This book has many excellencies. The author shows himself thoroughly versed in his subject. He writes with elegance, occasionally with force, as in the remarks on the influence of the Protestant Reformation on literature. His taste is true and his judgment sound. In fact, judging by the work itself, he would seem possessed of the qualities fitted to make him an admirable compiler of a literary manual.
The first sentence of the author’s preface explains the object of the book: “The compiler of this work has long felt the necessity of some text book of British and American literature which, in its general bearing, would be free from sectarian views and influences, and, in the extracts, be entirely unexceptionable in point of morality.” This sentence is open to misinterpretation. It is plain, however, from the general plan of Father Jenkins’ work, as well as from numerous passages in it, that he has had in view from the beginning to restore to the Catholic Church, the inspirer of the highest literature, the mother of Christian art, and the fosterer of the sciences, her rightful place in English letters. In most of the text-books used in schools her influence on thought and literature is altogether ignored and herself in too many instances derided. It is clear, then, what the learned author meant by freeing his book from “sectarian views.” While giving their lawful place to all writers, of whatever manner of belief or no belief, he had for his direct object the
pruning out of all anti-Catholic and immoral passages, and the insertion of established Catholic authors who are systematically excluded from ordinary text-books.
No object could be better calculated to confer more lasting benefit on the minds of the young generation growing up around us, for whom chiefly the present work is intended. We open the book with eagerness, therefore, and turn over page after page with interest, often with admiration, until we come up to the present century, when, especially within the later half of it, Catholic literature in England and the United States has, from a variety of causes, received a new and remarkable impulse. It is hardly too much to say that Catholic questions are among the chief questions of the day here as well as in England; they have been such for the last fifty years; they promise to be such for at least fifty years to come; and Catholic writers to-day hold their own in every branch of literature. After three centuries of silence, of death almost, the church has risen again among these peoples who went astray, the voice of truth is heard, and its utterances are manifold. Surely there is reason to expect that due notice of such awakening, of such signs of life and hope, be taken in a literary text-book, which, after all, can only hope to make its way in Catholic schools. Yet here, in this crucial point, Father Jenkins’ work is singularly and lamentably defective. Whether or not he intended to supply the deficiency is not known to us; but those who took up the work after his death ought to have supplied it.
We turn to the book, and what do we find? The only Catholic writers of the century who are found worthy a place in this Catholic manual are, to take them as they occur: Dr. Lingard, Thomas Moore, Cardinal Wiseman, Dr. Newman, Aubrey de Vere, in England and Ireland; Bishop England, Robert Walsh, and Archbishop Spalding, in America. And these are all!
Where is Dr. Brownson? His name occurs in a casual note of the author’s, in
the same way as the names of Griswold, Cleveland, or Reid occur. Where is Dr. Pise, Dr. Huntington, George H. Miles, Dr. White, Colonel Meline, John G. Shea, Dr. R. H. Clarke, Archbishop Hughes—they simply run off the pen—together with dozens of others, many of whose names will not need recalling to the readers of this magazine? We shrink from extending the catalogue of the absent to England and Ireland.
Writers conspicuous by their absence are by no means restricted to the Catholic faith. Among strange omissions are the following: Southwell is in, but not Crashaw; Shakspere, but not Massinger, or Beaumont and Fletcher; Addison, but not Steele; all the earlier novelists are absent. The dramatists of the reign of Charles II. are ignored. Goldsmith is remembered, but Sheridan is forgotten. Scott is in, but Burns is out. Moore and Byron, and even Rogers, find their place; but Shelley and Keats are nowhere to be found. Dickens and Thackeray are here, but Bulwer Lytton is absent; and so the list goes on.
The book is supposed to reach up to the present day. The writers on political philosophy, the scientists, the theologians, many of the writers on history known to us as living among us still and destined to live long after us, are altogether omitted. Not a hint even of their existence is given. The “compiler,” as he styled himself, says in the preface that “whatever has relation to our common humanity, and interests all men alike, whether it be fictitious or real, in poetry or in prose, comes within the appropriate province of literature. Even popularized science is not excluded.” And he adds, strangely enough in the light of the chief defect we have noticed: “If, in the early periods, the name of an eminent divine or scholar is introduced whose writings might seem to belong rather to the department of science than belles-lettres, it is because he ranks among the few men of his epoch who were remarkable for intellectual vigor and general knowledge.” This being so, where are the English, Irish, and American Catholic theological, philosophical, and polemical writers of the last half-century?
Of course a work of this kind, which aimed at doing justice to our Catholic writers of the present century, would quite overrun the limits of an ordinary