Chapter IV: Part 4

Scott shows much of the nobility of Dryden’s later work. He does not confuse good with evil; he is always tender of good sentiments; he hates vice and all meanness; in depicting so many fine characters who could only have bloomed in a Catholic atmosphere, he shows a sympathy for the “old Church” at once pathetic and admirable to a Catholic. There is no novel of his in which the influence of the Church is not alluded to in some way or other. And how delightful are his heroines when they are Catholic! How charmingly he has drawn Mary Stuart! And the man that does not love Di Vernon and Catherine Seton has no heart for Beatrice or Portia. And then there is the grand figure of Edward Glendenning in “The Abbot.”

Dryden and Scott both owed so much to the Church, were so naturally her children, that one feels no ordinary satisfaction in the conversion of the one, and some consolation in the fact that the last words of the other were those of the “Dies Irae.”

Brownson and Newman are two authors more talked about than read in this country. In England Newman’s most careful literary work is known; Brownson’s work has only begun to receive attention. Newman has gained much by being talked and written about by men who love the form of things as much as the matter, and who, if Newman had taught Buddhism or Schopenhauerism, would admire him just as much. As there is a large class of these men, and as they help to form public opinion, it has come to pass that he who would deny Newman’s mastery of style would be smiled at in any assembly of men of letters. Brownson has not had such an advantage. He gave his attention thoroughly to the matter in hand; style was with him a secondary consideration. Besides, he wrote from the American point of view, and sometimes—at least it would seem so—under pressure from the printer. Newman was never hurried; Horace was not more leisurely, Cicero more exact. It would be absurd to compare Newman and Brownson. I simply put their names together to show that they should be read, even if other writers must be neglected, by Catholic Americans. I take the liberty of recommending three books as valuable additions to the home shelf:—Brownson’s “Views,” and the “Characteristics” of Wiseman and Newman.

Every young American who wants to understand the political position of his country among the nations should read three books—Brownson’s “American Republic,” De Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” and Bryce’s “American Commonwealth.” But of these three writers the greatest—incomparably the greatest—is Brownson: he defines principles; he clarifies them until they are luminous; he shows the application of them to a new condition of things. There have been Catholics—why disguise the fact, since they are nearly all dead or imbecile?—who fancied that our form of government was merely tolerated by the Church. Brownson gave a death-blow to those ancient dragons of unbelief. Certain parts of this great work ought to be a text-book in every school in the country. And it will now be easier to build a monument to this profound thinker, as there is a well-considered attempt to popularize such portions of his books as must catch the general attention, for there are many pages in Brownson’s works which are hidden only because they suffered in their original method of publication.

Open a volume of his works at random, and you will find something to suggest or stimulate thought, to define a term or to fortify a principle. Read, for instance, those pages of his on the Catholic American literature of his time and you will have a standard of judgment for all time. And who to-day can say what he says as well as he said it? As to those parts of his philosophy about which the doctors disagree, let us leave that to the doctors. It does not concern the general public, and indeed it might be left out of consideration with advantage.

Brownson’s works are mines of thought. In them lie the germs of mighty sermons, of great books to come. Already he is a classic in American literature, and there is every reason why he should be a classic, since he was first in an untilled ground; and yet it is a sad thing to find that of all the magnificent material Brownson has left, the “Spirit Rapper,” that comparatively least worthy product of his pen, seems to be the best known to the general reader.

If one of us would confine himself to the reading of four authors in English—Shakspere, Newman, Webster, and Brownson—he could not fail to be well educated. The “Idea of a University” of Newman is a pregnant book. It goes to the root of the subtlest matters; its clearness enters our minds and makes the shadows flee. It cannot be made our own at one reading. There are passages which should be read over and over again—notably that on literature and the definition of a classic. If any man could make us grasp the intangible, Newman could. How sentimental and thin Emerson appears after him! Professor Cook, of Yale, has done the world a good turn by giving us the chapter on “Poetry and the Poetics of Aristotle” in a little pamphlet; and John Lilly’s “Characteristics” is a very valuable book. Any reader or active man who dips into the chapter on the “Poetics” will long for more; and, if he does, the “Characteristics” will not slake his thirst; he will desire the volumes themselves and drink in new refreshments with every page.

I have known a young admirer of “Lead, Kindly Light”—which, by the way, has only three stanzas of its own—to be repelled by the learned title of “Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” but, in search of the circumstances that helped to produce it, to turn to certain pages in this presumably uninteresting work. The charm began to work; Newman was no longer a pedant to be avoided, but a friend to be ever near.

