Chapter III: Seraphin and Louise (2)

It is this sovereign action of the Divine Providence, irresistibly shaping to its own end the will of man without infringing an iota on his liberty, that the true philosophy of history purposes to contemplate. It is part of this principle that God, sovereignly wise, who could not call into being the least atom without giving it an end worthy of himself, could not for a stronger reason produce the masterpiece of his hands, the rational soul, without giving it an end, and without urging it unceasingly to the realization of that end. That which is true of the individual is true of society, and is truer still of all humanity.

This end being attainable by visible means, and, on the other hand, being conformable to the nature of God and the nature of man, it ought to be possible to discover it by means of a study of facts, which constitute history, and by means of a profound observation of those two natures, which constitute philosophy. Philosophy furnishes the data _a priori_; history possesses itself of these data and verifies them by experience. The result of this double revision is one of the most attractive branches of knowledge for the mind, and most capable of enlarging the soul, the knowledge of the divine economy, and of the secret resorts by which Providence governs the affairs of this world.

The divine government operates in three different spheres, to which respond three degrees of the philosophy of history.

The first sphere of action chosen by Providence is the conscience of each man. Undoubtedly we are not to look in this world for the definite accomplishment of individual destinies. God has reserved for a more durable life the full award of his law. Meanwhile it has often been his will to anticipate this eternal award by a temporary one, which, in this life, may avenge his justice for the outrages of crime. Thus, there are some lives most obscure; there are, for a still stronger reason, brilliant lives which leave their mark on the memory of the human race. It is not often possible to discover this award. To arrive at it, history will borrow from philosophy the moral laws which ought to regulate the conduct of individuals; and she will look for the confirmation of these laws in the prosperity or misfortune which have accompanied their observance or their neglect. Such is the study which constitutes the first degree of the true philosophy of history, and which makes this science an excellent school for morality.

But history mounts still higher by the aid of philosophy; its mission, in fact, is not merely to recount the life of certain individuals, who by their talents, their virtues, or their crimes have left a deep trace in the memory of generations: above all, it is the tableau of the destiny of peoples which it is called upon to paint; it is social events which, above all, form the interest of its pictures. Therein each people appears like a moral personality, with its infancy, its growth, its maturity and its decrepitude; its special character, its qualities and faults, its good points and its crimes, its prosperity and its misfortune. The life of each people is, then, a grand drama, wherein not one of the elements of the most moving interest is wanting; but this drama must have its moral, and, in order to give it one, history must have recourse anew to philosophy. Philosophy will not fail it; she will furnish it with the social laws, that is to say, those by which societies are constituted, governed, and developed. The application of these laws, which she deduces from the nature of man, she invites history to seek in the facts. If her theories are true, it is impossible that their accomplishment should not confer happiness on society, and their violation misfortune. History ought therefore, again, from this point of view to be the counter-proof of philosophy; and it ought to become so after a manner still more complete than when it occupied itself with the destiny of individuals. In truth, this destiny, playing its part chiefly on the invisible theatre of conscience and carrying it on into after-time, often escapes the application of history. Societies, on the contrary, having an existence temporal in its duration and public in its most important events, ought to show forth in their history with great clearness the award of the laws which the Creator has imposed upon them, and which philosophy establishes _a priori_ by its deductions. The study of this award must purchase, then, at the price of very great difficulties, the precious advantages which it promises. It is this which constitutes the second degree of the philosophy of history, and which makes this science the best school of politics.

Lastly, history mounts a degree still higher: beyond the moral individualities which we call peoples, she discovers an individuality much more vast and much more lasting--humanity, the immense body whose members are all peoples, and in which each individual plays his _rôle_, like a living molecule which influences in its part the destinies of the whole. As each nation has its character and as it were its own style of feature which distinguish it from other nations, so humanity is distinguished from the other species of rational beings wherewith the Creator has peopled the universe, by prerogatives and by infirmities which no other shares with it. It also has had its infancy, its growth, its ripe age; and everything leads us to believe that it will one day have its decrepitude. It also, in fine, has its mission, which it accomplishes in the course of ages, and at the term of which its development will cease.

This common destiny of humanity constitutes, together with its common origin, the unity of this vast body. It permits us to lift ourselves up even to the divine thought, which, in sowing this innumerable multitude in the immensity of the ages, proposed to itself a plan as harmonious in its unity as when it launched into space this immense variety of globes and atoms which compose the universe. Behold herein the true unity of the human race, whose substantial unity, as seen by the pantheist, is nothing but an absurd parody.

