Chapter V (25)

Full, hearty, and loyal allegiance to the pope is therefore an essential part of Christian duty. It is the duty and the interest of all Catholic Christians, bishops, priests, and laymen, to stand by the pope, as the Vicar of our Lord Jesus Christ and God's Vicegerent upon earth; and to make common cause with him, as knowing that we must stand or fall together. There are special reasons why American Catholics should appreciate this high obligation. The American Catholic Church is to a great extent an offshoot from the Catholic Church of Ireland. It was the pope who sent St. Patrick into Ireland to convert that country from heathenism to Christianity. The Irish people have always been foremost among all other Catholics in filial reverence, devotion, and obedience to the See of St. Peter. When all but one man in the English hierarchy basely deserted their allegiance to the pope in submission to the will of a tyrant, only one Irish bishop of insignificant character imitated their example, and even he repented before his death. {531} It was for their loyalty to the pope that the Irish people were reduced to _feed on nettles_, both literally and figuratively. The glorious archbishop O'Hurley, tortured on Stephen's Green and hanged, the intrepid monks hurled into the sea from the heights of Bantry, the slaughtered victims of Drogheda and Wexford, and the rest of the noble army of Irish martyrs and confessors, suffered and died for this doctrine of the Catholic faith, that the Pope is the Vicar of Jesus Christ and the supreme head of the Church upon earth. The whole Irish nation has suffered martyrdom for three centuries, for its unswerving fidelity to the See of Peter. It would be unworthy of us, who have received the sacred plant of faith watered by the blood and preserved by the heroism of this faithful nation, and now enjoy full liberty to partake of its fruits and to propagate it far and wide, in peace, to degenerate from the sentiments of such noble ancestors.

Moreover, the Catholic Church in America has ever been under the most immediate and special care of the Holy See, ever obedient and loyal, and therefore, ever united and prosperous. Nowhere in the world do the bishops and priests receive a greater degree of respect and obedience from their people, or a more abundant fruit from their labors in preaching the word and administering the sacraments of Christ. No heresy or schism, no violent disputes, no extensive alienation of the faithful from their pastors, none of those internal disorders which are far more dangerous than any outward opposition, have as yet arisen to trouble our peace. The chief reason of this is found in the perfect and unbroken union of our hierarchy and people with the apostolic See of St. Peter. Were it not for this, as there is no coercive force of the state to enforce a compulsory exterior unity like that of the Russian Church, and no patriarchal jurisdiction of one bishop over all the others, the decrees of national or provincial synods would have no binding efficacy, the union of bishops with each other would be broken, the authority of the bishops would be defied by the clergy, of the clergy by the people, and the same disintegration tending to final dissolution would take place among us which we see in the surrounding sects. The same result would inevitably take place throughout the world, if the supremacy of the successor of St. Peter were overthrown. State policy, and the power of kings and parliaments, are broken reeds to lean upon. Were the church left to depend upon these, they would soon withdraw their support, and, bereft of a principle of internal life and unity, Christianity would resolve itself everywhere into dust and air, never again to be revived on earth.

Peter, living in the unbroken line of his successors, is the rock and foundation upon which the church, that is, Christianity itself, is built; and because the gates of hell shall never prevail against this rock, to overthrow it, therefore Christianity shall endure to the end of the world.

The full and unimpeded exercise of the spiritual supremacy of the pope over the Catholic Church throughout the whole world being necessary to its well-being, the perfect independence of this supremacy from all political power is also necessary as the condition of its free exercise. The experience both of the past and the present proves that the political power is always disposed to tyrannize over the church and deprive it of its divine right to liberty. {532} The only check to this domination of kings over bishops, and the only lever by which the episcopate may be raised out of this dependence on the civil power, is the independent power of the Holy See. The pope must confirm the nominations to bishoprics, and the decrees of local councils, otherwise they are null and void. Were it not for this prerogative, which Napoleon the First violently but unsuccessfully attempted to wrest from Pius VII., the king would be the real head of each national church in nearly every Catholic state. If one of these national churches had within its bounds the principal and supreme see of the whole Catholic Church, the sovereign of that nation, through his power over the nomination to that see and its administration, would have power to exercise dominion over the Catholic Church. If the archbishop of Paris or of Vienna had the supremacy, the emperor of France or of Austria would be the virtual head of the Catholic Church, as the English sovereign and the Russian sovereign are the real heads of the English and Russian churches, notwithstanding the nominal primacy of the archbishops of Canterbury and of Moscow. Just so, if the pope became the subject of a king ruling over his episcopal city of Rome. He could not exercise his spiritual supremacy, except in dependence on the will of the sovereign. He could not call an oecumenical council, send a legate, receive an ambassador, issue an encyclical, promulgate a decree, receive or send out the documents necessary for the government of the universal church, or possess the necessary means for the transaction of indispensable business, without the permission of the political authority. In time of war, his communication with the belligerents would be completely cut off. The nomination to the sovereign pontificate would either really, or at least in the opinion of other nations, always be controlled by political influence, and so also would be the confirmations or direct appointments to episcopal sees throughout the world. Laws in regard to marriage or other matters, over which the sovereign pontiff has direct jurisdiction, might be passed, which he would be obliged to condemn, and yet be unable to do so, or at least without perpetual conflicts with the civil power. He would be continually subject to the treatment which the Archbishop of Cologne received from the King of Prussia, and the bishops of Italy from Victor Emmanuel, confiscation, imprisonment, or exile. The exercise of his supremacy would therefore become impossible. For, it could only be exercised in dependence on the will of a monarch or a cabinet, and neither kings, bishops, or people would ever submit to such a supremacy. How would American Catholics like to have King Victor Emmanuel and Ratazzi or Ricasoli dictating the affairs of the church in this country? Our hierarchy here is, thank God! free from the dictation of the state, and the head of our hierarchy must also be a free and independent pope.