“Callista” amounts to very little as a novel; it is valuable because Newman studied its color from authentic sources. But “The Dream of Gerontius” is only beginning in our country to receive the attention due to it. It was a text-book in classes at Oxford long before people here touched it at all, except in rare instances. It is a unique poem. There is nothing like it in all literature. It is the record of the experience of a soul during the instant it is liberated from the body. It touches the sublime; it is colorless—if a pure white light can be said to be colorless. It is the work of a great logician impelled to utter his thoughts through the most fitting medium, and this medium he finds to be verse. In Dante the symbols of earthly things represent to us the mystic life of the other world. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, chief of the Pre-Raphaelites, imitated the outer shell of the great Dante—the sensuous shell—but he got no further. Newman soars above, beyond earth; we are made to realize with awful force that the soul at death is at once divorced from the body. Dante does not make us feel this. The people that Virgil and he meet are not spirits, but men and women with bodies and souls in torment. No painter on earth could put “The Dream of Gerontius” into line and color. Flaxman, so exquisite in his interpretation of Dante, would seem vulgar, and Doré brutal. None of us should lack a knowledge of this truly wonderful poem, which must be studied, not read. Philosophy and theology have found no flaws in it; humanity may shiver in the whiteness of its light, and yet be consoled by the fact that the comfort it offers is not merely imaginative, or sentimental, or beautiful, but real.

It is impossible to suppress the love of the beautiful in human nature. The early New Englanders, to whom beauty was an offence and art and literature condemned things—who worshipped a God of their own invention, clothed in sulphurous clouds and holding victims over eternal fire, ready, with the ghastly pleasure described by their divines, to drop these victims into the flame—were not Christians. Christians have never accepted the Grecian _dictum_ that earthly beauty is the good and that to be æsthetic is to be moral; but Christianity has always encouraged the love of beauty and led the way to its use in the worship of God.

Among Americans, Longfellow had a most devout love of the beautiful. And it was this love of beauty that drew him near to the Church. That eloquent writer Ruskin has little sympathy with men who are drawn towards the Church by the beauty she enshrines, and he constantly protests against the enticements of a Spouse the hem of whose garment he kisses. Still, judging from his ill-natured diatribe against Pugin, in the “Stones of Venice,” he had no understanding of the sentiment that caused Longfellow, when in search of inspiration, to turn to the Church.

Longfellow’s love of the melodious, of the beautiful, of the symmetrical, led him into defects. He could not endure a discord, and his motto was “_Non clamor, sed amor_,” which, as coming from him, may be paraphrased in one word, “serenity.” His superabundant similes show how he longed to carry one thing into another thing of even greater beauty, and how this longing sometimes leads him to faults of taste.

But this lover of beauty—led by it to the very beauty of Ruskin’s Circe and his forefathers’ “Scarlet Woman”—came of a race that hated beauty. And yet he stretched out through the rocky soil of Puritan traditions and training until we find him translating the sermon of St. Francis of Assisi to the birds into English verse, and working lovingly at the most Christian of all poems, the “Divine Comedy.” It was he—this descendant of the Puritans—who described, as no other poet ever described, the innocence of the young girl coming from confession. But it was his love of beauty and his love of purity that made him do this. In Longfellow’s eyes only the pure was beautiful. A canker in the rose made the rose hateful to him. He was unlike his classmate and friend Hawthorne: the stain on the lily did not make it more interesting. His love of purity was, however, like his hatred of noise, a sentiment rather than a conviction.

The love for the beautiful leads to Rome. Ruskin fights against it, Longfellow yields to it, and even Whittier—whose lack of culture and whose traditions held him doubly back—is drawn to the beauty of the saints.

As culture in America broadens and deepens, respect for the things that Protestantism cast out increases. James Russell Lowell’s paper on Dante, in “Among My Books,” is an example of this. The comprehension he shows of the divine poet is amazing in a son of the Puritans. But the human mind and the human heart _will_ struggle towards the light.

Longfellow was too great an artist to try to lop off such Catholic traditions as might displease his readers. In this he was greater than Sir Walter Scott, and a hundred times greater than Spenser. Scott’s mind, bending as a healthy tree bends to the light, stretched towards the old Church. She fascinated his imagination, she drew his thoughts, and her beauty won his heart; but he was afraid of the English people. And yet, subservient as Scott was, Cardinal Newman avows that Sir Walter’s novels drew him towards the Church; and there is a letter written by the great cardinal in which he laments that the youth of the nineteenth century no longer read the novels of the “Wizard of the North.” Scott cannot get rid of the charm the Church throws about him. He was not classical, he was romantic. He soon tired of mere form, as any healthy mind will. The reticent and limited beauty of the Greek temple made him yawn; but he was never weary of the Gothic church, with its surprises, its splendor, its glow, its statues, its gargoyles—all its reproductions of the life of the world in its relations to God.

Similarly, Longfellow was not a classicist. The coldness of Greek beauty did not appeal to him; he could understand and love the pictures of Giotto—the artist of St. Francis—better than the “Dying Gladiator.” When Christianity had given life to the perfect form of Greek art, then Longfellow understood and loved it. And he trusted the American people sufficiently not to attempt to placate them by concealing or distorting the source of his inspiration. No casual reader of “Evangeline” can mistake the cause of the primitive virtues of the Acadians. A lesser artist would have introduced the typical Jesuit of the romancers, or hinted that a King James’s Bible read by Gabriel and Evangeline, under the direction of a self-sacrificing colporteur, was at the root of all the patience, purity, and constancy in the poem. But Longfellow knew better than this, and the American people took “Evangeline” to their heart without question, except from some carper, like Poe, who envied the literary distinction of the poet. We must remember, too, that the American people of 1847 were not the American people of to-day; they were narrower, more provincial, less infused with new blood, and more prejudiced against the traditions of the Church to which Longfellow appealed when he wrote his greatest poem.

