Chapter XVI: Found at Last! (2)

The time had now come when Napoleon was resolved to be divorced from Josephine. He consulted the Archbishop of Bordeaux and his clergy on the subject. Their reply was unfavorable, and he summarily dismissed them and had the vicar-general and the superior of the seminary deprived of their offices. One day, after a very silent repast with the empress, he broached the subject to her. She fell fainting to the floor; the emperor summoned the chamberlain and had her carried to her apartments. Her adieu to sovereignty was effected under trying circumstances. A grand reception took place at the Tuileries on the evening of her departure. She assisted at the funeral of her worldly greatness, and the fate of Napoleon was decided at the same moment by a few hurried words spoken by two courtiers as they were leaving the imperial presence. Negotiations for the marriage of Napoleon with the Grand Duchess Olga, sister of the Czar of Russia, were all but concluded. That night M. Floret, the first secretary of the Austrian Embassy, whispered to M. de Sémonville that the emperor might easily have the hand of Marie Louise of Austria. This was related to Napoleon; the alliance with Russia was broken off; and two years later came the retreat from Moscow, when the arms fell from his soldiers’ hands. But to espouse a daughter of the Catholic house of Austria it was necessary to obtain not only a civil but also a religious divorce from Josephine. No other authority than that of the pope, Cardinal Fesch declared, would be otherwise than “uncertain or dangerous” on the subject; but to apply to the captive of Savona would be useless. Napoleon therefore created an ecclesiastical tribunal for the occasion, over which his uncle, Cardinal Fesch, was appointed to preside. The emperor first attempted to make it appear that his marriage with Josephine in 1804 was invalid, because it had taken place without witnesses or deed; but the cardinal was able to show that this was not true. He next alleged as a cause of illegality the absence of the parish priest; but the faculties conferred upon Fesch by Pius VII. more than supplied this deficiency. As a last resort Napoleon declared that he had never consented to the religious marriage, thus openly confessing that he had deceived Josephine, Cardinal Fesch, and the Holy Father. This statement, however, was probably an after-thought and false, which is not surprising in an habitual liar like Napoleon. The tribunal was threatened with the anger of the emperor if it kept him waiting beyond a certain day. As it had been created only to do his bidding, his marriage with Josephine was declared null; but let us remark that the Holy Father had nothing to do with this business; he was not even consulted, as he had already given proof of what might be expected from him in the case of Jérôme Bonaparte and Miss Paterson. Nearly all the cardinals were at this time living in Paris. Fourteen of them gave it as their opinion that the divorce had been rightly granted; thirteen others asserted that the tribunal was incompetent, and that the case should have been submitted to the pope. In consequence they determined not to assist at the marriage of Napoleon and Marie Louise. When Cardinal Fesch reported this to the emperor, he got into a fit of rage. “Bah! they will not dare,” he exclaimed; and when Cardinal Consalvi, the leader of the thirteen, came to a public audience at the Tuileries eight days before the ceremony, Napoleon came up to him, stopped before him, gave him a thundering look, and passed on without speaking a word. As he entered the chapel of the Louvre for the wedding he wore an air of triumph; but his countenance grew dark when he perceived the thirteen were not there.

“Where are the cardinals?” he asked in an irritated tone.

“A great number are here,” was the reply.

“Ah! the fools; but they are _not_ here,” said Napoleon with another glance at the empty seats. “The fools, the fools!”

He declared that it was his intention to cause _the resignation of these individuals_, and that henceforth they were to be deprived of the Purple. In this way arose the title of Black and Red cardinals. The property of the thirteen was seized and their income went to swell the public treasure, whilst they were sent to different provincial towns and placed under surveillance.

The difficulty as to the appointment of bishops to vacant dioceses had not been settled. In May, 1810, Napoleon despatched two cardinals, most favorable to his pretensions, to Pius VII., whom he still held a prisoner in Savona, to persuade the pope to confirm the bishops appointed by the emperor; but the Holy Father was immovable. Napoleon thereupon resolved to make his own bishops and dispense with the papal confirmation. Cardinal Fesch, who had accepted the title of Archbishop-elect of Paris, now refused to take possession of his see without the approval of the pope.

“I can force you to obey me,” said Napoleon to his uncle.

“Sire, _potius mori_,” replied the cardinal.

“Ah! ah! _potius mori_—rather Maury. Be it so. You shall have Maury.” Cardinal Maury accepted, and in a few days his vicar-general was arrested and sent to the dungeon of Vincennes, where he remained till the fall of the empire. About the same time Vincennes opened its gloomy gates to Cardinals di Pietro and Gabrielli. This was in 1811. Pius VII. had been in prison for two years. Napoleon now ordered his jailers to treat him with greater severity. No person was allowed to see him without the emperor’s permission; and for violating this regulation some priests from Marseilles were thrown into a filthy dungeon. All letters to and from the Holy Father were submitted to the inspection of the keeper of the prison.

“It is useless for the pope to write,” said Napoleon; “the
less he does, the better it will be.… The less that which he
writes reaches its destination, the better.… I trouble
myself very little as to what he may do.… Let him be told
that it is distressing for Christendom to own a pope so
ignorant of what is due to sovereigns, but that the state
will not be disturbed, and good will be effected without
him.”

