venice,” he had no understanding of the sentiment that caused Longfellow, when in search of inspiration, to turn to the Church.

Longfellow’s love of the melodious, of the beautiful, of the symmetrical, led him into defects. He could not endure a discord, and his motto was “Non clamor, sed amor,” which, as coming from him, may be paraphrased in one word, “serenity.” His superabundant similes show how he longed to carry one thing into another thing of even greater beauty, and how this longing sometimes leads him to faults of taste.

But this lover of beauty—led by it to the very beauty of Ruskin’s Circe and his forefathers’ “Scarlet Woman”—came of a race that hated beauty. And yet he stretched out through the rocky soil of Puritan traditions and training until we find him translating the sermon of St. Francis of Assisi to the birds into English verse, and working lovingly at the most Christian of all poems, the “Divine Comedy.” It was he—this descendant of the Puritans—who described, as no other poet ever described, the innocence of the young girl coming from confession. But it was his love of beauty and his love of purity that made him do this. In Longfellow’s eyes only the pure was beautiful. A canker in the rose made the rose hateful to him. He was unlike his classmate and friend Hawthorne: the stain on the lily did not make it more interesting. His love of purity was, however, like his hatred of noise, a sentiment rather than a conviction.

The love for the beautiful leads to Rome. Ruskin fights against it, Longfellow yields to it, and even Whittier—whose lack of culture and whose traditions held him doubly back—is drawn to the beauty of the saints.

As culture in America broadens and deepens, respect for the things that Protestantism cast out increases. James Russell Lowell’s paper on Dante, in “Among My Books,” is an example of this. The comprehension he shows of the divine poet is amazing in a son of the Puritans. But the human mind and the human heart will struggle towards the light.

Longfellow was too great an artist to try to lop off such Catholic traditions as might displease his readers. In this he was greater than Sir Walter Scott, and a hundred times greater than Spenser. Scott’s mind, bending as a healthy tree bends to the light, stretched towards the old Church. She fascinated his imagination, she drew his thoughts, and her beauty won his heart; but he was afraid of the English people. And yet, subservient as Scott was, Cardinal Newman avows that Sir Walter’s novels drew him towards the Church; and there is a letter written by the great cardinal in which he laments that the youth of the nineteenth century no longer read the novels of the “Wizard of the North.” Scott cannot get rid of the charm the Church throws about him. He was not classical, he was romantic. He soon tired of mere form, as any healthy mind will. The reticent and limited beauty of the Greek temple made him yawn; but he was never weary of the Gothic church, with its surprises, its splendor, its glow, its statues, its gargoyles—all its reproductions of the life of the world in its relations to God.

Similarly, Longfellow was not a classicist. The coldness of Greek beauty did not appeal to him; he could understand and love the pictures of Giotto—the artist of St. Francis—better than the “Dying Gladiator.” When Christianity had given life to the perfect form of Greek art, then Longfellow understood and loved it. And he trusted the American people sufficiently not to attempt to placate them by concealing or distorting the source of his inspiration. No casual reader of “Evangeline” can mistake the cause of the primitive virtues of the Acadians. A lesser artist would have introduced the typical Jesuit of the romancers, or hinted that a King James’s Bible read by Gabriel and Evangeline, under the direction of a self-sacrificing colporteur, was at the root of all the patience, purity, and constancy in the poem. But Longfellow knew better than this, and the American people took “Evangeline” to their heart without question, except from some carper, like Poe, who envied the literary distinction of the poet. We must remember, too, that the American people of 1847 were not the American people of to-day; they were narrower, more provincial, less infused with new blood, and more prejudiced against the traditions of the Church to which Longfellow appealed when he wrote his greatest poem.

It is as impossible to eliminate the cross from the discovery of America as to love art and literature without acknowledging the power that preserved both.