It is folly to imagine another and purely ideal state of things, in which the pope might have perfect independence without sovereignty. There is no likelihood that such a state of things will become actual, and there would be no security for its permanence did it ever begin to exist. Divine Providence has given the vicar of Christ a temporal sovereignty as the security of his independence and the bulwark of the liberty of the universal church. The pope has solemnly declared that it is the necessary and the bounden duty of all the members of the church, whether kings, prelates, or people, to maintain that sovereignty at all hazards. {533} To throw the whole burden of sustaining the Holy See and the authority of the successor of St. Peter upon Divine Providence, is both presumptuous and cowardly. Christ has promised that his church shall last to the end of the world, and he will fulfil this promise, if necessary, by miraculous intervention. But he has not promised that particular nations shall not lose the faith, or that faithlessness and cowardice shall not bring after them their natural disastrous consequences. The glory, prosperity, and extension of the Catholic Church depend on the efforts of the free human will; and the providence or grace of God will not aid us, except in proportion to our fidelity and generosity in maintaining his cause and our own. Our confidence that the holy Roman Church cannot be overthrown rests on the sure foundation of that divine word, not one iota of which can fail, even though heaven and earth may pass away. "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall never prevail against it." This is no warrant for our abandoning the ground to the enemies of the church, trusting that God will thwart their designs by miraculous intervention. But it is an encouragement to loyalty, fidelity, and unalterable hope in the ultimate triumph of the holy cause. It is our duty to do all in our power to secure this triumph by our own efforts, and having done this, we may then leave the result in the hands of Divine Providence. We can never foresee, with certainty, through what straits Divine Providence will permit the church to pass, or how far it will allow the designs of her enemies to proceed toward an apparent ultimate success. Nevertheless, there does not appear at present so much reason to apprehend dark and disastrous days for the church and religion, as there did during the epoch preceding the present one. Even during the reign of the present severely tried but indomitable chief pastor of the church, there have been periods far more critical and threatening than the present. Indeed, we may say that those Catholics who are desponding and discouraged now, derive their reason for foreboding evil more from their own timidity and impatience than from any real external motives. The Holy See is in perpetual conflict against powerful enemies, no doubt, and the Holy Father sometimes threatened with a prospect of exile from Rome. Yet, notwithstanding this, the march of events continually brings nearer the reconciliation and pacification of Christendom, upon the basis of a universal recognition of the independence and inviolability of the sacred domain of the Roman Church, which God has set apart as the seat of the successor of St. Peter. In truth, there has often been in the past a greater need of absolute reliance on the predictions of the divine word as the only firm ground of hope, than at present. We are not called upon for the same heroic exercise of faith and hope which was exacted from our ancestors. We can look back upon the dangers and trials through which they passed, and find in their result a reproach for our own pusillanimity, and a support for our confidence in the present and future triumph of the church. We are in an invincible fortress, on an immovable rock; and yet we do not appreciate the strength of our position as clearly as those do who are tossing about on the turbulent sea of the surrounding world. Although humiliating, it is yet true, that we can find no language so well adapted to stimulate faint-hearted Catholics to courage, as that uttered under an overawing compulsion by adversaries or aliens to the church. {534} One of the most eloquent of these reluctant tributaries, carried away by a kind of natural ecstasy, in contemplating this glorious theme, like another Balaam blessing the tents of Israel, rises to a kind of sublimity far above his usual flight, and seems to speak with a catholic inspiration worthy of a Bossuet. He is speaking of that dark era when Pius VII. ascended the chair of St. Peter, and these are his words:

"It is not strange that in the year 1799 even sagacious
observers should have thought that at length the hour of the
Church of Rome was come: an infidel power ascendant, the pope
dying in captivity, the most illustrious prelates of France
living in a foreign country on Protestant alms, the noblest
edifices which the munificence of former ages had consecrated
to the worship of God turned into temples of victory, or into
banqueting houses for political societies, or into
Theophilanthropic chapels; such signs might well be supposed to
indicate the approaching end of that long domination. But the
end was not yet; again doomed to death, the milkwhite hind was
still fated not to die. Even before the funeral rites had been
performed over the ashes of Pius VI., a great reaction had
commenced, which, after the lapse of more than forty years,
appears to be still us progress. Anarchy had had its day; a new
order of things rose out of the confusion, new dynasties, new
laws, new titles, and amidst them emerged the ancient religion.
The Arabs have a fable that the great Pyramid was built by
antediluvian kings, and alone, of the works of men, bore the
weight of the flood. Such as this was the fate of the papacy;
it had been buried under the great inundation, but its deep
foundations had remained unshaken, and, when the waters abated,
it appeared alone amid the ruins of a world which had passed
away. The republic of Holland was gone, the empire of Germany,
and the great council of Venice, and the Helvetian League, and
the house of Bourbon, and the parliaments and aristocracy of
France. Europe was full of young creations; a French empire, a
kingdom of Italy, a confederation of the Rhine; nor had the
late events affected only territorial limits and political
institutions; the disposition of property, the composition and
spirit of society, had, through a great part of Catholic
Europe, undergone a complete change; but _the unchangeable
church was still there._"

The unchangeable church was still there, when Pius VII. was restored to his episcopal city, where his successors, one after the other, ascended the throne of St. Peter, and when Macaulay wrote the words we have quoted. It is still there, now, after all the commotions of the last twenty years; there it will be until the day prefixed by the Creator for the end of all human institutions. We may apply to it, in a more elevated and spiritual sense, the words of the poet

"While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand;
When falls the Colisaeum, Rome shall fall;
_And when Rome falls, the world._"

--------

{535}

Plagiarism and John Bunyan.