On the 8th of January, 1811, experts sent from Paris entered the episcopal palace at Savona, where the Holy Father was confined, opened his doors and drawers, searched his correspondence, unsewed his clothes, and broke open his desk, in order to discover something that might incriminate him. They even took away his breviary and the Office of the Blessed Virgin. He was also ordered to deliver up the Ring of the Fisherman; but, justly suspecting that it would be used for fraudulent purposes, he broke it in two and handed the pieces to Napoleon’s agent. A moral terrorism reigned over the religious world in France and Italy. The emperor’s vengeance pursued even ladies who gave alms to the Black cardinals. The cardinals, bishops, and priests who had spoken against his tyranny were in prison; the rest remained silent.

Napoleon now called a National Council to devise measures for governing the church without the assistance of the pope. The French bishops had for the most part been kept ignorant of the precise nature of the trouble between himself and Pius VII., and he intended by this new move to impress upon the mind of the Sovereign Pontiff that he could nor rely upon the support of the bishops. First, however, a deputation was sent to the pope to urge upon him the pressing necessity of conforming without further delay to the will of the emperor. Pius VII. was at this time in very feeble health, and Napoleon did not hesitate to bribe his physician, Dr. Porta, that he might inform the members of the deputation of the most favorable opportunity to take advantage of the weak and suffering state of the Holy Father to wring from him the desired concessions. For some days those who surrounded him were able to attest the presence of all the symptoms of madness.

“You will have seen,” wrote his jailer to the Minister of
Worship, “by my last letters that the uncertainty of the
pope when he is left to himself goes to the length of
affecting his reason and his health. At present the mental
alienation has passed off.”

Still, the bishops sent by Napoleon to Savona were obliged to return without the pope’s signature to the document of concessions. The National Council was opened on the 17th of June, in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, under the nominal presidency of Cardinal Fesch. The opening discourse was delivered by Mgr. de Boulogne, Bishop of Troyes, who spoke in eloquent and burning words “of the Supreme Head of the episcopate, without whom it resembles a branch separated from the tree and withered, or a vessel tossed by the waves without rudder or steersman.”

“This see may be removed,” he said, “but it cannot be destroyed. Its magnificence may be taken away, but never its strength. Wherever this see shall establish itself it shall draw all others around it.” These words fell like burning coals in the midst of the assembly and produced great emotion. The effect had not died away when the Bishop of Nantes arose to comply with the formality of asking each prelate whether it pleased him that the council should be opened. “Yes,” answered the Archbishop of Bordeaux, “saving the obedience due to the Sovereign Pontiff, to whom I bind myself and whom I swear to obey.” Then Cardinal Fesch in a loud voice read the oath as prescribed by a bull of Pius IV.: “I acknowledge the Holy Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church to be the mother and mistress of all other churches; I promise and swear perfect obedience to the Roman pontiff, the successor of St. Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and Vicar of Jesus Christ on earth.” One by one the bishops bound themselves irrevocably to the cause of Pius VII. Napoleon was furious and berated his uncle for “getting up one of his scenes.” Two laymen were appointed to be present in his name at all future meetings of the bishops.

Some of the courtier prelates drew up a fulsome address to Napoleon, a kind of treatise on state theology, which they presented to the members of the council for their signature. Mgr. de Broglie, Bishop of Ghent, declared he would never sign it. Another bishop proposed that “the liberty of the pope” should be demanded. This was received with a confused murmur of applause; but Cardinal Fesch, who dreaded the wrath of his nephew, declared that the time was inopportune for such a request. Napoleon, unable longer to restrain himself, ordered the council to put an end to its “idle debates.” He gave the members eight days to devise an expedient for providing bishops for the vacant sees. As a sign of his displeasure he refused to receive the council officially at the Tuileries. The bishops, he said, had “acted as cowards.” In answer to the demand to find an expedient for providing bishops for the vacant sees without the confirmation of the pope, the council declared that it would first be necessary to send a deputation to consult Pius VII. This declaration was carried by Fesch to his imperial nephew. He was received with an outburst of anger. Napoleon would soon show the bishops their place. When the cardinal attempted to reason with him, he rudely stopped him: “What! theology again! Where did you learn it? Be quiet; you are an ignoramus.” He threatened to dissolve the council and organize a system of state religion, but finally drew up a decree himself, in which he falsely asserted that the pope had made the desired concessions. The bishops were deceived, and, with two exceptions, voted in favor of the decree. A little reflection, however, convinced many of them of the fraud which had been practised upon them, and they recalled their votes. Suddenly, on the 11th of July, Napoleon dissolved the council. The following day, at three o’clock in the morning, Mgr. de Broglie, Mgr. de Boulogne, and Mgr. Hirn, who had taken a prominent part in opposing the decree, were arrested in their beds and carried off to the prison of Vincennes. In August five cardinals and eight bishops, partisans of the emperor, were sent to Savona to make still another effort to win over Pius VII. to Napoleon’s plans. The Holy Father, who was so closely guarded that no one was allowed to see him except his bribed doctor and the jailer, was in total ignorance of all that had passed in the National Council. For five months, from September, 1811, to February, 1812, these cardinals and bishops used every argument and artifice to induce the pope to sign the decree of the council.

