The world goes to Munich for art, instruction, and artistic models; Germany goes there for philosophical and scientific theories. Foreigners would rather leave Berlin and Vienna unvisited than miss a week at Munich; and a stay among its galleries, libraries, and museums, is part of the education of every travelled man. It has its literary, its fashionable, and its diplomatic circles, and, strangely enough, each of these pronounces it an equally agreeable resort. The cultivated world filters through it all the year round, and, like Geneva and Rome, though perhaps in a lesser degree than either, one might stay there a lifetime and yet see the whole panorama of intellectual Europe unrolled at intervals before one’s eyes. Although Munich possesses a learned and important university, it is not to that alone she owes her supremacy, for it is a fact worthy of notice that in our days the sovereignty of thought is more the attribute of an aggregate of independent thinkers, than the exclusive privilege of certain bodies trained in the same traditions, and cast in much the same mould. Whether or no this is an advantage, is a question we need not enter into here; it is beside our subject. We hope subsequently to be able to draw a companion picture of that ancient state of things which made the intellectual centres of the past, both in their growth and in their influence, so widely different from our own. Certain it is, however, that that influence was less ephemeral formerly than now.
From Munich we have not far to go to another of the world’s volcanoes, Paris, the modern enigma. Like a witch’s cauldron, always seething, never safe, Paris is playing an uninterrupted game of political conjuring. Unlike other cities whose intellect is distinct from their politics, Paris cannot help giving a political tinge to its literary and philosophical creations. Social questions are violently joined to intellectual problems; and savants or beaux-esprits will eschew a brother philosopher or wit who wears alien colors and belongs to another camp. The talent that rides uppermost in Paris is identified with socialism, and from literary Bohemianism soon lapses into political outlawry. Victor Hugo is its apostle, Alfred de Musset its poet. On the one hand, a frantic, destructive vigor urges it to assert its self-assumed and imperious sovereignty; on the other, a maudlin, opium-like languor soothes its sensuality and bids it revel in momentary luxury. Sybarites are always tyrants; Nero crowned with roses and singing to his lute while Rome was helplessly burning by his orders, is a fit image of modern Paris displaying her world-alluring softness while Europe is in flames through her baneful principles. We speak of Paris in her zenith; but it is to be feared that the spirit which made her the rose-entwined firebrand of the world, will not long be quelled even by her own unparalleled misfortunes. In her deepest humiliation, when the sympathy of the universe was hers, did she not find strength enough to turn on her true friends, and, by her fiendish attempts on law and order, to alienate the shocked and insulted instincts of a world that had been ready to take up arms in her defence? It may be said that that Paris was not the real one; yet it is the one that rules—rules sourdement, as the French so expressively say, when she is herself ruled by an iron hand, rules through her infidel press, her immoral literature, her unwholesome poetry, her rotten philosophy, her frivolous and heedless society. True it is that in Paris, which proudly calls itself “the capital of the world and the heart of humanity,” there are circles of quiet literary men—coteries of harmless exiles from other lands; men whose lives are bounded by the Bibliothèque Impériale and the Théâtre Français; and men, too, whose one aim is charity and one ambition, heaven. True, France can boast as many missionaries as communists, as many martyrs as soldiers, almost as many religious as unhung miscreants. But how many Montalemberts, how many Dupanloups, how many Lacordaires, beside the innumerable spawn of Dumases, George Sands, Balzacs, Michelets, Taines, and Renans? No doubt in the records of the Almighty there are to be found in this modern Sodom the ten just men that will save it from spiritual destruction, but we are speaking of it principally in the intellectual sense, and surely, from this point of view, where are its saviors? A centre of intellect it is most undoubtedly and most unfortunately, but a centre such as a powder magazine might be. The streams it pours over Europe’s world of thought are lava-streams, scorching the purer air of principle to make way for the poisonous gases of self-indulgence. If Paris were sovereign, peace would be no more, and truth would leave the earth, dismayed. The very opposite, of Rome, its spirit is one of fever, catching even to the calmest pulse of a law-abiding and metaphysical northerner—a spirit that broods over one like the blast of a furnace, and bewilders like the breath of a coming simoom. We have experienced it ourselves in days long before the last great judgment that has crushed the unhappy city; we have marvelled at its obtrusive activity, so fatiguing to the eye, because, unlike that of London or New York, it denotes only the frivolous search after empty pleasure, not the calm plodding after necessary business; we have wondered at its frothy show, where the greatest display is a sure sign of the worst depravity; we have longed to be out of its unwholesome, oppresive spell, that seemed to paralyze the mind and darken the understanding. To think that this possessed city should be the pioneer of the nineteenth century, and have more influence over the moral destinies of the world than Napoleon ever had over the kingdoms of Europe, or than Bismarck can ever have over the future of Paris itself! What have we done to deserve it? What has brought this Egyptian plague upon us, the Nile of the intellect turned into blood, the fertilizer become poison?
