Chapter III: Part 3

You will doubtless find that what you most need in the beginning is to know more about words and about books. But this vacuum can be filled by earnest thought and serious application, system, and thoroughness. It takes you a long time to play a mazurka of Chopin’s well. It takes you a long time even to learn compositions less important. A young woman sits many months before a piano before she learns to drag “Home, Sweet Home!” through the eye of a needle; and then to flatten out again _con expressione_; and then to chase it up to the last key until it seems to be lost in a still, small protest; and then to bring it to life and send it thundering up and down, as if it were chased by lightning. How easy it all seems, and how delighted we are when our old friend, “Home, Sweet Home!” appears again in its original form! But there was a time when it was not easy—a time when the counting of one and two and three was not easy. So it is with the art of writing. It is not easy in the beginning. It may be easy to make grandiloquent similes about “prairie-grass” and the “eternal light which cheers,” etc.; but that is just like beginning to play snatches of a grand march before one knows the scales.

To begin to write well, one must cut off all the useless leaves that obscure the fruit, which is the thought, and keep the sun from it. Figures should be used sparingly. One metaphor that blazes at the climax of an article after many pages of simplicity is worth half a hundred scattered wherever they happen to fall. It is a white diamond as compared to a handful of garnets.

VI. Letter-writing.

There is no art so important in the conduct of our modern life, after the art of conversation, as the art of letter-writing. A young man who shows a good education and careful training in his letters puts his foot on the first round of the ladder of success. If, in addition to this, he can acquire early in life the power of expressing himself easily and gracefully, he can get what he wants in eight cases out of ten. Very few people indeed can resist a cleverly written letter.

In the old times, when there was no Civil Service and Congressmen made their appointments to West Point at their own sweet will, an applicant’s fate was often decided by his letters. There is a story told of Thaddeus Stevens, a famous statesman of thirty years ago, that he once rejected an applicant for admission to the military school. This applicant met him one day in a corridor of the Capitol and remonstrated violently. “Your favoritism is marked, Mr. Stevens,” he said; “you have blasted my career from mere party prejudice.”

The legislator retorted, “I would not give an appointment to any blasted fool who spells ‘until’ with two ‘ll’s’ and ‘till’ with one.” And the disappointed aspirant went home to look into his dictionary.

Such trifles as this make the sum of life. A man’s letter is to most educated people an index of the man himself. His card is looked on in the same light in polite society. But a man’s letter is more important than his visiting-card, though the character of the latter cannot be altogether neglected.

It is better to be too exquisite in your carefulness about your letters than in the slightest degree careless. The art of letter-writing comes from knowledge and constant practice.

Your letters, now, ought to be careful works of art. Intelligent—remember I say _intelligent_—care is the basis of all perfection; and perfection in small things means success in great. In our world the specialist, the man who does at least one thing as well as he can, is sure to succeed; and so overcrowded are the avenues to success becoming that a man to succeed must be a specialist and know how to do at least one thing better than his fellow-men.

If you happen to have a rich father, you may say, “It does not make much difference; I shall have an easy time of it all my life. I can spell ‘applicant’ with two ‘c’s’ if I like and it will not make any difference.”

This is a very foolish idea. The richer you are, the greater will be your responsibilities, the more will you be criticised and found fault with, and you will find it will take all your ability to keep together or to spend wisely what your father has acquired. The late John Jacob Astor worked harder than any of his clerks; in the street he looked careworn and preoccupied; and he often lamented that poor men did not know how hard it was to be rich. His hearers often felt that they would like to exchange hardships with him. But he never, in spite of his sorrows, gave them a chance. It is true, however, that a rich man needs careful education even more than a poor man. And even politicians have to spell decently. You have perhaps heard of the man who announced in a letter that he was a “g-r-a-t-e-r man than Grant.”

Usage decrees certain forms in the writing of letters; and the knowledge and practice of these forms are absolutely necessary. For instance, one must be very particular to give each man his title. Although we Americans are supposed to despise titles, the frequency with which they are borrowed in this country shows that we are not free from a weakness for them. You have perhaps heard the old story of the man who entered a country tavern in Kentucky and called out to a friend, “Major!” Twenty majors at once arose.

You will find that if you desire to keep the regard of your friends you must be careful in letter-writing to give each man his title. Every man over twenty-one years of age is “Esquire” in this country. Plain “Mr.” will do for young people—except the youngest “juniors,” who are only “Masters;” everybody else, from the lawyer, who is rightly entitled to “Esquire,” to the hod-carrier, must have that title affixed to his name, or he feels that the man who writes to him is guilty of a disrespect. A member of Congress, of the Senate of the United States, of the State legislatures, has “Honorable” prefixed to his Christian name, and he does not like you to forget it. But a member of the British Parliament is never called “Honorable.” When Mr. Parnell and Mr. William O’Brien, both members of Parliament, were here, this rule was not observed, and they found themselves titled, much to their amazement, “Honorable.”

Except in business letters, it is better not to abbreviate anything. Do not write “Jno.” for “John,” or “Wm.” for “William.” “Mister” is always shortened into “Mr.,” and “Mistress” into “Mrs.,” which custom pronounces “Missus.” If one is addressing an archbishop, one writes, “The Most Reverend Archbishop;” a bishop, “The Right Reverend;” and a priest, “The Reverend”—always “The Reverend,” never “Rev.”

