Chapter XVI: Found at Last! (8)

As a part of the same programme, the “Press-Bureau” just a year ago raised the cry that France was buying horses, and that in less than three months she would declare war on Germany. On the same day and at the same hour this startling announcement was made in Frankfort, in Leipzig, in Stuttgart, and other cities. The following day hundreds of newspapers throughout the fatherland took up the chorus and began to shout that the empire was threatened. Now, all the world knows that France at that time was as little thinking of making war on Germany as of tunnelling the Atlantic Ocean; but this piece of journalistic legerdemain roused the Teutonic mind to the necessity of strengthening the army and increasing the military resources of a country which was already a camp of soldiers.

No figure of rhetoric is more forcible than repetition, and we may calculate with mathematical precision just how many leading articles, all saying the same thing in fifty different localities, are required in order to fabricate a public opinion on a given subject.

Another trick of the reptile-press is employed to prevent the people from getting a knowledge of the speeches of the opposition in parliament. The arguments of these orators are either excluded from its columns or caricatured so as to appear childish or ridiculous. When, for instance, Sonnemann, the member for Frankfort, made an appeal in behalf of the Alsacians, who had themselves been reduced to dead silence, and showed from authentic documents the pitiable condition to which that province had been brought, the organs of the “Press-Bureau” declared that “to answer such utterances would be beneath the dignity of a chancellor of the empire; such want of political honor had no claim to pass as the honest views of an individual”; and when Mallinckrodt placed his hand on Lamarmora’s book to prove his charges against Bismarck, the _Spener’sche Zeitung_ announced that “the national parties were filled with deepest disgust at the conduct of the _Centrum’s_ faction, and were not able to conceal their regret that Prince Bismarck should deign to answer these Ultramontane brawlers, since, by consenting to notice the tricks of Windthorst, Mallinckrodt, and Schorlemer, he was giving prominence to what ought to be completely ignored”; and then closed with the phrase of Frederick the Great, “Shall we play at fisticuffs with the rabble?” The _Norddeutsche Allgemeine_ and _National Zeitung_ indulged in similar strains, and these articles were then republished by nearly the entire German press. When an opponent is especially troublesome the press-reptiles raise the cry that he has been bought up by foreign gold; and in this they are probably sincere, since it must be difficult for them to understand how any man could refuse to sell himself for a proper consideration.

For five years now Bismarck’s venal press has poured the full tide of its wrath upon the bishops and priests of Germany. Here was a subject upon which the reptiles could distil their venom to their hearts’ content. What magnificent opportunities were here offered to the “mud-bathers” to hunt through the sewers of the centuries and to wallow in the mire of the ages; to revive Luther’s vocabulary and refurbish the rusty weapons that for hundreds of years had lain idle and hurtless! What an open field was here in which to ventilate historical calumnies, to produce startling effects by the dramatic grouping of striking figures; to bring out the light of the golden present by causing it to fall upon the dark and bloody background of the past! And what divine occasions for indignation, wrath, horror, word-painting to cause the hair to stand on end and the eyes to start! Here was place for withering scorn, patriotic thunder, lurid lightning to sear the Jesuitic head bent upon the ruin of the new empire. And with what demoniac delight the hired crew ring the changes on each popular catch-word—progress, liberty, culture, free thought; and how they foam and rage when a bishop or a priest has the “boundless impudence” to speak in defence of the church! “It has come to this,” says the _Dresdener Volksbote_ (April 17, 1873): “Minorities must keep silence.”

“Gone,” exclaims a former German Minister of State,—“gone is the reign of noble ideas; the power of the love of country and of freedom; the worth and honor of the national character! Money alone is loved, and all means by which it is acquired seem natural and praiseworthy.” The very foundations of the moral order are attacked by this vile press. The events of 1866 and 1870 are now spoken of as “an historical phenomenon, which cannot be judged by the current notions of morality, but in accordance with which these moral principles themselves must be widened and corrected.” This is the low and degrading philosophy to which the idolatry of success fatally leads.

But, for the honor of journalism, a portion of the German press has remained closed against the insidious power of the “Reptile-fund.” No Catholic newspaper has lent itself even covertly to this conspiracy against truth and liberty; and it must be admitted, too, that the socialistic journals have refused the government bribes; their circulation, however, which is not large, is confined almost exclusively to the laboring classes, and their influence is but little felt. The power of the Catholic press in Germany is of recent growth. In the early part of the present century the only periodical of any weight devoted to the defence of the interests of the church in Germany was the _Theologische Quartalschrift_, founded in 1819 as the organ of the Tübingen professors. Twenty years later Joseph Görres established in Munich the _Historisch-politischen Blätter_, which soon caused the influence of his powerful mind to be felt throughout the fatherland, and which, under the editorial management of the historian Jörg, is still to-day one of the ablest reviews in Germany. The censorship of the press which, prior to the revolution of 1848, was maintained in all the German governments, was exercised in a way that rendered Catholic journalism impossible. No sooner, however, had the Parliament of Frankfort proclaimed the liberty of the press than the Catholics hastened to take advantage of it by creating newspapers to advocate their religious interests. The bishops and priests, in obedience to the earnest exhortations of Pius IX., threw themselves into the work with a will; the people followed their example; press-unions were formed and a large number of Catholic newspapers sprang into life. Bismarck’s persecution of the church gave yet greater force to this movement and increased both the number and the circulation of Catholic journals. In the new German Empire there are to-day two hundred and thirty newspapers devoted to the interests of the church. The _Augsburger Wochenblatt_ has a subscription list of thirty-two thousand; the _Mainzer Volksblatt_, one of thirty thousand. Twelve thousand copies of the _Germania_ (in Berlin) are sold daily, and many other Catholic journals have a circulation of from five to ten thousand copies. As this powerful Catholic press could not be bought, nothing remained to be done but to silence it.