It is here, in fact, that we find ourselves face to face with the two philosophies of history--the false and the true. Both wish for unity, because unity, which is the essence of God and the law of the world, is also the last want of our mind and the last end of science. But the first of these philosophies only establishes unity in the world by destroying its diversity, which is an essential condition of beauty and of life. In its eyes individuals are nothing but unreal phenomena, which appear, only to vanish; space alone is something; it alone remains while all the rest passes away. And as it would be too absurd to give space a separate reality, independent of that of individuals, to make humanity something existing outside of man, it is forced to conclude, in the final analysis, that this humanity, which alone truly exists, is nothing in itself but a form which is developed by some fatality in time and space; and all of us who persuade ourselves that we each have our own existence are in reality but the varied expressions of this form, the passing vibrations of an ideal fluid, the fleeting tints of a cloud. Behold the philosophy of history according to pantheism!

How much greater, how much more consoling, how much more beautiful is the true philosophy of history--that of which St. Augustine and Bossuet have made themselves the eloquent interpreters! And in the meantime, in the midst of all these varied existences, in the midst of these actions so divergent, in the midst of these liberties so often at war, she finds a perfect unity, the unity of the divine thought--bringing back to its end all these divergencies, and making of their very opposition so many means thereto. But what is this thought, what is this one end, which God is working in the world, and for the realization of which, willingly or unwillingly, all these individuals and peoples labor? For a reply to this mighty question, it has pleased God not to abandon us to uncertain conjecture. He hath spoken from the beginning of the world; and in proportion as the human race has developed has he manifested more clearly its destiny--a destiny thrice divine since it has God for its principle, God for its term, and God again for its means; it is the divinization of man by Jesus Christ the God-man, the conquest of eternal happiness by God himself, by the fulfilling of the earthly ordeal in the image of God Incarnate.

Such is the divine thought which it has pleased God to reveal to us from his own mouth. The incarnation of the Son of God is, therefore, the pivot around which roll the events of history--as the divinization of men in him is the term where these events ought to meet. The glory of the Word Incarnate: such is the closing scene to which all the catastrophes of this drama ought infallibly to lead up--a drama whose every historic period forms a scene, whose plot borrows a most captivating interest from the apparent triumph of human passions. Jesus Christ: such is the word which unlocks the great enigma of the ages--Jesus Christ: behold the Sun, whose dawn and coming form the natural division of the ancient and modern world, whose presence and whose absence make the day and the night in the moral order, and whose final triumphs over the mists and vapors, which to this day have striven against him, will give to the earth the unity and the happiness for which it sighs.

But one may stop me, and tell me that I am no longer treading on philosophic ground. I am happy to confess it. For the same reason that in seeking the final explanation of his individual destiny man is compelled to have recourse to his Creator, so must he abide his final explanation alone of the destiny of the world. Reason tells him that in the existence of humanity God pursues one end, and that this end should be the manifestation of his divine attributes. It can tell him no more. As for the mode of this manifestation, it rests entirely with the will of God; and it would consequently be a presumption on the part of philosophy to pretend to determine it, since its power does not stretch beyond necessary truths. We acknowledge, therefore, that, without the aid of faith, the science of history cannot reach its third degree. Therein we detract in no wise from philosophy; for, if it must necessarily borrow from revelation this fact of the free end of God, as it borrows from history the knowledge of the free actions of men, it is no less true that by its processes these different facts meet together to form the most harmonious of all the tableaux, and the most inspiring of all the poems which human thought has ever conceived--the divine epic of humanity.

TO BE CONTINUED.

A SUMMER IN THE TYROL.

The Tyrol is--or was, when we knew it--one of the most primitive countries in Europe. Entirely Catholic, it comes up to the ideal of the faith of the middle ages far better than even the most historic cities of Italy, that by-gone cradle of our faith. It is not sufficiently overrun with tourists to be corrupted by them, and their stay in any of its towns is seldom long. Before the Brenner Railroad was opened, it was almost, practically speaking, as secluded a spot as the interior of China.

Twenty years ago, hardly any language but a _patois_ of German was understood by the Tyrolese, and when a couple of English explorers made a tour among the mountains, journeying on foot nearly the whole of the way, they were amused one night by finding their old English valet seated in the kitchen of a very unpretending _Gasthaus_, with his bare feet stamping on the floor within a cabalistic-looking circle drawn in white chalk. The old man had been frantically but vainly endeavoring to make the natives understand his master’s need of--a foot-bath! One of the travellers was luckily able to come to his assistance in good Hanoverian German, which itself, however, was only just barely comprehensible to the simple mountaineers.

