Chapter XXIII: Part VI: They Sang (19)

The story that forms the foundation of this play has been torn to shreds by writers of every shade of opinion. Its truth, based mainly on the “casket letters,” was never accepted even at the English court. Elizabeth herself was compelled to acquit her cousin of all such scandalous charges. Yet on this Mr. Swinburne, with the chivalry of a poet and the honesty of a man who must have read history, builds his nauseous drama. Again, Mary was, by all concession, a lady. High and royal spirit she had indeed, of which in some notable instances she gave ample proof; but she has never been accused of indulging in language unworthy the royal woman she was, or savoring in any sense of coarseness. She was also a consistent and practical Catholic, who knew her religion and how to hold it, even against that fierce Calvinistic wolf, John Knox, to whom it were a happiness had his insulted sovereign only meted out the measure he persistently advocated for all Catholics. But she was too gentle‐natured to adopt means of enforcing silence and obedience more congenial to the spirit of her English cousin, who had a very summary manner of dealing with theological difficulties. This much being premised, let us now look at the Mary of Mr. Swinburne.

Here we have her in the very first scene of the first act. Rizzio is pleading with her the recall of Murray:

QUEEN. “What name is his who shall so strengthen me?”

RIZZIO. “Your father gave him half a brother’s name.”

QUEEN. “I have no brother; a bloodless traitor he is,

Who was my father’s bastard‐born. By heaven!
I had rather have his head loose at my foot
Than his tongue’s counsel rounded in mine ear.”

This is only her fourth speech in the play. It does not seem to have impressed Rizzio sufficiently; for, turning a page, we find her still railing at the subject of her wrath in this vigorous style:

... “By my hand,
Too little and light to hold up his dead head,
It was my hope to dip it in his life
Made me ride iron‐mailed and soldieress.”

With occasional spurts of this nature the queen enlivens her somewhat tedious colloquy of thirteen pages with Rizzio concerning Murray. She is candid enough to say in one place of her half‐brother, whom the Mary of history really believed in too long and too blindly for her own happiness:

“I am gay of heart, light as a spring south wind,
To feed my soul with his foretasted death....”

And again:

“Oh! I feel dancing motions in my feet
And laughter moving merrily at my lips,
Only to think him dead, or hearsed, or hanged—That
were the better. I could dance down his life.
Sing my steps through, treading on his dead neck,
For love of his dead body and cast‐out soul.”

Verily, a real Highland fling! And lest there should be any possible doubt as to the meaning of “cast‐out soul,” this gentle lady pursues it to its place, and gloats over its eternal torments in this Christian fashion:

“He shall talk of me to the worm of hell,
Prate in death’s ear and with a speechless tongue
Of my dead doings in days gone out....”

It is surely punishment enough to be condemned to carry on a conversation of any kind with the worm of hell and in the ear of death; but to compel even a cast‐out soul to perform this unpleasant duty “with a _speechless_ tongue” is punishment that passes ordinary comprehension. Doubtless, however, matters are or will be altered for Mr. Swinburne’s special convenience in the lower regions. Abandoning the wretched Murray to his destiny, we look for other revelations of Mary’s character, although something of her mettle may be gathered from the passages already given, which have been taken almost at random from the first twenty‐eight pages of the five hundred and thirty‐two. They are by no means the liveliest specimens to be found.

It would display a lamentable lack of knowledge of nature supposed to be human to imagine for a moment that the woman—if the expression is allowable—revealed in these passages is likely to be at all squeamish or foolishly coy about the profession of what Mr. Swinburne would probably call her love for Bothwell. The insignificant facts that her own husband, Darnley, and Bothwell’s wife, Jane Gordon, were still living, would naturally weigh lightly as feathers in the balance against her desire. Most of the scenes between the queen and Bothwell might be shortly described as “linked foulness long drawn out.” Were they even word for word true, it would still be a wonder and a shame to honest manhood that they could be dwelt upon and gloated over by any writer at all. Horace boasted of belonging to the “Epicurean herd.” Were he living now, he would, we honestly believe, feel conscientious scruples at admitting Mr. Swinburne into the company. Only such passages are quoted here as are presentable and necessary to endorse our judgment of this drama.

Without even an attempt at disguise, Mary and Bothwell discuss the best means of getting rid of Darnley. As a wife, expecting soon to be a mother, and as a Christian woman, it is only natural that she should urge on the not unwilling Bothwell in this style:

“_Would I were God!_
Time should be quicker to lend help and hand
To men that wait on him. . . . Were I a man,
I had been by this a free man.”

In the course of the second act she falls sick, as she believes, to death. She makes her dying confession to the Bishop of Ross, who, it is to be presumed, knew his religion. That being the case, it was somewhat rash in Mr. Swinburne to put into his mouth a gross error. He assures the dying queen that

“The man that keeps faith sealed upon his soul
Shall through the blood‐shedding of Christ be clean.
And in this time of cursing and flawed faith
Have you kept faith unflawed.
Have no fear, therefore, but your sins of life

Shall fall from off you as a vesture changed.
And leave your soul for whiteness as a child’s.”

