Chapter XXX: Part III: On the Boulevards (4)

The tradition of constant faith and resolute orthodoxy on the part of the queens of France was upheld in the century following that of Radegundes (the seventh), by Bathildis, the wife of Clovis II.; the friend of Eligius, Bishop of Noyon, and of Owen, Bishop of Rouen. Both of these had been placed in responsible positions at court through the influence of Radegundes--the co-operator of Genis, the holy almoner, who subsequently became Archbishop of Lyons, and the wielder of great power through the complaisance of her husband. Bathildis was pre-eminently the support of the episcopate and the refuge of the poor. She had herself been a captive, being by birth an Englishwoman, and having fallen to the lot of Erchinoald, the first officer of the King of Neustria, who treated her very kindly. Ventura says of her: “At the death of her husband, having been entrusted with the regency of the kingdom and the guardianship of her three little children, the oldest only five years old, she acquitted herself of this double office with such wisdom and prudence that even the great nobles and statesmen could not withhold their admiration and respect. With such counselors as the holy bishops Eligius, Owen, and Leger, it is not astonishing that she should have succeeded in banishing from the church in France the shameful simony which, through royal connivance, had hitherto dishonored it, and abolishing in civil matters the unjust and vexatious taxes that were grinding down the people. She multiplied hospitals, monasteries, and abbeys. The famous monastery of Chelles owes its origin to her.... But the most important of all her foundations was that of Corbie, which afterwards became so celebrated in France, and where this queen, as zealous for the propagation of science as for the strengthening of religion, established under able masters, gathered from all parts of the world, a system of the most complete literary and scientific education. This monastery, next to that of Lerins, was a true university and a centre of enlightenment. The regency of this woman renewed the glories and wonders of the reign of Pulcheria. Never had sovereign so exerted herself for the welfare of her people, both religiously, scientifically, and politically. But her greatest glory, which has not been sufficiently recognized, was ... that, contrary to the cold calculations of a false philosophy, she dared to do what no man had done before her. She abolished slavery in France (where it still subsisted), and was the first Christian sovereign who proclaimed as a national principle ... that a slave becomes free on setting his foot on the soil of France!”[82]

Between Bathildis and Blanche of Castille, from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries, there was no lack of holy and learned women in France, but it would be impossible to enumerate them all. “The mother of St. Louis, though the church has never formally canonized her, stands out as one of the grandest figures in ecclesiastical history. Her stern and unflinching devotion to religious principle, instilled early into the mind of her son, sowed the seeds of sanctity in the exceptional life of that holy king. Her talents were no less remarkable than her austerity. Her marriage at the age of fourteen with Louis VIII., King of France, gave her the high position to which her birth, her genius, and her beauty entitled her. This union was the model of Christian marriages, and her historian, the Baron Chaillon, says that during the twenty-six years it lasted she and her husband were never separated for a single instant, and that not the slightest shadow darkened the serenity of their intercourse. Even at an early age and before her husband’s accession to the throne, her father-in-law, Philip Augustus, did not refuse to take and follow her advice in matters of state importance.”[83] At her husband’s death she became, by his desire, regent of the kingdom. Ever eager to put her son’s personal prestige foremost, she carefully initiated him into the affairs of the realm, and accustomed him early to appear in his royal character in public. She wisely averted the ever-impending coalitions of the great vassals of the crown against the royal authority. She continued the war against the Albigenses, whose dissensions were ruining the kingdom; she obtained the annexation of the territory of the Counts of Toulouse to the crown, and quelled the revolt of the Duke of Brittany, who ended by gladly recognizing his fealty to her son. When she committed to Gaulthier, the Archbishop of Sens, the mission of treating for the hand of Margaret of Provence for the young king, these were the severe instructions she gave him: Only to propose the marriage formally after he had well studied the character of the young princess, and had well satisfied himself as to the stability of her principles, the purity of her life, and the sincerity of her religion. Butler, in his life of St. Louis, says of the queen: “By her care, Louis was perfectly master of the Latin tongue, learned to speak in public, and to write with elegance, grace, and dignity, and was instructed in the art of war, the wisest maxims of government, and all the accomplishments of a king. He was also a good historian, and often read the works of the Fathers.” Thus it will be seen that, without departing from the strictest feminine delicacy, a woman may be the sole responsible preceptor of a statesman and warrior, and yet leave no stain of “petticoat government” on his education, nor any suspicion of undue asceticism on his belief.