Titles such as “A.M.,” “B.A.,” “LL.D.,” are not generally put on the envelopes of letters, unless the business of the writer has something to do with the scholarly position of the person addressed. If, for instance, I write to a Doctor of Laws and Letters, asking him to dinner, I do not put LL.D. after his name; but if I am asking him to tell me something about Greek accents, or to solve a question of literature, I, of course, write his title after his name.

To put one’s knife into one’s mouth means social exile; there is only one other infraction of social rules considered more damning, and this is the writing of an anonymous letter. It is understood, in good society, that a man who would write a letter which he is afraid to sign with his own name would lie or steal. And I believe he would. If he happen to be found out—and there are no secrets in this world—he will be cut dead by every man and woman for whom he has any respect. If he belong to a decent club, the club will drop him, and he will be blackballed by every club he tries to enter. By the very act of writing such a letter he brands himself a coward. And if the letter be a malicious one, he confesses himself in every line of it a scoundrel. A man capable of such a thing shows it in his face, above all in his eyes, for nature cannot keep such a secret.

Another sin against good manners, which young people sometimes thoughtlessly commit, is the writing to people whom they do not know. This is merely an impertinence; it is not a crime; the persons that get such letters simply look on the senders as fools, not as cowards or scoundrels.

Usage at the present time decrees that all social letters should be written on _unruled_ paper, and that, if possible, the envelope should be square. An oblong envelope will do, but a square one is considered to be the better of the two; the paper should be folded to fit under. The envelope and the paper should always be as good as you can buy. Money is never wasted on excellent paper and envelopes. It is one of the marks of a gentleman to have his paper and envelopes as spotless and well made as his collar and cuffs.

A man ought never to use colored paper, or paper with a monogram or a crest or coat-of-arms on it. If you happen to have a coat-of-arms or a crest, keep it at home; anybody in this country who wants it can get it. White paper and black ink should be used by men; leave the flowers and the monograms and the pink, blue, and black paper to the ladies. It is just as much out of place for one of us to write on pink paper as to wear a bracelet.

Bad spelling is a social crime and a business crime, too. No business house will employ in any important position a young man who spells badly. He may become a porter or a janitor, but he can never rise above that if he cannot spell.

In social letters or notes, one misspelled word is like a discord in music. It is as if the big drum were to come in at the wrong time and spoil a cornet solo, or a careless stroke ruin a fine regatta. When dictionaries are so numerous, bad spelling is unpardonable, and it is seldom pardoned.

One of the worst possible breaches of good manners is to write a careless letter to any one to whom you owe affection and respect. Nothing is too good for your father or mother—nothing on this earth. When you begin to think otherwise, you may be certain that _you_ are growing unworthy of affection and respect.

There is a story told of one of the greatest soldiers that this country ever knew, who, though he happened to fight against us, deserves our most respectful homage; this brave soldier was the Confederate General Sidney Johnston. A soldier had been arrested as a traitor on the eve of a battle. The testimony was against him; there was no time to sift it, and General Johnston ordered him to be shot before the assembled army. A comrade who believed in him, but who had no evidence in his favor, made a last appeal. When the soldier was arrested, he had been in the act of writing a letter to his father. He begged this comrade to secure it and send it home, giving him permission to read it. The comrade read it and took it to General Johnston. It was an honest, loving letter such as a good son would write to a kind father. It was carefully written. General Johnston read it, expecting to find some sign of treason there. He read it twice; and then he said to the comrade: “Why did you bring this to me?”

“To show you, general,” the soldier answered, “that a man who could write such a letter to his father on the eve of battle could not have the heart of a traitor.”

“You are right,” General Johnston said, after a pause; “let the man be released.”

He was released, and later it was discovered that he had been wrongly suspected. He was killed in that battle. Such a son would rather have died a hundred times than have such a father know that he had been shot or hanged as a traitor.

The letters we write home ought to be as carefully written as possible. _There is nothing too good for your father or mother._ They may not always tell you so; but you may be sure that a well-written and affectionate letter from you brightens life very much for them. Have you ever seen a father who had a boy at school draw from his pocket a son’s letter and show it to his friends with eyes glistening with pleasure? I have. “There’s a boy for you!” he says. “There is a manly, cheerful letter written to _me_, sir, and written as well as any man in this country can write it!” If you have ever seen a father in that proud and happy mood, you know how your father feels when you treat him with the consideration which is his due. Your mothers treasure your letters and give them a value they do not, I am afraid, often really possess. If you desire to appear well before the world, begin by correcting and improving yourself at school and out of school. A young man who writes a slovenly letter to his parents will probably drop into carelessness when he writes formal letters to people outside his domestic circle.

It is a good rule to answer every letter during the week of its receipt. It is as rude to refuse to answer a question politely put as to leave a letter without an answer—provided the writer of the letter is a person you know.

Some young people are capable of addressing the President as “Dear Friend,” or of doing what, according to a certain authority, a young person did in Baltimore. This uncouth young person was presented to Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore. “Hello, Arch.!” he said—and I fear that his friends who were present wished that he were dead.