Although we have no personal reminiscences of that style of travelling which skims over half a continent in a two months’ tour, yet the local knowledge we acquired by a four months’ residence in one town of the Tyrol will perhaps not be entirely uninteresting. Innsbruck, although the capital of the province, is nothing more than a large village with two or three roomy and tidy but very old-fashioned inns, and a church or two not remarkable for either beauty or antiquity. Besides the inns, which were too much embedded among streets and houses to be suitable to our taste, there were, outside the town, a few cheap “places of entertainment,” where lodging could be had for next to nothing, and where unlimited quiet might be enjoyed. One was a “Schloss,” anciently some baronial or monastic dependency, very picturesque and inaccessible, and on the inside very susceptible of English home comfort, but for an invalid this could not be thought of. The road that led to it was enough to jolt any springs to pieces, and once a carriage had safely got up, it seemed impossible that it should ever get down again. So this had to be given up despite the romantic name and position of the “Schloss.” Lower down, and on the turnpike road, just beyond the bridge over the Inn (which gives the town its name), was another house, partly a _châlet_, comfortable enough and very quiet. It was delightfully primitive. A wide wooden staircase led right up from the entrance door on the left hand, and never, on the darkest night, was there by any chance a light to guide you over it. The first floor consisted of a wide passage with rooms on each side, like a monastery, and a large _Saal_, or public room, with a clean boarded floor and a billiard table. Beyond this were three or four other rooms. Our party took the whole floor, including the _Saal_, which during our stay was to be a private room. Sufficient furniture was brought in to make one corner of it look civilized, and it served for drawing, dining, and billiard room alike. Nothing cooler nor more rustic could have been imagined, and, to add to the pleasantness of this retreat, the windows opened on a balcony, just like those on the toy Swiss _châlets_ we have so often seen. There was a chapel in the house, and the proprietor claimed that he had a right to have Mass said there every Sunday. However problematical this sounded, Mass _was_ said notwithstanding, but under a legitimate permission obtained for our own party. There in the little dark closetlike room, with a congregation of servants and stray guests or laborers out in the corridor beyond, Mass was offered every Sunday and very often on week-days. Sometimes the Jesuits from the town would officiate, sometimes the parish priest of the little church half a mile further up the country. The Jesuit church, standing on the edge of the town, among great lindens and elm-trees, was a large, tawdry renaissance building, where brick and stucco did duty for the marbles of Italy, and artificial flowers and gilded finery reigned supreme. There was not one feature worth noticing about the whole church, and even the Madonna shrine was but a sad burlesque on the wonderful idea it symbolized. But, on the other hand, the priests worked hard and earnestly, services were frequent and well attended, the confessionals crowded, and the communions numerous. There were real sympathy and sound counsel to be had there; strength to be gathered from the exhortations given in secret, and instruction in all necessary religious knowledge to be reaped from the plain and practical sermons delivered in public. The devotion of the Tyrolese is as simple as it is deep; it has no need of exalting externals to draw it to God, it is so full of vitality and manliness that it does not ask for the æsthetic helps whose absence often makes such a void in our own devotion, and we cannot choose but admire it, though it is vain for our weaker if more cultured Christianity to endeavor to imitate it.

The parish church outside the town to which we have referred was much smaller and poorer than that of the Jesuits, but a great feeling of peace came over you as you entered it, and as, pacing to and fro under its low, simple roof, you thought of the many holy and acceptable peasant lives that had been lived under its shadow, and ended joyfully within its churchyard. It stood on a small but abrupt hill, which, from the singular flatness of the vale of Innsbruck, looked higher than it was. Iron crosses with rude metal rays or crowns attached to them replaced in this Tyrolese cemetery the broad gravestones to which our northern eye is so well accustomed, and so it is throughout all Germany and Switzerland. About a mile further than this church stood a little private chapel, near a deserted villa, or, as the French would call it, a _château_. This chapel was always open, and was our invariable resting-place every day during a long stroll into the country. A high gate of rusty and intricate iron-work divided the main chapel from the lower and narrower part accessible to the public at all times, and remains of gilding and heraldic colors denoted the connection, in the past at least if not in the present, of this little oratory with some old family of high standing. Here and there a group of cottages that hardly made a hamlet was dotted on the green landscape, and the only sound to be heard was the tinkling of the great square cow-bells, or the peculiar _jödel_ of the mountaineer, a cry now made familiar to the outside world by “Tyrolese minstrels” (or their spurious personifiers). The Tyrol is famous for its wild flowers, as are all Alpine tracts, the gentian and the wild rhododendron[177] predominating. All kinds of summer meadow flowers grow well in the green pasture lands near Innsbruck, and the forget-me-not lines the frequent brooks with thick fringes of blossom.[178]

