within our intention. Moreover, the charms of style are essentially requisite. Happily, we have begun to supply the dearth of such books in the English language, partly by such as are originally written in English, partly by translations. John Henry Newman has given us a certain quantity of historical writing worthy of comparison with “Livy’s pictured page,” and justly meriting for him the title, so felicitously invented by an Italian critic, of “the Claude Lorraine of English literature.” The accomplished authoress of Christian Schools and Scholars is another skilful miner in the gold-fields of Catholic history; and Mrs. Hope, also, has shown in her volumes on the conversion of the Teutons and Anglo-Saxons how specially adapted to labor successfully in this department are cultivated women. Montalembert’s Monks of the West is an unrivalled masterpiece, as all know; and if we were to catalogue all the various pieces of historical composition on similar topics to be found in recent European literature, enough of them would be found to make a small library. All books of this kind in the English language would, however, make but a small collection, merely enough for a nucleus of a library of Catholic historical literature. The educated and reading classes in England and the United States have been, within a very recent period, shockingly ignorant of the history of all except a few nations during a few epochs, in regard to which they have received a certain amount of information from popular works, mixed up with a great amount of error and misrepresentation. There has doubtless been an improvement slowly taking place for the last thirty years, and becoming continually more
rapid as it advances. Yet, rating this improvement at the highest value it can possibly be imagined to have, the amount of knowledge, especially in regard to the real, genuine history of Christendom, which is current among the readers of only English books, or even accessible to them, is lamentably small. Even the most of those who are supposed to know something of foreign literature may, without injustice, be taxed with the same lack of information. We consider, therefore, that the example of Ozanam is one which has a special fitness in it to allure and stimulate those whose vocation it is to give instruction, by lectures or writings, to a zealous imitation. There are Australian and Californian mines waiting for those who will work them, in which those who have not the ability to dig out great masses of the golden ore may find nuggets and gold-dust in abundance to increase the common treasure in general circulation. Historical works of original and thorough research are wanted. Where translations from German, French, and Italian works suffice, let them suffice, and original authors take up new topics. Would that, even by the easy method of translation from foreign languages, our English historical literature might be enriched, and that the taste for solid reading were sufficiently diffused to enable enterprising publishers to employ the hundreds of persons able and willing to undertake this work! Besides these more extensive historical works, there is a great need for others of lesser magnitude, for which the materials already exist in abundance. All that is necessary to make these rich materials available is, that they be worked up by those who possess the art of conveying
instruction and imparting delight to inquisitive minds by the skilful use of their vernacular idiom in a way suited to the capacity and taste of their listeners or readers. Teachers in colleges and schools who are able to lecture to their pupils will, in our opinion, stimulate their minds to thought and study much more easily and efficaciously by lectures on topics of this kind than by adhering exclusively to the mere class routine. And we venture to suggest also to those who give lectures to literary associations or general audiences, that they would do well to exchange their usually trite and abstract topics of vague and general declamation for specific and individual subjects taken from the historical domain. We may say the same to those who undertake to write books, or articles for the periodicals. And here it occurs to our memory to refer to certain historical and biographical articles which have appeared in some of our magazines as specimens and illustrations. The Civiltà Cattolica has published a long series of brief but remarkably accurate and graphic historical sketches of the lives and reigns of the Sovereign Pontiffs, under the title of I Destini di Roma. The Month has repeatedly given short articles of the same kind, either singly or serially, which are perfect models of the popular historical style. Our children and young people, and indeed all people whatever who can be induced to hear or read anything instructive, with the exception of a small class of severely-disciplined minds, must be charmed in order to be taught. Truth must be made visible; in concrete, distinct, and brilliant pictures, images, representations of actual realities, living examples; as
a splendid form in symmetrical figures. This is the reason why works of imaginative genius are so keenly relished by the multitude, and especially those fictitious narratives called novels and romances, whose particular form is most easily apprehended by the common imagination. Fiction, in so far as it is constructed according to the rules of true art, is but a shadow of real life. The reality is far more interesting. Compendiums and textbooks must indeed be dry, and they are necessary, as grammars and dictionaries are both extremely dry and extremely necessary. But, besides these dry skeletons of history, we need other books in which the epic and lyric harmony and dramatic life of man’s variegated action on the earth are reproduced—works which bear the same relation to dry annals that the Æneid or the Cid sustain to Latin and French grammar. They should be composed with such a charm of style that an intelligent boy or girl would eagerly take them under a tree of a fine summer-day, and beguile delightfully a long afternoon in their perusal, if they are for juvenile readers; and if they are of a more ambitious aim, that they allure their readers to burn the midnight oil over their pages. Nor would we exclude historical romances from the category of useful and instructive literature, if they are constructed in conformity to the truth of history and inculcate wholesome moral lessons.