Their efforts were successful. Pius VII., worn out with importunities, feeble in body and in mind, wrote the brief of adhesion. But Napoleon was not satisfied. He was already organizing his army for the fatal Russian campaign, and he wrote to his Minister of Worship the following instructions: “I send you the original papal brief. Keep it and communicate its contents to nobody. I wish to find the bishops in Rome on my return, to see what we can do.… The truth is, the church is experiencing a crisis.” His victory over Russia was, in his imagination, already an accomplished fact; he would return the undisputed sovereign of all Europe, would gather the bishops in Rome, and would give to the church, as he had given to the state, a _Code Napoléon_.

On the 24th of January, 1812, the Holy Father wrote to him in the most unaffected and simple manner, and begged to be permitted to consult disinterested counsellors and to have free communication with the faithful. Napoleon disdained to answer this letter, but sent through his Minister of Worship the following notification to the deputation at Savona: “His majesty deems that it is unfitting to his dignity to answer the letter of the pope.… His majesty pities the ignorance of the pope, and compassionates a pontiff who could have played so great a part, but who has become the calamity of the church.… His majesty understands these matters of ecclesiastical jurisdiction better than the Holy Father.… If the pope cannot make a distinction which is simple enough to be grasped by the most uncultivated seminarian, why does he not voluntarily descend from the papal chair and leave it to a man who is less feeble in mind and better principled than he?” And now, just as he was setting out on the Russian campaign, he ordered that Pius VII. should be transferred from Savona to Fontainebleau.

The Holy Father was unwell, but to this no attention was paid. Just before reaching the Mont Cenis he fell dangerously ill. The journey was not interrupted. A bed was fitted up in the carriage and a surgeon procured, who, with the instruments that might be needed, accompanied him. When they reached Fontainebleau nothing was prepared, and the pope had to pass the first night in the porter’s lodge. A _Guide-book of Paris_, published at this time, informed the French that they possessed a “papal palace” in their capital. But the end was drawing near. On the 24th of June, 1812, Napoleon crossed the Niemen at the head of an army of five hundred thousand men. As he reached the opposite bank his horse stumbled and fell. His fatalism led him to consider this a bad omen. The Russians fled before him, and, after the victories of Smolensk and Borodino, he rode into Moscow on the 15th of September. It was silent as a desert, and the Kremlin, where he took up his residence, was like a tomb. At midnight from a hundred quarters the flames burst forth, and in the lurid light of the burning city the army began the fatal retreat. The weather, which had been fine, suddenly grew cold; sleet and snow and rain beat with merciless fury upon the men, from their benumbed hands their arms fell, and by the roadside they laid down to die. On the 18th of December Napoleon arrived, a fugitive, in Paris. In this one campaign he had lost 250,000 men, half of whom had died of cold and hunger.

With the beginning of the year 1813 he wrote to Pius VII. and begged him to believe that his feelings of respect and veneration were independent of circumstances. Shortly afterwards he went to visit the Holy Father at Fontainebleau, and upon their first meeting for eight years he embraced him with every mark of affection. The health of the pope was wretched, and advantage was taken of his weak condition to obtain still further concessions.

Upon the promise of Napoleon to liberate the imprisoned cardinals, bishops, and priests, Pius VII. signed the Concordat of Fontainebleau—an act which he almost immediately recalled, and which he never ceased to regret. When the faithful Pacca, after so long a separation, was at length admitted to his presence, he expressed his admiration for the pope’s heroic constancy.

“But finally,” cried out the Holy Father in anguish, “we
have sullied our conscience. Those cardinals dragged me to
the table and made me sign.”

Pius VII. was still held a prisoner, and Napoleon acted as though the Concordat of Fontainebleau still existed. He appointed bishops, imprisoned priests, and drafted seminarians to fill up his decimated regiments.

The victories of Lutzen and Bautzen were more brilliant than important. In August, 1813, the Emperor of Austria declared against his son-in-law. Then came the crushing defeat of Leipsic, and Napoleon was slowly driven back upon France, closely followed by the allied armies. Orders were sent to remove Pius VII. from Fontainebleau, and a few days later the war was raging at the very gates of the palace which he had so recently occupied. Finally, on the 10th of March, 1814, when all hope was lost, Napoleon signed a decree which restored his dominions to the pope. Since his removal from Fontainebleau Pius VII. had been driven about through various parts of France, closely guarded; but now that he turned his face toward Rome, his journey assumed the appearance of a triumphal procession, and at length, on the 24th of May, 1814, the Feast of Our Lady, Help of Christians, he re-entered the Holy City amid the universal enthusiasm of his people. Just one month before, in the palace of Fontainebleau, Napoleon signed the decree which declared his empire at an end; and, a fallen sovereign, he passed out in silence through the ranks of the men whom he had so often led to victory.

In his last meeting with Josephine he took her hand and said: “Josephine, I have been as fortunate as any man upon earth. But in this hour, when a storm is gathering over me, I have in the wide world none but you upon whom I can repose.” And in St. Helena he said to Caulaincourt: “If I live a hundred years, I shall never forget those scenes; they are the fixed ideas of my sleepless nights. I have had enough of sovereignty. I want no more of it; I want no more of it.”