Concerning the dissensions of the nobles and vassals who refused to be present at the young king’s coronation, Butler says: “The queen regent put herself and her son at the head of his troops, and, finding means to bring over the Count of Champagne to his duty, struck the rest with such consternation that they all retired.... The whole time of the king’s minority was disturbed by these rebels, but the regent, by several alliances and negotiations, and chiefly by her courage and diligence, by which she always prevented them in the field, continually dissipated their cabals.” Of the negotiations with the Count of Toulouse, a dangerous and powerful vassal, Butler gives these details: “In the third year of her regency, she obliged Raymund, Count of Toulouse and Duke of Narbonne, to receive her conditions, which were that he should marry his daughter Jane to Alphonsus, the king’s brother, who should inherit the county of Toulouse, and that, in case they should have no children by this marriage, the whole inheritance should revert to the crown, which last eventually happened.” The same author says of Margaret of Provence “that she surpassed her sisters in beauty, wit, and virtue.” In 1242, after the majority and marriage of her son, Blanche founded the monastery of Maubuisson. Louis was remarkable for the even-handed justice with which he protected the serfs against the encroachment of their feudal lords, and on one occasion refused to allow Mgr. Enguerrand de Coucy the privilege of being tried by his peers, and condemned him to death by the ordinary process of law, for having arbitrarily hanged three children who had been caught hunting rabbits in his woods. He afterwards spared his life, but deprived him of all his estates and exacted from him an enormous fine, which he employed in building and endowing a mortuary chapel where Mass should be offered every day for the souls of the murdered children. The rest of the fine was divided into several foundations for hospitals and monasteries. In 1248, St. Louis, according to a vow he had made in sickness, set out for the crusade against the Sultan of Egypt, leaving his mother once more regent of France. Ventura says of her during this second regency that, “being in France in the body, yet in the East in spirit, and following mentally her heroic son in his dangerous undertaking, she seemed to multiply herself. Entirely absorbed in the care of the home government of a great kingdom, that she might make justice, order, and peace supreme therein, she was also participating none the less entirely in the great struggle between the Cross and the Crescent, ... and it is impossible to entertain a correct idea of the wisdom, forethought, and activity of which Blanche, during those five years, gave proof, thus being enabled to send aid in kind, in arms, and in money, to the army in the East, yet without taxing and unduly oppressing the people at home. Thus she did not neglect the smallest details in order to assure the success of an expedition in which the rational honor of France as well as the triumph of Christianity was engaged.” Ventura then goes on to remind the would-be “emancipators” of woman that, throughout her arduous duties, Queen Blanche, notwithstanding her immense governing powers and her proud experience of fifty years, did not hesitate to take as a trusted friend and counsellor the learned Archbishop of Sens, Gaulthier-Cornu. Of this latter prelate and statesman, a contemporary historian has said, “As long as his power was in the ascendant, fraud and dishonesty hid their face, while peace and justice reigned.” Blanche of Castille died before her son’s return from Egypt, and hastened to pronounce her vows of monastic consecration to God before she breathed her last, on the first of December, 1252.

We must now go back some centuries to place before our readers a fugitive account of those French princesses who exercised in Spain a true apostolate. We have already mentioned the younger Clotildis, but Indegonda, the daughter of Sigisbert, King of Austrasia, and Rigontha, the daughter of Chilperic, King of Neustria, remain to be noticed. They were married to two brothers, the former to Hermenigild, the latter to Reccared, sons of Levigild, King of the Spanish Visigoths. Indegonda suffered great persecutions from her husband’s step-mother on account of her religion, the second wife of Levigild being a bigoted Arian, and it was even a long time before Hermenigild consented to become a Catholic. When at last Indegonda had obtained this happy conversion, she herself and her husband’s uncle, the holy Leander of Seville, were exiled, and Hermenigild so persecuted by his father that, having been betrayed by the Greeks and deserted by the Romans, he fell a victim to Arian vengeance, and, after suffering torture and imprisonment, was cruelly put to death by order of Levigild himself. This barbarian king, however, repented his unnatural cruelty before he died, and, recalling his brother-in-law Leander, entrusted him with the care of his remaining son Reccared. Rigontha, the wife of the young prince, had suffered great injustice at the hands of her own father Chilperic, the lover of the too famous Fredegonda. She had succeeded in converting her husband, and, together with his uncle Leander, exercised a salutary influence over him. Reccared assembled the Arian bishops of his kingdom, and spoke to them so persuasively that they acknowledged themselves willing to be reconciled to the church. The province of Narbonne, at that time under his dominion, followed his example, while the neighboring tribe of the Suevi, also Arians, speedily joined the church. A council was then assembled at Toledo, and the intimate union of Spain with Catholic interests was founded on a solid and reliable basis.

It is told as a pleasantry of some shrewd critic of modern times that, whenever he saw or heard a disturbance of any sort, his unfailing question was, “Who is she?” being certain that, whatever might be the effect, a woman was sure to be the cause. If this is unfortunately no longer a libel on the sex in this distracted century, at least we may point back to the so-called dark ages, and proudly say, with a certainty far more absolute than that of our cynical contemporary, when we read of any great consummation in the history of religion and civilization, “Who was she?”