It is an error to consider literature as merely a means of instruction for a secular purpose or of transitory pleasure, and to confine the effort at cultivating the spiritual faculties in view of the soul’s everlasting destiny, to the use of means directly religious. This is one form of the erroneous doctrine that the
temporal order ought to be separated from the spiritual order, and therefore education be secularized. If there are any who think that the clergy have no interest in any but their own technical, professional studies, and that catechisms, didactic sermons, ascetic books, and biographies of saints written in that formal method which is so inexpressibly unnatural and tedious, with virtues tied up in separate bundles and commonplace dissertations overloading the narrative, are the only and sufficient means of salvation, we might say to them: Look at the Bible, and study the method which the divine Wisdom adopted. It is a book of history, poetry, eloquence; with little of professedly abstract, didactic instruction. It is an inspired literature, and the sermons of our Lord even are thrown into a popular and concrete form which addresses the imagination more directly than the understanding. The Bible, as well as nature, reason, and experience, teaches us the practical lesson that for the young and for the multitude object-teaching is the proper and only successful method. The divine philosophy, as well as the human, must be taught by example, and history is philosophy teaching by examples. In the history of Christendom, both public and private, the sacred history of the Old and New Testament is continued. The church is the spouse of Christ. The Evangelists paint the picture of the bridegroom, and Catholic historians of the bride. To win admiration and love for her, it is enough to represent her as she is.
Frederic Ozanam was inspired with this idea, which was infused into his soul by the Holy Spirit who consecrated him to his high vocation. He devoted himself to
his literary and historical labors as a professor at the Sorbonne, not for the sake of science, fame, or any earthly advantage or emolument, but as an apostle of the Catholic religion; that he might win the studious youth of Paris to love Catholic truth and return to the church of their ancestors. For fifty years no Catholic lecturer, speaking as a Catholic, had been heard in that ancient, desecrated temple of the Christian philosophy of the glorious days gone by of France. The voice of Ozanam was heard, without the slightest flattening of its Catholic tone, with no timid reticence of his Catholic principles, and it captivated that crowd of turbulent, unbelieving youth by its magic eloquence. His biographer tells us:
“No man in his position was ever so much beloved in Paris; it was almost an adoration. After hanging upon his lips at the Sorbonne, bursting out every now and then, as if in spite of themselves, into sudden gusts of applause, and then hushing one another for fear they should lose one of the master’s words, his young audience would follow him out of the lecture-hall, shouting and cheering, putting questions, and elbowing their way up for a word of recognition, while a band of favored ones trooped on with him to his home across the gardens. They never suspected what an additional fatigue this affectionate demonstration was to the professor, already exhausted by the preceding hour and a half’s exertion, with its laborious proximate preparation. No matter how tired he was, they were never dismissed; he welcomed their noisy company, with its eager talk, its comments and questions, as if it were the most refreshing rest. There was, indeed, only one reward that Ozanam coveted more; this was when some young soul, who had come to the lecture in doubt or unbelief, suddenly moved by the orator’s exposition of the faith, as it was embodied or shadowed forth in his subject, opened his eyes to the truth, and, like the blind man in the Gospel, cried out, ‘giving thanks.’
“One day, on coming home from the