Of course there is a sense in which this may be taken as correct. The man that really keeps his “faith sealed upon his soul” and “unflawed,” acts up to his faith and lives its life. But this is not what Mr. Swinburne means. In several passages he is at pains to show that it is not. His meaning simply is that because Mary held to the profession of the Catholic faith the bishop assured her that her sins would be remitted. That faith alone was sufficient for salvation was the heresy of Luther. We do not know whether those useful little compendiums of Christian doctrine commonly known as catechisms were much in vogue at the time. Had they been, Mary would have found in hers the following question and answer, which would have shamed the Bishop of Ross: “Will faith alone save us?” “No; it will not without good works.”

It must be remembered, however, that Mr. Swinburne, and not the bishop, is the real father confessor to his own penitent, and a very indulgent one he makes. The queen says:

“I would have absolution ere I die,
But of what sins I have not strength to say
Nor hardly to remember.”

After all that has gone before, that reads remarkably like a wilful lie, as Mr. Swinburne’s bishop might have hinted, particularly as she has memory enough left to enumerate her virtues, which conclude with this:

“I have held mine own faith fast, and with my lips
Have borne him [God] witness if my heart were whole.”

Whereupon the worthy bishop takes occasion to repeat his blunder. Glossing beautifully over her sins in a graceful sentence or two, the queen proceeds to “remit all faults against her done,” and ends in this edifying strain:

“I will not take death’s hand
With any soil of hate or wrath or wrong
About me, but, being friends with this past world,
Pass from it in the general peace of love.”

Just at this happy moment, by what would doubtless be considered “a stroke of genius,” Murray is made to enter and announce the arrival of Darnley, the unfortunate individual whose crime it is to persist in being Mary’s lawful husband when she is in love with one who, by her own command, was somebody else’s lawful husband. As may be supposed from what we know of her already, the contrite queen greets the announcement as contrite queens in similar situations are wont to do, thus:

“By heaven! I had rather death had leave than he.
What comes he for? To vex me quick or dead
With his lewd eyes and sodden, sidelong face,
That I may die with loathing of him?
By God, as God shall look upon my soul,
I will not see him.”

After this there is clearly nothing left for the bishop to do but administer the last sacraments and bid the Christian soul depart in peace. Luckily, however, at this critical juncture, and by another “stroke of genius,” the well‐known tramp of Bothwell’s heel falls on the ear of the dying queen, who immediately feels better, and bids her attendants “bring him in.”

One more passage, and we have done with Mr. Swinburne’s Mary. Darnley is not yet murdered; Bothwell is not yet divorced from Jane Gordon; he who became James I. of England is about to be born; the queen has in the preceding scene made the “confession” noticed above; the time, therefore, was ripe for her to make the following declaration to Bothwell:

“I purge me now and perfect my desire,
Which is to be no more your lover—no,
But even yourself, yea, more than body and soul,
One and not twain, one utter life, one fire,
One will, one doom, one deed, one spirit, _one God:_
_For we twain grown and molten each in each,_
_Surely shall be as God is, and no man_.”

Were there such a thing as love in _delirium tremens_, surely this would be an instance; only that Mary is perfectly cool and collected in making so plain and definite a statement. And Bothwell is just the kind of man to understand and appreciate the pleasant prospect held out for them both. He responds cheerily, hopefully, and prayerfully withal:

“God speed us, then, till we grow up to God!”

The reader has probably seen enough of Mr. Swinburne’s Mary Stuart. It will be clear to any impartial mind that beheading was far too easy a fate for such a character.

In one thing at least has the author succeeded. He set out to paint a monster, and a monster indeed he has painted in Mary. The question for the reader to determine is whether his very full‐armed Minerva be an emanation from the brain of this modern Jove or one who was a real, living woman. A woman ravenous for blood, lost to all shame, hating even her unborn offspring, blasphemous as Satan, cruel and pitiless as hell, brawling as a drunkard, full of oaths and coarse expressions as a trooper—if this be a true picture of Mary, Queen of Scots, of the woman who in her day drew, as she still continues to draw, the hearts of all true men and honest women to her side, then has the author done his work well and literature a service. But if she be the opposite of all this—a woman cruelly murdered and systematically wronged, at mention of whose name the heart of that chivalry which is never dead, and will never die while Christian manhood lives, leaps up—one is at a loss to father the writer’s monster on any other than himself. Viewed in this light, it can only be looked upon as the product of an imagination diseased, an intellect debauched, and a mind distorted—the work of a man whose moral nature has gone astray, and to whom consequently all that is true, pure, womanly, manly, godly, has lost its significance and value.

From the Christian heroine to the pagan hero we turn with a feeling of relief. The very title of Mr. de Vere’s drama challenges criticism. To write about Alexander the Great is one thing; to make Alexander speak for himself is another. The world, fashionable as it is to abuse its taste, is discriminating in the conferring of titles that are universal. Local magnates of greater or less magnitude are common enough; but men whom all civilized nations in all ages have agreed to crown with _greatness_ are very few and very far between. From the number of these the son of Philip of Macedon probably stands out pre‐eminent In his brief career he accomplished more than any human conqueror ever accomplished, and he succeeded in leaving more after him. So complete and marvellous was his success, and so gigantic his projects, while his means were proportionately limited, that, beyond all possibility of doubt, the man, young as he was, must have been a marvellous genius. Being so, he must not only have done great deeds, but thought great thoughts. He must have been fitted in every way to be a leader of men. This, perhaps the most marvellous character in human history, is the one of all others whom Mr. de Vere, with a courage which, if not justified by the result, can only be looked upon as either rashness or folly, has undertaken to set living and real before us, speaking the speech, thinking the thoughts, scheming the schemes, dreaming the dreams of Alexander. Greatness thus becomes one of the necessary standards by which we must judge Mr. de Vere’s work. If his chief character is not great in thought and word, as we know him to have been in deed, he is not Alexander, and this work can only be regarded as a more pretentious failure than the other. If he is great in thought and speech, where are the elements of his greatness to be found? In the brain of the author, in the conception of the poet—nowhere else. For in this case the speeches are not, as they were in the other, ready made and to hand. The record of Alexander’s deeds we have; but Alexander we must imagine for ourselves. What manner of man, then, is this that Mr. de Vere has given us? is the first and most natural question to be asked.