Not long after the death of Blanche of Castille, another Spanish princess, the daughter of Peter III. of Aragon, and the niece of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, took up the tradition of holiness, which seemed the birthright of the royal maidens of mediæval times. Her father attributed his success in his undertakings against the Moors to her prayers and early virtues. At twelve years old she was married to Denis, King of Portugal, to whom she was not only a most faithful wife, but whom she succeeded, by her meekness and silent example, in winning back from his sinful courses. She is praised by her biographers for her ascetic virtues, and for her utter disregard of her earthly rank. But what concerns us more is to look into the influence she held on social and political affairs. Among these it is impossible not to reckon her charities, for private charity has often much to do with public honesty and morality. Butler tells us that she “made it her business to seek out and secretly relieve persons of good condition who were reduced to necessity, yet out of shame durst not make known their wants. She gave constant orders to have all pilgrims and poor strangers provided with lodging and necessaries. She was very liberal in furnishing fortunes to poor young women, that they might marry according to their condition, and not be exposed to the danger of losing their virtue. She founded in different parts of the kingdom many pious establishments, particularly a hospital near her own palace at Coimbra, a house for penitent women who had been seduced into evil courses, at Torres-Novas, and a hospital for foundlings, or those children who for want of due provision are exposed to the danger of perishing by poverty or the neglect and cruelty of unnatural parents. She visited the sick and served them with her own hands, ... not that she neglected any other duties, ... for she made it her principal study to pay to her husband the most dutiful respect, love, and obedience, and bore his infidelities with invincible meekness and patience.” Let us stop to note this last sentence, which no doubt by many of our chafing sisters of this age may be misunderstood. This meekness was not a want of spirit; it was the effect of “the subordination of our inferior nature to reason, and of our reason to God,” as one of the most lucid and most sympathetic of American exponents of Catholic truth once expressed to the writer the whole duty of man upon earth. It was no passiveness, no supineness, but the heroic endurance of the martyr, who is more concerned at another’s sin than his own wrong, and who does not consider that reprisal and resentment are efficient means to win the sinner back. When a woman stoops to retaliation, she forgets the dignity of her sex, and, if _she_ forget it, who can she expect will remember it?

We may also be allowed to say one word about the numerous foundations constantly mentioned in the lives of these great Christian women of past ages. It is perhaps the general belief that nothing but monasteries were endowed in early times. We have sufficiently shown how fallacious such belief would be. Institutions of every kind, in which Catholic ingenuity was multiplied till it embraced every need and provided for every contingency, were sown all over the Christian world. The East was not forgotten, and, indeed, even the great orders of the Templars and the Hospitallers were originally nothing but organized bodies for the defence and shelter of the pilgrims who flocked to the holy places. Such charities as tended to diminish the temptations to crime were foremost among the many originated during the middle ages. We have only to refer to history to prove this. Even had these foundations been confined to monasteries, we must remember that the conventual abodes of old united in themselves nearly all the characteristics of other institutions, and in the less favored districts virtually supplied their place. Besides being the only secure and recognized homes of learning, the solitary centres of education, they were also the refuge of the homeless or benighted wanderer; the asylum of the oppressed poor, of threatened innocence, and of unjustly accused men; the hospital of the sick, the sure dispensary of medicines to the surrounding peasantry, and the unfailing granary of the poor during troublous times or years of famine. There was hardly one want, physical or spiritual, that could not find ready relief at the monasteries of both monks and nuns, so that in founding such retreats it is no exaggeration to say that orphanage, asylum, reformatory, hospital, and school were comprised within their walls.

We must return to the great queen whose munificence has led us into this digression, and resume, as was our purpose from the beginning, the rigid relation of mere historical facts to which we more willingly entrust the cause than to the most eloquent apologies.

When Elizabeth’s son, Alphonsus, revolted against his father and actually took up arms, she made the most prudent efforts to mediate between them, for which the Pope, John XXII., greatly praised her in a letter he wrote to her on the subject; but, certain enemies of hers having poisoned her husband’s mind against her, he banished her to the town of Alanquer. She refused all communication with the rebels, and at last was recalled by her penitent husband. Butler says: “She reconciled her husband and son when their armies were marching one against the other, and she reduced all the subjects to duty and obedience. She made peace between Ferdinand IV., King of Castille, and Alphonsus della Corda, his cousin-german, who disputed the crown; likewise between James II., King of Aragon, her own brother, and Ferdinand IV., King of Castille, her son-in-law. In order to effect this last, she took a journey with her husband into both these kingdoms, and, to the great satisfaction of the Christian world, put a happy end to all dissensions and debates between those states.” During her husband’s illness, which followed soon after, Elizabeth nursed him most devotedly, and ever exhorted him to think of his spiritual welfare. Her husband’s death was the end of her public career as queen--a fitting proof of the little value she placed upon the distinctions for which half the world is periodically laid in ashes. Her son, Alphonsus, and her grandson, also named Alphonsus, the young King of Castille, having again proclaimed war upon each other, Elizabeth set out to meet and reconcile them. She died on the way, in 1336, having obtained peace through her exhortations to her son, who attended her at her deathbed. Thus peace and brotherly love among princes and nations, as well as among the individuals of her own immediate circle, was ever nearest the heart of this great and admirable woman. How well it would be if she were taken as a model by the women of our day, and if her influence could be followed by the reward which our Lord himself attached to the noble office of peace-makers!