It is as impossible to eliminate the cross from the discovery of America as to love art and literature without acknowledging the power that preserved both.

IX. Of Shakspere.

The time has come when the Catholics of this country—who possess unmutilated the seamless garment of Christ—should begin to understand the real value of the inheritance of art and literature and music which is especially theirs.

The Reformation made a gulf between art and religion; it declared that the beautiful had no place in the service of God, and that a student of æsthetics was a student of the devil’s lore. Of late a reaction has taken place.

Fifty years ago the picture of a Madonna by Raphael or Filippo Lippi or Botticelli in a popular magazine would have occasioned a howl of condemnation from the densely ignorant average Protestant of that time. But the taste for art has grown immensely in the last twenty years, and now—I am ashamed to say it—non-Catholics have, in America, learned to know and love the great masterpieces of our inheritance more than we ourselves. It is we, English-speaking Catholics, who have suffered unexpressibly from the deadening influence of the Reformation on æsthetics. As a taste for art and literature grows, “orthodox” protest against the Church must wane, for the essence of “orthodox” protest is misunderstanding of the Church which made possible Dante and Cervantes, Chaucer and Wolfram von Eschenbach, Fra Angelico and Murillo, Shakspere and Dryden. And no cultivated man, loving them, can hate the Church that, while guarding morality, likewise protected æsthetics as a stretching out towards the immortal. Art and literature and music are efforts of the spirit to approach God. And, as such, Christianity cherishes them. Art and history are one; art and literature are history; and nothing is grander in the panorama of events than the spectacle of the fine arts, in Christian times, emptying their precious box of ointment on the head of Our Lord to atone for the sins of the past.

The flower of all art is Christian art; it took the perfect form of the Greeks and clothed it with luminous flesh and blood.

Miss Eliza Allen Starr has shown us some of the treasures of our inheritance of art. It is easy to find them; good photographs of the masters’ works—of the Sistine Madonna of Raphael, of the Immaculate Conception of Murillo, of the Virgin of the Kiss by Hébert, and of the beautiful pictures of Bouguereau are cheap everywhere. Why, then, with all these lovely reflections of Catholic genius near us, should we fill our houses with bad, cheap prints?

Similarly, why should we be content with flimsy modern books? The best of all literature is ours—even Shakspere is ours.

If there is one fault to be found in Cardinal Newman’s lecture on “Literature” in that great book, “The Idea of a University,” it is that the most subtle master of English style took his view of Continental literature from Hallam. When he speaks of English literature, he speaks as a master of his subject; on the literature of the Greeks and Romans, there is no uncertainty in his utterances; but he takes his impressions of the literature of France and Spain from a non-Catholic critic, whose opinions are tinctured with prejudice. One cannot help regretting that the cardinal did not apply the same test to Montaigne that he applied to Shakspere.

Similarly, most of us have been induced, by the Puritanism in the air around us, to take our opinions of the great English classics from text-books compiled by sciolists, who have not gone deep enough to understand the course of the currents of literature. We accept Shakspere at second hand; if we took our impressions of his works from Professor Dowden or Herr Delius or men like George Saintsbury or Horace Furness, or, better than all, from himself, it would be a different thing. But we do not; if we read him at all, we read him hastily; we read “Hamlet” as we would a novel, or we are content to nibble at little chunks from his plays, which the compilers graciously present to us.

The text-book of literature has been an enemy to education, because it has been generally compiled by persons who were incapable of fair judgment. In this country, Father Jenkins’s compilation is the best we have had. It is a brave attempt to remove misapprehensions; but a text-book should be merely a guide to the works themselves. There is more intellectual gain in six months’ close study of the text and circumstances of “Hamlet” than in tripping through a dozen books of “selections.” The Germans found this out long ago, and Dr. Gotthold Böttcher puts it into fitting words in his introduction to Wolfram von Eschenbach’s “Parcival.” The time will doubtless come when even in parochial schools the higher “Reader” will be a complete book—not a thing of shreds and patches, like the little dabs of meat and vegetables the keepers of country hotels set before us on small plates. This book will, of course, be intelligently annotated.

Some of us have a certain timidity about claiming Shakspere as our own and about reading his plays to our young people. This is because we have given in too much to the critical spirit, which finds purity in impure things, and impurity where no impurity is intended. It is time we realize the evil that the English speech has done us by unconsciously impregnating us with alien prejudices.

Surely no man will accuse Cardinal Newman of condoning sensuality or coarseness. His idea of propriety is good enough; it is broad enough and narrow enough for us. That foreign code which would keep young people within artificial barriers and then let them loose to wallow in literary filth, that hypocritical American code which leaves the obscenities of the daily newspaper open and closes Shakspere, is not ours.