“Dear Sir” is always a proper form to begin a letter with to anybody older than ourselves, or to anybody we do not know intimately. And if we begin by “Dear Sir,” we should not end with “Yours most affectionately.” “Yours respectfully” or “Yours sincerely” would be the better form. To end a letter with “Yours, etc.,” is justly considered in the worst possible taste; and it is almost as bad as to begin a letter with “Friend Jones,” or “Friend Smith,” or “Friend John,” or “Tom.” The Quakers address one another as “friend;” we do not. Begin with “Dear John” or “Dear Tom,” or even “Dear Jones” or “Dear Brown,” if you like, but do not use the prefix “friend.” In writing to an entire stranger, one may use the third person, or begin with “Sir” or “Madam.” Suppose, for instance, you want some information from a librarian you do not know personally. You may write in this way:

“Mr. Berry would be much obliged to Mr. Bibliophile for Dr. St.
George Mivart’s book on ‘The Cat,’ which he will return as soon as
possible.”

Or Mr. Berry would say:

“SIR: I should be much obliged if you would lend me Dr. St. George
Mivart’s book on ‘The Cat.’

“Yours respectfully.”

No man in decent society ever puts “Mr.” before his own name, except on visiting-cards. There, usage has made it proper. A married lady or a young girl always has “Mrs.” or “Miss” on her cards, and, of late, men have got into the habit of putting “Mr.” on theirs. No man of taste ever puts “Mr.” before or “Esq.”[1] after his own name when signing a letter.

Footnote 1:

The title Esq. really belongs only to those connected with the legal
profession, but republican usage has much extended it.

Another fault against taste is a habit—prevalent only in America—of writing social letters under business headings. Here is an example:

J. J. ROBINSON & CO.,

New York.

Manufacturers and Dealers in the Newest Styles
of Coffins, Caskets, and Embalming Fluids.

Orders carefully attended to.

All payments C.O.D.

No deductions for damages allowed after thirty days.

Under that heading appears a note of congratulation:

“DEAR TOM: I hasten to congratulate you on your marriage. Believe
me, I wish you every blessing, and if you should ever need anything
in my line, you will always receive the greatest possible reduction
in price. May you live long and prosper!

“Yours very affectionately,
“J. J. ROBINSON.”

This is an extreme example, I admit; but who has not seen social notes written under business headings just as incongruous? When we write to anybody not on business, let us use spotless white paper without lines; let the paper and envelopes be as thick as possible; and let us not put any ornamental flower, or crest, or coat-of-arms, or any bit of nonsense at the top of our letters. The address ought to be written plainly at the head of our letter-paper, or printed if you will. And if we begin a letter with “Dear Sir,” we ought to write in the left-hand corner of the last sheet the name of the person to whom the letter is addressed. But if we begin a letter with “Dear Mr. Robinson,” it is not necessary to write Mr. Robinson’s name again. If a man gets an invitation written in the third person he must answer it in the third person. If

“Mrs. J. J. Smith requests the pleasure of Mr. J. J. Jones’s company
at dinner on Wednesday, April 23, at seven o’clock,”

young Mr. J. J. Jones would stamp himself as ignorant of the ways of society if he wrote back:

“DEAR MRS. SMITH: I will come, of course. If I am a little late,
keep something on the fire for me. I shall be umpire at a base-ball
match that afternoon, and I shall be hungry. Good-by.

“Yours devotedly,
“J. J. JONES.”

You may be sure that if young Mr. Jones should put in an appearance after that note he would find the door closed in his face.

An invitation to dinner must be accepted or declined on the day it is received. One is not permitted to say he will come if he can. He must say Yes or No at once. The words “polite,” “genteel,” and “present compliments” are no longer used. “Your kind invitation” now takes the place of “your polite invitation;” and “genteel” is out of date. The letters “R. S. V. P.” are no longer put on notes or cards. It is thought it is not necessary to tell, in French, people to “answer, if you please.” All well-educated people are pleased to answer without being told to do so. The custom of putting “R. S. V. P.” in a note is as much out of fashion as that of drawing off a glove when one shakes hands. In the olden times, when men wore armor, a hand clothed in a steel or iron gauntlet was not pleasant to touch. There was then a reason why a man should draw off his glove when he extended his hand to another, especially if that other happened to be a lady. But the reason for the custom has gone by; and it is not necessary to draw off one’s glove now when one shakes hands.

But to return to the subject of letter-writing. If you are addressing a Doctor of Medicine or Divinity, you may put “Esq.” after his name in addition to his title “M.D.” or “D.D.” but it is a senseless custom. But “Mr.” and “Esq.” before and after a man’s name sends the writer, in the estimation of well-bred people, to “the bottom of the sea.” Paper with gilt edges is never used; in fact, a man must not have anything about him that is merely pretty. Usage decrees that he may wear a flower in his button-hole—and Americans are becoming as fond of flowers as the ancient Romans; but farther than that he may not go, in the way of the merely ornamental, either in his stationery or his clothes.

