Catholic novelists, and Protestant also, have a noble field before them wherein to sow and reap. It is for them to show that vice and unchastity are not the only subjects which can interest us; that godliness and true love are not such dull, insipid, everyday things; that suffering and self-denial and sacrifice for a noble purpose, the soul-conflict of human passion against the eternal decrees, and its mastery after much struggle and weary strife, are full of the profoundest interest for man; that history is but the chronicle of this conflict, and when rightly read shows it forth in every page; that our souls can be fired, our flagging senses stimulated, our admiration aroused, by the well-told story of the struggle of right when we see a God moving and acting in it all, far more than by the adoration of indecency deified.
Review Of Vaughan's Life Of S. Thomas: Concluded.[114]
In our last number, we endeavored to give our readers some idea of Prior Vaughan's Life of S. Thomas of Aquin. We purposely omitted, however, to say anything of his treatment of the personal history of the saint himself. The name of Thomas of Aquin belongs to church history, to theology and philosophy; but it also belongs to what is known by the somewhat uncouth name of hagiography; and the story of the saint is more engaging to the greater number of readers, than the history of the theologian or the philosopher. We have already hinted that some of Prior Vaughan's best pages are to be found in the narrative of the saint's personal story.
Biography is as old as the days of Confucius, or at least as the times of his early disciples; and whilst its object has been, on the whole, the same in all ages, its forms have undergone infinite variety. Men have written Lives in order to cheat Death of his victims. They have tried to keep heroes alive by embalming them in incorruptible and imperishable speech, that all time might know them, and their influence might reach from age to age. Biography has always had a moral purpose: to make men patriotic, or brave, or virtuous—to make them better in heart, rather than more subtle in intellect. Example being the great motive power in the world, the images of men in books have done much to shape the world's course. But the books that have preserved the memory of heroic men have been of many different sorts. In old times, they used to be books [pg 255] of anecdote—books which were a threaded series of pithy sayings and generous deeds, each with a point of its own, and altogether tending to form the citizen, the soldier, or the virtuous man. And the style of Plutarch and of Diogenes Laertius was continued by Ven. Bede, by William of Malmesbury, by Froissart, and by the innumerable chroniclers of the middle ages. The biographer speaks in his own person now and then, but his words are very brief, and are often not so much an assistance to the tale, as a break in it or a sort of private aside with the reader. The personal features of the hero, his mind or his body, are not made much of by the old biographers. You hear about his height, his complexion, the color of his hair, or the length of his chin; but you are never told when his eye flashes or his lip curls. Dates are not matters of importance. You have his birth and his death, but there is none of that curious comparative chronology which modern readers know of. And as for any sense of the picturesque, any idea of scene-painting or putting in backgrounds, it need not be said that the old biographies are as plain as the background of a Greek theatre. They now and then give particulars of time, place, and circumstance which their modern transcribers seize upon as a miner seizes on the rare and welcome nugget; but these are entirely beyond their own intention. The historical and the moral are the only two elements to be found in lives from Xenophon down to Dr. Johnson. The latter biographer suggests that, in his days, the moralizing element had developed out of the merely moral. But the life of Prior and the life of Alcibiades are not very distantly related. The time was coming when lives began to be picturesque. The growth of the propensity to the picturesque is a curious problem. Why is it that Homer never describes Troy, that Herodotus never gives us a picture of Marathon, that Cæsar has no eye for the Rhine, and that Froissart does not paint St. Denis on the day of the Oriflamme, whilst, on the other hand, Montalembert stops his story to describe the Western Isles, De Broglie lets us see the Council of Nicea as it sat, Stanley consecrates pages to paint Judæa and Carmel, and every writer of a saint's life at the present hour provides for a picture or two in every chapter? Who began this? We do not mean who began the picturesque in literature, for that question, though a curious one is not so difficult to answer; but who began the picturesque in biography? It is Chateaubriand who usually gets the credit of having initiated all the romance and sentimentality that has crept into serious literature during the last half-century. Chateaubriand has only left, if we remember rightly, one attempt at biography, and the Vie de Rancé contains certainly sentiment and romance enough, but it is not graphic in the way that modern biographies are. The author dashes off brilliant sketches of society, he recites imaginary scenes, or rather episodes, in which nature plays her part, he makes incisive remarks, and utters beautiful poetry; but when he comes face to face with De Rancé, the penitent and the monk, his hand seems to falter, and he grows feeble and disappointing, just where a modern writer would have seized the opportunity of powerful painting and strong situation. For ourselves, whatever influence Chateaubriand had—and he had much—in directing men's thoughts to analogies that lie beneath the surface of nature, of history, and of the human heart, we are inclined to attribute [pg 256] the modern craving for the picturesque to the development of a quality in which Chateaubriand did not especially excel; we mean, earnestness and reality. Many causes, and most of all, perhaps, that series of political and religious phenomena which is summed up in the word revolution, have combined, during the present century, to take literature out of the hands of merely professional writers, or to make those only choose it as a profession who have something earnest to say. Style and thought have come to be considered one thing. As De Quincey observes, style is not the mere alien apparelling of a thought, but rather its very incarnation.