Shakspere was the result of Catholic thought and training. There is no Puritanism in him. His plays are Catholic literature in the widest sense; he sees life from the Christian point of view, and, depicting it as it is, his standard is a Catholic standard. There is no doubt that there are coarse passages in Shakspere’s plays—it is easy to get rid of them. But they are few. They seem immodest because the plainness of language of the Elizabethan time and of the preceding times has happily gone out of fashion. It would be well to revise our definition of immorality, by comparing it with the more robust Catholic one, before we condemn Shakspere or the Old Testament, though the scrupulous Tom Paine, who has gone utterly out of fashion, found both immoral!

Hear Cardinal Newman (“Idea of a University,” page 319) speaking of Shakspere: “Whatever passages may be gleaned from his dramas disrespectful to ecclesiastical authority, still these are but passages; on the other hand, there is in Shakspere neither contempt of religion nor scepticism, and he upholds the broad laws of moral and divine truths with the consistency and severity of an Æschylus, Sophocles, and Pindar. There is no mistaking in his works on which side lies the right; Satan is not made a hero, nor Cain a victim, but pride is pride, and vice is vice, and, whatever indulgence he may allow himself in light thoughts or unseemly words, yet his admiration is reserved for sanctity and truth; ... but often as he may offend against modesty, he is clear of a worse charge, sensuality, and hardly a passage can be instanced in all that he has written to seduce the imagination or to excite the passions.”

In arranging a course of reading for young people, it seems to me that those books which _define_ principles should be put first. When a reader has a good grasp of definitions, he is in a mathematical state of mind and ready to assimilate truth and reject error. Books of literature should not be recommended to him until he is sure of his principles; for, unhappily, the tendency of American youth is to imagine that what he cannot refute is irrefutable. If the young reader be thoroughly grounded in the doctrines of his faith and armed with a few clear definitions of the meaning of things, even Milton cannot persuade him that Satan is a more admirable figure than Our Lord, or Byron seduce him into the opinion that Cain was wronged, or Goethe that sin is merely a more or less pleasing experience.

It is remarkable that the Puritanism which lauds Milton as a household god turns its face from Shakspere; and yet Milton’s great epic is not only the deification of intellectual pride, but it contemns Christianity. There are very few men who can to-day say that they have read “Paradise Lost” line after line with pleasure. There are long stretches of aridity in it; and those who pretend to admire it as a whole are no doubt tinctured with literary insincerity. But there are glorious passages in the “Paradise Lost,” unexcelled in any literature; and therefore the epic should be read in parts, and one cannot be blamed if he “skip” many other parts. The great parts of “Paradise Lost,” ought to be read and re-read. The comparative weakness of the “Paradise Regained” shows that Milton had not that sympathy with the Redemption which he had with the revolt of Satan. And yet, in some pious households, where puritanized opinion reigns, Shakspere is locked up, while “Paradise Lost” is put beside the family Bible!

It is not necessary that one should read all of Shakspere’s writings; the early poems had better be omitted; but it is necessary for purposes of culture that one should read what one does read with intelligence. Before beginning “Hamlet”—which a thoughtful Catholic can appreciate better than any other man—one should clear the ground by studying Professor Dowden’s little “Primer” on Shakspere (Macmillan & Co.), and Mr. Furnivall’s preface to the Leopold edition of Shakspere, and George H. Miles’s study of “Hamlet.” Then, and not until then, will one be in a position to get real benefit from his reading. To read “Hamlet” without some preparation is like the inane practice of “going to Europe to complete an education never begun at home.” I repeat that a Catholic can better appreciate the marvels of Shakspere’s greatest play, because, even if he know only the Little Catechism, he has the key to the play and to Shakspere’s mind.

The philosophy of “Hamlet” is that sin cankers and burns and ruins and corrupts even in this world, and that the effects do not end in this world. Shakspere, enlightened by the teaching of centuries since St. Austin converted his forefathers, teaches a higher philosophy than that of Æschylus or Euripides or Sophocles—he substitutes will for fate. It is not fate that forces the keen Claudius to murder his brother; it is not fate that obliges him to turn away from the reproaches of an instructed mind and conscience: he chooses; it is his own will that makes the crime; he does not confuse good with evil. The sin of the Queen is not so great; she is ignorant of her husband’s crime; in fact, from the usual modern point of view, she has committed no sin at all. And, as the Danish method of choosing monarchs permitted the nobles to name Claudius king, while her son was mooning at the Saxon university, she had done him no material wrong. But as there is no mention of a dispensation from Rome, and as Shakspere makes the Danes Catholic, the people of Denmark must have looked on the alliance with doubt. The demand made to Horatio to exorcise the spirit, as he was a scholar; the expression, “I’ll cross it,” which Fechter, the actor, rightly interpreted as meaning the sign of the cross; a hundred touches, in fact, show that “Hamlet” can and ought to be studied with special profit by Catholics.

