Exceptions have been taken to it, on the ground that one meets nothing in it but theories, without any practical conclusion. Yet what can be more practical than the exhortation which confronts us on every page, to seek in all our religious acts, in sacraments, worship, and discipline, the divine intention involved therein? What more practical than to urge us to develop all the forces of our nature under the divine influence, and to tell us that the more conscientious, reasonable, and manly we are, the more completely men we are, so much the more favorable ground will the church find within us for her working?
Far from urging any abrupt change, Father Hecker recommends that everything should be done with prudence, consideration being had for the manners of every country. He is persuaded that, by placing more confidence in the divine work in souls, they will become insensibly stronger, and will increase thus indefinitely the force and energy of the whole body of the church. Such a future will present us with the spectacle of the conversion of peoples who at present are bitterly hostile to her—a future which we shall purchase at the cost of many sacrifices. But our trials will be full of consolations if we feel that they are preparing a more general and abundant effusion of divine illumination upon the earth. Per crucem ad lucem.
Personal Recollections of Lamb, Hazlitt, and Others. The Bric-à-Brac Series. Edited by R. H. Stoddard. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1875.
This volume is a compendium of one of those books of memoirs or personal recollections bequeathed to us by the survivors of the English Renaissance of the beginning of the century—My Friends and Acquaintances, by P. G. Patmore. This the editor has supplemented, in the case of Hazlitt, by some letters and reminiscences culled from the Memoirs published by his grandson, W. Carew Hazlitt. These works, it might be fairly supposed, would be of themselves light enough for the most jaded and flippant appetite. However, the aid of the “editor” is called in—heaven forgive the man who first applied that title, honored by a Scaliger and a Bentley, to the modern compiler of scandal!—the most entertaining and doubtfully moral tidbits are picked out; and the result is the class of books before us, which is doing for the national intellect what pastry has done for its stomach. The mutual courtesies—honorable enough when rightly understood—existing between publishers and the periodical press make honest criticism seem ungracious; and thus the public judgment is left uninstructed by silence, or its frivolous tastes are confirmed by careless approval.
The motives impelling the awful scissors of the “editor” not only deprive the original works which fall under them of the modicum of value they may possess, but affirmatively they do worse. They give an absolutely false impression of the persons represented. Thus, in the case before us the character and genius of Lamb are as ridiculously overrated as his true merits are obscured; and the same may be said with even more justice of the portrait given of Hazlitt. Singularly enough, though the editor derives all he knows, or at least all he presents to the reader, from Mr. Patmore and Mr. Carew Hazlitt, he speaks in the most contemptuous terms of both. One he pronounces “not a man of note,” and the other he terms, with a delightful unconsciousness of self-irony, “a bumptious bookmaker, profusely addicted to scissors and paste”; and both he bids, at parting, to “make room for their betters.” If such be the character of Mr. Patmore and Mr. Hazlitt, what opinion, we may ask, is the reader called upon to entertain of the “editor” who is an accident of their existence? Nor is it in relation only to the authors after whom he gleans that the “editor” shows bad taste and self-sufficiency. The immortal author of the Dunciad, speaking of a kindred race of authors, tells us,
“Glory and gain the industrious tribe provoke,
And gentle Dulness ever loves a joke.”
“The ricketty little papist, Pope,” is the witticism the editor levels at the brightest and most graceful poet of his age—a master and maker of our English tongue, and a scourge of just such dunces as himself.
Of the writers whose habits and personal characteristics are treated of in this volume we have little or no room to speak, nor does the work before us afford any sufficient basis to go upon. Lamb occupies a niche in the popular pantheon, as an essayist, higher than posterity will adjudge him. His essays are pleasing and witty, and the style is marvellously pure; but they want solidity; they are idealistic, humorous, subjective; they fail to present that faithful transcript of manners, or to teach in sober tones those lessons of morality, which make the older essayists enduring. Lamb’s other works are already forgotten. He was an amiable man in the midst of unhappy surroundings, and his unassuming manners have enshrined his name with affection in the works of his contemporaries.
Hazlitt’s was not a character to be admired, nor in many ways even to be respected. He was devoured with vanity and grosser passions. His work was task-work, and therefore not high. ’Tis true Horace tells us,