It is not easy to form a just estimate of the character of Napoleon. We have heard veterans who had fought at Austerlitz and Lutzen declare that when he rode along the line his glance did so blind the eye that they could not look upon him; and they thought so. This light of glory still enshrines his memory and dazzles us, to prevent us from seeing him as he was. No one has ever doubted his surprising strength; his almost incredible power to bear labor, whether of body or mind; his wonderful intellect, which grasped things with equal ease, in general and in detail; his unequalled ability to organize an army, a nation, or a continent; his courage, which rose superior to the most crushing defeat.

But with these great endowments he had a coarse and selfish nature. He was as ready to lie as to tell the truth. No act that was expedient was bad. His ambitious ends sanctified all means by which they could be attained. Dissimulation, deceit, hypocrisy, betrayal of friends, imprisonment, murder, assassination, he was ready to use indifferently as his purposes demanded. Without moral convictions himself, he believed others equally devoid of them. To assign conscience as a reason for anything was in his eyes pretence and hypocrisy. The religious scruples of the pope and cardinals he held to be mere obstinacy and ill-will. When Pius VII. declared he had not the power to annul the marriage of Jerome with Miss Patterson, Napoleon saw in this only a desire to take revenge for the way in which he had been insulted at the coronation. After having persecuted bishops and priests, keeping many of them in prison, during his whole reign, he had the impudence to declare in St. Helena that the priests were all for him as soon as he allowed them to wear violet-colored stockings. He was the coarsest reviler and insulted all whom he feared or hated. The pope and the cardinals were “idiots and fools”; the republicans were “mad dogs and brigands”; the King of Prussia was “the most complete fool of all the kings on earth”; the Spanish Bourbons were “a flock of sheep”; De Broglie, the Bishop of Ghent, was “a reptile”; the priests who disapproved of the Concordat were “the scum of the earth”; and of the philosophers he said: “Je les ai comme une vermine sur mes habits.” His conduct towards women was coarse and contemptuous. They ought to know nothing and were not fit to have opinions. He told Madame de Staël to go home and knit her stockings; the greatest woman was she who had the most children—he wanted soldiers. He did not conceal his contempt for men. “Every year of my reign,” he said in St. Helena, “I saw more and more plainly that the harsher the treatment men received, the greater was their submission and devotion. My despotism then increased in proportion to my contempt for mankind.” From 1804 to 1815 he sacrificed to his mad ambition not less than five millions of men. Several thousand French subjects were shot merely for desertion. Each principal town had its _place aux fusillades_. The prisons of France were filled with his victims. A more thorough tyrant than he never lived. Liberty of all kinds was odious to him. He hated all whom he could not enslave. To be free was to be his enemy. While he reigned men spoke with bated breath, the press was fettered, and the church was in chains. In his own family he was a despot; he gave his brothers crowns, but only on condition that they would become his slaves; and when Lucien thought that even royal honors might be bought at too dear a price, he was forced to leave France.

His jealousy was surpassed only by his vanity. “Go,” said he to his soldiers, “kill and be killed; the emperor beholds you.”

He had a barbaric love of vulgar display, and this was one of the passions which impelled him to his bloody wars. No man ever had less heart. If he loved any one, it was Josephine, and her he sacrificed without a pang. Remorseless as destiny, which was his god, he trod out with the iron hoof of war right and life, and where he passed there was wailing and desolation as after pestilence. In his last illness on the desolate rock of St. Helena he spoke with reverence and feeling of religion. From the hands of the priest sent to him by Pius VII. he received the sacraments of the church. For six years he had held in cruel confinement Christ’s vicar, the gentlest of men; for six years he himself pined in living death on the barren island of St. Helena. It was the 5th of March, 1821, that he died. On the tomb of St. Peter Pius VII. offered up the divine Sacrifice for the repose of the soul of Napoleon.

[75] _The Life of Pope Pius VII._ By Mary H. Allies. London:
Burns & Oates. 1875.

MODERN ENGLISH POETRY.

Mr. Stedman, the author of _The Victorian Poets_, appears to be a painstaking and conscientious writer. He has read with extraordinary industry all the poetry of the period to which his criticism is limited, including not a little which, if he deemed it his duty to study, it was not worth his while to name. He has brought to this study a highly, although we think not methodically, cultivated mind and a retentive memory. He has a remarkable fluency of diction, bordering occasionally on volubility, and a certain fecundity of illustration; but his words have at times a vagueness, not to say inaptness, of application which is not suggestive of clearness or depth of thought. His work, he will pardon us for thinking, is rather an “essay in” technical than “philosophical criticism.” He himself appears to be conscious of this; for he writes in his preface: “If my criticism seems more technical than is usual in a work of this kind, it is due, I think, to the fact that the technical refinement of the period has been so marked as to demand full recognition and analysis.” Furthermore, he informs us that he “has no theory of poetry”; and we must own that, in the absence of any theory of poetry, a philosophical criticism of it seems to us to be out of the question. The qualities he requires of it “are simplicity and freshness in work of all kinds, and, as the basis of persistent growth and of greatness in a masterpiece, simplicity and spontaneity, refined by art, exalted by imagination, and sustained by intellectual power”; but does he understand what he means by this? We do not. Are we to understand that the only inseparable qualities, the only properties, of poetry which must characterize “work of all kinds”—by which we presume he means every real poetical production—are simplicity and freshness? What does he mean by simplicity? what by freshness? Does he refer these qualities to expression only? If so, what does he mean by “simplicity not being excluded from the Miltonic canon of poetry”?