Friend and foe alike are busy about him. At the opening of the play Parmenio, the testy but honest‐hearted veteran of Philip, before Alexander has yet made his appearance, in words where the admiration of the soldier and the irritability and jealousy of old age are admirably blended, says:

“A realm his father owed me,
And knew it well. The son is reverent too,
But with a difference, sir. In Philip’s time
My voice was Delphic on the battle‐field.
This young man taps the springs of my experience,
As though with water to allay his wine
Of keener inspirations. ‘Speak thy thought,
Parmenio!’ Ere my words are half‐way out
He nods approval or he smiles dissent.
Still, there is like him none! I marvell’d oft
To see him breast that tempest from the north,
Drowning revolt in the Danubian wave.
The foe in sight, instant he knew their numbers;
If distant, guess’d their whereabout—how lay
The intermediate tract—if fordable
The streams—the vales accessible to horse:
’Twas like the craft of beasts remote from man.”

Antisthenes, the rhetorician, describes the man of action as a rhetorician might:

“This king is valued past his worth:
He nothing says that’s sage, like Ptolemy,
Or keen‐edged, like Craterus. This I grant him:
_Sagacity supreme in observation_;
He sees with eye inspired. Seeing with him
Is Act and Thought, not sense.”

Arsinoë, the daughter of Darius, thinks that “he neither loves nor hates.” He is royal‐faced, “albeit too eager‐eyed.” And Hephestion, the strong friend on whom alone of all men Alexander leans, tells her of him:

“He loves not many, and himself the least:
_His purposes to him are wife and child_.”

“Free him from that conceit,” says Parmenio later on, “that he’s a god,”

“The man of men were he:
None like him we have had since Marathon.”

PHILOTAS. “I grant his greatness were his god‐ship sane,
But note his brow: ’tis Thought’s least earthly temple
Then mark, beneath, that round, not human eye,
Still glowing like a panther’s! In his body
No passion dwells; _but all his mind is passion,_
_Wild, intellectual appetite, and instinct_
_That works without a law_.”

PARMENIO. “But half you know him.
There is a zigzag lightning in his brain
That flies in random flashes, yet not errs.
Chances his victories seem; but link those chances,
And under them a science you shall find,
Though unauthentic, contraband, illicit,
Yes, contumelious oft to laws of war.
Fortune, that as a mistress smiles on others,
Serves him as duty‐bound; her blood is he,
Born in the purple of her royalties.”

And so they go on describing him, each in his own way; for, with felicitous art, the presence of Alexander is made to permeate the drama, yet so unobtrusively and unconsciously to all seeming that the mind of the reader, though held fast on the chief character throughout, never wearies of him. The extracts given, culled from here and there, point all in one direction. They are consistent, however they may vary in expression, about the man they describe. He is not like other men; he towers above them; he stands alone. But even this only tells us what men say of him. It may mean no more than any young‐lady novelist’s description of her hero, whose biting sarcasm and brilliant wit are gifts that it was thought were buried with Sheridan. All which we are willing to concede, only that by some untoward accident the brilliant wit and biting sarcasm never appear on the surface. How does Alexander speak for himself?

In literature, as in life, very much depends on the impression a man makes on his introduction. Alexander’s introduction is happy and suggestive. He meets us first at Troy when setting out on his expedition. Around him rise the temples of the memorable dead who died in the Ten Years’ War. He is in search of the fane of Achilles, his ancestor, as he claims. Aphrodite and Helen have no attractions for him, upon whose mind “the wise Stagirite” had impressed the high code of pagan morals, that the passions were “a yoke which Action’s strenuous sons should scorn to bear.” He stands on ground where heroes fought and strove for ten long years together, and the question comes at once to his earnest mind,

“That ten years’ war, what fruit thereof remains?
What empire lives, its witness and its crown?
What shall we say? That those were common men
Made large by mists of Time? Or shall we rather
Conclude them real, and our age a fraud?”

His friend Hephestion is reminded by the fanes around, not of the greatness, but of the littleness, of man and of the common ashes to which we come at last. In what, had he the ear to hear it, had been for his leader a solemn warning, he cries out:

“Alas! how small an urn
Suffices for the earth‐o’erstriding dust
Which one time shook the world!”