Turning to England, once the Island of Saints and the home of religious learning, we see the influence of woman most peremptorily asserted. There is Bertha, the daughter of Charibert, King of Paris, and wife of Ethelbert, King of Kent, whom we have already mentioned, with Brunehault, as being the apostles of the faith in England, and the zealous helpers of Gregory and Augustine. Rohrbacher says of her that she contributed mainly to the conversion of her husband and of the whole nation, and St. Lethard, her almoner and Bishop of Senlis, greatly aided her. There is Eanswide, her grand-daughter, the child of Eadbald, who was also converted later on and became abbess of the monastery at Folkestone, as Butler tells us. There is the great Edith, or Eadgith, the daughter of King Edgar, who in the tenth century was the ornament of her sex and the marvel of men. “She united,” says Butler, “the active life of Martha with the contemplation of Mary, and was particularly devoted to the care of the sick. When she was but fifteen years old, her father pressed her to undertake the government of three different monasteries, of which charge she was judged most capable, such was her extraordinary virtue and discretion. But she humbly declined all superiority.... Upon the death of her brother, Edward the Martyr, the nobility who adhered to the martyred king desired Edith to quit her monastery and ascend the throne, but she preferred a state of humility and obedience to the prospect of a crown.” Another Edith, the daughter of the great Earl of Kent, Godwin, became the queen of Edward the Confessor, with whom she lived by mutual consent in perpetual virginity, according to a vow the king had made many years before his marriage. Reading, studying, and devotion were her whole delight. Edward’s mother, Emma, is ranked among the saints, and was mainly instrumental in the religious and learned education of her son. Ventura, in his admirable work on Woman, which has become, as it were, a text-book for all those who are truly interested in the theme and history of woman’s greatness, draws attention to the fact that it was under the reign of Edward the Confessor--who is credited by prejudicial historians with “womanly” weakness, and who, on the contrary, was such an irrefragable proof of what the grave and wise influence of good women can do--that the equality of all men before the law was first recognized as a principle. Edward’s niece, Margaret, the wife of Malcolm, King of Scotland, was also a most eminent and influential princess. Her husband, whose confidence in her was unbounded, deferred to her in every particular of state government, whether internal or external, secular or religious. Their children’s education he left entirely in her hands, and, while she carefully surrounded them with masters well versed in all the knowledge then attainable, she was no less solicitous for the improvement of the nation. Butler says of her: “She labored most successfully to polish and civilize the Scottish nation, to encourage among the people the useful and polite arts, and to inspire them with a love of the sciences.... By her extensive alms, insolvent debtors were released, and decayed families restored, and foreign nations, especially the English, recovered their captives. She was solicitous to ransom those especially who fell into the hands of harsh masters. She also erected hospitals for poor strangers.” Her daughter Maud, who was the first wife of Henry I. of England, followed in her footsteps, and was highly revered, both during her life and after her death, by the two nations to which her birth and marriage linked her. Two great hospitals in London, that of Christ Church, Aldgate, and of St. Giles in the Fields, are due to her munificence and foresight.

We have no space to mention many of the Anglo-Saxon princesses who, either on the throne or in the cloister, swayed great political issues and protected learning while they shielded the virtue of their sex. We must leave the Island of Saints for other kingdoms whose queens were conspicuous not only in procuring the conversion of these realms to Christianity, but also in the territorial aggrandizement and material prosperity of the countries they governed. Bridget, Queen of Sweden, the famous author of the most interesting revelations ever written, was no less remarkable personally than fortunate in her many and distinguished children. Warriors and crusaders, holy wives and consecrated virgins, she offered them to God in every state, and instructed each with particular care. A pilgrimage to Rome in days when the journey from Scandinavia to the south was more an exploration than a safe pastime was bravely undertaken by her in her widowhood, and the foundation of her order and chief monastery at Vatzen is certainly one of the most boldly conceived systems known to the world. The monasteries of this order were double, and contained a smaller number of monks and a larger of nuns, divided by so strict an enclosure that, although contiguous, the communities never even saw each other. In spiritual matters, the monks held authority, but in temporal the nuns governed the double house; and in fact the monks were only attached to the foundation in a secondary degree of importance, and for the greater spiritual convenience of the cloistered women. Such subordination goes far to show how the pretended inferiority of woman is really an unknown thing in the church. The fanaticism and bad faith of later times affected to see an abuse in this system, and most of these monasteries were destroyed at the Reformation, but Butler says that a few exist yet in Flanders and Germany. St. Bridget’s works have been printed and reprinted from age to age, and have seemingly never lost what may be styled in modern parlance their popularity. She also procured a Swedish translation of the Bible to be written by Matthias, the Bishop of Worms, who died about the year 1410. She was altogether one of the most prominent women of the fourteenth century, and no unworthy successor to the central figure of the preceding age, Catherine of Sienna, of whom we shall have to speak briefly later on.

Two empresses of Germany deserve a passing notice here--Mathilda, the wife of Henry I. called the Fowler, and her daughter-in-law, the famous Adelaide. The former had been educated by her grandmother, who bore the same name as herself, and who was the abbess of the monastery of Erfurt. Once again we have a woman of genius, prudence, and great governing powers coming forth to rule a disturbed empire--and from what school? The world will hardly dare to call it unenlightened or narrow-minded; yet it was a monastery. During her husband’s wars against the Danes and Hungarians, then (it was in the ninth century) nothing better than barbarians, Mathilda was several times left regent, and Ventura tells us “that public affairs did not prosper less, the country was not less tranquil, nor the people less contented, because it was a woman who steered the helm of the state. When the emperor returned, he found everything in perfect order. The empress relinquished the functions of regent only to resume her former place of intercessor for the unfortunate, protectress of prisoners, and wise auxiliary to justice.” Adelaide, Princess of Burgundy, renewed in the following century the glories of Mathilda’s reign. She was married to the son of the latter, after having been for a short time the Queen of Lothair, King of the Lombards in Italy. Ventura says that her zeal for the public good and her love of the people gained her the appellation of the “mother of her kingdom.” After her husband’s death, Adelaide, says Butler, “educated her son Otho II. with great care, and his reign was happy as long as he governed by her directions.” His mother became regent after his death and that of his wife, and her biographer, Butler, tells us that she “looked upon power as merely a difficult stewardship, and applied herself to public affairs with indefatigable care.”[84]