It is the fashion now to fasten envelopes with wax and to use a seal; but it is not at all necessary, though there are many who prefer it, as they object to get a letter which has been “licked” to make its edges stick.

Begin, in addressing a stranger, with “Madam” or “Sir.” “Miss” by itself is never used. After a second letter has been received, “Dear Madam” or “Dear Sir” may be used. Conclude all formal letters with “Yours truly,” or “Sincerely yours,” not “Affectionately yours.” Sign your full name when writing to a friend or an equal. Do not write “T. F. Robinson” or “T. T. Smith;” write your name out as if you were not ashamed of it.

Put your address at the head of your letters, and if you make a blot, tear up the paper. A dirty letter sent, even with an apology, is as bad a breach of good manners as the extending of a dirty hand. Answer at once any letter in which information is asked. Do not write to people you do not know or answer advertisements in the papers “for fun.” A man that knows the world never does this. These advertisements often hide traps, and a man may get into them merely by writing a letter. And the kind of “fun” which ends in a man’s being pursued by vulgar postal cards and letters wherever he goes does not pay.

In writing a letter, do not begin too close to the top of the page, or too far down towards the middle. Do not abbreviate when you can help it; you may write “Dr.” for “Doctor.”

Do not put a yellow envelope over a sheet of white note-paper. It is not necessary to leave _wide_ margin at the left-hand side. A habit now is to write only on one side of the paper; to begin your letter on the first page, then to go to the third, then back to the second, ending, if you have a great deal to say, on the fourth. A late fad is to jump from the first to the fourth.

With a good dictionary at his elbow, black ink, white paper, a clear head, and a remembrance of the rules and prohibitions I have given, any young man cannot fail, if he write, to impress all who receive his letters with the fact that he is well-bred.

VII. What to Read.

Young people who determine to study English literature seriously sometimes find themselves discouraged by the multitude of books; consequently they get into an idle way of accepting opinions at second hand—the ready-made opinions of the text-book. In order to study English literature, it is not necessary to read many books; but it is necessary to read a few books carefully. The evident insincerity of some of the people who “go in” for literary culture has given the humorous paragrapher, often on the verge of paresis from trying to be funny every day, many a straw to grasp at. There is no doubt that some of his gibes and sneers are deserved, and that others, undeserved, serve as cheap stock in trade for people who are too idle or too stupid to take any interest in literary matters.

Literary insincerity and pretension are sufficiently bad, but they are not worse than the superficial and silly jeers at poetry and art in the line of the worn-out witticisms about the “spring poet” and the “mother-in-law.”

The young woman who thinks it the proper thing to go into ecstasies over Robert Browning without having read a line of the poet’s work, except, perhaps, “How They Carried the News from Ghent to Aix,” is foolish enough; but is the man who sneers at Browning and knows even less about him any better? The earnest student of literature makes no pretensions. He reads a few books well, and by that obtains the key to the understanding of all others. He does not pretend to admire epics he has not read. He knows, of course, that the _Nibelungenlied_ is the great German epic; but he does not talk about it as if he had studied and weighed every line. If he finds that the _Inferno_ of Dante is more interesting than the _Paradiso_, he says so without fear, and he does not express ready-made opinions without having probed them. If the perfection of good manners is simplicity, the perfection of literary culture is sincerity.

Among Catholics there sometimes crops out a kind of insincerity which almost amounts to snobbishness. It is the tendency to praise no book until it has had a non-Catholic approbation. Now that Dr. Gasquet’s remarkable volume on the suppression of the English monasteries and Father Bridgett’s “Sir Thomas More” have received the highest praise in England and swept Mr. Froude’s historical rubbish aside, there are Catholics who will not hesitate to respect them, although they did hesitate before the popular laudation was given to these two great books.

When a reader has begun to acquire the rudiments of literary taste, he ought to choose the books he likes; but he cannot be trusted to choose books for himself until he has—perhaps with some labor—gained taste. All men are born with taste very unequally developed. A man cannot, I repeat, hope to gain a correct judgment in literary matters unless he works for it.

Mr. Frederick Harrison says: “When will men understand that the reading of great books is a faculty to be acquired, not a natural gift, at least to those who are spoiled by our current education and habits of life? An insatiable appetite for new novels makes it as hard to read a masterpiece as it seems to a Parisian boulevardier to live in a quiet country. Until a man can really enjoy a draught of clear water bubbling from a mountain-side, his taste is in an unwholesome state. To understand a great national poet, such as Dante, Calderon, Corneille, or Goethe, is to know other types of human civilization in ways which a library of histories does not sufficiently teach.”

Mr. Harrison is right. It is not always easy to like good books; but it is easier to train the young to like them than to cleanse the perverted taste of the older. The chief business of the teacher of literature ought to be the cultivation of taste. At his best, he can do no more than that; at his worst, he can fill the head of the student with mere names and dates and undigested opinions.

When the student of literature begins really to enjoy Shakspere, his taste has begun to be formed. He may read the “Vicar of Wakefield” after that without a yawn, and learn to enjoy the quiet humor of Charles Lamb. He finds himself raised into pure air, above the malaria of exaggeration and sensationalism. His style in writing insensibly improves; he becomes critical of the slang and careless English of his every-day speech; and surely these things are worth all the trouble spent in gaining them. Besides, he has secured a perpetual solace for those long nights—and perhaps days—of loneliness which must come to nearly every man when he begins to grow old. After religion, there is no comfort in life, when the links of love begin to break, like a love for great literature. But this love must be genuine; pretence will not avail; nor will mere “top-dressing” be of any use.