But Alexander cannot contemplate the end of men and things in this calm fashion. To him, as to Achilles, death is “malign and intercepting.” It bears no thought of peace or rest. He describes it as “that frustrate, stagnant, ineffectual bourn where substance melts to shadow.” Far away in “the dimness of the dolorous realm” he sees, though sad, “the unvanquishable youth” of Achilles surviving and lamenting—

“Despite the embalm’d, purpureal airs and gleam
Immeasurable of amaranthine meads,
The keen, reviving, strenuous airs of earth,
And blasts from battle‐fields”—

that is the very breath of his nostrils—earth, life, action, with a purpose in it, and the keen intoxication of occasional “blasts from battle‐fields.”

But he is not a mere genius errant, a Don Quixote of conquerors, wasting himself on windmills and flocks of sheep. He has a clear, resolute purpose before his mind, to which he shapes all things. It is to make the world one empire, which Grecian intellect should rule. The Governor of Sardis, when the Granicus is won, he bids:

“Tell those realms
Betwixt the Euxine and Pamphylian Seas,
That Grecian galaxy of Lesser Asia,
That Argive choir in eastern exile sad,
That Doric garland on base Persia’s brow,
We came not here to crush them, but exalt;
This hand shall lift them to their first estate,
And lodge them mid the skyey heights of Greece.”

Such is his plan; and whatever crosses him must break before or bend to that. Kings, empires, mighty cities, religion, customs and traditions, commerce, all must yield before his indomitable will. Nothing is sacred to Alexander, save what is sacred to Alexander’s plan. All things were fashioned to his purpose, and existed only to be made subservient to him. He gazes from the sea‐shore on Tyre of the ships, with its wealth, its energies, its possibilities, and the little it has done with them, and bursts forth:

“Wings without body! such—no more—is commerce
Which rests not upon empire! Commerce, ruling,
Disperses man’s chief energies, _but, ruled_
_By spirit heroic_, increase yields of thoughts
That give to greatness wider basis. Tyre!
How soon thy golden feathers forth shall fly
Upon the storm of War!”

Lacking the “spirit heroic,” Tyre’s opportunities and life have hitherto been thrown away, as were thrown away the letters that Phœnicia gave, useless to the inventors. He goes on:

“Men stumble thus on glories not for them,
The rightful appanage of the capable.
The empire I shall found shall tread the earth,
Yet over it go flying. From its vans
The twin‐born beams of Grecian Song and Science
Shall send perpetual dawn.”

Mr. de Vere’s verse is tempting to quote; but we must hasten on. Some idea of his Alexander may be gathered from the passages given; but, as we said, he permeates the book, and we must leave it to the reader himself to trace the slow growth and development of this singularly‐rounded yet most difficult conception. We do not believe that the author in this instance has fallen below the level of his subject, high and remote as that level was. A strong, resolute, far‐seeing character, possessed with the very passion of empire, speaks to us in every line of _Alexander_. Many of his sayings have almost the wisdom and the brevity of proverbs. “Time takes still the conqueror’s side,” he tells Hephestion; and when that great‐ souled character puts the deep and solemn question, “_Is there forgiveness for conquerors?_”—his answer is:

“Aye; but for half‐conquerors, none.”

Here is his policy told in a line:

“Strong hand makes empire; hand that heals retains it.”

When, in a light moment, he asks his generals, were gods their slaves, what fortunes would they choose, and all cry out, “A kingdom!” he says aside:

“Note this, Hephestion:
Imagination is economist,
And vastest ends move less the appetite
Than small things near and easier of access.”

Here is a truth for conquerors to ponder. In the height of his conquest he is convinced that

“The vanquish’d must connive, or victory’s self
Its own grave digs in the end.”

All the littleness of greatness, all those surroundings that to small minds stamp, if they do not constitute, greatness, are for him emptiness.

“To breathe applauses is to breathe that air
By breath of men defiled: I stand, and stood,
On the mountain‐tops, breathing the breath of gods.”

There is another aspect to his character at which we must glance. We have called attention at the beginning to his jealous hatred of death. Life and death are to him constant enigmas, to which he sees no solution. The only, or at least the great, obstacle that he sees in the way of accomplishing his dream and passion of empire is death. No human foe he fears; but the fates. Time, he passionately says, is no friend of his. He has to build his empire in few years. He is running a constant race with time, and something seems to whisper to him ever that his years are few. In this, too, lies an humbling fact. He, like others, is human and subject to death. This inward struggle and rebellion against his humanity is constantly going on. The thought, What am I? What do I? Who am I? Whence come I? Where go I?—all these things for ever trouble him. He would be a god; but he finds his loftiest aspirations bounded by a wall of flesh, and beyond that—a blank.

With keen dramatic instinct and happy thought the author gives him the opportunity of answering for himself these questionings. He visits the temple at Jerusalem, and converses with the high‐priest. The truth is unfolded to him, and the true God made known. He hesitates, and finally rejects the truth. It clashes with his purpose.

“O’er all the earth my empire shall be just,
Godlike my rule,”

he promises the high‐priest; whose answer is the solemn rebuke:

“Young man, beware! God’s prophet
Awards thee Persia’s crown, but not the world’s:
He who wears that should be the Prince of Peace.
Thy portion lies in bounds. Limit and Term
Govern the world.”