In the higher efforts of poetry, he tells us, we must still have simplicity; but instead of freshness we are there to look for “spontaneity.” Are, then, “simplicity and spontaneity” the basis of persistent growth (we must own that even the meaning of this expression is hidden from us) and of “greatness in a masterpiece”? No; it must be “simplicity and spontaneity refined by art, exalted by imagination, and sustained by intellectual power.” But will not the simplicity, and most assuredly the spontaneity, disappear in the “artistic refinement”? Still more difficult is the idea of “simplicity and spontaneity exalted by imagination” being the “basis” of a poetical “masterpiece.” Poetry is the offspring of the imagination. Its excellence depends absolutely on the force and vigor of that intellectual power. There can be no poetry in its absence. And what other is imagination than intellectual power?

The poetic feeling we believe to be the echo of the soul to God in the presence of all his works. It is the emotion—really rapture—which wells up within it at the contemplation of the sensible images in which he reveals portions of his beauty in every variety and combination of form, proportion, color, touch, scent, and sound. Let the poet stand alone by the long margin of the sea on a still summer day. What but it is that profound emotion of which he is so intensely conscious as he looks out upon the immense ocean in its still unrest, which the blue heavens only seem to limit because his power of vision can reach no further, and when he hears the mellow murmur of the wavelets as, rearing themselves in graceful curves, they fall in low whispers along the yellow sands, as if depositing some message from infinitude, and then rapidly withdraw?

What else is that indefinable transport, resembling, only in an infinitely inferior degree, the ecstasy of a saint, which holds in suspense all our faculties as, in the languid heat of summer-tide, we stand at the foot of craggy heights between which in distant ages some river has found for itself a channel; and, as we gaze into the impenetrable shade of the dense thickets which cover their sides, hear the distant sound of falling waters, and scent the fresh perfume of the breathing foliage, the river flowing past us at our feet, to be almost immediately hidden from our view by projecting headlands, covered, they too, with the living darkness of foliage crowding upon foliage, trees on trees?

The delightful trance into which the poetic soul is lulled by the beauty and truth of God speaking through even the least of his works defies analysis; but we may say of it with some confidence that the objects that provoke it never weary of their charm. And wherefore? Because they do not obstruct the instinct of immortality, the yearning for infinitude, which is a passion within the soul of the poet, but is wholly absent from no one in whom God’s image is not quite effaced. On the contrary, their apparent endlessness, their want of boundary and definite outline, suggest infinitude, and awake the echoes of immortality from their profoundest depths, and minister to the deep yearning of the soul for something more lovely than aught of which it has been hitherto cognizant.

This it is which accounts for the immense superiority of Gothic to Grecian architecture—a superiority so complete as to elevate it into quite another sphere of beauty. The pleasure we experience at the sight of the highest efforts of a Greek architect is almost exclusively æsthetic, sensible, artistic. It is occasioned by sharpness of outline, grace of form, beauty of proportion. In these is the only poetry it can express; which can never, consequently, mount to sublimity. It can only be beautiful at best. It pleases the sense, but the soul—of the poet, at all events—soon wearies of them.

But the Gothic cathedral, with its soaring arches interlacing one another, its many naves, aisles, chapels, and recesses, its endless wealth of tracery and sculpture, its clustering pinnacles and spires pointing heavenwards, the deep shadows of its buttresses, and its many mounting roofs—in short, the utter absence of definiteness of outline, and its grandeur as well as grace of form and beauty of proportion—respond, and powerfully, to the soul’s craving for infinitude, impatience of limitation, and heart-yearning for the infinitely Beautiful and True.

This poetic sense it is which causes all mere human pleasures so soon to pall upon us. For it is impossible for the human soul to experience any save a transient pleasure from aught less than the infinite and eternal. Life itself is not a pleasure, because we know it is passing away. If we believed we should be annihilated at death, the pain of life would be intolerable.

We hold, therefore, that this suggestiveness—which must not be confused with obscurity, an element antagonistic to poetry—must underlie every expression of poetry, whatever form it may take. A didactic poem is a contradiction in terms, although such a production may abound in poetical passages. It reminds one of the pictures one sees sometimes in which the painter represents with great accuracy a melon or grapes, a glass with wine in it, knives and forks, a loaf of bread, a cheese sometimes, not omitting the maggots, or a lobster tempts his brush—in short, anything which goes into the human mouth for bodily sustenance. Ordinary folk gape with wonder at the cleverness of the imitation; but there is no one so dull as to suppose that there is in it any of the poetry of art.

The visible creation is the expression of the divine Idea in it. It is impossible, consequently, that it should not express, in all its infinitude of forms, modes, color, scent, sound, etc., the truth and beauty of Him who conceived it. It would be contrary to reason to suppose that he sent it forth into objective existence as a mere toy for the amusement of his august creature, as we throw dissolving views of grotesque figures upon a white surface for the amusement of children. It was to convey to us intimations of himself, as well as snatches of his happiness. The spherical form of the unnumbered worlds; the limited power of our visual organ, which can only see the beginnings of things; perpetual motion; sound and scent, which fail not when they are no longer within the reach of our senses; the revolution, in never-ending cycles, of years, seasons, weeks, and days; renewed life never failing to come forth from rest and repose—ay, even from death and corruption; imaginary horizons, vanishing distances, light prevailing over darkness; the thrill of awful pleasure with which the created soul of man apprehends this deep meaning of things—that spiritual instinct to which time is a pain, eternity a rapture—in all are mirrored, in every variety and form of grace and loveliness, as well as of unsightliness and horror, Infinitude, Immortality, God the infinitely lovable, because he is the infinitely Beautiful and True.