There is a wider difference than the mere width of the Channel between Paris and Oxford. What calm, scholarly, refined associations come to our mind when we name the Alma Mater of so many of England’s greatest men! It is like a refreshing ocean breeze after the scorching blast of a volcano. We feel at home here. Gladstone, Pusey, Keble, Newman, were sons of this English centre of thought—Stanley for a long time was identified with it, all the intellectual movements of this century sprang from it, and to represent it in Parliament is accounted the highest political honor. All schools of thought have started from it; “High Church,” “Low Church,” and “Broad Church” have all found their headquarters there, and recruits from these several camps have left it to bring their various gifts to that other and wider university over which the Holy Ghost presides everlastingly. If one might use words that must seem a paradox, Oxford, once made and fashioned by the church, has in our days herself influenced the church. We mean that the university has given to the Catholics of England that unrivalled body of priests who stand alone in Europe for their indomitable energy, their self-sacrificing earnestness, and their gentle and truly Christian refinement. Among Protestants, it is only the strict truth to say that Oxford has created the Church of England, and vivifies her now even more than state protection, or the universal adoption extended to her by usage and courtesy among the educated classes. Most truly has Oxford been called the Rome of English Protestantism. It is sad for us to think of the perverted influence of a system essentially Catholic, of traditions and customs that have lost their meaning while they have kept their form, and yet it is also a proud thought to dwell upon, that such as this matchless seat of intellect is, and such as its absolute identification with English national thought and national character makes it certain ever to be, it owes it to the church of Alfred, of Langton, of Scotus—the church of Peter—alone.
We have said that, in modern times, universities as such have less influence than the aggregate of independent thinkers. This, however, hardly applies to England, for the mass of enlightened men in that country forms, practically, the true university. Cambridge, as a seat of equal learning, yet scarcely of equal brilliancy or influence, is of course included. The social and intellectual training of both is the same, the traditions practically so. The whole body of able men in England belongs to either one or the other of these universities, and, never unlearning their modes of thought and unconsciously stamping their impress deeper on each succeeding work undertaken or effort accomplished, therefore never cease to belong to them. England is thus one university, and Oxford is the epitome of educated England. Very national and jealous of foreign irruption is this vast and compact body; its members will taste and examine very closely before an alien theory be admitted among them, but, once admitted, it is adopted with eagerness, nationalized, and so embodied in a thoroughly English shape that its origin becomes undistinguishable. The spirit of Oxford, unlike that of Paris, is the very reverse of cosmopolitan; there is no versatility in its essence, no straining after effect, novelty, nor even domination; it does not care to impose itself on others, and thus it differs ever from the national-minded spirit of Munich, but it vigorously resents anything being imposed upon it. Ideas grow slowly, and systems ripen there before they are tried; a school of thought goes out whole and calm, not upon tentative excursions, but to certain conquest. Foreigners are more curious to see Oxford than they are to examine any other English institution; foreign savants look with pride or longing on the rare gift of its honorary degrees. Its buildings are the only palaces known in England, and excel in nobility of architecture every modern public erection and almost every private residence. It keeps up customs of hospitality, of generosity, of courtesy, that seem lost amid the dwarfishness of modern politeness; its grand solemnity of demeanor and stateliness of etiquette shame our puny and impudent code of manners; the freedom of later behavior seems by its side a stunted pollard when compared to the magnificent oak of bygone centuries. Oxford