Water-mills are very often found on the line of these mountain brooks, and as only the old-fashioned appliances are known, the places where they are built are fortunately not disfigured by business-looking arrangements or alarmingly active squads of men. One of these picturesque mills we well remember, standing over a beautiful, foaming brook, and surrounded by hay-fields. It was a very silent, lonely walk, and used to be almost a daily one with us, until the old farmer to whom the mill and hay-field belonged once waylaid us at the door of his cottage and began expostulating in no very choice language, and ordering us not to trample his hay any longer unless we liked to pay him for the damage. The old fellow was very small and wizened, and whether the garment he had on was a smock-frock or a night-shirt it was difficult to determine, though the certainty of his unmistakable nightcap was apparent.

Of course, like all thoroughly Catholic countries the Tyrol is full of wayside shrines, with rude daubs reminding the passer-by of some religious event or point of Christian doctrine. Besides these, however, one thing cannot fail to strike a stranger as he walks through the lands round Innsbruck. On every house or building that is not an absolute “shanty” appears in the flaming colors sacred to the chromos of the cheap press the figure of a young Roman soldier pouring water out of a common jug on a most terrific and disproportionate conflagration. This is meant to represent St. Florian, a saint much honored in the Tyrol, and to whom tradition attributes a particular sovereignty over fire. The buildings, both farm and dwelling-houses, that abound most in that part of the country, are of wood, and very liable to the kind of destruction over which St. Florian has power. Hence his image is painted on the outer wall by way of a preservative, a kind of “insurance,” that may make stockholders smile, but that will bring in more of those riches garnered up where “the rust doth not eat, nor the moth consume,” than their long-headed thriftiness will ever be able to gather.

Pilgrimages, among a people so devout as the Tyrolese, are numberless. Every village has its chapel where of old miracles were wrought or some proof of divine favor was manifested. Five or six miles from Innsbruck is one of these hamlets, called Absam, where the shrine is of a somewhat peculiar nature. Among the several visits we paid to it was one on the day of the Assumption. The road leads through fields of flax, one of the crops most cultivated in the Tyrol. Its tiny blue flowers were thickly spread over the fields, and August seemed thus to have put on a fitting livery with which to greet the blue-mantled Queen whose triumph is commemorated on the 15th of that month. The village church at Absam is small and otherwise uninteresting. The altar, over which hangs the miraculous image, is covered with ornamental ex-votos, while larger votive offerings, curious little commemorative pictures, and plain tablets adorn the walls for a long space beyond. The image itself is on glass, a common thick pane, of very small dimensions, with the veiled head of the Virgin scratched in dark outline upon it. Tears are coursing down her cheeks, and the expression is wonderfully strong and sweet. It is strange that these few rude lines should be able to speak so energetic and unmistakable a language, but then we must remember the legend which calls this image the work of an angel. It was suddenly found in the church one morning, four or five centuries ago, and was immediately transferred from the window to a private chamber. A great deal of religious litigation and examination had to be gone through before it was allowed to be placed in a shrine and publicly venerated. Since then cures have been yearly obtained in this church, which has become famous through the Tyrol. We do not remember another instance of a miraculous image being graven on _glass_. It has none of the attributes of stained glass, neither in color nor in style, and is all of one piece. It is now framed in a showy gilt frame with a royal cross-surmounted crown ornamenting the top. Both pictures and prints of it are to be procured in the village, and also representations on glass, two or three inches square, but whose likeness to the original are perhaps not entirely reliable.

This was not the only shrine we visited while at Innsbruck. The pilgrimage of Waldrast included a picturesque journey half-way up the Brenner pass, and through some very wild and beautiful Alpine scenery among the lesser peaks. We slept at a little inn at the foot of Waldrast, so as to be able to make the most of the early morning. The day was beautiful; it was in the beginning of September, and just that season when, in Europe, summer and autumn seem to make but one. A thin mist hung over the mountain tops, the path was rugged and winding, and there were frequent brooks and fences to jump over or climb. Heather grew in purple masses under foot, and the growth of trees varied from oak to chestnut, till it left the higher and more barren ground to the pines alone. After two or three hours’ good walking, we reached the chapel, which is only one level lower than the uncovered mountain top. It had grown quite chilly despite the sun which was advancing on his way. We were just in time to hear Mass, if we remember right, and had but little time to spare for refreshment. There is a _Gasthaus_ opposite the church, a little solitary, whitewashed, low-roofed cottage, very clean and comfortable. It is pretty full all the summer, but entirely deserted, even by its keeper, during the winter. We asked to see the priest. He turned out to be a Servite, and told us that the church belonged to his order. There was next to it a bare-looking house with one (and the larger) portion in ruins, a gaunt shell with no roof and full of _débris_ inside. It had been a monastery, but circumstances, chiefly of a persecuting nature, had obliged the monks to abandon the place. One of their community, however, was always there, to attend to the shrine and receive the still numerous pilgrims; he himself had never left the place for ten years, and, saving the visitors to the shrine, never saw a human being. During six months out of twelve he could safely say he was a hermit. We asked him how he spent his time. “I have a small library,” he answered, “and read a great deal, but when I have more time than I can fill by reading, or my office, or even the work of the church, I turn carpenter.”