The middle ages are so fruitful a field for historical details of the greatness of woman, that we find our materials crowding one upon the other in too great a profusion for our present limits. But some great figures in what we may call the Christian Pantheon of woman cannot be passed over without a word of notice. The tenth century gave another holy empress to Germany, Cunegonda, the wife of Henry II., himself a saint, and a descendant of St. Mathilda. His sister Giselda married King Stephen of Hungary, upon the express condition that he would endeavor to christianize his people. Cunegonda, who reigned for a short time between the death of St. Henry and the election of his successor, proved herself as competent to govern a realm as the greatest man; these are Ventura’s own words. The story of Elizabeth of Hungary has been eloquently told by the author of the _Monks of the West_, and pictorial art has handed down from generation to generation the touching legend of her life. Married early to a prince remarkable for his piety and generosity, she was able to indulge in her favorite pastime--working for and serving the poor. We, in these days, seem to think that philanthropy, the “love of man,” is an invention coeval with the erection of gossiping committees and wrangling “boards”; but, when we look back upon the history of our race, we are forced to remember that when man was loved for the sake of God, spiritually as well as temporally, and when the old-fashioned virtue of “charity” was not ashamed to own its created--not self-existent--origin, a broader system of benevolence was spread over Christian earth, and more daring undertakings were cheerfully and successfully carried through. Elizabeth of Hungary was not untried by adversity, and after her husband’s death suffered cruel persecutions from her brother-in-law Henry, with the undaunted fortitude which a good conscience ensures and which God’s grace strengthens. We are told of her that she spoke little and always with gravity, and especially shunned tattlers. Women are always being taxed on one side with ridiculous frivolity in speech, and urged, on the other, to a contradiction of the charge by the pedantic phraseology of surface science. We have not alluded in these pages as often as we should have done to the great love of silence which distinguished the great women whose memory is honored. Whether as religious or as seculars, the useful employment of time and a discreetness of conversation were the two special and similar characteristics of their widely different lives, and thus they provided for the devotions and the acts of charity which shared so large a portion of their days and nights. They were never idle or even uselessly occupied, and we know but few women of our own generation who could truthfully say the same of themselves. What powers, what energy, do we not see wasted in superfluous social duties; for while, as our modern phrase goes, they _kill time_, they are also engaged in stifling, dwarfing, or destroying the higher powers of their mind. Solitude, silence, meditation, these are essentials to a well-balanced mind; but how many minds there are who voluntarily go on, not heeding, until the world and its claims, its sham triumphs, and its petty rivalries upset this balance and obscure the mind’s eye! There are as many women whose intellect is wrecked on the shoals of Fashion with its “laws of the Medes and Persians,” as there are others whose sensibility is stranded on the rocks of Woman’s Rights Conventions with their reckless disregard of all natural ties and time-honored duties.