This revelation tells on his character throughout the rest of the play. He has no longer that blind confidence in himself, though his mind like a vise holds to its resolution of founding the empire he was warned he could not found. His iron will and indomitable energy overcome all obstacles; but time is creeping on, and he feels it. To unite Persian and Greek together, in order to win the Persian, he must be proclaimed a god; and a god he is proclaimed. But the emptiness and mockery of the title are shown with intense force in the workings of the king’s mind up to this madness. He strives to argue himself up to godhead only by arguing godhead down to him:

“A race of gods hath fallen:
Then Zeus in turn may fall. I find for gods
No thrones secure; _to man’s advance no limit_;
No certain truth amid contending rites;
No base for faith.”

He remembers the warning about limit and term, only to say scornfully,

“That’s for others:
To grasp a world for me is feasible;
To keep a half‐world, not.”

He turns further and further away from faith of any kind; his creed resembles that of more modern conquerors:

“The man that empire founds
Must measure all things by the needs of empire.”

And the final outcome of his thoughts is this:

“This only know we—
We walk upon a world not knowable,
Save in those things which knowledge least deserve,
Yet capable, not less, of task heroic.
My trust is in my work: on that I fling me,
Trampling all questionings down.”

And yet the next moment he cries out:

“I sometimes think
That I am less a person than a power.
Some engine in the right hand of the gods,
Some fateful wheel that, round in darkness rolling,
Knows this—its work, but not that work’s far scope.
Hephestion, what is life? My life, since boyhood,
Hath been an agony of means to ends;
An ultimate end I find not. For that cause,
On‐reeling in the oppression of a void,
At times I welcome what I once scarce brook’d—
_The opprobrium of blank sleep_.”

There are many scenes of strong dramatic power in this drama—the death of Darius, the quarrel with Parmenio, the rebellion of the Greeks, the last scene with Philotas, and others; but the power and intensity deepen at the close, when death at last creeps into the veins of the conqueror. He has lost Hephestion earlier in the drama, and this loss rends his heart. There is much truth in his singular, almost selfish love for his great‐souled friend, who stood to Alexander as a wife would stand to another man. But he to whom “his purposes were wife and child” could not lean on a woman. It must be a man, strong, brave, keen‐eyed as himself, but calmer, larger hearted, humbler, greater souled. Such was Hephestion, and his strong yet sweet character is not only admirably drawn, but affords an excellent foil throughout to the eager, impetuous, fiery nature and fiery words of the king.

Omens thicken around him, and the end comes at Babylon. The fever that burns at his heart seizes on his body while sailing on the Lake of Pallacopas. As the royal barge passes, a strain rises up from the waters:

“We sate beside the Babylonian river:
Within the conqueror’s bound, weeping we sate:
We hung our harps upon the trees that quiver
Above the rushing waters desolate.

“If I forget thee, Salem, in thy sadness,
May this right hand forget the harper’s art!
If I forget thee, Salem, in my gladness,
My tongue dry up and wither, like my heart!”

It is a relic of the Babylonian captivity. The song forces from Alexander the sad confession, significant to all conquerors:

“The ages pass, like winds;
The old wrong remains, rooted like tombs, and moves not:
All may be done through Time; yet Time does naught.
Let kings look well to that.”

The end is on him. Though “maimed, and tamed, and shamed,” he is resolute still, but impotent, and the empire lacks completion, he confesses, while

“The years, the months,
The hours, like ravening wolves that hunt a stag,
Come up upon my haunches.”

Fighting time to the last, he succumbs; but he will not even die as other men. In his half‐delirium he tells Ptolemy:

“I have a secret—one for thee alone:
’Twas not the mists from that morass disastrous
Nor death of him that died, nor adverse gods,
Nor the Fates themselves; ’twas something mightier yet,
And secreter in the great night, that slew me.”

And thus, surrounded by his warriors and his generals, with success within his grasp, but that grasp nerveless, his last moments troubled with awful visions and ill dreams, resentful to the last against what slew him, in doubt and in fear, in youth and glory and empire, in the fatality of success, staring with strained eyes into the dread void beyond that no ray of faith illumines, he whose nod was life or death to nations, Alexander, _the god_, passes away and dies—of a little slow fever that has entered and claimed for its own the clay of which he was made.

Mr. de Vere has written at once a magnificent poem and a powerful drama. We have devoted our attention in both instances to the chief characters, and thus many scenes and personages in _Alexander the Great_ on which in reading we have dwelt with much pleasure and admiration must pass unnoticed. The author, if we may say so, has surprised us by the strength and finish of this work. The action of the piece is rapid; the characters, small and great, rounded and full; the scenes most varied and dramatically set. The clew to the play we take to be that old whisper which first allured our parents from their allegiance, and tempts forever the race of man: _Ye shall be as gods_. The whisper runs through the piece from the first line to the last, and lends to it a purpose and a plan of its own. The dramatist has taken the man who in human history came the nearest to exemplifying its truth to prove its utter and miserable falsehood, and to read with a new force the old and eternal command that alone can order the life of man wisely and well: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.”

When he died, Alexander was nearly thirty‐three. With him really, though remnants lingered after him, his scheme and his empire passed away; and when to‐day we look for what is left of the world’s conqueror, of Alexander the god, we must search in musty tomes and grope in desert sands. Nothing is left of him, save some words and histories; and even were they lost also, and his very memory blotted out with them, the world to‐day would in reality be little or none the loser.