And he took us into a workshop, littered over with shavings and sawdust, where among planks and rough logs of wood were various useful things of his own making. We particularly noticed a little wooden sleigh, and asked him its use.

“I use it in the winter,” he said, “to take me down to the village, to buy necessaries every week; and, when there is plenty of snow to cover the inequalities of the path, it works very well. Coming back, however, I have to load my purchases on it, and drag it up after me. It is good exercise,” he added, with a good-humored laugh, “and keeps me warm.”

He led us into the church, and told us the story of the apparition. This image was not so old as that of Absam, although it could boast of three centuries’ antiquity at least. It had been found by a woodman while chopping a tree on the mountain very near the spot where the church now stands. The figure suddenly appeared, surrounded by a marvellous light, in the cleft made by his axe in the wood. Years of suspense followed, during which authentications of this wonderful occurrence were severely tested, the devotion of the villagers preceding, however, the permission of the church to venerate the image as miraculous. During this time it was housed in the hamlet at the foot of the mountain, where crowds flocked to visit it. When it was removed to the Servite church and monastery, built expressly for its reception, on the spot where it had first appeared, its translation was a cause of grief as well as joy, those who had guarded it till then loudly lamenting their loss. The monastery, we believe, was reduced to its present condition through the decrees against monastic orders issued during the unhappy reign of the infidel Emperor Joseph. The church was never, however, without its chaplain. It is a plain, whitewashed building, with a flat frontage, irregularly pierced with a great many windows, while to the back rises one of those extraordinary steeples so often seen in the Tyrol, suggestive of a farm-house rather than a church. Often and often have we come upon such, sometimes of red tiles and not unfrequently of green, so that we were forcibly reminded of St. George and his scaly dragon. The interior of Waldrast church corresponds to the exterior, and is very plain and inartistic. The image itself is of wood, and peculiarly German in its cut. Our Lady is covered with a stiff, heavy mantle, and bears her Divine Son, also robed in the same kind of garment, absolutely shapeless except where his hand comes forth. The Virgin bears a globe in her hand, and both she and the Divine Infant are crowned. The crowns, however, and the chains and ornaments on the figures, are due to the devotion of the faithful.

The Servite father who kindly showed us over the church was still a young man, and seemed very quiet and refined. His ten years’ solitude had not taken any of the grace of civilization--ought we not rather to say of charity?--from his manner, nor given him in any way the air of a Nabuchodonosor. He wore his black habit and a long black beard. We were sorry to be able to see so little of him, for we had a long journey home before us, and the greater part had to be performed on foot. We left Waldrast at midday, feeling that in these out-of-the-way nooks more can be learnt of the inner life of a people than in larger centres of bustle and activity.