Literature used to be considered in the light of a “polite accomplishment.” A book of “elegant extracts” skimmed through was the only means deemed necessary for the acquirement of an education in letters. It means a very different thing now, and the establishment of the reading circles has emphasized its meaning for Catholic Americans. It means, first of all, some knowledge of philology; it means a critical understanding of the value of the stones that make up the great mosaic of literature, and these stones are words.

A bit of Addison, a chunk of Gibbon, a taste of Macaulay, no longer reach the ideal of what a student of English literature should read. We first form our taste, and then read for ourselves. We do not even accept Cardinal Newman’s estimate of “The Vision of Mirza” or “Thalaba” without inquiry; nor do we throw up our hats for Browning merely because Browning has become fashionable. A healthy sign of a robuster taste is the return to Pope, the poet of common-sense, and to Walter Scott. But we accept neither of these writers on a cut-and-dried judgment made by somebody else. It is better to give two months to the reading of Pope and about Pope than to fill two months with desultory reading and take an opinion of Pope at second hand.

In spite of the ordinary text-book of literature, the serious student discovers that Dryden is a poet and prose-writer of the first rank, that Newman is the greatest thinker and stylist of modern times, that no dramatic writer of the last two centuries has come so near Shakspere as Aubrey de Vere, and that Coventry Patmore’s prose is delightful. If all the students of literature that read “A GENTLEMAN” have not discovered these things for themselves, let them take up any one of these writers seriously, perseveringly, and contradict me if they think I am wrong.

Matthew Arnold showed long ago that, if the basis of English literature was Saxon, its curves, its form, its symmetry, its beauty, were derived from the qualities of that other race which the Saxons drove out. Similarly, if the author of that Saxon epic, the “_Beowulf_,” if Cædmon and the Venerable Bede uttered high thoughts, it was reserved for Chaucer to wed high thoughts to a form borrowed from the French and Italians. Chaucer saved the English language from remaining a collection of inadequate dialects. The Teutonic element supplied his strength; the Celtic element his lightness and elegance. Now this Chaucer was a very humble and devout Catholic. “Ah! but he pointed out abuses—he was the Lollard, enlightened by the morning-star of the Reformation,” the text-books of English literature have been saying for many years. “See what he insinuates about the levity of his pilgrims to Canterbury!” All of which has nothing to do with his firm faith in the Catholic Church.

Chaucer was inspired by the intensely Christian Dante and the exquisite Petrarch, but, unfortunately, he took too much from another master-the greatest master of Italian prose, Boccaccio. When I use the word Christian, I mean Catholic—the words are interchangeable; and Dante is the most Christian of all poets.

But Boccaccio was a Christian; he had faith; he could be serious; he loved Dante; his collection of stories, which no man is justified in reading, unless it is for their Italian style, has attracted every English poet of narrative verse, from Chaucer to Tennyson; and yet, though these stories have moments of pathos and elevation, they are full of the fetid breath of paganism. A pope suppressed them; but their style saved them—for art was a passion in Italy—and they were revived, somewhat expurgated. In his old age he lamented the effects of his early book.

The occasional coarseness in Chaucer we owe to the manners of the times; for the English, far behind the Italians, were just awakening from semi-barbarism. Dante had crystallized the Italian language long before Chaucer was born. Italy had produced the precursor of Dante, St. Francis of Assisi, and a host of other great men, whose fame that of St. Francis and Dante dimmed by comparison, long before the magnificent English language came out of chaos. The few lapses in morality in Chaucer are due both to the influence of Boccaccio and to the paganism latent in a people who were gradually becoming fully converted. But the power of Christianity protected Chaucer; the teaching of the Church was part of his very life, and nothing could be more pathetic, more honest than his plea for pardon. The Church had taught him to love chastity; if he sinned in word, he sinned against light. The Church gave him the safeguards for his genius; the dross he gathered from the earthiness around him. Of the latter, there is little enough.

Chaucer was born in 1340; Dante in 1265; and Dante helped to create the English poet. Italy was the home of the greatest and noblest men of all the world, and these men had revived pagan art in order to baptize it and make it a child of Christ. Chaucer has suffered more than any other poet at the hands of the text-book makers, who have conspired for over three hundred years against the truth. We have been made to see him through a false medium. We have been told that he was in revolt against the religion which he loved as his life. He loved the Mother of God with a childlike fervor; a modern Presbyterian would have been as much of a heretic to him as a Moslem; he was as loyal a child of the Church as ever lived, and to regard him as anything else is to stamp one as of that old and ignorant school of Philistines which all cultivated Americans have learned to detest.