Some centuries later there died Another at the age of thirty‐three. He came into life silently; he went out of life ignominiously. He led no army; he had no following of any note; he was the son of a carpenter, and born of a despised race. He was born, he lived, he died, in poverty, sorrow, and suffering, a social outcast even from his own people. The last three years of his life he spent in preaching in and about Jerusalem. His doctrines were strange and startling. They were utterly subversive of all human glory and greatness. Like Alexander, he proclaimed himself divine, and claimed to be the Son of God. Like Alexander, he too died, but a death of ignominy. Before his name had spread far beyond Jerusalem, men rose up, Jew and Gentile, king and priest, church and state, together hanged him on a tree, nailed him there, tortured and slew him, and when he was dead sealed up the tomb in which he was buried. And there, humanly speaking, was an end to him and his.

To the world what had he left? A memory—nothing more. Men said that he had wrought wonders, that virtues flowed out of him, that his hands rained mercies, that the blind saw, the lame walked, the lepers were cleansed, the very dead rose again. Idle rumors! like that other of his bursting the tomb and rising again, walking in the flesh and ascending into the heaven from which he said he had come. And this was “the Expected of the nations,” “the Prince of Peace,” who was to accomplish what the high‐ priest warned Alexander was not for him, with all his power, to accomplish—to unite all the nations under one yoke. A likely prospect with the material he had left!

He left behind him no empire, no record, not a line of writing. He left a few words, a few maxims, a few rules of life, a few prayers, a few promises, a few men who timidly believed in him, a few commands. The world, its belief and non‐belief alike, its customs, maxims, tendencies, he condemned as wrong. He commanded it to remodel itself according to the few rules he had left—rules singularly comprehensive, simple, and clear: to believe in him, to obey him as the son of God and God, to believe and obey those, and those only, whom he sent forth in his name, armed with the powers he gave them, fighting with the weapon of the cross. And what is the result? Who is the conqueror of the world now? Jesus Christ, in whose name every knee shall bow, or Alexander the Great? Here is a mystery surely that men should ponder. What shall explain the victory over the world, over sin, and over death, of Him whom they nailed to the tree nineteen centuries ago? Nothing but the words of Peter—“Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God.” Thou art he that was to come, and we look for no other. “And he was clothed with a garment sprinkled with blood: and his name is called _The Word of God_. And he hath on his garment and on his thigh written King of kings and Lord of lords.”

Requies Mea.

Keep me, sweet love! Thy keeping is my rest.
Not safer feels the eaglet from beneath
The wings that roof the inaccessible nest,
Than I when thou art with me, dearest, best,
Whose love my life is, yea, my very breath!
Thy Son to Egypt fled to prove our faith.
Not Herod’s men had snatched him from thy breast,
Or changed his thronèd slumber into death.
How wonderful thy keeping, mighty Queen!
So close, so tender; and as if thine eyes
Had only me to watch, thine arm to screen;
And this inconstant heart were such a prize!
And thou the while, in beatific skies,
Art reigning imperturbably serene!

Ontologism And Psychologism.

Our readers sometimes complain that the philosophical articles of THE CATHOLIC WORLD are too hard to be understood. Yet some of these very readers make a great effort to read these articles, and ask questions about metaphysical subjects—among others, about the very topic of the present article—showing a great desire to gain some knowledge about them. We are going to try to make this article intelligible to these readers, even to those who are yet quite young persons, in whose laudable efforts to improve their minds and acquire knowledge we are greatly interested.

We shall begin, therefore, by explaining some terms which need to be well understood before they can be used in a satisfactory manner, and especially the two which make up the title of this article. Ontology is the name given to one branch of metaphysics, which is also called general metaphysics, in distinction from the two other principal branches of that science—to wit, logic and special metaphysics. It is derived from two Greek words—that is, the first two syllables from a word which means being, and the last two from one which means reasoning. It is therefore a reasoning about being, or the scientific exposition of the object of the idea of real being, of metaphysical truth, good and evil, beauty, substance, accident, quantity, causality, the finite and the infinite, the contingent and the necessary, etc. Psychology is also a Greek derivative signifying a scientific exposition of the rational soul of man, its powers and operations, which is a sub‐division of special metaphysics. Therefore every philosopher must be an ontologist and a psychologist, in the proper sense of those terms. Yet, there is a difference between ontology and ontologism, psychology and psychologism. Ontologism and psychologism are names denoting opposite philosophical systems which diverge in opposite directions from the scholastic philosophy, or that philosophy commonly taught in the Catholic schools after the method and principles of the Angelic Doctor, S. Thomas Aquinas. Of the authority which this philosophy possesses in the church we cannot now treat at length. We will, however, cite here the latest utterance of the Sovereign Pontiff which has come to our knowledge, as a sample of a great number of similar official expressions of approbation from the Holy See. In a letter to Dr. Travaligni, founder of the Philosophico‐Medical Society of S. Thomas Aquinas, dated July 23, 1874, Pius IX. says: “With still greater pleasure we perceive that, faithful to your purpose, you have determined to admit only such members to your society as hold and will defend the doctrines propounded by the sacred councils and this Holy See, and in particular the principles of the Angelic Doctor concerning the union of the intellective soul with the human body, and concerning substantial form and primary matter (_materia prima_).” We shall take for granted at present that in all its essential parts, as well as in those specified in the above quotation, the philosophy of S. Thomas has the highest sanction and authority in the church which any system of philosophy can have, and that it is the only true and sound philosophy. The system of ontologism differs from it by proposing a totally different ontology, which is made the basis of an essentially different philosophy. The advocates of that system call themselves ontologists, as claiming to be the only philosophers who understand rightly real being and the relation of intelligence to it as the object of its intuition and knowledge. They are also called by that name by their antagonists for the sake of convenience and courtesy, as those who believe in God, but not in revelation, are called theists, although neither party has an exclusive right to the appellation given to it by usage. Psychologism is a system which makes the basis and starting‐ point of philosophy to lie exclusively in the individual soul and its modifications, like Des Cartes, whose first principle is, “I think, therefore I am.” The opponents of the scholastic philosophy who pretend to be ontologists give it the nickname of psychologism, because they either misunderstand or misinterpret its ontological and psychological doctrine. The scholastic philosophy is also frequently called Aristotelian, because S. Thomas derived a great part of his metaphysics from the great philosopher of Greece; and Peripatetic, which was the name given to the school of Aristotle, because the teachers and pupils used to walk up and down during their lectures and discussions. Those who diverge from the philosophy of S. Thomas in the same direction with the ontologists are also frequently called Platonists, because they follow, or are supposed to follow, Plato, in regard to certain opinions differing from those maintained by Aristotle.