In proportion to the strength of this instinct is the excellence or inferiority of the poetic gift. From this must it draw all its highest inspirations. Poetry is, in fact, its advertent expression; and thus the poet is, like God—only, of course, after a secondary and imitative fashion—a creator (ποιητὴς). He avails himself of some of the illimitable wealth of imagery in which God has expressed, or given objective existence to, his own one but infinitely varied idea, and, by fresh combinations, throws them into really new forms or creations. Out of many examples that come to mind—for excellence in this is less uncommon than in the higher order of poetry, of which the crown and lord of nature form the material—may be quoted the following creation of a midsummer noon in the _Earthly Paradise_, by Morris:

“Within the gardens once again they met,
That now the roses did well-nigh forget;
For hot July was drawing to an end,
And August came the fainting year to mend
With fruit and grain; so ‘neath the trellises,
Nigh blossomless, did they lie well at ease,
And watched the poppies burn across the grass,
And o’er the bindweed’s bell the brown bee pass,
Still murmuring of his gains. Windless and bright
The morn had been, to help their dear delight;
But heavy clouds, ere noon, grew round the sun,
And, half-way to the zenith, wild and dun
The sky grew, and the thunder growled afar;
But, ere the steely[76] clouds began their war,
A change there came, and, as by some great hand,
The clouds that hung in threatening o’er the land
Were drawn away; then a light wind arose
That shook the light stems of that flowery close,
And made men sigh for pleasure.”

This brings us to another, and an important, point in which it is our misfortune to differ from Mr. Stedman. He regards poetry as an art. He treats it as such throughout this work; and as such he criticises it. Hence his criticism is almost exclusively technical; hence, too, it exhibits frequent inconsistencies. For example, amongst the properties he assigns to the highest poetry, which we have already quoted, he places spontaneity. By this term he means, we presume, a freedom from effort, the unbidden outflow of imagination, not the labored product of teaching and practice. But this is utterly inapplicable to art, which supposes instruction, clumsy first efforts, and perfection acquired only by years of toil. What there is of art in poetry is limited, or nearly so, to its expression; and even here the less there is of art, and the more of what Mr. Stedman means by spontaneity, the loftier and the more genuine the poetry. It is no praise but a depreciation of Matthew Arnold’s or Tennyson’s poetry to trace the inspiration of one to Bion and Moschus and of the other to Theocritus. In good sooth, he does the laureate injustice in the far-fetched examples of imitation of Theocritus he ascribes to him. It is the blemish of nearly all our modern poetry that its expression is so labored, so technical. For this it is that, in the highest poetry, nearly all who have tried it have failed; none more signally than Tennyson in _Queen Mary_. One only has succeeded—Sir Aubrey de Vere. Another—whom, because he has so foully outraged the moral sense of all mankind, we prefer not to name until he has made reparation, and who, if he had not cast from him all sense of the beautiful and the true, might have been perhaps the greatest poet of the age—is as remarkable for the originality and unstudiedness of his expression as for the brilliance and fecundity of his imagination.

Mr. Stedman literally limits poetry to expression. In a passage at the side of which is the marginal index, “What constitutes a poet,” he writes: “Again, the grammarian’s statement is true, that poetry is a means of expression. A poet may differ from other men in having profounder emotions and clearer perceptions; but this is not for him to assume, nor a claim which they are swift to grant. The lines,

“Oh! many are the poets that are sown
By nature—men endowed with highest gifts,
The vision and the faculty divine,
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse,”

imply that the recognized poet is one who gives voice, in expressive language, to the common thought and feeling which lie deeper than ordinary speech. He is the interpreter; moreover, he is the maker—an artist of the beautiful, the inventor of harmonious numbers which shall be a lure and a repose.”

It is clear from this unintelligible and self-contradicting passage that the writer has no theory of poetry. Yet in it he makes a very definite attempt to sketch such theory, although he before told us that he has none. What he means by it being “a grammarian’s statement” that “poetry is a means of expression” we know not. Had he asserted that poetry is the poet’s means of expression, we could have understood him without agreeing with him; but he identifies poetry with its expression. Say they must co-exist; but they are not identical. There is not a human soul without a body, nor a leaf without the sap of the tree; but great confusion would ensue from identifying the one with the other. He goes, however, even further than this. It seems to be his idea that no one can be a poet who does not write poetry. It is true he uses the term “recognized,” but he goes on to describe the poet as “an artist of the beautiful, the inventor of harmonious numbers.” But it is not necessary, for any one to be a poet, that he should be recognized as such. There are those who “want the acomplishment of verse” through the very intensity of the poetic gift. Their intuitions are so profound that language sinks under the task of conveying them; expression is overwhelmed. People never write more feebly than when under the influence of strong emotion. For this reason it is, too, that poetry may sometimes be improved by the travail of art, the less, however, in proportion to the inspiration of the poet. There are those, pre-eminently Shakspere, in whom the expression is nearly as inspired as the poetry.