There are not many writers of any popularity or eminence who have not in their day, either in their own behalf or by the sensitive proxy of their intimate friends, had occasion for self-defence against the charge of plagiarism. From young authors especially, some little slur or other on this tender point is pretty sure, at some time, to evoke a thin-skinned answer, replete with a peculiar modest defensive ferocity that critics know by heart, and grin over with a grim relish. This is a thing of course--a well-marked stage of the fever of authorship. Only we notice that most of those who begin with young Byron's philippics end with old Wordsworth's philosophy. The fact is, splendid sensitiveness, here as everywhere, does not pay, and beyond most men the author finds it cost him dear. For of all ill-matched and absurd controversies, there is none like a wrangle about plagiarism. It is a duel of javelins and catapults, of fly and lion. All the advantage is with the attacking party. The accusation is vague and sweeping to the last degree, and the easiest imaginable to make. It need not even be said; it can be sneered. And how cheap it is to be sophistical about it! A little ingenuity to cook up a factitious resemblance, a little malice to point a bit of irony or innuendo, and the thing is done. To rebut such crimination may take days of labor. These very days consumed, too, are so much dead disadvantage; the whole matter grows stale the while. Then the answer must not only conclusively meet the charge, both as to the _animus furandi_ and the fact of theft, but it must be intrinsically interesting, both to revive interest enough in the subject for the reading public to go to the trouble of revising its opinion, and because every word an author writes is matter for fresh criticism, while his opponent may waive all pretensions to style. Practically we incline to think it is much as in battle, where it takes a man's weight in lead to kill him. Now and then, some one is demolished utterly by one of these elaborate broadsides, but the number of them that miss the mark must be enormous. It is only effects and successes that we all remember. The shot that sunk the Alabama at a few hundred yards, made more impression in history than the dozens of idle shell that the great Sawyer gun used to send spinning miles away over the Ripraps. One general net result is a vast waste of the author's time, which is always valuable to him, and sometimes to the public. And after all, with the truest aim and best powder--who is hit? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, some nobody. And this is truer every day. Pope and Byron could at least single out their Dennises and Amos Cottles by name; but nowadays, what with pseudonyms and anonyms, and above all the editorial pronoun, one fights the very air.

Thus we find authors of standing strangely meek under audacious strictures of this sort, and very little given to tilting at the mosquitoes of the press. This is more than dignity; it is sense. But (and now we strike the point we have been coming at all this while) the world draws from this fact a very exaggerated inference. {536} It seems, to reverse the old law rule, that one story's good till another is told. The very fact of an accusation's going unanswered seems to crush it under a _vis inertiae_ of silence. This is all worldly wise, but not very infallible. If a man shouts something against me before my street-door, and I let him shout away at his own sweet will, I am tolerably sure, whether it be truth or calumny he is vociferating, that his wind must give out after a while. The world, though, is apt instead of listening to him, to stare up at my window, and see if I mind it. If I make no sign, he is a vituperator, and some good citizen just mentions him to the policeman round the corner. But all this while may not he be bawling the blessed truth, and I slinking behind the shutters? Public opinion says no. If a man of standing does not deign or see fit to come out against a charge, it is a fabrication or a fancy sketch. Now, the truth is, as history well knows, that there is a vast amount of systematic stealing in the world of letters, and that these same majestic gentlemen, who are above replies, have done their very fair share of the stealing. What is the effect, then, of this false estimate of men and things? This: that when a writer has once attained station, with a decent regard to the conventionalities of literary larceny, he can steal all he chooses with impunity. All he has to do is to alter enough to keep him that runs from reading the resemblance. This done, there remains the one risk that some one who cannot be ignored may expose the theft. But this risk is not, by far, so great as it seems. The man of calibre enough for the task is generally an amiable man, and always a busy one, and has plenty of pleasanter things to do than airing his neighbor's peccadilloes. Besides, it is an even chance but he has some little appropriation of his own to cover up, and this fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind. Thus a very little judgment in the selection of the author stolen from passes the whole fraud scot free. And there are good reasons why there should be a good deal of this fraud. _First-class plagiarism pays_, like everything first-class. It has a high market value, with large and ungrudging profits. For the reading power is omnivorous, and it feels that an old author made modern, or a foreign author made native, is not as good as new but better. Pisistratus Caxton is a vast improvement on _Tristram Shandy_, and the _Comedy of Errors_ on the _Menaechmi_; and the primmest of the decriers read Bulwer and Shakespeare, and do _not_ read Plautus and Sterne. Boucicault's plays draw in London, and we never hear of English purists staying away till they can go to see the originals at Paris. But it is idle to multiply instances. The fact is too patent to need illustrating, that the nineteenth century prefers essences of books to books, and the juice of literary fruit to the fruit itself. Extracts, and digests, and compilations and abridgments, and _horti sicci_ of all sorts are the order of the day, and the old fogies, who prate of _meum_ and _tuum_, and dream of international copyright, and read old authors through, _"miranturque nihil nisi quod Libitina sacravit,"_ find that these are all side issues. The public does not care a rush where a man gets what it wants. This may be the best law, or it may not; the law it certainly is. Let any one who doubts the popularity of plagiarism, only take up that fine, furious, generous little book, Mr. Reade's _Eighth Commandment_, and see for himself what is the fashion and what is not.