At the close of the year 1872 all Prussian journals were warned, under pain of confiscation, not to publish the Christmas Allocution of Pope Pius IX. Mallinckrodt, the vigilant Catholic leader, raised his voice in protest against this attempt upon the liberty of the press; but the Reichstag was silent, and the newspapers which had not heeded the warning were seized. The _Mainzer Journal_ was brought into court for having presumed to print an open letter to the emperor, in which was found the following sentence: “The emperor is bound by the laws of the moral order just like the least of his subjects.” The government procurator (Schön, in Mainz, on the 19th of December, 1873) declared that the emperor is a “sanctified” person, whose majesty is “above the laws of the state,” and the bare address “to the emperor” is a punishable offence. For republishing this open letter the editors of the _Kölner Volkszeitung_ and the _Mühlheimer Anzeiger_ were condemned to prison for two months. Siegbert, the managing editor of the _Deutscher Reichszeitung_ (Catholic), was called upon to give the name of the writer of a certain article which he had published; and upon his declaration that this would be a breach of honor he was thrown into prison.

On the 1st of July, 1874, a new law came into force, by which still further restrictions were placed upon the liberty of the press; and on the 15th of the same month the Minister of Justice enjoined upon the government officials to keep sharp watch upon the newspapers. Within six months from this date the _Germania_ newspaper in Berlin had been condemned thirty-nine times; and there were besides twenty-four untried charges against it in court. In January, February, March, and April, 1875—four months—one hundred and thirty-six editors were condemned either to prison or to pay a fine. The most of these were Catholics, though some of them belonged to the democratic and socialistic press. It is not necessary to say that the “press-reptiles” were not represented among them. These editors were thrust into the cells of common criminals, were refused books and writing material, and were forced to live upon “prison fare,” which many found so unpalatable that they could eat nothing but rye-bread.

The reptile-press alone is tolerated. If a man wishes to be honest, and has, notwithstanding, no desire to go to jail, the most unwise thing which he could do would be to become a journalist in the new German Empire. To refuse to eat of the “Reptile-fund” is to condemn one’s self to Bismarck’s “prison fare” of beans and cold water.

To poison the wells is not held to be lawful, even in war; but to taint the fountain-sources of knowledge, and to corrupt the channels through which alone the public receives its general information, is not thought to be unworthy of a great hero, if we may judge from the Prussian chancellor’s popularity with Englishmen and Americans, which is not diminished even by his determined efforts to crush all who refuse to sell their souls or renounce their manhood.

“The only man,” said Carlyle of Bismarck—“the only man appointed by God to be his vicegerent here on earth in these days, and knowing he was so appointed, and bent with his whole soul on doing and able to do God’s work.” And our great centennial celebration of the reign of popular government is to be desecrated by a colossal statue of the man who is its deadliest enemy.

We have not, in this country, wholly escaped the evil effects of the vast European conspiracy against truth and honor which is carried on through the agency of “Press-Bureaus,” “Telegram-Bureaus,” “Correspondence-Bureaus,” and “Reptile-funds.” One may, for instance, readily detect the “trail of the serpent” in many of the cable despatches to the Associated Press, and not less evidently in the European correspondence of some of our leading journals. Is it not worthy of remark that so few of our great newspapers should have taken up the defence of the persecuted and imprisoned German editors? The American press, which can, upon such slight compulsion, be blatant and loud-mouthed, has been most reserved in its treatment of Bismarck; has, indeed, hardly attempted to veil its sympathy with his despotic and arbitrary measures. If this approval of tyranny went merely the length of applauding his persecution of the Catholic Church, it might be explained by the desire to pander to popular Protestant prejudice. But how shall we account for it when there is question of the degradation and enslavement of the press itself; of the violation of every principle of liberty; and of the systematic consolidation of the most complete military despotism which the world has ever seen? Might it not be possible, even, to trace to the _Reptilien-fond_ the recent attempts to rekindle in the United States the flame of religious hate and fanaticism? However this may be, it is unfortunately true that money is the controlling power in American as in German journalism. Its influence is as discernible in the columns of our own “independent” press as in a genuine Berlin “mud-bather’s” double-leaded leader.

“How can we help it?” said a well-known editor of Vienna. “A newspaper office is a shop where publicity is bought and sold.” “I will be frank,” said another journalist. “I am like a woman of the town (_Ich bin die Hure von Berlin_): if you wish to have this and that written, pay your money.” Praise and blame, approval and condemnation, are the articles of merchandise of the press, and they are offered to the highest bidder.