The way down the other side of the mountain led through sparse forests of pine, where workmen were felling the trees and piling them in heaps as high as houses along the path. Glimpses might be caught now and then of far-off precipices, walls of rock or of snow with the intense golden white of the noonday sun glorifying their stern beauty, and reminding one of those still more difficult ascents to virtue, seemingly so inaccessible, yet so gloriously transfigured in the light of God’s help and God’s promises. Wild flowers abounded through the wood, and mosses and ferns grew in great tangles of greenery by the brooks which their growth overshadowed. It was a delightful expedition, and one that we should very much like to repeat. But nothing in this world ever duplicates itself; the places we once visited with such confident hopes of returning to enjoy them the next year, have we ever seen them again, or if we have, has it ever been with the same feelings, the same hopes, the same companions, nay, even the same _self_? In this law of change lies, to our mind, the sad side of travel. We go to a place, we learn to admire it, we remember it with pleasure, we almost begin to have associations with it and its surroundings, it grows in fact into our soul’s history, and makes itself a place in our life. We leave it, and never see it again. We have the regret of having seen and felt beauty that is not for us, we have longed for what we could not have, we have dreamed of utopias that were never to be realized, and we have prepared for ourselves a nest of disappointments for the future. Is not this so much time and energy lost? so much vitality taken out of our life which might have been usefully employed at home? But if the place we have visited once becomes a frequent resort, if we go back to it again and again and find ties and duties to bind us there, the charm of life is doubled, and the happiness of home reproduced under a different set of circumstances. No one knows a place if he have not lived there in all seasons and spent quiet months in finding out its hidden beauties. Places, like people, grow upon you; and what once seemed bare will, by long acquaintance, appear as full of interest as it was once devoid of it. It happened thus to ourselves in a seaside town in England, where the coast is rather bare of trees, and the country mostly flat and divided without hedges into com and hay fields. Again, the country round Milan, which is always conventionally styled “the fertile plain of Lombardy,” is of this nature. Wide fields of rice, half-flooded, and a network of roads fringed by pollard willows or low hedges, with here and there a neat little farm-house, do not at first sight constitute a beautiful country. But after three or four weeks’ constant driving through these lanes, you discover the loveliest bits of “Pre-Raphaelite” nature, small triangular patches of luxuriant grass, with flowers of brilliant hue and starry shape; tiny brooks running through meadows with fire-flies making movable illuminations on their banks by night, and many more beautiful and minute details that naturally enough escape the first glance. The Roman Campagna, even with its desolate, Niobe-like grandeur, is susceptible of this alchemy of habit. To the unaccustomed eye of a stranger it may look grand, but scarcely beautiful; to one who has walked, ridden, and driven through it in all directions, it reveals secrets of pastoral beauty, soft vales hidden by groves of ilex or cork, with violets growing plentifully in their recesses, and rivulets trickling through their rocky crevices. Even cities are better known when seen gradually, after the manner of a peaceable resident rather than that of a hurrying tourist. What do we know, to take our own case, of the Campo Santo of Pisa, which we visited between the arrival and departure of the two trains from Leghorn, compared to what we learnt of St. Mark’s at Venice, where we heard Mass every day for five months? And this feeling is surely enough to breed a weariness of _mere_ travel, however instructive it may be. The only places we should care to revisit are those where we stayed long enough to make them feel like home. Innsbruck is certainly one that recalls many touching domestic scenes, many of those little memories which, like a daisy-chain, bind life together, childhood and youth, sickness and health, trouble and joy--frail links, but so fair, begun in early childhood and winding themselves round the heart, through the vicissitudes of many years, the wanderings in many lands, and, above all, through the intangible changes of a restless mind and soul.

For the general reader, this sketch may perhaps have no further interest than to make him acquainted with some of the local traits of a country not so well known as other European fields of travel; for the Catholic, it ought to possess the additional interest of an effort meant to show how thoroughly this country is still imbued with the faith. Its patriotism, too, ever closely bound to faith, was conspicuous in the wars against Napoleon and in the Tyrol. The first decade of this century is noted chiefly for the name, not of the resistless invader Bonaparte, but of the stubborn defender of mountain freedom, Andreas Hofer. Here and there are his relics--his gun, or his cap, or the cup out of which he drank. Every other inn has his figure for a sign, and every other child bears his name in memory of his gallantry. His descendants, poor and simple peasants as he was himself, are as proud of their ancestry as the haughtiest Montmorency or the oldest Colonna; and no Tyrolese mountaineer can talk for half an hour without mentioning some of Hofer’s exploits against the French.

We cannot conclude without again speaking of that weird _jödel_ or herd-song peculiar to the Tyrol. We have never heard it as performed by the hired companies of “minstrels” so often advertised in large towns, but we had the opportunity of listening to it under very pleasant circumstances at Innsbruck. In the beginning of September, just before our pilgrimage to Waldrast, a rural _fête_ was given in honor of one of our party whose birthday it was. The open court-yard behind our house served as an _al fresco_ dining-hall, a band was engaged, and fireworks and illuminations prepared. In this primitive assemblage, speeches were actually made, and, as it was not easy for the English and Tyrolese to understand each other, an interpreter was found in the bright and quick-witted courier who had superintended the whole thing. After this cordial display of mutual friendship, and a few songs and pieces, the people were left to their private enjoyments, the priest from the nearest parish being present among them. About an hour afterwards, and before the party of mountaineers dispersed, they begged leave to sing us their _jödel_, thinking it was the most interesting thing for strangers to hear well done. Thirty men in rugged costumes, whose ornamentation chiefly consisted in silver buttons, were then brought into the great _Saal_, and the chorus began. Suddenly a single voice broke in with the marvellous _jödel_; all the others dropping into silence, and then again joining in the national song. It was indeed strange and weird-like, the echoes seemed to break again and again in renewed bursts of plaintive sound; it was not like the cry of a bird or of any animal, nor yet was it suggestive of a human voice; it had in it something of what, were we Pantheists, we might call the “voice of nature.” The effect was indescribable, and, because so beautiful, saddening. We should not wish to hear it again on the stage or in the concert-room; the effect would be lost, and merged into a dramatic trick. Sung by those thirty strong voices, used to no concert hall but the open air and the mountain passes, the _jödel_ was one of those things that one likes to look back upon and place among the fresh, healthy remembrances of the past. Sung before those who have always been at our side through weal or woe, this Tyrolese song becomes more than a mere remembrance, and remains a sacred memory, shared with the dead and the absent, the ever beloved and unforgotten ones of our heart. So true is it that a thing unconnected with love, however brilliant it may be in the field of art or literature, is a failure as far as our individual appreciation of it is concerned--that this simple mountain song, vigorously but hardly skilfully performed, is far dearer to our remembrance than the perfect strains heard at other times from the lips of finished artists.