Poland presents us with several instances of heroic womanhood during the middle ages. Dombrowka, the daughter of Boleslas, Duke of Bohemia, married Mieczylas, Duke of Poland, on condition of his becoming a Christian. By her example he not only became a religious, but a pure, merciful, and just, man. His wife could not forget her own countrymen while evangelizing her new subjects, and it was to her repeated solicitations that Bohemia owed the establishment of the Archiepiscopal See of Prague. Christianity, which in those times we might call the dower of the royal maidens of Europe, was first carried into Hungary by the marriage of Adelaide, the sister-in-law of Dombrowka, to Geisa, chief of the Huns. This Geisa was father to St. Stephen, of whose exemplary queen, Giselda, we have already spoken. Of another Polish princess, Hedwige, the wife of Henry, Duke of Silesia and Poland, we are told that by her prudence and persuasiveness she succeeded in delivering her husband, who had been made a prisoner by her uncle, and in obtaining peace between these two princes. Even in our own days, have we not had recent examples of the high esteem in which the mediation of woman was held in a Catholic country by a Catholic sovereign? Who can forget that delicate diplomatic missions have been confided in past years to a woman who was the incarnation of social charm as she was also the most devoted and uncompromising enthusiast in the cause of the Catholic religion--the Empress Eugenie! This Hedwige, who, in 1240, was so instrumental in raising an army with which to encounter the heathen hordes of Tartars who threatened at that time to destroy civilization in Europe, was succeeded by another queen of the same name as the saintly Cunegonda of Germany. It was she who towards the beginning of the fourteenth century, as Dlugossius, her biographer, and the Bollandists relate, was the first to provide for the working of the salt mines of Wieliczka, which afterwards proved an infinite source of wealth to the kingdom. She also cheerfully contributed the _whole_ of her princely dowry to the equipment of an army to be led against the Tartars who had made a second raid upon the frontiers of Poland. But the greatest heroine of the country whose women are to this day the bravest under misfortune, and the most faithful to their religion, was another Hedwige, to whom Poland is indebted for her territorial aggrandizement and some of the most interesting as well as useful of her public institutions. Born a princess of Hungary, the elective crown of Poland was offered to her when she was only eighteen, and, when her marriage became a matter of national importance, she made, _herself_, a choice which only her own consummate prudence and foresight could have justified. Jagellon, Grand Duke of Lithuania and the surrounding barbarous provinces, became her husband, on the conditions, proposed by Hedwige, that his entire domains should be incorporated _for ever_ in the kingdom of Poland; that his people should embrace Christianity; that Christians who had been enslaved should be set free; that certain Polish provinces once alienated should be restored, and that all Lithuanian treasures, whether hereditary or conquered by Jagellon from his enemies, should be appropriated for the benefit of the kingdom of Poland. Here is a treaty in which a kingdom is consolidated and a dynasty established, through the unassisted efforts of the genius and prudence of a woman. Hedwige founded numberless hospitals, schools, churches, and monasteries; the great cathedral of Wilna and seven episcopal sees also owe their origin to her. Only through her death and her husband’s good-natured but weak indifference when once her influence was removed was a great monastic institution abandoned, which had for its object the study and preservation of the Slavic languages and peculiar rites. The University of Prague was already in her day a world-famed seat of learning. Hedwige, in concert with the King of Bohemia, founded and endowed in that city a spacious and magnificent college, where the youth of Lithuania were gratuitously received and provided for during their academical course. Education was certainly as gravely thought of in those days as in our later times, when we boast of its benefits being so _widely_ diffused. Whether it is as _deeply_ impressed on its ordinary recipients, let the recent “commemorations” at Oxford proclaim. Dlugossius says the college (which exists to this day) was called the Queen’s House, “a name which is in itself an undying monument to the memory of this great woman, whose worthy thought it embodied, and charity it still expresses; remaining for ever a living testimony to the world of the merits of its illustrious foundress.” Boniface IX., who reigned during the last decade of the fourteenth century, corresponded with Hedwige, upon whom he relied as the principal support and auxiliary of religion in her realms. She was always appealed to as mediatrix between the king and his subjects, as also by the vassal nobles among themselves. What the king could not do by threats, she accomplished partly by her persuasive exhortations, partly by her grave and majestic demeanor. Her historian relates that she even quelled a popular rising, and put down the abuses which had given occasion to it, before the king had time to march an army into the disaffected district and reduce it by force. Once, while her husband was fighting in Lithuania, the Hungarians, her own countrymen, invaded Poland and captured several towns. “She no sooner heard of this,” says Ventura, “than she assembled the nobles and barons, improvised an army on the spot, and, without losing an instant, herself led it on to the frontiers. There, to the great astonishment of her generals, she displayed the military talents and bravery of an old warrior. It was she who directed the sieges, organized the sallies and attacks, and gave battle on the open ground, while the whole army obeyed her enthusiastically, proud to serve under a woman-general. She conquered the enemy at every encounter, wrested from them the important stronghold of Leopol, took other cities, and not only repossessed herself of the Russian territories usurped by the Hungarians, but also added to the kingdom of Poland a vast tract of country which voluntarily surrendered itself to her rule.”[85] Hedwige is perhaps less known than other renowned women of the middle ages, and therefore we have been led to speak more at length of her extraordinary powers. It would be useless to remind the reader that she was no less remarkable for the modesty of her private life and the austerities and charities of her secret life than famed for the wonderful and versatile talents displayed in her public career. Chastity and devotion invariably accompany all greatness in Catholic womanhood, but, as we shall have occasion to illustrate this fact later on, we will not now stop to consider it in its evident bearings on the vexed question raised by certain indiscriminate apostles of the rights of woman.

We cannot pass over, among the prominent women of mediæval times the famous Countess Mathilda, of Tuscany, the friend and ally of Gregory VII., Hildebrand the Reformer. Rohrbacher calls her the modern Deborah, and adds that in Italy, whose princes were mostly traitors to the cause of truth and patriotism, “one man only, during a long reign of fifty years, showed himself ever faithful, ever devoted to the church and her head, ever ready to second them in efforts for the reformation of the clergy and the restoration of ancient discipline, ever prompt to defend them, sword in hand, from their most formidable enemies, never allured by bribes, intimidated by threats, or cast down by adversity, and this _one man_ was _a woman_, the Countess Mathilda.”

Her donation of Tuscany, the Marches, Parma, Modena, Reggio, and various other cities and lands, to the Holy See, is a fact that stands alone in history, and is simply the most momentous act of practical devotion which the Chair of Peter ever received. This generous and unreserved gift, first made to Gregory VII. in 1077, and confirmed in 1102 to Pascal II., is the unparalleled expression of the whole nature of woman, in its thoroughness, its spirit of martyrdom, its enthusiastic and unerring instincts, towards the good and the true. Henry IV. of Germany, having incurred excommunication, was reconciled to the Pope through the good offices of the great countess, and met him for that purpose at the fortress of Canossa, then a fief of the Countess of Tuscany. Ventura says of her that she was as learned as she was pious, and as solicitous for the propagation of science and the interests of literature as for the reformation of clerical abuses and the consolidation of the church. She multiplied schools and colleges over her dominions, but the crowning work of her great reign was the foundation of the famous University of Bologna, confessedly the best seat of learning in Europe for many centuries. Mathilda gathered together all the enlightened and talented masters of her age in this time-honored and world-renowned university, and in honor of her munificence it has remained a custom to this day to allow women to graduate there, to take a doctorate, and “profess” in public any of the learned faculties. Women, we are told by Ventura, the earnest panegyrist of the sex, have taken advantage of this custom at all times, and even up to the present day, when (in the beginning of this century, we believe) the celebrated female professor, Tambroni, taught Latin and Greek within the Bolognese university. Cardinal Mezzofanti, the great linguist, was at one time her pupil.