“When the proprietor of a journal,” says Sacher-Mosach, a widely-known and conscientious writer, who was for some time connected with the Vienna newspaper, the _Presse_, and afterwards with the _Neue Freie Presse_—“when the proprietor of a journal has entered into lucrative relations with a bank, he is not content with placing his sheet at its disposition in whatever relates to financial matters; but if the director of the bank, as sometimes happens, is a man of fancy who patronizes an actress who has beauty but not talent, he will order his theatrical critic to praise this lady without stint; and the critic will reserve all his squibs for some old _comédienne_ who is not protected by a bank director or by any one else. If a great publisher has all the works which appear in his house advertised in the journal, the proprietor will direct his book critic to find them all admirably written, profound, and full of the freshest and most delightful thoughts; and the author is just as certain to be praised in this sheet as he is to be torn to pieces by the newspapers in which his book has not been advertised. The first principle of journalistic industry and of the criticism at its command is to recognize merit only when and so far as it is financially profitable to do so.”[102]

It is far from our thought to wish to deny the vast power for good exercised by the press; but this is its own constant theme, and we have deemed it a more worthy, even though a less pleasant, task to point out at least some of the ways in which its power may be turned against the highest interests of truth and the dearest liberties of the people. A thoughtful and fearless work on the influence of journalism on our American civilization would be a fitting contribution to the centennial literature, and at the same time a most instructive chapter in the history of the country. The only attempt of this kind which so far has been made does not rise above the dignity of a compilation, and is without value as a philosophical discussion of the subject.

[97] _Die deutsche Zeitschriften und die Entstehung
der öffentlichen Meinung. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte
des Zeitungswesens._ Von Heinrich Wuttke.—The German
newspapers and the origin of public opinion: a
contribution to the history of journalism. Leipzig:
1875.

[98] _Die deutsche Zeitschriften_, p. 309.

[99] This spurious document has got into many
books; _e.g._, into Hahn’s _Geschichte des preussischen
Vaterlandes_.

[100] See _Ma Mission en Prusse_, by Benedetti, Paris,
1871, p. 372 et seq.

[101] Roth, _Achtzig Tage in preussischen Gefangenschaft_,
p. 13.

[102] Sacher-Mosach, _Ueber den Werth der Kritik_,
Leipzig, 1873, p. 55.

SOME FORGOTTEN CATHOLIC POETS.

“… Illacrimabiles
Urgentur, ignotique longa
Nocte carent quia vate sacro.”

When we speak of Catholic poets, three of the foremost names in English literature come up at once—Dryden, Pope, and Moore. The two latter are more eminent, perhaps, as poets than as Catholics, but of Dryden’s sincerity and steadfastness in the change of faith which “moralized his song” and gave a masterpiece to English poetry there is, happily, no doubt. Many later names are familiar to the general reader as those of Catholics whose genius has lent lustre to our own epoch. Some, like Newman, Faber, De Vere, and Adelaide Procter, claim fellowship with the most famous and are known wherever English poetry is read. Others, like Caswall, Coventry Patmore, and D. F. MacCarthy, are favorites of a narrower circle. All are known as Catholic poets to many by no means intimate with their works. Even poor Clarence Mangan has not been denied his place and his crust of praise on the doorsteps of the “Victorian Era”—he was never a very importunate suppliant: no act of Parliament could have made that minstrel a “sturdye begger”—and is scarcely yet forgotten, although he added to the (æsthetic) crime of being a Catholic and the weakness of being an Irishman the unpardonable sin of living and dying in utter poverty and wretchedness.

Our present business, however, is not with these or with any who, being dead, have friends and followers to sound their praises, or, living, whose books may still be read and admired, if only by themselves. We shall take leave to introduce the reader into an obscurer company, where he will yet, we are assured, find those who are not unworthy of his friendship and esteem. They themselves and their memories even are ghosts; but they will gladly take form and substance to receive our sympathetic greeting and unbosom themselves of their sorrows. Fate has pressed hardly on them; they have felt the “iniquity of oblivion”; forgetfulness has been for most of them their only mourner; upon their trembling little rushlight of glory that each fondly hoped was to be a beacon for eternity that sardonic jester, Time, has clapped his grim extinguisher and they are incontinently snuffed out. Posterity, their court of last appeal, is bribed to cast them, and their scanty heritage of immortality is parcelled out among a younger and greedier generation. Instead of the trophies and mausoleums they looked to so confidently, the monuments more lasting than brass, they are fain to put up with a broken urn in an antiquarian’s cabinet, a half-obliterated headstone in Sexton Allibone’s deserted graveyard.

We own to a weakness for neglected poets. The reigning favorite of that whimsical tyrant, Fame, ruffling in all the bravery of new editions and costly bindings, worldly-minded critics may cringe to and flatter; we shall seek him out when he is humbled and in disgrace, very likely out at elbows and banished to the Tomos of the bookstall or the Siberia of the auction-room. We are shy indeed of those great personages who throng the council-chambers of King Apollo, and are ill at ease in their society. A bowing acquaintance with them we crave at most, to brag of among our friends, and, for the rest, are much more at home with the little poets who cool their heels in the gracious sovereign’s anteroom. These we can take to our bosoms and our firesides; but imagine having Dante every day to dinner, leaving hope at the door as he comes scowling in, or Milton for ever discoursing “man’s first disobedience” over the tea and muffins! Don Juan’s Commander were a more cheerful guest.