keeps up the ideal among Englishmen, or rather it is the ideal personified. It is a standing protest against the levity of modern and fast life—a city of sanctuary for learning, art, ecclesiasticism, æsthetics, philosophy, and taste. Those who have lived all their lives in it as fellow-tutors or professors, love it to idolatry; those who have gone forth to their several professions and been knocked about by the vicissitudes of the world, love it as the Garden of Eden of their lost peace; those who have left it for the Catholic Church, love it with the most mournful and deepest of loves, even as Gregory loved the fair-haired heathen boys that were Angles, but whom he longed to see angels. The greatest mind in England—John Henry Newman—loves it with this sorrowful love, which has prevented him from ever seeing it again since he severed himself from it, and suffered more in this severing than the loss of friends or the wilful misconception of enemies; and in his room at Edgbaston, where his retired life is now entirely spent, there hangs a view of the beautiful English university town, with this significant motto in illuminated characters beneath: “Son of man, dost thou think these dry bones shall live?” (Ez. xxxvii. 3).
From Oxford we must cross the Atlantic to find our last intellectual centre in this age. It is the youngest, though not the least vigorous, and it stands alone on the Western continent, where it has not inaptly been called—as Edinburgh once was—the Modern Athens. Boston is also more or less the product of a university, but here, as elsewhere, the taint is on the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Infidelity and cynicism make their home there in the midst of the luxuriant growth of intellect. Pride of mind has ended in riot of soul, and amid the intoxicating creations of its own strong vitality, the genius of New England has spiritually lost its way. But humanly speaking, what a fair field of intellect is here displayed! It is through Boston that America is best known to Europe. Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, Holmes, are household words wherever the English language is spoken; and the dignified history of New England, no less than her weird and fascinating literature, is as interestingly familiar to English as to American minds. Boston is New England crystallized, the representative city of America, the channel of communication between the Old and the New World, the crucible of every new theory and the test the successful passing of which is, as it were, a “degree” in itself. Boston stands forth as the champion of science against commerce, and the breakwater which strives to save America from the imputation—thrown on England by the French—of being “a nation of shopkeepers.” The West, with its gigantic future roughly mapped out, and its raw material inconveniently spread over the whole land, looks with uneasy and half-dismayed contempt at the scholarly capital of New England; the North, with its sleek prosperity and organized system of elegant life, steals a look askance, in which envy is but thinly concealed behind an affectation of patronage. Of the South we cannot speak, since its naturally true instincts of appreciation and intellectual discernment have been cruelly and rudely shaken by the great convulsion whose effects will long remain but too prominent; but if ever there rises a rival, friendly yet altogether dissimilar, to the New England Athens, it will be in the gifted South, among the descendants of the cavaliers, that we shall turn to look for it. Such a one there should be, for this vast continent, in whose bosom the whole of Europe would lie like an island, must have more than one species of intellectual life, and ought to have more than one acknowledged exponent of it. In the South we should find the ardor of Paris, the ambition of Munich, and the refinement of Oxford, mingled and harmonized; and let us trust that in the lands discovered by Catholic missionaries, and colonized by Catholic gentlemen, we might at least escape the ban that clings to the older centres of intellectual life in Europe, the revolutionary and antichristian tendencies of France, and the unhappy heresies of England and Germany.
OLD BOOKS.
For out of old fields, as men sayth,
Cometh all this new corn from yere to yere,
And out of old books, in good faith
Cometh all this new lore that men lere.
—Chaucer.