Suppose that one begins with “Hamlet,” having cleared the ground, and then takes the greatest of the tragi-comedies, “The Merchant of Venice.” Here opens a new field. Before beginning this play, it would be well to read Mgr. Seton’s paper on the Jews in Europe, in his excellent “Essays, Chiefly Roman.” It will give one an excellent idea of the attitude of the Church towards Shylock’s countrymen, and do away with the impression that Antonio was acting in accordance with that attitude when he treated Shylock as less than a human being. Portia not only offers a valuable contrast to the weakness of Ophelia and the criminal weakness of Gertrude, but she is a type of the ideal noblewoman of her time, whose only weakness is love for a man of lesser nobility than herself, but who holds his honor as greater than life or love.

Shakspere’s “Julius Cæsar,” for comparison with “Hamlet,” might come next, and after that the most lyrical and poetical of all the comedies, “As You Like It,” or perhaps “The Tempest,” with Prospero’s simple but strong assertion of belief in immortality.

Having studied these four great works, with as much of the literature they suggest as practicable, a distinct advance in cultivation will have been made. The best college in the country can give one no more. But they must be _studied_, not read. He who does not know these plays misses part of his heritage; for the plays of Shakspere belong more to the Catholic than to the non-Catholic. Shakspere was the fine flower of culture nurtured under Catholic influences.

X. Of Talk, Work, and Amusement.

There are too many etiquette books—too much about the outward look of things, and too little about the inward. Manners make a great difference in this world—we all discover that sooner or later; but later we find out that there are some principles which keep society together more than manners. If manners are the flower, these principles are the roots which intricately bind earth and crumbling rocks together and make a safe footing. To-day the end of preaching seems to be to teach the outward form, without the inward light that gives the form all its value. By preaching I mean the talk and advice that permeate the newspapers and books of social instruction.

Manners are only good, after all, when they represent something. What does it matter whether Mr. Jupiter makes a charming host at his own table or not, if he sit silent a few minutes after some of his guests are gone, and listen to the horrors that one who stays behind tells of them? And if Mrs. Juno, whose manners at her “at home” are perfect, sits down and rips and tears at the characters of the acquaintances she has just fed with coffee and whatever else answers to the fatted calf, shall we believe that she is useful to society?

There is harmless gossip which has its place; in life it is like the details in a novel; it is amusing and interesting, because it belongs to humanity—and what that is human is alien to us? So far as gossip concerns the lights and shades of character, the minor miseries and amusing happenings of life, what honest man or woman has not a taste for it? And who values a friend less because his peculiarities make us smile?

But by and by there comes into the very corner of the fireside a guest who disregards the crown of roses which every man likes to hang above his door. The roses mean silence—or, at least, that all things that pass under them shall be sweetened by the breath of hospitality; and he adds a little to the smile of kindly tolerance, and he paints it as a sneer. “You must forgive me for telling you,” he whispers, when he is safely sheltered beneath your friend’s garland of roses; “but Theseus spoke of you the other night in a way that made my blood boil.”

And then the friendship of years is snapped; and then the harmless jest, in which Theseus’s friend would have delighted even at his own expense if he had been present, becomes a jagged bullet in an ulcerated wound. _Sub rosâ_ was a good phrase with the old Latins, but who minds it now? It went out of fashion when the public began to pay newspaper reporters for looking through keyholes, and for stabbing the hearts of the innocent in trying to prove somebody guilty. It went out of fashion when private letters became public property and a man might, without fear of disgrace, print, or sell to be printed, any scrap of paper belonging to another that had fallen into his hands.

A very wise man—a gentle man and a loyal man—once said, “A man may be judged by what he believes.” If we could learn the truth of this early in life, what harm could be done us by the creature who tears the thorns out of our hospitable roses, and goes about lacerating hearts with them? When we hear that Jason has called us a fool, we should not be so ready to cry out with all our breath that he is a scoundrel—because we should not be so ready to believe that Jason, who was a decent fellow yesterday, should suddenly have become the hater of a good friend to-day. And when, under stress of unrighteous indignation, we have called Jason a scoundrel, the listener can hardly wait until he has informed Jason of the enormity; “and thereby hangs a tale.”

But when we get older and wiser, we do not ask many people to sit under our roses; and those whom we ask we trust implicitly. In time—so happily is our experience—we believe no evil of any man with whom we have ever cordially shaken hands. Then we begin to enjoy life; and we, too, choose our acquaintances by their unwillingness to believe evil of others. And as for the man who has eaten our salt, we become so optimistic about him that we would not even believe that he could write a stupid book; and that is the _nirvâna_ of belief in one’s friends.

Less manners, we pray—less talk about the handling of a fork and the angle of a bow, and more respect for the roses. Of course, one of us may have said yesterday, after dinner, that Jason ought not to talk so much about his brand-new coat-of-arms; or that Ariadne, who was a widow, you know, might cease to chant the praise of number one in the presence of number two. But do we not admire the solid qualities of both Jason and Ariadne? And yet who shall make them believe that when the little serpent wriggles from our hearthstone to theirs?