It is pleasant, we take it, to turn aside now and then from the crowded highway where these great folks air their splendors, and lose ourselves in the dewy woods where the lesser muses hide, tracing some slender by-path where few have strayed.—_secretum iter et fallentes semita vitæ_. The flowers that grow by the roadside may be more radiant or of rarer scent; but what delight to explore for ourselves the shy violet hidden from other eyes, to stumble by untrodden ways upon the freshness of secret springs, and perhaps of a sudden to emerge in the graveyard aforesaid, where the air is full of elegies more touching than Gray’s, and our good sexton is at hand to wipe the dust from this or the other sunken tombstone of some world-famous bard and help us to decipher his meagre record. The tombstone is the folio containing his immortal works; it is heavier than most tombstones, and his world-famous memory moulders quietly beneath it. Surely there is something pathetic in such a destiny; something which touches a human chord. We may pity the fate of many a forgotten poet whose poems we should not greatly care to read. With their keen self-consciousness, which is not vanity, and their sensitiveness to outward impressions, poets more than most men cling to that hollow semblance of earthly life beyond the grave, that mirage of true immortality, we call posthumous fame. More than most they dread and shrink from the callous indifference, the cynical disrespect, of the mighty _sans-culotte_, Death. To die is little; but to die and be forgotten, to vanish from the scene of one’s daily walks and talks and countless cheerful activities, as utterly and as silently as a snow-flake melts in the sea; to be blotted out of the book of life as carelessly as a schoolboy would sponge a cipher from his slate—this jars upon us, this makes us wince. From that fate, at least, the poet feels himself secure; he leaves behind him the Beloved Book. With that faithful henchman to guard it, the pale phantom of his fame cannot be jostled aside from the places that knew him by the hurrying, selfish crowds. It will remain, the better part of himself, “the heir of his invention,” but kinder than most heirs, to jog the world’s elbow from time to time and buy him a brief furlough from oblivion. Through that loyal interpreter he may still hold converse with his fellows, who might ill understand the speech of that remote, mysterious realm wherein he has been naturalized a citizen; he will keep up a certain shadowy correspondence with the cosey firesides, the merry gatherings, he has left that may serve to warm and cheer him in the chilly company of ghosts; perhaps—who knows?—may even lend him dignity and consequence among that thin fraternity. He will not wholly have resigned his voice in mundane matters; his memory, as it were a spiritual shadow, will continue to fall across the familiar ways; he will have his portion still, a place reserved for him, in the bustling, merry world. Very likely at this stage of his reflections he will whisper to himself, _Non omnis moriar_; in his enthusiasm he may go further, and with gay, vain, prattling Herrick share immortality, as though it were a school-boy’s plum-cake, among his friends. Hugging this smiling illusion, he resigns himself to the grave, and the daisies have not had time to bloom thereon before the Beloved Book, the loyal interpreter, the faithful henchman, the wonder-worker of his dream, is as dead and utterly forgotten as—well, let us say as the promises our friend the new Congressman made us when he expressed such friendly anxiety about our health just previous to the late election.

So utter, even ludicrous, a _bouleversement_ of hopes so passionate—and there is nothing a poet longs for so passionately as remembrance after death, unless it be recognition in life—may touch the sourest cynic. It may be as Milton says in his proudly conscious way: _Si quid meremur, sana posteritas sciet_. But what comfort is it to our undeserving to know that a sane posterity is justified in forgetting it? Good poetry, like virtue, is its own reward. But the bad poet, outcast of gods and men, and of every bookseller who owns not and publishes a popular magazine; the Pariah of Parnassus, the Ishmael of letters, with every critic’s hand against him, haunted through life by the dim, appalling spectre of his own badness, helplessly prescient in lucid intervals of the quaintly cruel doom which is to consign him after death to the paper-mill, there to be made over—_heu! fides mutatosque deos!_—for the base uses of other bad poets, his rivals—if to this martyr we cannot give consolation, we surely need not grudge compassion.

The discerning reader may have gathered from these remarks that the bards we are about to usher back from endless night into his worshipful presence are not all of the first order, or indeed of any uniform order, of excellence. They are not all Miltons or Shaksperes: _si quid meremur_ would be for some of them an idle boast, and their posterity can hardly be convicted of insanity for having sedulously let them be. But neither must we argue rashly from this neglect of them that they deserved to be neglected. Neglect was for a time the portion of the greatest names in English letters. Up to the middle of the last century it was practically the common lot of all the writers who came before the Restoration. Literary gentlemen, the wits of the coffee-house, the Aristarchuses of Dick’s or Button’s, knew about them in a vague way as a set of queer old fellows who wrote uncouth verses in an outlandish dialect about the time of Shakspere and Milton. The more enterprising poets stole from them; but English literature as a living body knew them not. They were no longer members of the guild or made free of its mysteries; they were foreigners among their own people, speaking a strange tongue, shrewdly suspected of unwholesome dealings in such forbidden practices as fancy and imagination, and on the whole best excluded from the commonwealth of letters. Even Shakspere and Milton were little more than names. To the patched and periwigged taste of Queen Anne’s and the Georgian era they made no appeal; the critics of the quadrille-table and the tea-gardens, the “pretty fellows” of the Wells, voted them low and insipid. Milton was a wild fanatic with heterodox notions of regicide, who wrote a dull epic which the ingenious Mr. Addison saw fit to praise in his _Spectator_ for a novelty, of course, though his papers upon it were certainly far less amusing than those devoted to Sir Roger and his widow or the diversions of the Amorous Club; while Shakspere was a curious old playwright whom the great Mr. Pope stooped to admire with qualifications, and even to edit—with notes, and some of whose rude productions, notably _King Lear_, when polished and made presentable by the elegant Mr. Tate, were really not so bad, though of course not for a moment to be compared to such superlative flights of genius as _The Distressed Mother_ or _The Mourning Bride_. Does anybody nowadays read the elegant Mr. Tate, King William’s laureate of pious and immortal memory? Besides his labors in civilizing _King Lear_ and his celebrated _Poems upon Tea_, perhaps also upon toast, a grateful country owed to him, in conjunction with Dr. Brady, its rescue from Sternhold and Hopkins, “arch-botchers of a psalm or prayer,” of whom we read, with a subdued but mighty joy, that they

“… had great qualms
When they translated David’s Psalms,”

as well they might. Yet, despite this notable achievement, Nahum (Nahum, O Phœbus! was his name) has long since ceased to fill the speaking trump. But for his impertinences to the “poor despised” Lear he would be quite forgotten. He is a fly like many another preserved in Shakspere’s amber.