We have been led so far in the search, however superficial, for instances of the greatness of woman, as recognized, protected, and rewarded by the church, that we have reached a limit to our explorations in this article without mentioning any of the great women of the middle ages save those of royal descent. There are many who claim our attention, and whose influence over public affairs and the minds of men was not less than that exercised by the royal matrons and maidens we have cursorily named. Some were destined to mingle in political struggles, others owe their fame to their learning, one of them to actual feats of arms, and all to the spirit of chivalry which rendered a woman inviolable and sacred wherever honor was known and laws revered. But this spirit itself, what was it save the offspring of that higher spirit of reverential homage ever inculcated by the church towards that sex which gave a mother to our God?

Before taking up the subject of the status of woman within the church after the sixteenth century, we may, perhaps, return for a brief space to the Catherines of Sienna, the Joans of Arc, and the Genevieves of ecclesiastical history.

FOOTNOTES:

[79] _Donna Cattolica_, ii. p. 74.

[80] _Lives of the Saints._

[81] _Life of St. Radegundes._ By Busslère

[82] _Donna Cattolica._

[83] _Donna Cattolica_, vol. ii. p. 104.

[84] _Lives of the Saints._

[85] _Donna Cattolica_, p. 174.

BRYANT’S TRANSLATION OF THE ILIAD.[86]

The appearance at this time and in this country of a first-rate translation of the _Iliad_ is an event of much significance. Through the exaggerated praise which London critics bestow on our dialect poetry, there runs a quiet assumption that our culture is narrow and unsound. Our oaten pipe is well enough, but our lyre disjointed and unstrung. To such insinuations Mr. Bryant’s work is a complete and final rejoinder. We shall find it easy to show that he has made the best translation of Homer in our language, and with one exception the very best extant. In the face of such an achievement, it will henceforth be preposterous to sneer at American scholarship.

Winged words the Homeric poems may well be called, which, fledged in the dawn of time, have not yet faltered in their flight across the centuries. Their superiority as works of art is not more unquestionable than is their procreative power. They have ever been--to use Milton’s words--as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon’s teeth. The history of Greek letters, we might almost say, is the genesis of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. Upon them Aristotle based his canons; from them the Attic tragedy drew her inspiration and her argument. To the same source the most delightful of Greek historians referred his style and his method, while the choir of lyric and erotic poets confessed their debt to him who “gave them birth, but higher sang.” The direct action of the Homeric poems upon the masters of the Latin literature has been compared to that of the sunlight, but their indirect influence through the medium of Athenian models was pervasive and quickening as the solar heat. The development of poetry among Western nations can be accurately measured by the thoroughness with which they have assimilated Homer. The _Orlando_ and the _Lusiad_ repeat the story of Ulysses. Even minor excellences of the _Iliad_ are reproduced in the _Jerusalem Delivered_. Milton and Goethe have drawn copiously from the same stores. Nor is there a single modern poet of the first rank, with the exception of Shakespeare, whose obligations to Homer are not manifold and obvious.

It is true that the eighteenth century, which sought to shatter so many idols, chose to depreciate these poems. Embellished by Pope, dissected by Fontanelle, and patronized by Mme. Dacier, they fell, it must be confessed, upon evil times. It is a suggestive commentary upon the self-styled _siècle du goût_ that the autocrat of letters could pronounce the _Iliad_ “une poème qu’on admire, et qu’on ne lit pas.”[87] To the author of the _Henriade_, Homer was only a _beau parleur_. It is now many years since the stigma went home to roost. Perrault and La Motte Houdart, who knew him only in the rags and gyves of an obscure translation, point with a satisfied smirk to the “coarseness” and “barbarism” of Homer. One is reminded of those Philistine lords who flung their jests at Samson Agonistes while he leaned against the pillars in Gaza.

Of living English poets, the strongest and sweetest acknowledge gratefully in Homer a source of their melody and strength. The fragment of an epic which is perhaps the Laureate’s best work was presented by the author as “faint Homeric echoes.” From Homer, quite as truly as from Chaucer, has the _Earthly Paradise_ caught its genial sunshine and bracing air. The world, we presume, would have lost nothing had Mr. Swinburne read Euripides less and the _Iliad_ more. A timely reaction has set in against the morbid self-consciousness and the hankering after glitter and novelty which are sure precursors of decay. Of that reaction, Matthew Arnold, who in childhood was taught to reverence Homer, has been the prophet and protagonist. With the same movement the temper and discipline of Mr. Bryant’s mind place him in active sympathy. We do not doubt that it was the aim of his _Iliad_ to elevate and purify the taste of his countrymen. The success which his translation has already achieved augurs for it not a little influence upon the national literature.

To the thoughtful artist, Schlegel could suggest nothing more useful than the study of casts from the antique. A faithful version of the _Iliad_ opens whole galleries of casts. The sculptor Bouchardon, we are told, was discovered reading Homer in a translation, and that a sorry one. “Ah, monsieur!” he exclaimed, “depuis que j’ai lu ce livre, il me semble que les hommes ont quinze pieds de haut.”[88] We know what Keats beheld upon looking into Chapman’s _Homer_, and we know that the quarry from which he hewed _Hyperion_ is not yet exhausted. Of the thousands who will now listen for the first time to the story of Achilles, it may well be that some will kindle at what they hear. They will know how to thank Mr. Bryant that those flames which blazed over Troy, leaping from headland to headland, have once more borne a message across the sea.