{537}

But the honest crusader against literary despoilers and desecrators, soon finds that without the limits of downright pillage lies a vast debatable land, which has been the Flanders, the Kentucky, the Quadrilateral of critic controversy from time immemorial--the territory of mere resemblance. This is far more difficult ground, because the critic's own fallible perceptions of likeness enter as an element of possible error into his judgment, and the danger of doing injustice is great. Here, it is true, are found the expertest plagiarists of all--the vampires of literature--the thieves that steal the soul and leave the body. But close beside them stand the true scholars, to whose assiduity books yield up an honest wealth, and who melt and mould their well-worn treasure into solid ingots of golden thought or exquisite fretwork of glittering fancies. And more puzzling than both, we have the myriad legions of fugitive resemblances--an army of ghosts, present to the comparing consciousness, but impalpable to the analyzing sense. Obviously it will not do to apply here the martial law of literary vindication. Men are too much alike to be damned for striking even strange coincidences. Among the best writers there are so many parallelisms that a mind with any turn for hunting phantoms of similarity, soon comes to the saying of King Solomon about nothing new under the sun. At any rate, if it ever did exist, the era of entire novelty is of the past now. Take out what a keen, well-read man could trace to Shakespeare, Byron, Macaulay, Carlyle, the Bible, the Greek tragedians, the Standard Speakers, and the Declaration of Independence, and how much is there left of to-day's English and American literature? Yet among the imitations, if there are many wilful and culpable, there are many more innocent and unwitting. True, not every one is born with so developed an organ of unconsciousness as Mr. A. M. W. Ball, who astonished himself by originating some one else's poem in full. But very few read over their familiar authors without finding the germs of a thousand thoughts they had never suspected not to be all their own. Indeed, for some time after beginning, a young author could, if he should choose, (which he doesn't,) pluck up his ideas like young blades of corn, and find the original seed of some pet author at the root.

But critics have called the name of plagiarist far too often and too lightly. The charge is old enough, heaven knows, for people to know what they mean by it. Waiving those ancient Sanscrit sages, who seem with malice prepense to have been born so long ago that we can't more than half believe in them, and before there was any intelligible language for them to be wise in, we find that Job, our oldest modern writer, has been read out of the rubric by a theologue somewhere out West, who has discovered in his style gross and servile plagiarisms from the Bible. Homer stood tolerably well till the German omniscients found out that, like Artemus Ward's friend, Brigham Young's mother-in-law, he was numerous, when it at once becomes plain, from the great uniformity of style, that _each one_ of him must have been a most accomplished plagiarist from the remaining fractional bards. Horace's spiteful and uncalled for commentaries on Lucilius, besides the outrageous ill taste of them, show that there was some shrewdness in the bite of the _cimex Pantilius_, the blear-eyed Crispinus, and other literary gentlemen--probably good fellows enough, too--as those ancient Bohemians went--who, no doubt, hinted at little likenesses between his _sermo merus_ and Lucilius' _sal nigrum_. {538} Martial's epigrams have crucified a dozen thieves into immortality. And so the old bandying of hard words has come down the annals of literature, till the self-same wave of bitterness that whelmed the luckless insect Pantilius foams about the shallows of Mr. Swinburne's self-defence, and finally goes combing over the City Hall with Mr. Charles Reade for its Neptune, and threatens to make flotsam of that cosy fixture, the _Round Table_. Yet, with all these precedents to define it, plagiarism is to-day a purely relative term--a weapon of the partisan wars of letters. If our enemies commit a coincidence, that is plagiarism; when our friends pilfer, it is adaptation, version, studies in style, or some other euphemism.

Modern criticism has not signalized its advance by establishing any principle to decide this difficult question of what is really plagiarism. There is absolutely no standard or criterion yet, and each one who wishes to form a right opinion, is thrown upon his own devices to reach it. Amid the many delicacies and difficulties of judging in this matter, we have found, or fancied we found, one rule of singular service in guiding us to a satisfactory conclusion. It is noteworthy, to say the least, that almost all the great plagiarists and imitators of all time have been writers of the self-conscious or _subjective_ order; men who wrote with Mrs. Grundy uppermost, and their theme next; whose real and primary aim was to exhibit and exalt themselves; to feed their personal vanity, ambition, or greed. The objective or intuitive class, on the contrary--those who wrote because they were full of their subject; thinking of it, feeling it, full of it; those in brief who develop their natures instead of advantaging themselves, are almost never caught depredating intentionally, while their very intentness on what they may have to say makes them the most frequent of unconscious imitators in mere manner and expression.

It may be generalizing too much to say that this fact contains a principle, but we do think it points to a presumption. The more satisfactory the rule, however, the more puzzling the exception, and in applying this test of subjectivity, we strike on quite a little _casus conscientiae_, in the issues presented by the two books which form our text.