It is a settled fact that young people must be amused. It is a settled fact, or rather an accepted fact, that they must be amused much more than their predecessors were amused. It is useless to ask why. Life in the United States has become more complicated, more artificial, more civilized, if you will; and that Jeffersonian simplicity which De Tocqueville and De Bacourt noted has almost entirely disappeared. The theatre has assumed more license than ever; it amuses—it does not attempt to instruct; and spectacles are tolerated by decent people which would have been frowned upon some years ago. There is no question that the drama is purer than it ever was before; but the spectacle, the idiotic farce, and the light opera are more silly and more indecent than within the memory of man. The toleration of these things all shows that, in the craving for amusement, high principle and reasonable rules of conduct are forgotten.

A serious question of social importance is: How can the rage for amusement be kept within proper bounds? How can it be regulated? How can it be prevented from making the heart and the head empty and even corrupt? In many ways our country and our time are serious enough. We need, perhaps, a touch of that cheerful lightness which makes the life of the Viennese and of the Parisian agreeable and bright—which enables him to get color and interest into the most commonplace things. But our lightness and cheerfulness are likely to be spasmodic and extravagant. We are not pleased with little things; it takes a great deal to give us delight; our children are men and women too early; we do not understand simplicity—unless it is sold at a high price with an English label on it. Luxuries have become necessities, and even the children demand refinements of enjoyment of which their parents did not dream in the days gone by.

And yet the essence of American social life ought to be simplicity. We have no traditions to support; a merely rich man without a great family name owes nothing to society, except to help those poorer than himself; he has not inherited those great establishments which your English or Spanish high lord must keep up or tarnish the family name. We have no great families in America whose traditions are not those of simplicity and honesty, and these are the only traditions they are bound to cherish. In this way our aristocracy—if we have such a thing—ought to be the purest in the world and the most simple. There is no reason why we should pick up all the baubles that the effete folk of the Old World are throwing away.

Whether we are to achieve simplicity, and consequently cheerfulness, in every-day life depends entirely on the women. It is remarkable how many Catholic women bred in good schools enter society and run a mad race in search of frivolities. In St. Francis de Sales’s “Letters to People in the World” there is a record of a lady “who had long remained in such subjection to the humors of her husband, that in the very height of her devotions and ardors she was obliged to wear a low dress, and was all loaded with vanity outside; and, except at Easter, could never communicate unless secretly and unknown to every one—and yet she rose high in sanctity.”

But St. Francis de Sales had other words for those women of the world who rushed into all the complications of luxury, and yet who defended their frivolity by the phrase “duty to society.” The woman who serves her children best serves society. And she best serves her children by cultivating her heart and mind to the utmost; and by teaching them that one of the best things in life is simplicity, and that it is much easier to be a Christian when one is content with a little than when one is constantly discontented with a great deal. If the old New England love for simplicity in the ordinary way of life could be revived among Catholics, and sanctified by the amiable spirit of St. Francis of Assisi, the world would be a better place.

Father Faber tells us what even greater men have told us before—that each human being has his vocation in life. And we nearly all accept it as true, but the great difficulty is to realize it. Ruskin says that work is not a curse; but that a man must like his work, feel that he can do it well, and not have too much of it to do. The sum of all this means that he shall be contented in his work, and find his chief satisfaction in doing it well. It is not what we do, but _how_ we do it, that makes success.

The greatest enemy to a full understanding of the word vocation among Americans is the belief that it means solely the acquirement of money. And the reason for this lies not in the character of the American—who is no more mercenary than other people—but in the idea that wealth is within the grasp of any man who works for it. The money standard, therefore, is the standard of success. But success to the eyes of the world is not always success to the man himself. The accumulation of wealth often leaves him worn-out, dissatisfied, with a feeling that he has somehow missed the best of life. That man has probably missed his vocation and done the wrong thing, in spite of the opinion outside of himself that he has succeeded.

The frequent missing of vocations in life is due to false ideas about education. The parent tries to throw all the responsibility of education on the teacher, and the teacher has no time for individual moulding. A boy grows up learning to read and to write, like other boys. He may be apt with his head or his hands, but how few parents see the aptitude in the right light! It ought to be considered and seriously cultivated. The tastes of youth may not always be indications of the future: they often change with circumstances and surroundings. But they are just as often unerring indications of the direction in which the child’s truest success in the world will lie. If a boy play at swinging a censer when he is little, or enjoy the sight of burning candles on a toy altar, it is not an infallible sign that he will be a priest. And yet the rosary that young Newman drew on his slate, when he was a boy, doubtless meant something.

“The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,” Longfellow sings. He who comprehends them gets near to the heart of youth. But who tries to do it? The boy is as great an enigma to his father, as a rule, as the old sphinx in the Egyptian desert is to passing travellers. And who but his father ought to have the key to the boy’s mind, and find his way into its recesses so gently and carefully that the question of his child’s vocation would be an easy one for him to answer?

If the religious vocations in this country are not equal in number to what they ought to be, we may attribute it to these two causes: the general desire to make money, and the placid indifference of parents. A boy is sent to “school”—school implying a sort of factory from which human creatures are turned out polished and finished, but not ready for any special work in a world which demands specialists. And what is specialism but the industrious working out of a vocation?