Since the beginning of the seventeenth century, repeated attempts have been made to translate the master-poems of the Greek and Latin literatures into English verse. We suppose it will be acknowledged that those attempts have for the most part failed. The truth is that translation as commonly practised in England cannot properly be called an art. There are no fundamental principles universally recognized as the conditions of its development. It is still hardly more than a trick, in which one succeeds better than another, but each proceeds upon a method of his own. Who has prefaced his work with such a definition of translation as criticism can admit to be exhaustive and final? We might have expected so much from Hobbes. We do not find it. Dryden’s cardinal idea, that translation is “a kind of drawing after the life,” has never been literally accepted by others. It did not uniformly govern himself. The face seen and the face drawn both appeal to the brain through the eye, whereas even those English translators who aim to infuse the identical thought, feeling, or fancy of their original have recourse to media of sensual metaphor, sometimes modified, sometimes distinct from those employed in their author’s language. On Sir George Cornewall Lewis’ view of translation we will not dwell, because we are not sure that we understand it, and at least cannot conceive the practical application of it. It is enough for us that he heartily commended as an instance of right treatment Hookham Frere’s _Aristophanes_, which is clever, fresh, and racy enough, but certainly not Attic. There is another theory, that we should ask ourselves what our author _would_ have said had he been writing in English. One objection to this is, as Mr. Newman remarks, that no two men would agree in their answers to such a question. Homer, if an Englishman and writing in our tongue, would unquestionably have given a different turn and tinge to his verse from that which it takes in Greek. But are we not bound to make the province of translation, as discriminated from paraphrase, the reproduction of what an author did actually say? Certainly the aim of Homeric translators into our tongue should be, not of course to compass the effect produced upon an Athenian reading Homer in the age of Peisistratos or upon a consummate scholar capable, we will say, of _thinking_ in Ionic Greek, but to make upon Englishmen or Americans of average culture an impression nearly identical with that which they derive from the _Iliad_ itself. Achieve this, and they who are themselves not scholars will at least be assured that they are reading Homer, not Sotheby or Pope. Such an aim does not seem too ambitious, but it has never been attained, rarely approached, in English. A radical error runs through all our metrical versions of the classic poets. Literal accuracy is by some repudiated, attempted by others, and occasionally secured in detached passages, but is always subordinate to the attainment of harmonious numbers and agreeable diction. Whenever literal accuracy seems likely to conflict with these, it is sacrificed. Now, if it be true that such sacrifice is frequently inevitable, then a genuine translation of the _Iliad_ is an impossibility. But this we are reluctant to admit. The matchless version of Voss has proved that it is possible to be at once literal and musical, to preserve in one Germanic language at least as much of the Homeric flavor as Germans of average culture can detect in the original. Perhaps one clue to his success is to be found in his employment of the hexameter. A profound artist, he could not fail to recognize the inextricable connection of rhythm and cæsura with the shape and play of thought. He saw that in some subtle sort the metre _is_ the poem. We have not abandoned the hope of seeing the hexameter one day naturalized in English. Mr. Kingsley’s _Andromeda_ showed a marked improvement on _Evangeline_, and what the Laureate might do in this way is sufficiently clear from his _Ode to Milton_, where he has grappled successfully with alcaics, undoubtedly the most intricate and difficult of dactylic measures. The distinction between quantitative and accentual metres has been pressed too far by men who have wanted patience to cope with those peculiarities which render our language somewhat intractable to dactylic verse.

Almost every familiar scheme of English metre has been applied to the reproduction of Homer. We have had Chapman’s fourteen-syllable line, the rhymed couplet of Pope and Sotheby, the unrhymed iambics of Cowper, Mr. Worsley’s Spenserian stanza, the ballad movement in seven beats of Mr. Newman, and many more. One or two of these are noble English poems, but as translations none can be compared with the work of Voss. We should have said, before the appearance of Mr. Bryant’s volumes, that a new version of the _Iliad_ executed upon one of the old plans and in one of the old metres was not called for. The attempt of Lord Derby to vie with Cowper in blank-verse had proved singularly unfortunate. Failing to accredit the scholar, its publication belittled the statesman. It is not with such a performance that the conservative party can match Mr. Gladstone’s _Homeric Age_. We should not highly commend Mr. Bryant were we to say that he is every-way more successful than Lord Derby. He has, in our judgment, surpassed Cowper, and that was no easy task. The associations, indeed, connected with what is known as blank-verse, render it to an English ear somewhat unsuitable to a poem like the _Iliad_, which presents an infinite variety of incidents and situations quite as often trivial as dignified. Still, Cowper, although his muse, stooping to certain homely details, discovers a sort of prudishness which is highly amusing, is generally vigorous and noble where energy and majesty are required, and had hitherto been the least unsatisfactory of Homer’s English translators. In examining Mr. Bryant’s work we shall mainly confine ourselves--so far as English writers are concerned--to a collation of Cowper and Lord Derby. We have neither space nor inclination to quote from the rhymed versions. Faithfully to reproduce Homer in rhyme was declared by Pope to be impossible, and Mr. Worsley’s _Odyssey_, delightful as it is, has not availed to set aside the judgment.