One reads with a sort of dumb rage of these essays of smirking mediocrity to “improve on” that colossal genius. It was Gulliver tricked out by the Liliputians. Tate was not the only ‘prentice hand that tried its skill at “painting the lily.” Cibber and Shadwell were industrious at it, and to this day many of us know Shakspere’s “refined gold” only as it comes to us electroplated from the Cibberian crucible. Lord Lansdowne prepared a _Jew of Venice_, which was acted with a prologue by Mr. Bevill Higgins—another Phœbean title which the great trumpeter has unaccountably dropped. Mr. Higgins brings forward Shakspere telling Dryden:

“These scenes in their rough native dress weremine,
But now, improved, with nobler lustre shine;
The first rude sketches Shakspere’s pencil drew,
But all the shining master-strokes are new.
This play, ye critics, shall your fury stand,
Adorn’d and rescuéd by a faultless hand.”

Here are two of the shining master-strokes:

“As who should say, I am, sir, _an_ oracle”;

“Still quiring to the _blue-eyed_ cherubim”!

And this was Pope’s “Granville the polite,” the “Muses’ glory and delight” of Young, who informs us, moreover—he had certainly a very pretty taste and boundless generosity in praising a person of quality—that, though long may we hope brave Talbot’s blood will run In great descendants, Shakspere has but one, And him my Lord (he begs will) permit him not to name, But in kind silence spare his rival’s shame. The generous reserve is vain, however. Each reader will defeat his useless aim, And to himself great Agamemnon name. Great Agamemnon is Granville:

“Europe sheathed the sword
When this great man was first saluted lord,”

apparently that he might give his whole time to filling Shakspere with shining new master-strokes like those above.

All this sounds ridiculous enough. But even genius was bitten by the same tarantula. We all know how Johnson treated _Lycidas_. Dryden found the rhyme in Milton’s juvenile poems “strained and forced” (this of _L’Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, for example!), and confessed that Shakspere’s diction was almost as difficult to him as Chaucer. How difficult Chaucer was much nearer his own time may be inferred from the leonine Latin version of the _Troilus and Cresscide_ which Francis Kinaston, an Oxford scholar, published in 1635, with the avowed object of rescuing Chaucer “from the neglect to which his obsolete language had condemned him by rendering him generally intelligible.” And Cartwright, “the florid and seraphicall preacher,” approves his pious labor, telling him:

“‘Tis to your happy cares we owe that we
Read Chaucer now without a dictionary.”

What a commentary on the educational system of the time that in England such English as this—

“This Troilus, as he was wont to guide
His yonge knights, he lad hem up and doune
In thilke large temple, on every side
Beholding aie the ladies of the toune,”

should be less generally intelligible than such Latin as this:

“Hic Troilus pro more (ut solebat)
Juveniles equites pone se sequentes
Per fani spatia ampla perducebat
Assidue urbis dominas intuentes.”

But so it was, and so it was to be long after. In 1718 Bysshe, in his _Art of Poetry_, “passed by Spenser and the poets of his age, because their language has become so obsolete that most readers of our age have no ear for them, and therefore Shakspere is quoted so rarely in this collection.” And Thomas Warton says of Pope’s obligations to Milton, “It is strange that Pope, by no means of a congenial spirit, should be the first who copied _Comus_ or _Il Penseroso_. But Pope was a gleaner of the old English poets; and he was here pilfering from obsolete English poetry without the least fear or danger of being detected.” Pope certainly was a proficient in his own “art of stealing wisely.” “Who now reads Cowley?” he asks, and answers his own question in the lines he borrowed from him.

What an anomalous period in our literature was this!—polished, witty, brilliant to the highest degree, displaying in its own productions incomparable taste and art, yet so incapable, seemingly, of “tasting” the great writers who had gone before it! Fancy a time when people went about—people of cultivation, too—asking who was that fellow Shakspere! To us he seems as real and as large a figure in his dim perspective as the largest and most alive that swaggers in the foreground of to-day. Do we not feel something weird and uncanny, something ghostly, on opening the _Retrospective Review_ so late as 1825, and finding Robert Herrick gravely paraded as a new discovery? Fifty years ago that was by the dates; as we read it seems five hundred. The critic antedates by centuries his subject—like his own god Lyæus, “ever fresh and ever young”—and is infinitely older, quainter, more remote from us. Is it our turn next to be forgotten? Shall we not all be asking at our next Centennial if Tennyson ever lived, debating whether Master Farquhar was really the author of the poems attributed to Browning, finding Longfellow difficult and obscure, and wondering in our antiquarian societies if Thackeray was a religious symbol or something to eat? Shall we—but if we keep on in this wise, one thing plainly we shall not do, and that is get back to our neglected Catholic poets—now twice neglected. Let us leave our future to bury its own dead, and betake ourselves once more to the poetic past.