The best book for the study of this poet is Cowden Clarke’s “Riches of Chaucer” (London: Crosby, Lockwood & Co.), the knowledge of which I owe to the kindness of Mr. Aubrey de Vere. And his works will repay study; Mr. Cowden Clarke arranged them so that they can be read with ease and, after a short time, with pleasure. To see Chaucer through anybody’s eyes is to see him through a darkened glass. Why should not we, so much nearer to him than any of the commentators who have assumed to explain him to us, take possession of him? He should not be an alien to us; the form of the inkhorn he held has changed; but the rosary that fell from his fingers was the same as our rosary.

English literature began with Chaucer. He loved God and he loved humanity; he could laugh like a child because he had the faith of a child. His strength lay in his faith; and, as faith weakened, English poets looked back more and more regretfully at the “merrie” meads sprinkled with the daisies he loved. He is as cheerful as Sir Thomas More; as gay, yet as sympathetic with human pleasure and pain, as the Dominican monks whom he loved. If he jibed at abuses—if he saw that luxury and avarice were beginning to creep into monasteries and palaces—he knew well that the remedy lay in greater union with Rome. Like Francis of Assisi, he was a poet, but a poet who loved even the defects of humanity, and who preferred to laugh at them rather than to reform them. Unlike Francis of Assisi, he was not a saint. He was intensely interested in the world around him; he was of it and in it; and he belongs doubly to us—the _Alma Redemptoris_, one of his favorite hymns, which he mentions in “Tale of the Prioress,” we hear at vespers as he heard it. The faith in which he died in 1400 is our faith to-day.

In no age have been the written masterpieces of genius within such easy reach of all readers. But it is true that older people, living at a time when books were dearer and libraries fewer than they are now, read better books; not _more_ books, but _better_ books. Probably in those days people amused themselves less outside their own homes. Some tell us that the tone of thought was more solid and serious. At any rate, the English classics had more influence on the American reader fifty years ago than they have to-day. The time had its drawbacks, to be sure. An old gentleman often told me of a visit to a Pennsylvania farm in the thirties, when the man of the house gave him, as a precious thing, a copy of _The Catholic Herald_ two years old! Now the paper of yesterday seems almost a century old; then the paper of last year was new.

Unhappily, the book of last year suffers the same fate as the paper of yesterday. The best way to counteract this unhappy condition of affairs is to clasp a good book to one with “hoops of steel” when such a book is found.

In considering the subject of literature, there is one great book which is seldom mentioned. This is Denis Florence MacCarthy’s translations from Calderon.

Calderon ought not to be a stranger to us. He approaches very near to Dante in deep religious feeling, and he is not far behind him in genius. If no good translation of some of his most representative works existed, there might be an excuse for the general neglect of this great author by English-speaking readers. And MacCarthy has done justice to those sublime, sacred dramas, called “autos,” in which all the resources of faith and genius are laid at the feet of God. It is to be hoped that in a few years both MacCarthy and Mangan may be recognized. Those who know the former only by his “Waiting for the May” will broaden their field of literary knowledge and gain a higher respect for him through his translations of Calderon. The names of Calderon, the greatest of the Spanish poets, and of MacCarthy, his chief translator, suggest that of another author too little known to the general reader. This is Kenelm Henry Digby, whose “Mores Catholici” is a magazine of ammunition for the Christian reader.

There is an amusing scene in one of Thackeray’s novels, where a journalist acknowledges that he finds all the classical quotations which garnish his articles in Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy;” and, indeed, many other things besides bits of Latin have been appropriated from Burton and Montaigne, in our time, by ready writers. Many a sparkling thought put into the crisp English of the nineteenth century may be traced back to Boethius. And who shall condemn this? Has not Shakspere set us an example of how gold, half buried in ore, may be polished until it is an inestimable jewel? Kenelm Digby’s “Mores Catholici” is a great magazine from which a thousand facts may be gathered, each fact pregnant with suggestion and stimulus. Sharp-pointed arrows against calumny are here: all they need is a light shaft and feather and a strong hand to send them home. Is an illustration for a sermon wanted? Is a fact on which to found an essay demanded? One has only to open the “Mores.” It is not a book which one reads with intense interest; one cannot gallop through the three large volumes—one must walk, laboriously stowing away every treasure. It is, in fact, a book through which one saunters, picking something at long intervals, perhaps. You may dip into it, as a boy dives for a cent, and come up with a pearl-oyster in your hand. It is a book to be kept on the lowest shelf, within reach at all times; at any rate, to be one of the books to which you go when you are in search of a fact or an illustration.

One of the few sonnets written by Denis Florence MacCarthy was addressed to Digby. Digby had painted a picture of Calderon and sent it to the Irish poet; hence the sonnet—

“Thou who hast left, as in a sacred shrine,—
What shrine more pure than thy unspotted page?—
The priceless relics of a heritage
Of loftiest thoughts and lessons most divine.”

And so the names of Calderon and MacCarthy and Digby come naturally together; and they are the names of men each great in his way. They are not found in the newspapers; they are seldom seen in the great magazines; those societies of the cultivated which are—thank Heaven!—multiplying everywhere for the better understanding of books know very little about them. Let us hope that Miss Imogene Guiney, who wrote so well of Mangan in one of the numbers of the _Atlantic Monthly_, will do a similar kind office for MacCarthy.