The Tyrol, no doubt, is fast putting off its early garb of faith and simple honesty; with Manchester prints and chignons, the free grace of its peasant women will vanish, and with the poisonous teaching of the International, the frankness and charm of its men will go. Already we have heard of the earnest workers of the Jesuit church being annoyed and insulted, and it may not be long before the cupidity of public officials will rob the shrines of many of their votive treasures. In these days of ruthless destruction, even the Tyrol may be dechristianized and made over to a worse barbarism than that of its savage bands of early settlers, and a worse slavery than that against which Andreas Hofer so ably and successfully fought. Still, it will always be a pleasure to us to think that we visited it in the days of its Catholic prosperity, and saw there the remains of that state of peace and public safety which everywhere characterizes a truly Christian land.

FOOTNOTES:

[177] Falsely called _rose des Alps_ by the French.

[178] The real “Alpenrose” of the Tyrolese is a strange-looking growth, a starry flower of a dull white, with thick velvety petals, five in number. It grows only in very inaccessible places, and is considered a great prize.

THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE MISSION OF THE BARBARIANS.

SECOND ARTICLE.

During the centuries of persecution, then, the Northern heavens grew darker and darker, and the storm-clouds thickened on the horizon. God was at work behind that dark and heavy cloud-wall planning the most terrible campaign that was ever executed. The heedless, sinning empire little thought what fire and tempest would sweep over it when that storm-cloud should burst. It considered itself a veritable part of the rock-built earth, and immovable while the world lasted; that it would only perish when the universe should cease to exist. But behind that fiery storm-cloud that hangs heavy and threatening in the Northern skies, there is a mightier God than paganism knows of, who will sweep the Roman power away as the leaves are swept by the autumn blasts. The moment of vengeance is fixed. Whilst the cry of the martyrs’ blood has been sounding in the ears of God, he has been preparing for that moment of wrath. But there was another cry, too, rising up to heaven from the length and breadth of the empire, and calling down vengeance and wrath. It was the cry of sin--a never-ceasing, clamorous, many-voiced cry--going up night and day from city and town and hamlet over the wide area of Roman dominion. The corruption, then, deep and universal, of the Roman Empire was the second cause of the barbarian invasion. Of this we have still to speak.

We must remark at the outset that, when we speak of the corruption of the Roman Empire, we are not referring to that period of history which preceded Christ. We wish to speak of that period which immediately preceded the great invasion of the Northern barbarians in the fifth century. We are about to point out another object which God evidently had in view in sending down his wild warriors, and why their course was one of fire and devastation. In a word, we are about to speak of that moral rottenness which had eaten through the very vitals of the Roman Colossus, and which God, unable to bear it longer before his high heaven, infecting, as it was, the very universe with its pestilent stench, sent his messengers of wrath with flaming sword and fiery torch to cleanse away from the afflicted earth. We must insist upon God being an active power in the world. We are no followers of Professor Seeley, who lectures to the young men of Cambridge on the Fall of the Roman Empire as if God had had no hand in it. However ingenious Prof. Seeley may be, he will never convince us that God does not make and unmake empires. We want no new theory of the Fall of the Roman Empire and the Invasion of the Barbarians. The grandest and the truest was given us long ages ago by St. Augustine in his immortal work _De Civitate Dei_, and it has satisfied all Christian thinkers up to the present day. Prof. Seeley asks what is the cause of the decaying condition of the empire? “It has been common,” he says, “to suppose a moral degradation in the Romans, caused by luxury and excessive good fortune. To support this, it is easy to quote the satirists and cynics of the imperial times, and to refer to such accounts as Ammianus gives of the mingled effeminacy and brutality of the aristocracy of the capital in the fourth century. But the history of the wars between Rome and the barbaric world does not show us the proofs we might expect of this decay of spirit. We do not find the Romans ceasing to be victorious in the field and beginning to show themselves inferior in valor to their enemies. The luxury of the capital could not affect the army, which had no connection with the capital, but was levied from the peasantry of the whole empire, a class into which luxury can never penetrate. Nor can it be said the luxury corrupted the generals, and through them the army.... Whatever the remote and ultimate cause may have been, the immediate cause to which the fall of the empire can be traced is a physical, not a moral, decay.”[179]