Ingenium miserâ fortunatius arte
Credit, et excludit sanos Helicone Poëtas
Democritus.

In more than one passage Mr. Stedman approaches the truth about poetry, as when he says that “poets differ from other men in having profounder emotions and clearer perceptions”; and again when he writes: “Certain effects are suggested by nature; the poet discovers new combinations within the ground which these afford.” If for “effects” had been substituted “conceptions of the beautiful,” it would have been very near a sufficiently accurate description of the creative power of the poet; but he is hampered by his identification of poetry with its expression, and so, even here, substitutes “effects”—which really has no meaning in the context—for ideas. Poetry is the intuition of the Beautiful and True as expressed in nature and in man, not an analysis of its causes and effects. Not the least inspired of modern poets, Rossetti, has very exquisitely sung this theory of poetry in a sonnet on “St. Luke the Painter”:

“Scarcely at once she [Art] dared to rend the mist
Of devious symbols: but soon having wist
How sky-breadth and field-silence and this day
Are symbols also in some deeper way,
She looked through these to God, and was God’s priest.”

The fault of almost all the modern English poets is that they are too artistic. Certainly their poetry cannot be blamed as _carmen quod non_.

Multa dies et multa litura coercuit, atque
Perfectum decies non castigavit ad unguem.

But it makes too much display of labor. We admire its artistic skill, and that is its principal attraction. We feel that it is not nature which is hymning amidst so much art. The result of such obvious effort betrays the handicraft of the artisan rather than the inspiration of the poet. It is the Versailles fountains instead of Niagara. It cannot be too much insisted on that poetry is not one of the fine arts. The greater number of modern English poets, however, treat it as such, as much as is possible with only the imagery of words for their material. They are disciples rather of Horace than of Democritus. There is plenty of _labor_ and _litura_, and of verse _perfectum decies ad unguem_; of _ingenium miserâ fortunatius arte_ but little. They surpass in mountain-labor the forgotten Lucilius, who _in versu faciendo sæpe caput scabunt, vivos et rodunt ungues_; but they have too little of “the sacred madness of the bards” for admission into Helicon. The reason is not far to seek. We notice a similar phenomenon in Greece when religious belief was forced to retire before scepticism and the prating sophists. To the sceptical temper of the age is undoubtedly owing the labor devoted to expression, which has done all it could to reduce poetry to an art. It has also occasioned a certain subjectivity, if we may use the word—a painful mental analysis—which is fatal to poetry.

Robert Browning is the greatest offender in this regard. So painfully intense, in truth, is his introspection that he pays far less attention to expression than his contemporaries. Cut off from the divine suggestiveness of nature by his hard materialism, he does nothing but think; and thinking poetically rather than syllogistically is an unamalgamation. Thought and expression are alike confused, rugged, and difficult. The reader, without even melody of rhythm to help him on, stumbles and gropes through intricate sentences, parentheses in parentheses, a startling image here and there; anon a whirring flight of poetry, or what resembles it; but the wings soon droop, and the poet is on the earth again, or lower than the earth—anywhere but soaring heavenwards. He has in him the making of a poet. Had he the Catholic faith, his imagination would carry him to great heights and keep him there. He might have soared nigh to Shakspere. His talent is dramatic—which is to say, his poetic gift is of the highest order; but nature has no divine suggestiveness to him, the hollow shell whispers no eternity in his dull ear; for him man has no end, events no purpose; and inasmuch as man has a definite end, and a sublime one, to which events definitely contribute, he is not able to create men and women, a destiny, or destinies, in any of which should there be a living verisimilitude. A plot in which men, women, and children talk and act as men, women, and children do talk and act is out of his reach. His highest effort is the dramatic poem, in which, however, occur at times passages of great dramatic power, showing what he could have done had he not been a heathen.

Mr. Tennyson has been the subject of various articles in THE CATHOLIC WORLD; but so markedly does he contrast with Browning, and so noteworthy is the different bias given to the poetry of each by the materialistic spirit of the age, that we cannot afford to pass him by here in complete silence.

We may look in vain in the poetry of the laureate for passages of dramatic force such as now and then light up the creaking, groaning poetry of Browning; but he never grovels, as the latter does very often indeed.

Tennyson has strong sympathy with the one faith, and, as one may think, a kind of supernatural bias in its favor, or he too, like the author of _Paracelsus_ and _Bishop Blosegram’s Apology_, might have used his poetry as a fantastic costume for crude psychological problems and for the mind-darkness of doubt. The distinguishing characteristic of his poetry is the exquisitely artistic finish of its expression. Every line shows signs of careful toil. His genius has been without doubt hampered by it. He is more artist than poet; and, as though conscious of this, he seems to claim inspiration by an affectation of oracular obscurity. Yet not unseldom the refined simplicity of word and phrase, the grace of imagery, and all the artistic brilliance of choicest ornament express poetry, although never of a very high order. An elegiac poem such as _In Memoriam_, of nearly seven hundred quatrains, however beautiful in expression, has “unreal” on the face of it; and that is fatal to its pretensions as a poem. Yet are there indications here and there of true poetic feeling.

