A Life of Pope Pius IX. By John R. G. Hassard. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1878.
“It is ... with the story of the private virtues of Pius IX., the outlines of his public life, and the most important works of his pontificate that the present biography will be chiefly concerned,” says the author of this really excellent life of the late Pope. Mr. Hassard has closely kept to the programme which he thus clearly set down for himself in the beginning, and the result is one of the most comprehensive biographies of Pius IX. that we have yet seen. The book is by no means a bulky one, yet the story of the wonderful pontificate is all there; the events that mark it grouped with the skill of a thoroughly practised and efficient pen: the secret forces that impelled those events brought to light; and the lights and shadows of the ever-shifting scene pictured with a rapid yet bold and true hand. Mr. Hassard has the happy gift of collecting his facts, setting them together in the briefest and most intelligible form, and leaving the reader to make his own comment on them. The comment is sure to be such as the author himself would make, so clear and logical is his arrangement of the premises. Another happy feature marks this biography: there is an absence of gush. The author writes tenderly and with an open admiration of his subject; but the tenderness never sinks into sentimentality, and the admiration is always manly and reasonable. The anecdotes are well chosen and happy, and most, if not all, of them will be new to the general reader. The author’s study of the workings of the secret societies, which play so prominent a part in the history of the last pontificate, has been close and searching. His acquaintance with European politics generally, so necessary in a biographer of Pius IX., is equally thorough. These necessary qualifications give a special value to the present Life, while the whole story is told with a genial glow of personal regard and admiration for its subject, none the less charming that its tone is rationally subdued. Mr. Hassard is to be congratulated on having produced a biography that will be cherished by Catholic readers as we cherish and keep by us, and look at again and again, a faithful miniature of one very dear to our hearts.
Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne. From the original manuscripts, with introduction and notes by Harry Buxton Forman. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1878.
Were these the letters of John Brown instead of John Keats the world would wonder, with reason, what possible motive could have induced their publication. Well might poor Keats, were he alive, say on seeing them in print and exposed to the public gaze, “Save me from my friends!” Their publication is, perhaps, the greatest injury that the unfortunate poet, or his memory, ever had to sustain. As letters, even as love-letters, they are remarkably dull and insipid. How Miss Fanny Brawne received them of course we do not know. Love is reputed to be blind. It is certainly color-blind. Othello could never have looked black—at least not very black—to Desdemona. Had he worn his native sable that poor lady would undoubtedly have been reserved for a better fate. So it is presumably with love-letters. They may contain wells of wit and wisdom and eloquence and fire to the party to whom they are addressed, and who is bewitched by love’s potion, though to all the rest of the world they are the very embodiment of absurdity and nonsense. Titania, over whom the spell has been wrought, sees an Adonis where everybody else only sees honest Nick Bottom, the weaver, fittingly capped by an ass’s head. It is an evil day for Bottom when the love potion has lost its virtue and the scales drop from the eyes of Titania. Such an event does happen at times to all the Bottoms and Titanias, and probably it happened to Miss Fanny Brawne, who never became Mrs. Keats, but Mrs. Somebody Else. If ever she had cause for a grudge against Keats she has more than revenged it by allowing some prying busybody access to these very silly letters which are now given to the public for the first time.