It is easy to see how earnestness leads to the picturesque in biography. In proportion as the writer is able to fix his mind upon his hero, in the same proportion he comes to realize him, as the phrase is. Not only are all the facts and circumstances collected with the care of a lawyer getting up a brief, but words and names that look dead and speechless are analyzed as with magnifying power, till they take significance and life. Every name, as Aristotle saw, is itself a picture; but it is a picture that only requires a more powerful imaginative lens to grow greater, fuller, and more living. And therefore the earnest writer, because he looks more intently at his subject, sees more in it to put upon his canvas; and the reader, struck by the significance that he cannot gainsay, and moved by the pictures, as pictures always move the human fancy, is held in bonds by the writer, and remembers long and vividly what impressed his thought so strongly at the first. He is like one who has seen the site of a great battle, and has once for all fixed for himself, as he gazed, the relative positions and movements of the fight; he will not easily forget it. Something must, no doubt, be added to this; something must be allowed to modern culture, to modern appreciation of art as art, to modern love of landscape, and to the general romanesque tendency begun by Chateaubriand. But so far from the tendency to picturesque biography being wholly attributable to sentiment, we hold that it is precisely our modern earnestness that makes us demand to see things nearer and more real. Doubtless the picturesque biographer is exposed to many dangers, and his readers to many trials. He may “realize” what does not exist; he may “analyze” out of his inner consciousness alone; he may usurp what is the privilege of the poet and the romancer, and give names and habitations not only to airy nothings, but, what is much more serious, to unsubstantial mistakes. And therefore we do not wonder that many well-meaning people, with the results of romantic biography or history before their eyes, and youthful remembrances of Lingard and Butler, have come to distrust every account of a personage or of a fact which contains the smallest mixture of imagination.
The length of these prefatory remarks may lead the reader to suppose that Prior Vaughan has written picturesquely and sensationally about S. Thomas of Aquin. Yet this, stated absolutely, would by no means be true. We shall presently give one or two passages, in which a fine imaginative and descriptive power, we think, is displayed. But the book bears no sign of a straining after pictorial effect. Yet its whole idea is pre-eminently picturesque. Prior Vaughan has written with the idea of not merely giving the history of his chosen saint, but of localizing it [pg 257] in time and in space. It is with this view that he enters into descriptions of Aquino, of Monte Cassino, of Paris and its University; it is for this that he brings S. Dominic and S. Francis on the canvas, and sketches the figures of Frederick II., of Abelard, of S. Bernard, of William of Paris. Each of these names has some connection with Thomas of Aquin, and each throws fresh light on the central object, when it is analyzed with care.
Here is the description, taken from the opening pages of the first volume, of the town of Aquino, which was, if not the birthplace of the saint, at least the principal seat of his family:
“The little town of Aquino occupies the centre of a vast and fertile plain, commonly called Campagna Felice, in the ancient Terra di Lavoro. This plain is nearly surrounded by bare and rugged mountains, one of which pushes further than the rest into the plain; and on its spur, which juts boldly out, and which was called significantly Rocca Sicca, was situated the ancient stronghold of the Aquinos. The remnants of this fortress, as seen at this day, seem so bound up with the living rock, that they appear more like the abrupt finish of the mountain than the ruins of a mediæval fortress. Yet they are sufficient to attest the ancient splendor and importance of the place; and the torrent of Melfi, which, tumbling out of the gorges of the Alps, runs round the castellated rock, marks it out as a fit habitation for the chivalrous and adventurous lords of Aquino, Loreto, and Belcastro.”—i. 3, 4.
Prior Vaughan, as a Benedictine, is naturally drawn to dwell upon the fact of S. Thomas having lived as a boy for five or six years in the Abbey of Monte Cassino. It certainly seems true that the child was placed by his parents in the abbey with a view to his continuing there after he came to years of discretion; just as so many children had been from the days of S. Benedict downwards. “To all intents and purposes,” says the author, “S. Thomas of Aquin was a Benedictine monk. Had he continued in the habit till his death—without any further solemnity beyond the offering of his parents—he would have been reckoned as much a Benedictine as S. Gregory, S. Augustine, S. Anselm, or S. Bede” (i. 20). We do not think that this can be denied. It was affirmed on oath, in the process of canonization, by an exceedingly trustworthy witness, that the saint's father “made him a monk” at Monte Cassino. And a monk he was, no doubt, as much as a boy of twelve can be a monk—and the Council of Trent, be it remembered, had not then fixed the age of religious vows at sixteen. But the frightful confusion of the times brought his Benedictine days to a premature close. Monte Cassino was pillaged and nearly destroyed, the community was scattered, and Thomas of Aquin went to Naples to study—and to find the habit of S. Dominic.