This specimen of Mr. Seeley’s philosophy of history gives us a very low opinion of his powers of penetration. If the professor could see a little further below the surface, he would surely discover that a frightful moral decay was the underlying cause of the physical decay. He cannot persuade us that, if the capital were so corrupt, the generals and the army would still maintain a manly and a vigorous character. If the central heart be corrupt, a corrupting influence will flow out over the whole body. It was so, beyond doubt, with the Roman Empire in past days; it has been so with another mighty empire in our own times. Moral corruption flowed out from the capitals of both empires, and destroyed the vigor, courage, and all the manly virtues of their peoples. And then the messengers of God came. They came from the North in both cases, and terrible was the devastation which God gave them power to effect. In both cases they were irresistible, simply because he who beckoned them on and was hid in the smoke of battle was the God of battles himself. This is the theory which a Christian professor at least will naturally follow. There is something far more satisfactory in this, both to the intellect and to faith, than in any theory that can be suggested by the naturalistic views of men of Mr. Seeley’s school. We wonder if the young men who sat under Mr. Seeley at Cambridge were satisfied when the professor summed up his theory of the fall of the empire in these words: “Men were wanting; the empire perished for want of men”? To go no further than that seems to us pitiably shallow indeed. We are not at all captivated by Mr. Seeley’s view. We feel far more satisfied in believing the grand, old Christian theory, viz., that the empire perished at the hands of God for its savage cruelty to the holy martyrs and for its widespread corruption and revolting crimes.

We have already endeavored to sketch out the history of the age of blood: it now remains for us to give a picture of the corruption in which the empire lay steeped at the period previous to the descent of the barbaric hordes. But we most honestly state that we cannot do more than give a faint portraiture of what is so offensive to Christian purity of mind. To point to the life in this case, even if we were able to do so, would be too painful for Catholic ideas. The picture would necessarily be too frightful for the eye of modesty to gaze upon. It would be a dreadful exposure to the light of day of the blackest and the most shameful side of fallen human nature. Of necessity, then, must the painting be in somewhat dim outlines. But even so, it will sufficiently answer our present purpose.

For well-nigh five centuries, then, had Christianity been at work over the length and breadth of the Roman Empire, and yet paganism and its demoralizing influence were not dead. We know well how boldly and triumphantly the apostles went from the Cenacle to the conversion of the pagan world. The heavenly fire that had come down upon them had lodged itself in their hearts. It shot its wondrous power through their whole bodies, darting forth from their eyes in living light, issuing from their mouths in burning words, nerving them up to brave tortures and racks. They went forth, did that little band from the Cenacle, fire-girt and heaven-inspired, to the most arduous task ever confided to mortal men. Their wondrous success we need not here recount. It was such as only men with God in their midst could effect. They no longer knew fear of earthly powers; they quailed not in the presence of the terrors of death. Nothing could withstand them in their course. The demons of paganism fled before them; a thrill of horror ran through the vast Pantheon of pagan worship, and the idols trembled on their pedestals. Like the Titans of old, those messengers of the Crucified scaled the Olympus of paganism, and hurled down the false gods that were enthroned there. Hell and Olympus mingled their groans at the sounding blows which were levelling the idols of false worship and shaking the universe. But was, then, paganism utterly destroyed? Did it never recover from the shock which it received at the hands of the apostles of Christ? Did the darkness flee away before the bright torches of light which Christians held up in the midst of cities and towns and on every hill-top, and never return? Did the demons who lurked in the pagan temples and spoke by the mouths of the idols plunge into the deep abyss at the approach of Christ’s preachers, and never come back again? It is usual to think that something like this was the case. But it is far from the historic truth. We must admit, indeed, that the success of the first apostles of Christianity was the most amazing fact which we have ever read of in history. The light of divine truth flashed with miraculous swiftness through the world. Thousands of persons abandoned the idols of paganism, and joined the strange, new standard of the Cross. But yet paganism, continued to exist and to spread its baneful influence--it was not a dead thing. It had become welded into the very substance of the empire. It was associated with so much of the grand historic past.