Of all English writers, one of the last to pitch on for a plagiarist is honest John Bunyan. He, if ever man was, is sincere, objective--a convinced missionary and messenger. Grave, rough, outspoken, self-praising, yet rigid, he seems at a first glance to embody and epitomize his age; that strange, fermented, fanatical age, when England seems one vast presbytery--a Massachusetts of political, social, and religious austerities and extremes; when the Englishmen of history seem to lose their characteristics for a while, and turn to foreshadowed, mediaeval Yankees; when we never think of them in connection with blonde love-locks and blue eyes, and slashed doublets, and foaming ale, and big, merry, unmeant oaths, and cheery taverns, and champing steeds; but as stern, sombre, black-a-vised, steel-capped, praying infantry, with jerkins on their backs, and Sternhold and Hopkins in every third knapsack. Yet, when we look closely, Bunyan is not so representative a man as he appears. {539} He was not only a better and bolder man than his fellows, but at bottom a different one. The reason why he typifies so much of those days is really that the man had a large measure of that tact for apparent conformity with the masses which is the essence of popularity, and which in him covered much independence. A hundred years later, he would have been the Francis Asbury of England. Under the Puritan crust lay hidden a red-hot Methodist. His autobiography--by far his most interesting work, in our opinion--is full of an ebullient fervor that was then a favorite novelty, is now to most of us a psychological study, but would waken only electric sympathy without a touch of surprise in many a circuit-riding itinerant of the south-west--unless, perhaps, he should wonder that there were such orthodox Methodists so long ago. He also fails in not representing that pragmatical hypocrisy which culminated in the Rump Parliament and Praisegod Barebones, and finally rotted the Commonwealth into the Restoration. Controversial and conceited he may have been, and he had no little reason to be honestly proud of the volcanic force of manliness that found him an imbruted tinker-boy, and made him a respected leader of his people. But in his great work no man could be more self-forgetful, more impersonal, more transparent to the thought within him. He is rife, permeated, possessed with his subject. His powerful imagination, always morbidly vivid, and at times in his life, disordered, bends its full force to the work. "He saw the things of which he was writing," says one of his biographers, "as distinctly with his mind's eye, as if they were indeed passing before him in a dream." Now, this is not the sort of man to go culling other people's words for his warm and swarming fancies. But moreover Bunyan was attacked in his lifetime with charges of plagiarism, and replied with his usual aggressive emphasis, and in his characteristic doggerel--in the preface to his _Holy War_.

"Some say the Pilgrim's Progress is not mine,
Insinuating as if I would shine
In name and fame by the worth of another,
Like some made rich by robbing of their brother.

"Or that so fond I am of being sire,
I'll father bastards, or, if need require,
I'll tell a lie in print to get applause.
I scorn it; John such dirt-heap never was
Since God converted him. Let this suffice
To show why I my Pilgrim patronize.

"It came from mine own heart, so to my head,
And thence into my fingers trickled;
Then to my pen, from whence immediately
On paper I did dripple it daintily.

"Manner and matter too was all mine own;
Nor was it unto any mortal known,
Till I had done it. Nor did any then,
By books, by wits, by tongues, or hand, or pen,
Add five words to it, or wrote half a line
Thereof; the whole and every whit is mine." ...

This leaves the suggestion of plagiarism apparently little room to stand upon, unless it fall back upon some safe generality, such as that in a republic (or commonwealth) all things are possible, or that the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, etc.

Against this giant of truth, panoplied in the very _robur et as triplex_ of self-conscious originality, comes out the queerest antagonist imaginable--a French David against a Welsh Goliath. These little books altogether deserve a passing word. Both are published privately and by subscription. One, the later, is a mere translation, arising out of its predecessor. The other is a most singular compilation, from a number of notes which one Mr. Nathaniel Hill, M.R.S.L., as we are not surprised to learn, died making. They make a book very unlike most books. To begin with, Mr. Basil Montagu Pickering, the publisher, has taken for his motto, "Aldi Discipulus Anglus," and the printing is an excellent imitation of that famous old press which so many dead scholars have blessed, and so many dead printers doubtless sworn at. {540} Then the engravings are very curious ones, copied from the oldest editions of the original, and combine a childlike range of scenery with a Chinese mastery of perspective. The text, though, is vilely marred by a variation of plan. Mr. Hill's idea was to show the indebtedness of Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_ to many earlier works, and its principal creditor happened to be this _Pélerinage de l'Homme_ of Guillaume De Guileville. His editors finding it so quaint, were struck by the bright afterthought of making this book itself the main subject. It may have sold better, but for ourselves we differ _toto caelo_ with their taste. Their method defies order, and results in a most extraordinary hotch-potch of queer quotations, Scripture references past number, antique French, archaic English to match, biographies, analogies, and translations, that reads like a fit of levity of old Fuller, or an _excursus_--or pilgrimage--from the _Anatomy of Melancholy_. Add now to all this, that to an old-fashioned translation of an antiquated poem by an obsolete monk, there are appended a body of notes full of all sorts of odd learning, and finally, that translation, notes and all, are by a woman, and the _outré_ picture is complete.

The comparison between De Guileville and Bunyan is not originated by this book. Southey, among others, speaks of the _Pélerinage_, which he entitles the _Pélerin de la Vie Humaine_, (although this name is not given it in any of the editions on the very full list of this volume,) and dismisses the subject with a wary vagueness that has to our ear a _soupçon_ of Podsnappery, and somehow makes us doubt if the worthy laureate ever read the book at all. But, at any rate, this is by far the most extended comparison yet made, and all the better in that it does not argue a preconceived theory.

