Great and grave and manifold grievances still exist in Ireland. Steadfastness and patience and right political representation must succeed in removing these in time. Great dangers also threaten the country, not the least of which is the very freedom to which it is at last rising. The hardest problem in regard to freedom is to use it wisely and well. It would be a sad thing for the Irish people if on the altar of a new-found freedom they sacrificed their grand old conservative spirit, their deep sense of the supernatural, their reverence for the church and the things of God. For them to drift into the liberalism of the age would be to destroy them. They have gained what they now possess by having been steadfast Catholics and steadfast Irishmen. Let them so continue. We rejoice at the growing sympathy in political and social life between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants. There is no harm in that; on the contrary, it is a great good. But to pass beyond that in matters vital to the faith would be wrong. To renounce, for instance, the right principles of education would be wrong. Let the Protestants go their way in all freedom, security, and peace, but let the Catholics also hold to their way, and insist on it.
Mr. Sullivan is least satisfactory in a point on which we are most deeply interested—the actual position of Ireland to-day, in its industries, its mode of life, its social condition, its educational status, its income, its outlay, how money circulates in the country, how the people are housed, fed, and clothed, compared with former years. These are matters on which, of all things, we desire as full and accurate information as could be obtained, for they are the outward and most visible signs of a people’s progress. Indeed, they are practically the only gauge by which to measure the actuality of that progress. But on this subject Mr. Sullivan gives us only a few rather hesitating words in his last chapter, with the consoling assurance that, “despite all disaster and difficulty, Ireland is marching on.” This is a very serious defect in a work dealing with “New Ireland,” and to remedy it we have applied to another quarter, as seen in the preliminary article on “Ireland in 1878” (The Catholic World, March, 1878). This will be followed by others on the same subject, taking up just the matters which Mr. Sullivan has allowed to escape him.
With this exception, we heartily congratulate the author on his latest volume. He is himself one of the political chieftains who has nobly helped to make a new Ireland. He is a very able and ready man, whose value was at once recognized in the English Parliament, and whose services to his country and to the party which he materially helped to form have been of the most marked and important character. His life has been an honorable one, and he has well earned the fame that now attends him. No man who looks hopefully to the new Ireland can help following with sympathy and interest the future career of A. M. Sullivan.
De Ecclesia et Cathedra; or, The Empire-Church of Jesus Christ. An epistle by the Hon. Colin Lindsay. Vols. i. and ii. London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1877. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society Co.)
Mr. Lindsay, who is a Scottish convert of some ten years’ standing, and was formerly one of the principal lay-leaders in the ritualistic party, has already won a high reputation by a valuable work on St. Peter’s Primacy. The present one is original in its conception and different from any other on the same subject in its method of treating the topics indicated by the title. The grand principles and laws of the church and the Papacy are considered in their universal character as forming the ground-plan of the government of divine Providence over the human race from the beginning. It has a wide historical sweep, and embodies a great mass of solid learning and sound reasoning. The author is sometimes fanciful in his theories and occasionally deficient in theological accuracy of expression, as well as in his style and construction of sentences. These are but faults of minor importance, however, not seriously detracting from the great merits of his most interesting and instructive work. It is quite in the same line of argument with the articles on Historical Christianity we have lately published, and those who are interested in that important and very attractive aspect of religion will find the greatest profit and pleasure in perusing it. One most valuable and quite novel portion of the author’s exposition of the apostolic and divine institution of the Papal Supremacy, is his application of the principle of reserve contained in the discipline of the secret to the particular doctrine in question, as explaining the guarded and reticent manner in which the sacred writers and the early Fathers speak of those high prerogatives of the Christian hierarchy and its chief, which would give umbrage to the Jewish priesthood and the Roman emperors. Full justice could not be done to Mr. Lindsay’s comprehensive and elaborate production without making a long and careful analysis and review of his positions and his manner of supporting them. We trust many of our readers will gain a much better knowledge of its contents than we could possibly give them in this way, by making a careful study of the work itself. It contains a complete historical demonstration of that which we think will soon be as universally admitted as any other great fact of undisputed history—that Catholicity and Christianity are identical and convertible terms, and that ancient and modern Catholicity are one and the same identity in respect to all which pertains to their essence and integrity as the one, universal religion, whose continuity has remained unbroken since the creation, and is destined to be coeval with the world.