God is very good to a man when that man is true to his vocation. To be content in one’s work is almost happiness. To do one’s work for the eyes of God is to be as near happiness as any creature can come to it in this world. Fortunate are they who, like the old sculptors of the roof of “the cathedral over sea,” learn early in life, as Miss Eleanor Donnelly puts it,—

“That nothing avails us under the sun,
In word or in work, save that which is done
For the honor and glory of God alone.”

Direction and coercion are two different things. The parents who mistake one for the other make a fatal error. Direction is the flower, coercion the weed that grows beside it, and kills its strength and sweetness.

The true gospel of work begins with the consideration of vocation, and the prayers and the appeals to the sacraments that ought to accompany it. This is the genesis of that gospel. It is true that if a man can be helped to take care of the first twenty years of his life, the last twenty years will take care of him. Those who find their vocation are blessed—

“And they are the sculptors whose works shall last,
Whose names shall shine as the stars on high,
When deep in the dust of a ruined past
The labors of selfish souls shall lie.”

XI. The Little Joys of Life.

Has enthusiasm gone out of fashion? Are the young no longer hero-worshippers? A recent writer complains of the sadness of American youth. “The absence of animal spirits among our well-to-do young people is a striking contrast to the exuberance of that quality in most European countries,” says this author, in the _Atlantic Monthly_.

Our young people laugh very much, but they are not, as a rule, cheerful; and they are amiable only when they “feel like being amiable.” This is the most fatal defect in American manners among the young. The consideration for others shown only when a man is entirely at peace with himself is not politeness at all: it is the most unrefined manifestation of selfishness.

Before we condemn the proverbial artificiality of the French, let us contrast it with the brutality of the average carper at this artificiality. “A Frenchman,” he will say, “will lift his hat to you, but he would not give you a sou if you were starving.” Let us take that assertion for its full value. We are not starving; we do not want his sou, but we do want to have our every-day life made as pleasant as possible. And is your average brutal and bluff and uncivilized creature the more anxious to give his substance to the needy because he is ready on all occasions to tread on the toes of his neighbor? He holds all uttered pleasant things to be lies, and the suppression of the brutal a sin against truth. One sees this personage too often not to understand him well. He is half civilized. King Henry VIII. was of this kind—charming, bluff old fellow, bubbling over with truth and frankness, slapping Sir Thomas More on the back, and full of delicious horseplay, when his dinner agreed with him! It is easy to comprehend that the high politeness of the best of the French is the result of the finest civilization. No wonder Talleyrand looked back and said that no man really enjoyed life who had not lived before the Revolution.

But why should enthusiasm have gone out? Why should the young have no heroes? Have the newspaper joke, the levity of Ingersoll and the irreverence of the stump-speakers, the cynicism of _Puck_ and the insolence of _Judge_, driven out enthusiasm? George Washington is mentioned—what inextinguishable laughter follows!—the cherry-tree, the little hatchet! What novel wit that name suggests! One _must_ laugh, it is so funny! And, then, the scriptural personages! The paragraphers have made Job so very amusing; and Joseph and Daniel!—how stupid people must be who do not roar with laughter at the mere mention of these august names!

Cannot this odious, brutal laughter, which is not manly or womanly, be stopped? Ridicule cannot kill it, but an appeal to all the best feelings of the human heart might; for all the best feelings of the human heart are outraged. How funny death has become! When shall we grow tired of the joke about the servant who lighted the fire with kerosene, and went above; or the quite too awfully comical _jeu d’esprit_ about the boy who ate green apples, and is no more? These jokes are in the same taste that would put the hair of a skeleton into curl-papers. Still we laugh.

A nation without reverence has begun to die: its feet are cold, though it may still grin. A nation whose youth are without enthusiasm has no future beyond the piling up of dollars. It is not so with our country yet; but the fact remains: enthusiasm is dying, and hero-worship needs revival.

One can easily understand why, among Catholics, there is not as much hero-worship as there ought to be. It is because our greatest heroes are not even mentioned in current literature, and because they are not well presented to our young people. St. Francis Xavier was a greater hero than Nelson; yet Nelson is popularly esteemed the more heroic, because Southey wrote his life well. But St. Francis’s life is written for the mystic, for the devotee. It is right, of course; but our young people are not all mystics or devotees; consequently St. Francis seems afar off—a saint to be vaguely remembered, but nothing more.

If the saints whose heroism appeals most to the young could be brought nearer to the natural young person, they would soon be as friends, daily companions—heroes, not distant beings whose halos guard them from contact. One need only know St. Francis of Assisi to be very fond of him. He had a sense of humor, too, but no sense of levity. And yet the only readable life of this hero and friend has been written by a Protestant. (I am not recommending it, for there are some things which Mrs. Oliphant does not understand.) And there is St. Ignatius Loyola. And there is St. Charles Borromeo—_that_ was a man! And St. Philip Neri, who had a sense of humor, and was entirely civilized at the same time. And St. Francis of Sales! His “Letters to Persons in the World” make one wish that he had not died so soon. What tact, what knowledge of the world! How well he persuades people without diplomacy, by the force of a fine nature open to the grace of God!