One thing, at least, it plainly proves--that Master Bunyan very much overstated his originality in saying that manner and matter too were all his own. It shows that from the time of the Norman troubadors (not to go back to the Apocalypse of St. John) the dream-form which is the framing of _The Pilgrim's Progress_ was a common and favorite device, and instances _Piers Plowman's Vision,_ (A.D. 1369,) Walter de Mapes's _Apocalypsis Golice_, the older poem, _The Debate of the Body and the Soul_, Lydgate's _Temple of Glass_, Hampole's _Prycke of Conscience_, (1349,) Sir David Lyndesay of the Mount's poem, _The Dreme_, (1528,) and _Dunbar's Daunce_, (1470.) Probably Bunyan, not being accused of stealing so obvious and public an artifice, did not have it in mind at all when he made his sweeping self-assertion.

In looking further for resemblances, those who expect to find strong similarity of any sort will be disappointed. In fact, they would in ordinary cases be dismissed as trivial. But we must remember the vast difference between the two works. De Guileville's is a true mediaeval monastic "boke," justly described in this volume as "a cold and lifeless dialogue between abstract and unembodied qualities." It is, in all but its ancient quaintness, the dullest and driest of books; there is not a ray of reality in it anywhere. Bunyan, on the contrary, gives us men and women where the old prior of Chaliz has nothing but ghosts of abstract ideas. One is like the antiquated masques or miracle-plays; the other like the theatre before Garrick's day. {541} Thus between a galvanized French _Roman_ of 1330 and a live English book of 1670, by a man innocent of French, any resemblance in diction would not only be matter of wonder but matter of the merest chance. We will, however, cite a few of the parallelisms given in the comparison which forms the gist and pith of these volumes. And first comes one which we cite because it contains the only lines we have seen worth remembering in De Guileville's dreary waste of dialogue. He is describing the lady (Gracedieu) whom his _Pélerin_ meets at the outset.

De Guileville.

_"Moult courtoise et de douce chère
Me fut grandement car première
Me saulua en demandant
Pourquoy nauoie meilleur semblant
Et pour quelle cause ie pleuroye
Et saucune defaulte auoie.
Adonc ie fuz comme surpris
Pource que pas nauoye apris
Que dame de si grant atour
Daignast vers moi faire vng seul tour
Fors et seullement pour autant
Que cil qui a bonte plus grant
Plus a en soy dhumilite
Grant doulceur et benignite
CAR PLUS A LE POMMIER DE POMMES
PLUS BAS SENCLINE VERS LES HOMMES,
Et ne scay signe de bonte
Si grant comme est humilite,
Qui ne porte ceste baniere
Na vertu ne bonte entiere."_ [Footnote 52]

[Footnote 52:
"Full courteously, and in most gentle wise
Made she first salutation, questioning
Wherefore that I bore not more cheerful mien
And why I wept, and if in aught I lacked.
And then I was as one o'erta'en with wonder,
That lady of so great nobility
Should even deign to turn towards such as I,
Saving for this sole cause, that whoso most
Of gracious ruth doth bless, the same alway
Most in his bosom bears of lowliness.
For the more rich in store of golden fruit,
More deeply bendeth unto man the tree.
Nor know I any sign of graciousness
Great as humility. Who bears not that
Graved on his banner, hath not truly virtue."]

Lydgate's Translation.

This ladye that I spak of here
Was curteys and of noble chere
And wonderly of gret vertu,
And ffyrst she 'gan me to salue
In goodly wise axynge of me
What maner thyng yt myght be
Or cause why I should hyr lere
That I made so heavy chere,
Or why that I was aye wepyng,
Wher of when I gan take hede
I ffyl into a maner drede
For unkonnyng and leudnesse
That ache of so great noblesse
Dysdenede not in her degre
To speke to on so pore as me;
But yiff it were so, as I guess,
Al only of hyr gentyllenesse,
For gladly wher is most beute
Ther is grettest humylyte,
And that ys verrylye the sygne
Suych ar most goodly and benygne,
An apple tre with frut most lade
To folk that stonden in the shade
More lowly doth his branches loute
Then a nother tre withoute.
Wher haboundeth most goodness
There is ay most of meeknesse,
None so gret token of bewte
As is parfyt humylyte.
Who wanteth hyr in hys banere
Hath not vertu hool and entere.

"The same gracious salutation," says our book, "is made by Evangelist to Christian whilst he is weeping." "I looked then," says Bunyan, "and saw a man named Evangelist coming to him, who asked, 'Wherefore dost thou cry?' 'Because I fear,' replies Christian, 'that this burden that is upon my back will sink me lower than the grave, and I shall fall into the grave.'"

The simile of the fruit-tree is excellent, and perhaps strikes us the better for its being the one oasis. The resemblance also is strong between the greetings of _Gracedieu_ and Evangelist, and in fact, in the whole situation, and seems hard to account for without supposing Bunyan to have known Lydgate's or some other translation of the earlier author.