We have seen that our Catholic poets, if forgotten, were at least forgotten in good company; in the ample recognition which came at last to the latter they did not so fully share. In that Renaissance of our early literature which marked the close of the last century, and which, pioneered by Percy, Ritson, Wright, Nichols, Warton, Brydges, and others, restored to the Elizabethan poets, with Chaucer and Milton, their “comates in exile,” a pre-eminence from which they will scarcely be dislodged, many of our particular friends came to the surface. But most of them did not long remain there, dropping quickly out of sight, either from intrinsic weight or the indifference of the literary fishers who had netted them. How far any such indifference may have been due to their faith we will not venture to say. We should be sorry to believe that the hateful spirit of religious bigotry had invaded the muse’s peaceful realm, scaring nymph and faun from the sides of Helicon with strange and hideous clamor. For our own part, we like a poet none the worse for being a Protestant, though we may like him a trifle the better for being a Catholic. We have a vague notion that all good poets ought to be Catholics, and a secret persuasion that some day they will be; that the Tennysons, the Holmeses, the Longfellows and Lowells and Brownings of the future will be gathered into the fold, and only the ——s or the ——s (the reader will kindly fill up these blank spaces with his pet poetical aversions) be left to raise the hymns of heterodoxy on the outside in melancholy and discordant chorus,

“Their lean and flashy songs
Grating on scrannel pipes of wretched straw.”

Awaiting that blissful time, however, we are content to enjoy the “music of Apollo’s lute” as it comes to us, without inspecting too curiously the fingers that touch it, so long as they be clean. And we are willing to believe that if our Catholic poets have had less than their fair share of attention, it has been their misfortune or their fault, and not because of any sectarian cabal to crowd them from the thrones which may belong to them of right among “the inheritors of unfulfilled renown.”

To tell the truth, indeed, such of them as we find prior to the time of Elizabeth have few claims on our regret. We count, of course, from the Reformation; when all poets were Catholics, there was nothing peculiarly distinctive in being a _Catholic_ poet. _The Shyp of Folys of the Worlde, translated out of Latin, Frenche and Doche into Englyshe tonge by Alexander Barclay, preste_, is too well known to come fairly into our category. But the _Shyp of Folys_ belongs, after all, at least as much to Sylvester Brandt as to Barclay, and the more original works of the good monk of Ely—his _Eglogues_ (though these, too, were based on Mantuanus and Æneas Sylvius, afterwards pope), his _Figure of our Mother_ _Holy Church oppressed by the French King_—even those trenchant satires, in which he demolished Master Skelton, the heretical champion, are sufficiently forgotten to be his passport. Another of his translations, _The Castle of Labour_, from the French, may have suggested to Thomson his _Castle of Indolence_—to the latter bard a more congenial mansion.

The “mad, mery wit” which won for Heywood, the epigrammatist, the favor of Henry VIII. and his daughter Mary seems vapid enough to us. Perhaps it was like champagne, which must be drunk at once, and, being kept for a century or two, grows flat and insipid. _The Play called the four P’s, being a new and merry Enterlude of a Palmer, Pardoner, Poticary, and Pedlar_, would scarcely run for a hundred nights on the metropolitan stage. His _Epigrams, six hundred in Number_, which were thought uproariously funny by his own generation, ours finds rather dismal reading. We somehow miss the snap of even that wonderful design, his _Dialogue containing in effect the number of al the Proverbes in the English tongue_, which all England was shaking its sides over long after Shakspere had flung his rarest pearls at its feet. Heywood’s great work is an allegory entitled, _The Spider and the Flie_, “wherein,” says a polite contemporary, “he dealeth so profoundly and beyond all measure of skill that neither he himself that made it, neither any one that readeth it, can reach to the meaning thereof.” It is a sort of religious parable, the flies representing the Catholics, and the spiders the Protestants, to whom enter presently, _dea ex machinâ_, Queen Mary with a broom. Heywood “was inflexibly attached to the Catholic cause,” and when, the broom-wielder having gone to another sphere, the spiders got the ascendant, he betook himself to Mechlin, where he died in exile for conscience’ sake. Therein Chaucer could have done no better.

Can we enroll Sir Thomas More among our tuneful company? Brave old Sir Thomas was a Catholic certainly—a Catholic of the Catholics—and he wrote poetry, too, or what passed for such. It is one of the many heinous charges brought against him by worthy Master Skelton in his _Pithie, Pleasaunt and Profitable Workes_—his going about

“With his poetry
And his sophistry
To mock and make a lie.”

But if poetry were a crime, and no other had been laid to his charge, the good chancellor might have stood his trial freely on such evidence as is found in his works. His _Mery Jest, how a Sergeant would learn to play the Freere_, is thought by Ellis to have furnished the hint for Cowper’s _John Gilpin_. _A Rufull Lamentation on the death of Queen Elizabeth_, Henry VIII.’s mother, has touches of pathos. The dying queen soliloquizes:

“Where are our castels now, where are our towers?
Godely Rychemonde, sone art thou gone from me!
At Westminster that costly worke of yours,[103]
Myne owne dere Lorde, now shall I never see!
Almighty God vouchsafe to grant that ye
For you and your children well may edify;
My palace byldyd is, and lo! now here I ly.”

These, however, were the pastimes of his early youth, and even so were greatly, and doubtless justly, esteemed in his own time for their purity and elegance of style. For this reason also they are freely quoted by Dr. Johnson in the preface to his dictionary. More’s fame does not rest on these achievements, but on the greatness of mind which baffled the tyrant, and “the erudition which overthrew the fabric of false learning and civilized his country.” If not a poet, he was better than a poet, a great and good man, and his memory not Catholics only, but all good men, must ever hold in affectionate reverence.