As to Calderon, he can be read but in parts. Like Milton, he travelled over many a barren stretch of prose thinking it poetry; and so we will be wise to follow MacCarthy’s lead in choosing from his dramas. He is so little known among us for the reason that we have permitted the English taste—which became Protestantized—to separate us from him. It is to the German Goethe that we owe the revival of the taste for Dante. Before Goethe rediscovered him, the English-speaking people of the world held that there were only two great poets—Shakspere and Milton.

To reclaim our heritage, we must know something of Calderon. There is no reason why our horizon should be limited to that which English Protestantism has uncovered for us. Calderon represents the literature of Catholic Spain at its highest point; and even the most narrow-minded man, having read a fair number of the pages of Calderon, can deny neither his ardent devotion to the Church nor his high genius, nor can he disprove that they existed together, free and untrammelled. We have been told that the outbreak of literary genius in the reign of Elizabeth was but the outcome of the liberty of the Reformation. How did it happen that Spain, in which there was no Reformation, produced Columbus, Calderon, Cervantes, and Italy illustrious names by the legion? Knowledge, after all, is the only antidote to the miasma of ignorance and arrogance which has clouded the judgment of so many writers on literature and art.

VIII. The Home Book-shelf.

It ought not to be so much our practice to denounce bad books as to point out good ones. To say that a book is immoral is to increase its sale. But the more good books we put into the hands of our boys, the greater preservative powers we give them against evil. Here is a bit from the Kansas City _Star_ which expresses tersely what we have all been thinking:

“The truth is that it is not the boys who read ‘bad books’ who swell
the roll of youthful criminality; it is the boys who do not read
anything. Let any one look over the police court of a busy morning,
and he will see that the style of youth gathered there have not
fallen into evil ways through their depraved literary tendencies.
They were not brought there by books, but more probably by ignorance
of books combined with a genuine hatred of books of all kinds. There
is not a more perfect picture of innocence in the world than a boy
buried in his favorite book, oblivious to all earthly sights and
sounds, scarcely breathing as he follows the fortunes of the heroes
and heroines of the story.”

It depends, of course, on what kind of a story it is. A boy may be a picture of innocence; but we all know that many a canvas on which is a picture of innocence is much worm-eaten at the back. If the book be a good one, a boy is safe while he is reading it—he can be no safer. If it is a mere story of adventure, without any dangerous sentiment, a boy is not likely to get harm out of it. It is the sentimental—not the honest sentiment of Sir Walter or Thackeray—that does harm to the boy of a certain age, but more harm to the girl. A boy’s preoccupation with his book may not be always innocent. It is a father’s or mother’s duty to see that it is innocent, by supplying the boy with the right kind of books. This, in our atmosphere, is almost as much of a duty as the supplying him with bread and butter. A father may take the lowest view of his duties; he maybe content with having his son taught the Little Catechism and with feeding and clothing him. However sufficient this may be among the peasants of the Tyrol, it does not answer in our country. The boy who cares to read nothing except the daily paper or the theatrical poster has more chances against him than the devourer of books. The police courts show that.

The parish library, as a help to religious and moral education, comes next to the parish school; it supplements it; it amplifies its instruction: it carries its influence deeper; it cultivates both the logical powers and the imagination. Give a boy a taste for books, and he has a consolation which neither sickness nor poverty nor age itself can take from him. But he must not be left to ramble through a library at his own sweet will. There are probably no stricter Catholics among our acquaintance than were the parents of Alexander Pope, the “poet of common-sense” and bad philosophy; and yet their carelessness, or rather faith in books merely as books, led him into many an ethical error.

There is no use in trying to restrict the reading of a clever American boy to professedly Catholic books in the English language. He will ask for stories, and there are not enough stories of the right sort to last him very long. He will want stories with plenty of action in them—stirring stories, stories of adventure, stories of school life, of life in his own country; and we have too few of them. And it requires some discrimination to square his wants with what he ought to want. But that discrimination must be used by somebody, or there will be danger.

Nevertheless, the boy who rushes through Oliver Optic’s stories, and Henty’s and Bolderwood’s, is not likely to be injured. They are not ideal books, from our point of view. He may even read Charles Kingsley’s boisterous, stupid stuff; but if he is a well-instructed boy, he will be in a state of hot indignation all through “Hypatia” and the other underdone-roast-beefy things of that bigot. Kingsley, with all his prejudice, though, is better for a boy than Rider Haggard. There is a nasty trail over Haggard’s stories.

There is some comfort in the fact that the average boy is too eagerly intent on his story to mind the moralizing. What does he care for Lord Lytton’s talk about the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in “The Last Days of Pompeii”? He wants to know how everything “turns out.” And in Kingsley’s “Hypatia”—which is so often in Catholic libraries—he pays very little attention to the historical lies, for the sake of the action. Nevertheless, he should be guarded against the historical lies. Personally—I hope this intrusion of the _ego_ will be forgiven—I had, when I was a boy and waded through all sorts of books, so strong a conviction that Catholics were always right and every one else wrong, that “Hypatia” and Bulwer’s “Harold” and the rest were mere incentives to zeal; I thought that if the Lady Abbess walled up Constance at the end of “Marmion,” that young person deserved her fate.