The next point is one of apparent discrepancy, but really of likeness. The _Pélerin_ is stopped by a _stream_, at which he desponds--signifying the water of baptism at the entrance to the church. Bunyan being a Baptist, with strong liberal views of communion, (which, indeed, embroiled him at one time with the radicals of his sect,) naturally balked at this abhorrent papistical metaphor, and substituted his famous _Slough of Despond_, which, it will be remembered, he makes to be sixteen hundred years old--the age of Christianity at his day.

{542}

Another slight touch, perhaps worth noting, is where De Guileville's pilgrims come from Moses, (the Mr. Legality of Bunyan,) as if

_"Yssys du bourbier,
Ou dun noir sac a charbonnier:"_

while Pliable, in a like case, is represented as seeming "bedaubed with dirt," as if he had been "_dipped in a sack of charcoal._" This certainly looks like a pebble for Goliath's forehead. Also these same muddy pilgrims of the _Pélerinage_, returning _"Enbordiz et encore tous familleux"_ come back all of a tremor and beg to join the others: so Christian, after his episode at Mr. Legality's, falls at the feet of Evangelist with prayers to be put again in the way of salvation. Again Christian's second companion _Hopeful_ and the _Pélerin's_ staff _Hope_ are branches of one idea. Farther on, _Gracedieu_ presents her _protégé_ with "the identical pebbles that David had in his scrip when he fought against Goliath." Bunyan makes the damsels of the palace called Beautiful, in exhibiting that establishment to the delighted Christian, display, among other aesthetic accessories of the place, "the sling and stone with which David slew Goliath of Gath."

Another curious parallelism is not cited at all in this book. De Guileville's hero is accosted by Avarice, who, in true Amazon style, swears by her golden _mammet_ she carries on her head ("_mon ydole est mon Mahommet_" says the old lady, instructively) that she will have his life, and makes him the alluring proposal, either to be killed at once, or to give up his staff and scrip, bow down to her _mammet_, acknowledge it the most worshipful of mammets, and then be killed after all. This reminds us very forcibly of the impressive occasion which so wrought on our childhood's susceptibilities, when "Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way, and said, 'I am void of fear in this matter; _prepare thyself to die; for I swear by my infernal den,_ that you shall go no farther: here will I spill thy soul!'" etc.

Such are the main body of the resemblances between the good old Cistercian abbot and the sturdy Baptist exhorter. There are many who will look them over and decide quite readily with Mr. Southey that the coincidences are fugitive and illusory, and that, as he says, _The Pilgrim's Progress_ might have been exactly what it is, whether Bunyan had ever seen this book or not." But this does not show either much acumen or much thought in Mr. Southey. For all he says might be true from the reason we have before suggested--that Bunyan knew no French, or certainly not enough to master the dialect of De Guileville, and might see the book a thousand times quite harmlessly. We confess, even that if Bunyan had really been familiar with the original poem, these similarities would be trifling. But when he must have drawn if at all from some one of the numerous translations--all indifferently poor--which abounded in his time, slight resemblances mean more. Those who have ever played at the well-known game of passing a story through a number of persons, one by one, will appreciate the force of this. Bunyan could scarcely help seeing some of the translations. For, strange to say, this, to us the baldest of books, was popular for generations, both in France and England. It is hard to understand these cases. We are apt to look upon them as instances of the inveterate slowness of ancient people; but apart from the fact that this slowness is a very difficult thing to analyze, we know that in a few years we shall be slow ourselves. {543} But what every one does not think is, that we are slow to-day. Any one who happens to glance over the shelves of any of our large publishing houses can find there numbers of dull-seeming works, on various specialties, full of facts, figures, demonstrations, discoveries, and what seems to us literally lumber of all sorts. Yet these books sell, and pay an invariable profit to a well-established house. Who buys them and what becomes of them, we shall probably learn when the disappearance of pins, and the necessity of summer clothing, and the origin of evil, are duly cleared up. Certain it is, that the _Pélerinage de l'Homme_ enjoyed a wide reputation and diffusion. Chaucer, especially, was familiar with its author, and his famous "A, B, C," is a palpable and, so far as we know, an undisguised imitation of De Guileville's _Prayer to the Virgin_, published in the same year 1330. Now, a work which, after filtering through three hundred years, another language and the brains of "painfulle" translators, could still yield the germ of the most nationally popular book in all English literature, has some claim to be called its original.

We shall not attempt to pass upon the question of plagiarism, for the honest reason that, as we have said, we really do not exactly know what the word means in the critical vernacular of to-day. The coincidences we have cited would certainly go to show that _The Pilgrim's Progress_ is not the entire novelty which its author so explicitly proclaims it. On the other hand, it is not proven to complete satisfaction that "John such a dirt-heap ever was" as to mean to steal anything from anybody. Perhaps the most peaceable as well as the most novel conclusion that suggests itself, is to harmonize both sides of this question by a third theory, namely, that one may be a palpable plagiarist, as the word is often used, without in the slightest degree detracting from his originality. The statement sounds extraordinary, but its ingenious advocate, M. Philarète Chasles, is an extraordinary Frenchman, and is talking when he advances it, about the "divine Williams," who is an extraordinary subject for a Frenchman to talk about. We are very much mistaken if those who smile at this seeming contradiction of terms will not find some force in the subjoined excerpt, which we premise, however, suffers greatly in translation for want of the peculiar super-emphatic style of the original French.

"Genius arranges and imitates, studies
and deepens; _it never invents_."