Our young people need only know the saints—not out of Alban Butler’s sketches, but illumined with reality—to be filled with an enthusiasm which Carlyle would have had them waste on the wrong kind of heroes.

One of the most interesting pictures of a priest in American literature—which of late abounds in pictures of good priests—is that of Père Michaux, in Miss Woolson’s novel “Anne.” He believed that “all should live their lives, and that one should not be a slave to others; that the young should be young, and that some natural, simple pleasure should be put into each twenty-four hours. They might be poor, but children should be made happy; they might be poor, but youth should not be overwhelmed by the elders’ cares; they might be poor, but they could have family love around the poorest hearthstone; and there was always time for a little pleasure, if they would seek it simply and moderately.”

But Père Michaux was French: he had not been corrupted by that American Puritanism which has, somehow or other, got into the blood of even the Irish Celts on this side of the Atlantic. Pleasures are not spontaneous or simple, and joy is only possible after a long period of worry. Simple pleasures—the honest little wild flowers that peep up between the every-day crevices of each twenty-four hours—are neglected because we have not been taught to see them. Life may be serious without being sad; but, influenced by the Puritan gloom, sadness and seriousness have come to be confounded.

Man was not made to be sad. Unless something is wrong with him, he is not sad by temperament. And sadness ought to be repressed in early youth. The sad child in the stories is pathetic, but the authors generally have the good sense to kill him when he is young. The sad child in real life ought not to be tolerated. And if his parents have made him sad by putting their burden of the trials of life on him so early, they have done him irreparable wrong. Simple pleasures are the sunlight of life; and the little plants struggle to the sunshine and find light for themselves, darken their dwelling-place as you will. The frown in the household, the scolding voice, the impatience with childish folly—all these things are against the practice of the Church and her saints. The Catholic sentiment is one of joy—not the Sabbath any more, but the Sunday, the day of smiles, of rejoicing; the day on which, as old Christian legends have it, the sun is supposed to dance in honor of the first Easter.

How much the French and Germans, who have not lost the Catholic traditions, make of the little joys of life! If the grandfather’s name-day come, there is the pot of flowers, the little cake with its ornaments. And how many other feasts are made by the poorest of them out of what the Americans, rich by comparison, would look on but as a patch upon his poverty! There should be no dark days for the young. It is so easy to make them happy, if they have not been distorted by their surroundings out of the capability of enjoying little pleasures. The mother who teaches her daughters that poverty is not death to all joy, and that the enjoyment of simple things makes life easier and keeps people younger—such a mother is kinder to her girls, gives them a better gift than the diamond necklace which the spoiled girl craves, and then finds good only so far as it excites envy in others.

Children should not be made to bear a weight of sadness. That girl will not long for an electric doll if she has been taught to get the poetry of life out of a rag-baby. And the boy will not pine for an improved bicycle, and sulk without it, if he has learned to swim. The greatest pleasures are the easiest had—

“Each ounce of dross costs an ounce of gold;
For a cap and bells our lives we pay;
Bubbles we buy with a whole soul’s tasking:
’Tis Heaven alone that is given away,—
’Tis only God may be had for the asking.”

Those who have suffered and borne suffering best are the most anxious that the young should enjoy the simple joys of life. Like this Père Michaux, they look for a little pleasure in each twenty-four hours. Is it a wild rose laid by a plate at the simple dinner, a new story, a romp, ungrudging permission for some small relaxation of the ordinary rules, or a brave attempt to keep sorrow away from the young? No matter; it is a little thing done for the Holy Child and for childhood, that ought to be holy and joyous.

There is a commercial axiom that declares that we get out of anything just as much as we put into it. This may be true in trade or not; it is certainly true of other things in life.

When the frost begins to make the blood tingle, and the glow of neighborly fires has more than usual comfort for the passer-by, as he sees them through windows and thinks of his own, the fragrance of home seems to rise more strongly than ever, and then there is a longing that the home-circle may revolve around a common centre. Sometimes this longing takes the form of resolutions to make life more cheerful; and sometimes even the father wonders if he, in some way, cannot make home more attractive. As a rule, however, he leaves it to the mother; and if the young people yawn and want to go out, it must be her fault. The truth is, he expects to reap without having sown.

Home can be made cheerful only by an effort. Why, even friendship and love will perish if they are not cultivated; and so if the little virtues of life—the little flowers—are not carefully tended they must die. Young people cannot be imprisoned or kept at home by force. We cannot get over the change that has come about—a change that has eliminated the old iron hand and rod from family life. We must take things as they are. And the only way to direct the young, to influence, to help them, is to interest them.

Books are resources and consolation; study is a resource and consolation. Both are strong factors in the best home-life; and the man who can look back with gratitude to the time when, around the home-lamp, he made one of the circle about his father’s table, has much to be thankful for; and we venture to assert that the coming man whose father will give him such a remembrance to be thankful for can never be an outcast, or grow cold, or bitter, or cynical.