Surrey, the gallant and the ill-fated, exactly reverses our doubt about Sir Thomas. A poet beyond question, is he to be reckoned a Catholic? His father was, and his son would have been had he had the courage of his opinions. The former, imprisoned at the same time with Surrey, “though a strong Papist,” says Lord Herbert, “pretended to ask for Sabellicus as the most vehement detecter of the usurpations of the Bishop of Rome.” And Surrey’s sister, the Duchess of Richmond, who swore away his life, “inclined to the Protestants,” says Walpole, “and hated her brother.” We need not dwell upon the doubt, however, since Surrey is otherwise ruled out of our small society. A poet included in all the regular collections, called by his admirers the first of English classics, and by Pope accorded the final glory of being “the Granville (!) of a former age,” can scarcely be held one of the neglected to whom alone our suffrages are due. There, too, is Nicholas Grimoald, also of dubious orthodoxy, though undoubted genius. Nicholas was Ridley’s chaplain and suspected of being tainted with his patron’s heresy, but cleared himself by a formal recantation. Let us trust it was sincere. Grimoald’s verses are often of remarkable elegance, and to the “strange metre” or blank verse, which he adopted from Lord Surrey, he lent renewed grace and vigor.

“Right over stood in snow-white armour brave
The Memphite Zoroas, a cunning clerk,
To whom the heavens lay open as his book,
And in celestial bodies he could tell
The moving, meeting, light, aspect, eclipse,
And influence and constellations all.”

The eighteenth century might own these lines, the product of the first half of the sixteenth.

Edward Parker, Lord Morley, was a “rigid Catholic” and a prodigious author. He lived to be near a hundred, and left at least as many volumes as he had years. Besides translations of countless Latin and Greek authors from Plutarch and Seneca to St. Thomas Aquinas and Erasmus, he wrote “several tragedies and comedies the very titles of which are lost,” and “certain rhimes,” says Bale with a sniff of disdain. All alike are “dark oblivion’s prey,” but history has preserved the important fact that “this lord having a quarrel for precedence with the Lord Dacre of Gillesland, he had his pretensions confirmed by Parliament.” What a sermon on human ambition! Genius toils incessantly for a century or so, turning off tragedies and comedies, rhymes and commentaries, without number, to be its monument through all time, and presently along comes that uncivil master of ceremonies, that insufferable flunky, Fame, kicks these immortal works without ceremony into the dust-heap, and introduces Genius to posterity as the person who “had the quarrel for precedence with my Lord Dacre of Gillesland.” No distinction here, you see; not even a decent observance of those pretensions which Parliament confirmed. Lord Dacre, who never wrote, perhaps never knew how to write, a line, has his name bawled as loudly to the company as the author of all these tragedies and comedies and rhymes. Poor Lord Morley! may he rest as soundly as his books! His pretensions to oblivion, at least, no one is likely to dispute.

Another poet and scholar not less scurvily treated, and to whom we have somehow taken a wonderful fancy, was George Etheridge, a fellow of Oxford and Regius Professor of Greek there under Mary. Persecuted for Popery by Queen Elizabeth, he lost his university preferments, but “established a private seminary at Oxford for the instruction of Catholic youth in the classics, music, and logic.” He also “practised physic with much reputation,” greatly, no doubt, to the joy of his pupils. A friend of Leland, the antiquarian, his accomplishments were varied and his learning profound. “He was an able mathematician,” says a contemporary, “and one of the most excellent vocal and instrumental musicians in England, but he chiefly delighted in the lute and lyre; a most elegant poet, and a most exact composer of English, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew verses, which he used to set to the harp with the greatest skill.” Of all these elegant productions one only survives—a Greek encomium, we are sorry to say, on that royal reprobate, Henry VIII.; and the memory of this pious scholar of the sixteenth century has suffered the slight of being confounded with the graceless dramatist of the seventeenth.

A cockle-shell weathers the storm that wrecks a frigate, and a nursery rhyme has outlived Etheridge’s poetry and Morley’s erudition. If widespread renown be a test of merit, _The Merry Tales of the Madman of Gotham_ must be a work of genius. “Scholars and gentlemen” _temp._ Henry VIII. “accounted it a book full of wit and mirth,” and the scholars and babies of three centuries later approve that judgment. The author of this famous poem was Dr. Andrew Borde, or Andreas Perforatus, as he preferred to call himself, “esteemed in his time a noted poet, a witty and ingenious person, and an excellent physician,” serving in the latter capacity, it is said, to Henry VIII. He was the original of the stage Merry-andrew, “going to fairs and the like, where he would gather a crowd, to whom he prescribed by humorous speeches couched in such language as caused mirth and wonderfully propagated his fame.” He wrote, besides the _Merry Tales_, _The Mylner of Abington_, a satire called the _Introduction of Knowledge_, and various medical works giving curious details of the domestic life of the time.

Many others we might catalogue who were better churchmen than poets—William Forrest, Queen Mary’s chaplain, whose gorgeously-illuminated MSS. show that he, at least, had a due appreciation of his _Saincted Griseilde_ and his _Blessed Joseph_; or Richard Stonyhurst, who, like Heywood, died in exile for his faith, and who merits immortality for having written probably the worst translation of Virgil ever achieved by mortal man. It was in the amazing hexameter of the time, that “foul, lumbering, boisterous, wallowing measure,” as Nashe calls it, which represented to Sir Philip Sidney and his coterie the grace and melody of Virgil’s line. The wits laughed it to death, and we read its epitaph in Hall’s parody:

“_Manhood and Garboiles shall he chaunt_ with changed feet.”