The Nabob. From the French of Alphonse Daudet, author of Sidonie, Jack, etc. By Lucy H. Hooper. Author’s edition. Boston: Estes & Lauriat. 1878.
Sidonie and Jack have been briefly noticed in these columns. The Nabob is a large advance upon either. Possessing all the characteristics that individualized those stories, it is larger in scope, firmer in touch, fuller in character, more vigorous and finished in execution. As far as writing, plot, and development go, it is a very remarkable book. We must say of it, however, as we said of its predecessors, it is not a pleasant story. There is a kind of hot-house effect about it, a forced process, so to say, that, while fascinating for the moment, is not natural and healthy. We breathe in an overcharged atmosphere. There is any quantity of intoxicating odors, of lights and flowers, and soft music and rich costumes and beautiful faces. But the light is not the blessed sunlight; the odors and flowers oppress us with their heaviness like those around a bier; the beautiful faces are painted, and we sigh for something fresh and free, even if it be not half so elegant or well “made up.” There is from the beginning a brooding sense of a storm coming, and the storm comes with awful and repulsive vehemence.
Doubtless the author meant to produce just such an effect and to achieve just such a result. If this were his chief intention he is to be congratulated on his success. He has given a highly dramatic story—melodramatic, in fact. There is wit enough and humor enough throughout; but even the wit is biting and the humor sour. The laughter has the sardonic tone of Mephistopheles, and an honest man shivers a little even while he joins in it. Every scene fits with niceness; the curtain always falls on a strong situation; there is not a dull incident throughout; and if nearly everybody in whom you have been interested gets murdered, or destroyed, or run away with, or debauched at the end, what will you have? A melodrama is a melodrama, and Paris is its paradise.
The Nabob is a story of Parisian life, as Parisian life is popularly supposed to have been when Napoleon III. was the arbiter of Europe and Paris Europe’s capital—a capital, if the novelists are to be believed, of political, social, literary, scientific, and moral charlatanism. Doubtless this is true to a great extent; for the leader of it all had, unfortunately for France and himself, much of the charlatan in his disposition. There is everything there but honesty and purity; or if honesty and purity there be, they are kept severely in the background. Their garb is too homely, their faces are too fresh, for this garish light and exotic atmosphere. They are out of place in this fashionable dance of death, as we say here the scholar and the gentleman are out of politics. There is a wonderful duke and statesman—De Mora—whose habit is to give a bored half-glance to the affairs of France, and the rest of his time to dilettanteism and amours, looking all the while to a quack doctor’s globules to keep his eyes bright, his step elastic, and his nerves steady enough for an evening party. There is a sculptor—Felicia Ruys—full of the noblest aspirations, but whose bringing up has been bad. She has been among Bohemians from her infancy, and she is left alone among them, under the care of an old aunt, a famous dancer in her day, whose wonderful toes had turned the crowned heads of Europe. Felicia’s noble nature finds itself bound in by an iron barrier of wickedness. She is surrounded always by a vicious circle from which she sees no outlet or escape. Is it so wonderful that she mistakes her narrow circle for the universe, and sees nothing but wickedness in all the world? How many do this in real life!
There is the wonderful Nabob himself, risen from nowhere, to whom one of the strange turns of Fortune’s wheel sent a fabulous fortune gathered by his own hard and not too scrupulous hands in Algeria. He is ignorant, vulgar, low, without any very strong moral sense, but with a really kind and good heart: he goes to Paris with his millions, and his millions conquer Paris—as long as they last. All the charlatans circle around him. He is a rich man; he wants now to be a great and a distinguished man; and it is truly wonderful to see how many kind friends spring up to make this rich man great and distinguished in a day. Even the Duke de Mora condescends to sell him his cast-off pictures at ducal prices; the illustrious and philanthropic Dr. Jenkins—Jenkins the great—feeds him on his globules at fees that are fortunes; Felicia Ruys makes a bust of him, and would have married him only that he is stupid enough to have been burdened with a wife; Moessard, one of the vampires of the press, writes the Nabob up, and, when the Nabob at last closes his pocket, writes the Nabob down. And so they go on all of them, in a whirl of gold-dust and pearl-powder and moral filth that is their world until they are swept out, each in his or her way, on the strong eddy that is for ever noiselessly, silently, relentlessly sweeping off human lives into the vast and eternal hereafter.