This state of mind, however, ought not to be generally cultivated; a discriminating taste for reading should. Do not let us cry out so loudly about bad books; let us seek out the good ones; and remember that it is not the reading boy that fills the criminal ranks, but the boy that lives in the streets and does not read.

There should be a few books on the family shelf—books which are meant to be daily companions—the Bible, the “Imitation of Christ,” something of Father Faber’s, “Fabiola” and “Dion and the Sibyls,” and some great novels.

People of to-day do not realize how much the greatest of all the romancers owes to the Catholic Dryden. Sir Walter Scott, in spite of frequent change in public taste, still holds his own. Cardinal Newman, in one of his letters, regrets that young people have ceased to be interested in so admirable a writer. But there is only partial reason for this regret. Sir Walter’s long introductions and some of his elaborate descriptions of natural scenery are no longer read with interest. Still, it is evident that people do not care to have his works changed in any way. Not long ago, Miss Braddon, the indefatigable novelist, “edited” Sir Walter Scott’s novels. She cut out all those passages which seemed dull to her. But the public refused to read the improved edition. It remained unsold.

It is safe to predict that neither Sir Walter Scott nor Miss Austen will ever go entirely out of fashion. Sir Walter’s muse is to Miss Austen’s as the Queen of Sheba to a very prim modern gentlewoman: one is attired in splendid apparel, wreathed with jewels, sparkling; the other is neutral-tinted, timid, shy. But of all novelists, Sir Walter Scott admired Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen. He said, with almost a sigh of regret, that he could do the big “bow-wow” business, but that they pictured real life.

Nevertheless, while Miss Austen is not forgotten—in fact, interest has increased in her delightful books of late years—Sir Walter Scott’s novels are found everywhere. Not to have read the most notable of the Waverley Novels is to give one’s acquaintances just reason for lamenting one’s illiberal education.

The name of Sir Walter Scott naturally suggests that of Dryden, from whom the “Wizard” borrowed some of the best things in “Ivanhoe”—and “Ivanhoe” is without doubt the most popular of Sir Walter Scott’s novels. That picturesque humbug Macaulay, who could sacrifice anything for a brilliant antithesis, has done much harm to the reputation of Dryden. He gives us the impression that Dryden was a mere timeserver, if a brilliant satirist and a third-rate poet. Some years will pass before the superficial criticism of Macaulay shall be taken at its full value. Dryden was honest—honest in his changes of opinion, and entirely consistent in his change of faith. No church but that of his ancestors could have satisfied the mind of a man to whom the mutilated doctrine and bald services of the Anglican sect were naturally obnoxious. Of the charge that Dryden changed his religious opinions for gain, Mr. John Amphlett Evans, a sympathetic critic, says that, if Dryden gained the approval of King James II., he lost that of the English people. Dryden understood this, for he wrote:

“If joys hereafter must be purchased here
With loss of all that mortals hold so dear,
Then welcome infamy and public shame,
And last, a long farewell to worldly fame.”

If Scott, through ignorance or carelessness, misrepresented certain Catholic practices, he never consciously misrepresented Catholic ideas; and, as a recent writer in the _Dublin Review_ remarks, he showed that all that was best and heroic in the Middle Ages was the result of Catholic teaching. This was his attraction for Cardinal Newman. This made him so fascinating to another convert, James A. McMaster, who had an inherited Calvinistic horror of most other novels. Scott, robust and broad-minded as he was, could understand the mighty genius and the great heart of Dryden. He was the ablest defender of the poet who abjured the licentiousness of the Restoration—mirrored in his earlier dramas—to adopt a purer mode of thought. Although Dryden was really Scott’s master in art, Sir Walter did not fully understand how very great was Dryden’s poem, “Almanzor and Almahide.” If Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered,” or Ariosto’s “Orlando Furioso,” or Milton’s “Paradise Regained,” or Fénelon’s “Telemachus” is an epic, this splendid poem of Dryden’s is an epic, and greater than them all. It is from this poem, founded on episodes of the siege of Granada, that Sir Walter Scott borrows so liberally in “Ivanhoe.”

One cannot altogether pardon the greatest fault of all Sir Walter made, the punishment of Constance in “Marmion.” But his theory of artistic effect was something like Macaulay’s idea of rhetorical effect. If picturesqueness or dramatic effect interfered with historical truth, the latter suffered the necessary carving to make it fit. It must be remembered, too, that Sir Walter Scott was not in a position to profit by modern discoveries which have forced all honorable men to revise many pages of the falsified histories of their youth and to do justice to the spirit of the Church.

Sir Walter Scott is always chivalrous and pure-minded. How he would have detested Froude’s brutal characterization of Mary Stuart, or Swinburne’s vile travesty of her! If his friars are more jolly than respectable, it is because he drew his pictures from popular ballads and old stories never intended in Catholic times to be taken as serious or typical. His Templars are horrible villains, but he never seems to regard them as villanous because they are ecclesiastics; he does not intend to drag their priesthood into disgrace; they are lawless and romantic figures, loaded with horrible accusations by Philippe le Bel, and condemned by the Pope—ready-made romantic scoundrels fit for purposes of fiction. He does not look beyond this.