Painful is it, and not without shame, to have a difference with all the world of criticism. But if we have reason, our fellow-critics will not disdain us; and if we have not, we throw the blame on our theory of poetry. But there is a modern poet—Rossetti—whom, on the whole, we must place on a higher pedestal than Tennyson. With an equal simplicity of word and phrase, a refinement of expression not inferior, he has the art, if it be the result of art, to conceal his art. It is true he has all the artistic finish of Tennyson—so much so that we cannot but feel that it is an artist who is singing to us; but the artist disappears in the poet. We must disenchant ourselves of the thrall of his poetry before we can criticise the artistic perfectness of its expression. It is not only that, as Tennyson, he paints scenes of nature and human doings with consummate art; but, true poet that he is, he catches the very life of nature and it throbs within his verse. His soul echoes to the Beautiful and the True imaged in nature through all her modes and forms of color, scent, and sound; he reads their meaning; and when he reproduces them, as Mr. Stedman has it, “in different combinations,” they are as suggestive of those ideas of God as the very images of nature herself. Take, for example, the eleventh song in _The House of Life—The Sea Limits_:

“Consider the sea’s listless chime:
Time’s self it is made audible—
The murmur of the earth’s own shell.
Secret continuance sublime
Is the sea’s end: our sight may pass
No furlong further. Since time was
This sound hath told the lapse of time.

“No quiet, which is death’s—it hath
The mournfulness of ancient life
Enduring always at dull strife.
As the world’s heart of rest and wrath
Its painful pulse is in the sands
Lost utterly, the whole sky stands,
Gray and not known, along its path.

“Listen alone beside the sea,
Listen alone among the woods;
Those voices of twin solitudes
Shall have one sound alike to thee.
Hark where the murmurs of thronged men
Surge and sink back and surge again—
Still the one voice of wave and tree.

“Gather a shell from the strown beach
And listen at its lips: they sigh
The same desire and mystery,
The echo of the whole sea’s speech.
And all mankind is thus at heart
Not anything but what thou art:
And earth, sea, man, are all in each.”

This is poetry of the loftiest kind.

We cannot forbear quoting one more example of his “quality.” It is poetry which reaches near to Shakspere. “The poet of the world” himself might have thus grandly imaged lust—with more nervous terseness, may be; but the structure of dramatic numbers exacts that, and we do not yet know that Mr. Rossetti is not equal to the drama.

“Like a toad within a stone
Seated while time crumbles on;
Which sits there since the earth was cursed
For man’s transgression at the first;
Which, living through all centuries,
Not once has seen the sun arise;
Whose life, to its cold circle charmed,
The earth’s whole summers have not warmed;
Which always, whitherso the stone
Be flung, sits there, deaf, blind, alone—
Ay, and shall not be driven out
Till that which shuts him round about
Break at the very Master’s stroke,
And the dust thereof vanish as smoke,
And the seed of man vanish as dust:
Even so within this world is lust.”

Thus much we have quoted in support of a criticism which will not be readily assented to by all. Our space does not admit of our quoting more. But we refer the reader to _The Blessed Damozel_ as a gem not to be outshone; and, for dramatic power joined to the loftiest poetry, to _A Last Confession_.

Next after Rossetti, if at all after, comes William Morris. In the form and sound and bias of their numbers there is a close resemblance. The imaginings of the latter flow more profusely, perhaps because he does not tarry to spend so much care upon his art. Indeed, whilst the _art_ of Rossetti is faultless in its way, a seldom blemish, like a minute blur in a diamond of the best water, may be detected in that of Morris, as the word “now” thrice in three successive quatrains, the word “golden” in five successive lines, in a scene, of almost tragic pathos, of _Sir Galahad, a Christmas Mystery_—the finest music he has smitten from the chords of no feeble instrument:

“Why not, O _twisting_ knight, now he is dead?”

But amidst so much finish and faultlessness slight fallibilities like these are, as it were, a relief. The truth is, the artistic spirit in both, which (and no wonder) is all enamored of mediæval art—art in those ages of faith when she appeared in forms of beauty as sublime as faultless—is too forgetful of the living, breathing, moving present. That they should drink in inspirations of the Beautiful and the True from the forms in which that most poetic age embodied them, is well; but the art—the poetic expression—was _natural_ to that epoch; it is not natural to this. If this is made too conspicuous, as we think it is in both these poets, there is a risk of mannerism; and mannerism is an artistic blemish. The attempt to entice men away from the turbid and muddy torrent of sounding hap-hazard words, which, setting in from Johnson and Gibbon, has swollen into an inundation of all but sheer nonsense from the babbling tributaries of the cheap press, to the nervous grace of simple words and simple sentences and the suggestive imagery of pure nature, is a service to letters as well as art, for which alone they and Tennyson, and all the poets of that school, deserve to be crowned. But aught by which so profoundly artistic a renaissance is needlessly dissociated from the present should have been carefully eschewed. In the matter of words we do not think that such as “japes,” “dromond,” “whatso,” the substitution of the ending “head” for “hood” in words for which universal custom has decreed the former, and so on, are a needed revival of the obsolete. We think, too, that simplicity of grammatical construction has been pushed to the verge of affectation. Still, it is so artistically done, is so beautiful in itself, and evidences such a return of leal homage from hideousness to the rightful Beautiful and the True, that it goes against us to complain.