They show nothing but weakness, mental and moral, in their author. It should be remembered, however, that they are the letters of a man marked for death. They exhibit not a trace of the wit and humor which Keats really had, and to which he sometimes gave expression. They are utterly without his classic grace and profound, if pagan, sympathy with nature. They are the expressions of morbid feeling, and of nothing else. They can serve no purpose but to lower Keats in the estimation of all who read them. He was never a robust character; but these exhibit him as a weakling of weaklings, and it was simply cruel to publish them. The whole thing is a piece of the worst kind of bookmaking we have seen. The introduction, which is worth nothing save to perplex, occupies sixty-seven pages; the letters, which are of about equal value, occupy one hundred and seven pages; an appendix of nine pages sets forth “the locality of Wentworth Place”; to all of which there are no less than six pages of an index with such headings as these: “Arrears of Versifying to be Cleared”; “Books lent to Miss Brawne not to be sent home”; “Brawne, Fanny”; “Brawne, Margaret”; “Brawne, Mrs.”; “Brawne, Samuel, Jr.”; “Brawne, Samuel, Sr.” (why not “The Brawne Family” at once?); “Café, Keats will not sing in a”; “Flirting with Brawne”; “Front parlor, Watching in”; “Getting Stouter”; “Laughter of Friends”; “Sore throat, Confinement to the house with”; and so on. We do not know who Mr. “Harry” Buxton Forman may be, but if ever it came to pass that we were threatened with fame at the cost of a future Harry Buxton Forman to hunt up our love-letters or butchers’ and bakers’ bills, or every scrap that we might write in an incautious moment, we should certainly prefer to all time our present happy obscurity.
Life of Henri Planchat, Priest of the Congregation of the Brothers of St. Vincent de Paul. By Maurice Maignen. Translated from the French, with an introductory preface. By Rev. W. H. Anderdon, S.J. London: Burns & Oates. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society Co.)
This Life is a beautiful one. In reading it we are constantly reminded of the just and faithful man—the privileged servant of God—who, amidst the turmoil of the world, possesses his soul in peace. Henri Planchat was born of good parents at Bourbon-Vendée on November 22, 1823. After a holy youth he was called to the sanctuary and studied under the venerable Sulpitians at Paris. Being ordained priest on December 22, 1850, he offered his first Mass the next day, and the day after that “attained,” says his biographer, “the climax of his wishes by becoming a member of the little community of Brothers of St. Vincent of Paul, in order to live and die in the service of the working classes and of the poor in general.” Interior recollection, humility, and the perfect performance of the duties of his ministry raised him to a martyr’s throne. A dreadful storm, the fury of the Commune, suddenly burst upon this life of singular simplicity and charity, devoted to the needy and the ignorant for upwards of twenty years, and he was basely massacred, out of hatred to religion, in the Rue Haxo, on the 27th of May, 1871, among that very class of people for whom he had labored so earnestly and so long. “We are the good odor of Christ,” says the apostle, and in the untimely yet happy death of Henri Planchat we perceive the aptness of Bacon’s saying about adversity, that “virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed or crushed.”
The Rev. Father Anderdon, S.J., has written an introductory preface to this English translation which is short and to the point; but a scholar like Father Anderdon should not have mistaken (preface) Poitou for Picardy, which was an altogether different province of the territorial divisions of France before the Revolution.
One of God’s Heroines: A Biographical Sketch of Mother Mary Teresa Kelly, Foundress of the Convent of Mercy, Wexford. By Kathleen O’Meara. New York: The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1878.
Nothing that the very gifted author of the Life of Frederic Ozanam writes can fail to attract attention or excite admiration. Miss O’Meara seems equally happy in biography as in fiction. Her stories, such as Are You My Wife? Alba’s Dream, etc., etc., need no recommendation to readers of The Catholic World. In the touching little biography which calls for the present notice Miss O’Meara has evidently performed a labor of love. The title exactly describes the subject of the sketch. Mother Kelly was indeed “one of God’s heroines,” called up at a time when such heroines are peculiarly needed—in our own days. She was born in 1813; she died on Christmas day, 1866. Her religious life was a sustained series of heroic actions—actions none the less heroic that they were done in a practical, unostentatious, matter-of-fact manner. Her good works live after her, and it was a kindly and just thought to commemorate them as they have been commemorated in the bright pages of this tender and graceful little memoir by so skilful a hand and appreciative a heart. No one can read One of God’s Heroines without feeling that after all the world is a brighter place than so many writers are wont to picture it. It will always be bright and worth living in while it can boast of such pious and charitable souls as Mother Mary Kelly. The only fault to be found with the present sketch of that life is its brevity.