The philosophical disputes which have been lately carried on with so much vehemence about questions of ontology are by no means of recent origin. They have been waged both within and without the limits of the Catholic Church. Des Cartes, the great modern master of psychologism, always professed to be a loyal son of the church, and had many disciples among Catholics. Malebranche, the author of modern ontologism, was a devout priest of the French Oratory; and Cardinal Gerdil, who began as an earnest advocate of the same doctrine, but gradually approached toward the scholastic philosophy in his maturer years, was really the second man to the Pope for a long time in authority and influence, as well as a most illustrious model of virtue and learning. More recently, the principal advocates of ontologism have been very devoted Catholics. The Louvain professors, Hugonin, Branchereau; for anything we know to the contrary, Fabre, and many others, have been most zealous and devoted Catholics. Only Gioberti, who was, however, the prince among them all, and one of the most gifted men of the century, among the well‐known leaders of that school, was a disloyal Catholic. We have heard on very good authority that Gioberti continued to receive the sacraments up to the time of his death, and was buried with Catholic rites. Nevertheless, as a number of priests were still in the external communion of the church at the time Gioberti was living in Paris, who were really heretics and have since apostatized, this fact alone does not count for much as a proof that he died in the Catholic faith. All his works were long before on the Index; he was at least suspended, if not _ipso facto_ excommunicated, as a contumacious rebel against the Pope. Dr. Brownson calls him “that Italian priest of marvellous genius, and, we were about to write, Satanic power.” And again he says: “Gioberti died, we believe, excommunicated, and his last book, published before his death, contains a scurrilous attack on Pius IX., and bears not a trace of the Catholic believer, far less of the Catholic priest.”(96) For a long time the Church did not directly interfere with the philosophical discussions which went on among her children in regard to ontology. Neither Des Cartes(97) nor Malebranche was condemned, nor were any specific propositions in the works of Gioberti censured. The Holy See has never been in the habit of using its supreme magisterial authority in deciding scientific controversies considered merely as scientific. Science is left to itself, to make its own way and fight its own battles, unless the interests of the faith become involved with those of science. When these interests demand the interference of the supreme authority, it utters its disciplinary edicts or its doctrinal decisions, as in its wisdom it deems opportune and necessary. For a considerable period of time philosophy was left in the enjoyment of the largest liberty, so long as the doctrines of the church were respected and maintained. But when professed Catholics, especially in Germany, began to frame systems of philosophy manifestly dangerous to sound theology and subversive of it, the Holy See began to exercise a more special vigilance over the teaching of philosophy in Catholic schools. Gregory XVI. and Pius IX. have condemned a number of works, of systems, or of distinct propositions in which philosophical errors were contained, because these were directly or indirectly subversive of the Catholic faith. Among other errors condemned, ontologism holds a prominent position. After various means more mild and indirect of correcting the evils which the teaching of this system threatened to produce had failed, the Holy See pronounced (Sept. 18, 1861) its condemnation of seven propositions embracing the fundamental tenets common to the so‐called ontologists, and some particular tenets advanced by individual professors or writers of the same school. The professors of the Catholic University of Louvain were required to make a formal act of submission to this decision of Rome, which they did in the most exemplary manner.

The Abbé Hugonin, when nominated to an episcopal see in France, was also required to make a formal renunciation of ontologism, which he had taught in his writings, as a condition of receiving the confirmation of the pope, and complied without hesitation. The Abbé Branchereau, a distinguished French Sulpitian and professor of philosophy, voluntarily submitted a statement of the doctrine contained in his _Prelections_ to the examination and judgment of the Holy See, and, when the judgment condemning his system was made known to him, promptly submitted and suppressed his work. In fact, there has been everywhere a most ready and edifying submission given to the judgment of Rome on a system which was rapidly spreading and gaining ground, and toward which a great number of the finest minds among Catholic scholars felt the strongest attraction. The reason of this may be found in the fact that those who had embraced this system or were inclined toward it were generally good Catholics, holding sound theological principles, and imbued with the love of truth and the love of the church, loyal to conscience, and well grounded in Christian humility and obedience. Consequently, ontologism, as a system, prevailing among Catholics and in Catholic schools, is dead, and rapidly passing into oblivion—a great gain for science, as well as for religion, since it removes a great obstacle in the way of the revival of the genuine and sound philosophy which alone contains the real and solid wisdom of the Grecian sages, the fathers of the church, and the gigantic masters of the mediæval schools, combined, harmonized, and reduced to method.