"Genius consists in understanding better, penetrating better,
surrounding with more light, what every one does
superficially, or understands by half. One of the singular
traits of Shakespeare is his supreme indifference as to the
subject he is to treat of. _He never cares about it;_ the
excellent artisan knows how to find material in everything. He
takes up at hap-hazard a pebble, a bit of wood, a block of
granite, a block of marble. Little he cares for his
predecessor's having made an old king disinherited by his
daughters, act and talk upon the stage; it is a fact like any
other fact, that counts for no more and no less. Shakespeare
goes on to find whatever of tears and of power there is in the
soul of this old man."

"_People to-day are running after an inventiveness which real
originality lacks;_ it dwells in the artist, not in the
materials he employs. With all great men it is tradition, it
is the people, it is the common heritage of ideas and customs
that has gathered the materials. They have taken them as they
came, and then laid their foundations, transmuted them,
immortalized them.

"If what is called invention were not a deceptive quality, we
should have to rate much higher than Dante, the first idle
monk, who wrote, in lumbering style, a vision of Paradise and
Hell; the coarse authors of certain Italian delineations would
carry the day over Molière; the unknown writers of certain
chronicles, divided into acts, would eclipse Shakespeare.

{544}

"In the epochs of literary decadence those are taken for
inventors who, impelled by a certain ardor of temperament, and
a certain fieriness of phrase, dislocate words and images, and
think they have launched ideas. These folk proclaim themselves
orators. Montaigne, Shakespeare, Molière took to themselves no
merit but that of studying nature, the world, and man."

"The true function of genius is to second.
--_Etudes sur IV. Shakespeare, etc._,
par Philarète Chasles. 1851; p. 88, _sqq._

There is no labor like making up one's mind, (unless it be, keeping it made up,) and we own ourselves charmed to find in this acute and able reasoning an outlet of escape from the whole duty of decision. And we think, too, that the many friends of the old Pilgrim--those who love him because (tenderest tie!) he was one of the picture-books of their infancy, those assuredly who have laughed at him in his French dress, converted to a good Catholic Palmer; [Footnote 53] and above all, the large Baptist connection of this magazine, will thank us; and if not, we assure them they ought to thank us, for this third horn of his sore dilemma.

[Footnote 53: _Petite Bibliothèque de Catholique_, tom.
xix. This is a translation of the first part of _The
Pilgrim's Progress,_ and is duly modified to doctrinal
fitness, and embellished with a frontispiece head of the
Blessed Virgin. Southey speaks also of a _Portuguese
translation_ of 1782. _Nil admirari ... !_]

--------

The Legend Of The Seven Sleepers.
A.D. 439.

The slaves of Adolius went forth on the hill,
And in toiling and talking got half through their day.
The sun was declining; the landscape was still,
As it stretched far beneath. While they delved in the clay,
And uncovered the rocks by command of their master,
Their stories and comments came faster and faster--
"How hot it became about noon!"
"How the olives were prospering greatly!"
That "the figs and the grapes would be plentiful soon--"
And "what changes had happened in Ephesus lately."

They wandered a century back, ay, and more,
To the time when the edict of Decius went out,
As they heard from their fathers. How fiercely it bore
On the Christians! Their blood in the streets flowed about
How the fame of Diana, whose beauty they knew
By description, those martyrs with horror did view!
How the Goth with his merciless torch
From the Euxine had rushed, an invincible foeman,
And spurning the goddess, had fired her high porch,
Despite of the wide-sweeping blade of the Roman.

{545}

Then one ceased his work, who was wrinkled and gray,
And, his hand on his mattock, he said: "It appears
Now since Decius did reign, from what wise people say,
To be clear of one hundred and eighty good years.
When his cruelty flourished, I'm told there were seven
Good youths of our city--so long gone to heaven--
Who fled to these parts and were pent
By the emperor's soldiers, who came on a sally,
And built up the cave." To his mattock he bent,
And a rock that he loosened rolled down to the valley.

They found a large rent where the rock had its bed,
Which with eager assault they made larger by delving;
And a cave was disclosed like a home of the dead--
It was horrid and cold, it was rugged and shelving.
The foulness of ages, unused to the light,
Seemed grimly reclaiming its curtain of night.
But look! as the mist grows more clear,
There's a form moving outward--of hell or of heaven--
The slaves did not question, but fled in their fear;
But in truth this was Iamblichus, one of the seven.

He paused at the mouth; placed his hands on his eyes;
Then he looked toward Ephesus, bathèd in light;
And he journeyed in haste, till with speechless surprise
A cross on the grand city gate met his sight.
He wondered, he doubted, he hearkened the din
Of the city; and kissing the symbol, passed in;
This place he so lately had known
Was transformed--had grown foreign, and altered, and cold;
He was famished for bread, and his wishes were shown;
But they liked not his accents, his dress, or his gold.

"Away to the judge with this madman or worse!"
"He has treasure that must be accounted." They went.
"I'm a Christian," he said, "and am wealthy; my purse
I have offered for bread. Should it be your intent
To enroll me a martyr, my life I'll lay down:
Take my life! Take my wealth in exchange for the crown."
Then the judge when he looked and saw clearly
That Decius' head on the coin did appear,
Declared, while he doubted, "this youth must be nearly
Two hundred years older than any one here!"

The bishop was sent for, and Iamblichus spoke:
"Six others and he had but yesterday fled;
They had slept in a cave, and this morning awoke;
And he had been sent to the city for bread."
"True sons," said the bishop, "of God's predilection!
These men are all saints who have found resurrection.

{546}