On names like these, however, we have not space to dwell. Not even neglect can sanctify them. We are at the dawning of that glorious outburst of creative genius which made the Elizabethan era a splendor to all times and lands, and worthier subjects await us.

At the outset we must prepare for something like a disappointment in the scanty list of Catholic poets which even this prolific period could furnish. Looking back on it, all England seems to have been furiously bent on making poetry enough to last it for all years to come. Englishmen, we know, in those days did other things—circumnavigated the globe once or twice, and conquered a continent or so—in the intervals of rhyming; but the wonder is how they found leisure for such trifles from the absorbing business of the hour. Poetry, in that electric century of song, appears to have been the Englishman’s birthright; Apollo possessed the nation. The judge scribbled odes upon the bench; the soldier turned a sonnet and a battery together; the sailor made a song as he brought his ship into action; the bishop preached indifferently in sermons and satires—it was hard at times to tell which; the office-seeker preferred his claims in rhyme, and his complaints were “married to immortal verse”—it is lucky our own age is more given to office-seeking than to poetry; the bricklayer dropped his trowel and was a mighty dramatist; the condemned, like André Chénier at a later day—“the ruling passion strong in death”—strung couplets on the very steps of the scaffold. Even princes were smitten with the general madness, and, catching something of the general inspiration, made verses which were no worse than a prince’s verses ought to be, and were often better than their laws. Were we poet-haters like Carlyle, we should have ample food for disgust in exploring that fiddling age. At every step in the most unlikely corners we stumble upon the inevitable rhymer.

In the Mermaid, where we drop in for a quiet cup of canary, and perhaps a glimpse of that rising dramatist, William Shakspere, we find him bawling madrigals over his sack; we overhear him muttering of “hearts” and “darts” as we take our constitutional in Powle’s Walk; the very boatman who wherries us across the Thames is a Water-Poet, as though poets were classified like rats, and will importune us before we land to buy one of his four-score volumes; like black care, Rhyme sits behind the horseman and climbs the brazen galley. We fly from him to the camp; and there is that terrible fellow, Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, whom we heard of anon slaughtering “vulgar Irishry,” men, women, and children, like so many rabbits—there is that martial hero, fresh from his last battue of unarmed peasants, simpering over the composition of “godly and virtuous hymns.” We ship with Drake for a trip to the Azores “to do God’s work,” and incidentally to fill our pockets, perhaps, as somehow or other “God’s work” usually did for that pious and lucky mariner. _Scandit æratas vitiosa naves_—the rogue Apollo is there before us. We have scarce got over our sea-sickness before our ingenuous skipper will be asking our opinion of the commendatory verses which “he hath writ,” he explains—a fine blush mantling under his bronze—“for his very good friend, Sir Gervase Peckham’s _Report of the Late Discoveries_.” We peep over my Lord of Pembroke’s shoulder as he sits writing in his cabinet—it is a liberty that by virtue of his privilege a well-bred chronicler may take. By his knit brows and preoccupied air it is some weighty state paper he is drafting—a minute, perhaps, of her majesty’s revenues from fines of popish recusants, and how the same may be increased.

“Dry those fair, those crystal eyes,”

the state paper begins, and it is a minute of the perfections of the Lady Christiana Bruce.

Even the queen’s majesty, between hangings of priests and virginal coquettings with princely wooers, finds time for the making of royal “ditties passing sweet and harmonicall.” When next we seek her beauteous presence, worthy Master Puttenham will buttonhole us in the ante-chamber and launch out into loyal praises of her “learned, delicate, and noble muse.” “Of any in our time that I know of,” he asseverates, “she is the most excellent poet, easily surmounting all the rest that have written, before or since, for sense, sweetness, or subtilltie, be it in Ode, Elegie, Epigram, or any other kinde of Poeme, Heroick or Lyrick.” Master Puttenham is known to be writing a book on the _Arte of Poesie_. We think as we listen to him of another Royal Poet singing yonder at Fotheringay behind prison-bars, whose strains sound sweeter to us, though we shall do well to hide our preference here—sweeter, but infinitely sad:

“O Domine Deus, speravi in te!
O care mi Jesu, nunc libera me!
In dura catena, in misera pœna, desidero te!
Languendo, gemendo, et genuflectendo,
Adoro, imploro, ut liberes me!”

Liberty is the burden of this captive’s song, and her royal sister lends a gracious ear to her prayer. The headsman is already sharpening his axe to break her fetters. And still another princely genius up there in Edinburgh is so busy with his Divine Sonnets, and his _Rules and Cautelis_ for the fashioning of the same, he has no time to observe that his mother is being led to death. But what is a mother’s life to those imperishable works?

“How, best of poets, dost thou laurel wear!”

roars lusty Ben Jonson, brimful of sack and loyalty.

“Thou best of poets more than man dost prove,”

echoes the faithful Stirling. Yet, strange as it may seem, we can never read these superhuman productions with any comfort. The Divine Sonnets fade, and instead we see the gloomy stage at Fotheringay, the hapless but heroic victim, the frowning earls, the gleaming axe, the fair head dabbled with gore. Let us turn to merely human geniuses.