It is time now to explain in what the essence of ontologism consists. In the words of M. Fabre, a professor at the Sorbonne, “Ontologism is a system in which, after having proved the objective reality of general ideas, we establish that these ideas are not forms or modifications of our soul; that they are not anything created; that they are necessary, unchangeable, eternal, absolute objects; that they are concentrated in the being to which this name belongs in its simple signification (_l’être simplement dit_), and that this infinite Being is the first idea apprehended by our mind, the first intelligible, the light in which we see all the eternal, universal, and absolute truths. Ontologists say, then, that these eternal truths cannot have any reality outside of the eternal essence, whence they conclude that they do not subsist except as united to the divine substance, and consequently that it can only be in this substance that we see them.”(98)

We will now give the first two, the fourth, and the fifth of the propositions condemned at Rome, and which, with the other three, were taken from the prelections of a professor in a French seminary, never published, but extensively circulated in lithograph or MSS., and which, the reader will see, express the identical doctrine summarized so concisely and ably by M. Fabre:

I. The immediate cognition of God, at least habitual, is essential to the human intellect, so that without this it cannot know anything, since it is the intellectual light itself.

II. That being which we intellectively perceive in all things, and without which we perceive nothing intellectively (_quod in omnibus et sine quo nihil intelligimus_), is the divine being.

IV. The congenital knowledge of God as simply being (_ens simpliciter_) involves every other cognition in an eminent manner, so that by it we have implicit knowledge of every being, under whatever respect it is knowable.

V. All other ideas are only modifications of the idea in which God is intellectively perceived (_intelligitur_) as simply being (_ens simpliciter_).

Similar propositions to these are found in the fifteen submitted by M. Branchereau to the judgment of the Holy See, viz.:

1. In the act of thought two things are to be essentially distinguished—the subject thinking and the object thought.

2. Again, the object thought is distinguished into two things—that which is being simply, and that which is being in a certain respect.

3. By that which is being simply we understand real being, concrete and infinitely perfect; ... in a word, that which is being simply is God.

12. From the first instant of existence the mind enjoys ideal perception, not indeed reflexively, but directly.

13. Among the intelligible truths, which we apprehend ideally, God occupies the first place, the intellective perception of whom, although essentially distinct from the intuition of the beatified, is terminated, not at a representative image, but at God himself.

The reader will now, we trust, understand without difficulty what is the fundamental idea of ontologism—namely, that God is the _immediate object_ of the intellect, the ideal object which faces it from its creation, is present to it as its light and its luminous, intelligible term of vision, in which all ideal, necessary, self‐evident, eternal ideas, verities, realities, are concentrated, beheld, made luminous; lighting up all objects whatsoever which exist and are perceived by sense and intellect, so that the things that are made are clearly seen by the invisible things of God, even his eternal power and Godhead; as Malebranche expressed it, “in Deo,” and Gioberti, “in Deo et per Deum”—in God, and by or through him, as clouds in a luminiferous ether. For an explanation of the scholastic doctrine of the origin of universal ideas we refer the reader to a former article on Dr. Stöckl’s Philosophy. In brief, it is the reverse of the one just delineated, viz., the universal and transcendental ideas are derived by abstraction from created things, and the knowledge of God is obtained by a discursive act of reasoning, by which we ascend from the knowledge of creatures to the knowledge of the Creator, whose invisible essence and attributes are understood by the things that are made. That is, God is known by a mediate and not an immediate apprehension, resulting in an intellectual judgment that he is. The mind terminates at a representative and inadequate image of God, and not at God himself or that which is God, real, concrete, necessary, infinite being, which is the remote and reflected object of the intellect.

We are now prepared to answer the question, What is the harm and danger of ontologism on account of which it has been condemned? It has not been condemned as heretical, for it does not formally, directly, and explicitly contradict any doctrine of faith. The Holy See has simply decided that it cannot be safely taught—that is, that it cannot be taught with a safe conscience, without danger to the faith, and consequently without grievous sin. It must therefore contain in it an error which cannot be extensively held and taught in Catholic schools without a serious danger of indirectly subverting Catholic faith and doctrine, especially in the minds of the young and inconsiderate. While this danger was only remote or not yet apparent, the error might be tolerated, and left to be opposed and refuted by argument. Moreover, it might be held and advocated in good faith and without sin by intelligent and pious men, who are liable to error when left to their own reasonings about abstruse matters in theology and philosophy. But when the danger was apparent and proximate, it was necessary to appeal to the supreme authority of the Roman Church, that the whole matter might be thoroughly examined and adjudicated; and, the judgment being once rendered, the cause is finished for all good Catholics. Thenceforth all that remains to be done is to study the import of the decision, and to search into the reasons by which the condemned errors may be proved false by philosophical and theological arguments, and the opposite truths brought out into a clearer light for the advancement of sound and solid science and the protection of the faith.