The next step finds him severely wounded by a French chassepot, the guest of Lord St. Jerome in his palace in Rome, carefully attended by Sisters of Charity and Clare Arundel. Nature has perished and grace triumphs. The venom of the anti-Catholic novelist and the malice of the statesman of the establishment are now revealed in a popish plot, which is supposed to be hatched by Lothair's Roman Catholic friends, the prelates of Rome, and, by implication, the holy father.
The object of the conspiracy is to impose upon Lothair and the world that he was wounded while fighting for the defence of the holy see, instead of in the ranks of its determined enemies, and to convince him that the Blessed Virgin Mary personally appeared to rescue him from inevitable death. These pages enhance the claims of the work as one of fiction, but detract very much from its reputation as a specimen of art. The plan is thoroughly un-English, and incompatible with the characters of the actors as previously portrayed. It is by no means impossible for the Blessed Virgin or any saint or angel to appear, and we should be bound to believe the fact if vouched for on credible testimony.
It is, however, naturally, politically, and religiously impossible for priests, bishops, and prelates to combine to make any human being believe a lie, or to palm off a false miracle for any purpose whatsoever. We are charitably left in doubt as to who believed or who did not believe in the apparition, but we are treated to a conversation in which Cardinal Grandison endeavors to make Lothair believe a lie, and to abuse the enfeebled condition of his brain to reduce him to a condition of mental and moral imbecility.
Mr. Disraeli evidently expects no advantages from Catholic voters, or, perhaps, counts on the charity which he abuses.
These passages are the only dangerous ones in the book; they are skilfully contrived to crystallize wavering minds, especially of young men of high rank, into determined opposition to the holy see. They are intended to awaken sympathy for Lothair's helpless and almost hopeless captivity, and to call forth sentiments of satisfaction and pleasure at his adventurous escape. He does escape, and falls into the arms of high-priest Phœbus and two inferior divinities of Madre Natura. They have little power, however, the divine Theodora being dead; and our hero, growing blasé if not wiser and better, subsides into an æsthetical but harmless admiration of external nature and Euphrosyne. Previously to his quitting Rome, the author invents a scene which is either a sop to spiritism, or an insult to his readers' intelligence.
The appearance of the Blessed Virgin, under any circumstances, is treated with derision; but Theodora, like the Witch of Endor, is summoned to interview Lothair in the Coliseum, and remind him of his fatal promise. Perhaps he only means to illustrate a phenomenon of an over-excited brain, whose circulation is enfeebled by a long illness and a severe wound. We are left purposely in doubt on this point, as on many others. This portion of the book contains vivid and beautiful sketches of camp-life and fighting on a small scale, of Rome and Italy, the Tyrrhenean Sea and classic isles. Under the auspices of the Phœbus and Euphrosyne, he is wafted in the yacht Pan to Syria and the Holy Land, and sinks into a pleasing and self-satisfied reverie on Mount Olivet.
The descriptions of Judea and Jerusalem, Calvary and Sion, Galilee and Jordan, Lebanon and Bashan, could be penned only by one who has the traditions of the Jew, the Roman, and the Christian. There is the mournful regret of the Jew, the proud remembrance of the Roman, and the weak and sickly sentimentality of a very doubtful sort of Christian. They want depth and pathos, and leave the mind disturbed and dissatisfied. They profane rather than hallow those sacred places which inspire terror or love in every human breast.
The habits of his English friends whom he meets in the Holy Land, who made excursions which they called pilgrimages, and feasted, made love, and hunted, express about the degree of sympathy which fashionable High-Church Anglicanism has with Calvary. The noble and gentle Syrian now appears to put the finishing touch to Lothair's religious experiences. He is a new figure in fiction, a specimen of oriental Turveydrop, and the patriarch of a new school of Israelitish evangelicalism. In the absence of authentic data, we should presume he had descended from a highly respectable family of Pharisees, which had, in process of time, intermarried with the Sadducees, and perhaps suffered some slight admixture with the heathen round about. He happily succeeds in removing all distinct and vivid religious impressions from the mind of Lothair, and prepares the way, after a final interview with his former Mazzinian general, who speaks in a cheerful and airy manner of his failure to blow up St. Peter's, and consoles Catholic readers with the assurance that the old imposture is still firmly seated, for his return to England, the arms of Lady Corisande, and the bosom of the church by law established. Here we leave him married to an heiress and laid up in lavender, to grow old, fat, and gouty.
While we may speak with some degree of complaisance of this novel as a work of art merely, and a picture of life and manners, in which it is far inferior to similar novels of Bulwer and several other contemporary writers of fiction, we are compelled to discuss this production in its political and moral significance in a very different spirit. Mr. Disraeli must have some powerful motive to induce him to attack the church and outrage the feelings of Catholics throughout the world while he himself has no settled and strong religious convictions of any kind. That motive must be the only one which would operate upon a mind like his—the desire to get back to power. He starts the "No-popery" hue and cry, and invents a most contemptible, shallow, and flimsy plot to influence what he supposes to be the radical hostility of the English people to the Church of Rome, and to throw contempt and discredit upon the conversion of Englishmen of rank, and especially that of the Marquis of Bute. We think he has not only committed a moral crime, but made a gross political blunder. We believe there is a profound sympathy throughout the world in the hearts of simply honest and good people with the holy father, and that if the question could be tested by vote to-day, Who is the best man living? Pius IX. would receive an overwhelming majority. While denouncing in the strongest terms the baseness of the attempt to impute fraud, chicanery, and political trickery to the policy and plans of the church, we have reason to thank the right honorable and learned author for the revelation he has made of the secret societies. He has had ample means of learning and understanding their operations, and his implied conclusion is, that the two great forces arrayed against each other in the modern world are the Roman Catholic Church and the secret societies, of whom Masonry is the mother. This is a conclusion which we accept. It is the everlasting antagonism between the church of Christ and the church of the devil. We hope the glimpse thus afforded will cause some of our clergy to reconsider the lenient opinions they sometimes express in regard to Masonry and its offshoots, and to recognize the supernatural wisdom that has directed the unwavering opposition which the church has manifested toward these works of darkness. As a whole, we do not think Lothair will do much harm. It will provoke much conversation and discussion. It will be praised, ridiculed, admired, and contemned, and speedily sink into oblivion, to be read only by students of literature and those who seek for the light that works of fiction throw upon contemporary history. It reminds us of something which occurred a long time ago, and which cannot be offensive to the right honorable gentleman, who finds a pleasure in insulting cardinals and bishops, inasmuch as the chief personages in the transaction are prototypes of himself and his book. It is the story of Balaam and Balaam's ass. He has attempted to curse, and in fact he has blessed, and the ass which he is riding only speaks like a human being when it meets the angel in the Catholic girl Clare Arundel.