Chapter IV: “a Flock of Sheep That Leisurely Pass By.” (6)

“It is said that for several weeks the Indians on this reservation have been without bread. Is this true?”

“It is. The freight contractors have failed to deliver the flour. I cannot issue what I have not. To make up for the lack of flour, I issue four pounds of beef to each Indian daily.”

“It is charged that the beef is poor. Is this charge true?”

“It is. What can I do? Like a quartermaster or commissary, I can only issue what I have on hand. If I had not this beef, the Indians would have nothing to eat. I cannot throw it back on the contractor’s hands, and wait for a better quality of meat; for while I was waiting the Indians would starve or leave the reservation to find subsistence where they could.”

“What is the allowance of coffee and sugar?”

“Four pounds of the former and eight of the latter to one hundred rations.”

I now took a friendly farewell of the Indian agent, and went away with a vague impression that it is not the poor, subordinate official who makes most money out of the Indians, but freighters and “big contractors,” and perhaps more especially their financial “backers,” the speculators of the great Eastern cities.

On our way back to the post we met Kicking Bird returning to his camp. He was mounted on a large cream-colored mule. We stopped, shook hands with him, and chatted a little. The interpreter joked him about riding a mule. Kicking Bird laughed, and said that as he was going to live hereafter like a white man, like a white man he should ride a mule.

It was the last time I saw Kicking Bird. Shortly afterwards he delivered up to the military authorities a number of the revolted Indians. Among them was a brother of one of his squaws. In revenge she poisoned the faithful chief.

Poor Kicking Bird! He had given his gorgeous war-bonnet to a veteran officer of the army as a token that he had left the war-path for ever. He proposed to teach his children the white man’s language and the white man’s peaceful arts. He fell a martyr to his fidelity to the government.

DE VERE’S “THOMAS À BECKET.”[210]

It is doubtful whether two years ago even the admirers of Aubrey de Vere looked for anything strikingly new or startling from his pen. His measure seemed filled. He was known and read as a poet whose melodious verse was the expression of thoughts lofty as well as tender, of profound meditations and large aspirations, of purity without fleck, yet cold almost as it was chaste. This were an enviable fame at any time, infinitely more so just now, when the ambition of our poets seems to be that of the prodigal, to waste their divine birthright on worthless objects, to live riotously, and finally, when all else is gone, to feed themselves and their readers on the husks of swine. Suddenly _Alexander the Great_ appeared, and in the author we beheld a new man. At once his fame took wings, while he, with the unconscious ease of one who took his place by right, strode beyond the men of to-day, and entered into that narrower circle of larger minds whose names are written in brass, whose works live after them and become part and parcel of the English tongue. One sign of Mr. de Vere’s undisputed success was significant. It is only such a transcendent genius as that of Dr. Newman that can overleap the barriers which prejudice has set around the Catholic name. It is still true, though less so than formerly, that the grand old name of “Catholic” blazoned on a literary scutcheon is regarded as a bar sinister by the non-Catholic press. Yet even this difficulty of caste was overcome by Mr. de Vere, and his _Alexander the Great_ was hailed by critics of every class and kind of thought to be a return to the palmy days of English drama, and a welcome addition to English literature.

Two years have passed, and a new drama is presented to us by the same author. From Alexander the Great to Thomas à Becket is a long stride and a trying one. It is a passage from the height of paganism to the height of Christianity. The hero of the one is the personification of the pride and the pomp, the glory and shame, the greatness and essential littleness, of paganism. The hero of the other is one of those men who throughout the Christian era, even up to our own times, have been found to stand up in the face of the princes of this world, and, if need be, pour out their hearts’ blood in confessing Christ and upholding his kingdom on earth.

We may as well say at once that in the new drama we miss many things which in _Alexander the Great_ won our admiration. We miss the sustained magic of those lines, almost every one of which is poetry of the highest order, yet so skilfully adapted that whosoever speaks them speaks naturally and in keeping with his character. In no place in _Alexander the Great_ could one say, “Here speaks the poet,” “Here the rhetorician,” “Here the dramatist.” This much, indeed, is true of _Thomas à Becket_. We miss, too, the brilliant epigrams, the proverbial wisdom of the brief sayings thrown so liberally into the mouths of this character and that. We miss the sharp contact and contrast of character so perfectly worked out among the different types of Greeks. There is no place in the later drama for such a conception as Alexander himself, the slow growth and development under our eyes of his many-sided character, with his strong resolve, his dreams, his daring hopes, his insane ambition, his thorough, practical manner of dealing with things as they pass, his slow-coming doubts, his wonder at the world, at his own mission in it, and at the unseen power that rules them both from somewhere. Indeed, we cannot call to mind a like conception to this in any drama.

The reason for the absence of such features as these is plain. In the one case the poet was freer to follow the workings of his own imagination; in the other he is more closely bound down to history, to facts, to the very words often spoken by his characters. And how thoroughly he has studied his subject may be seen in the preface to the drama, which is an admirable, though condensed, history of the whole struggle between St. Thomas and Henry II. But in compensation for what we miss we find a robustness, an off-hand freedom betokening real strength, a truth and naturalness of coloring, a noble manner of dealing with noble things, a straightforward honesty that winks at no faults, on whichever side they lie, a boldness and vigor that never flag from the first line to the last. There is less art than in the other, but much more of nature’s happy freedom. Moreover, the interest of the drama is none the less really of to-day because it represents men who lived and events which occurred seven centuries ago. Has this century seen no Henries or his like? Who shall say that we have no Beckets? Are there no men to-day ready to stand up in the face of princes calling themselves Christian, to risk land and life and all they have in the cause of Christ, at the same time that they obey their princes, be they Catholic or non-Catholic, “saving their order” and “saving God’s honor”?

The whole world makes sad reply. And though in these scientific days it is not the fashion to dash the brains of God’s priests out in the sanctuary, a method equally effectual is adopted to quench, if possible, the spirit within them. They are drained of such means as belong to their offices by fine upon fine; every effort is made to compel them, as was the case with St. Thomas, to betray their trust, to recognize rebellious, apostate, and recreant priests. And at length, when there is not a penny left, they are either driven into exile, as was St. Thomas, or cast into prisons where their martyrdom consists of a thousand petty insults and deprivations, and where, to take up recent examples, they are regaled on soup which is scientifically bad. After all, does there not seem something more magnanimous in the fierce brutality of the Plantagenet and his men?

The whole drama of _Thomas à Becket_ turns on the struggle between the archbishop and the king, and there is no hesitation on the author’s part in deciding which side to take in the contest. Mr. de Vere has certainly the courage of his convictions, and he is bold in their expression in days when St. Thomas is still regarded by the great majority of English readers as a mischievous and meddlesome prelate who courted, if he did not richly deserve, his fate. Let us, with Mr. de Vere’s permission, picture to ourselves a moment his lost opportunity of making himself infamously famous. Had he, with his great gifts and acknowledged place in the ranks of _literati_, only taken the other side; had he painted St. Thomas according to the orthodox Protestant reading, how his book would have been devoured, and what reviews written of it down all the line of the anti-Catholic army of writers! What comfort Mr. Gladstone would have found in such a convert in his next tilt with the Rock! Were it not a thing simply natural in any honorable man to adhere to the side of truth, and, more, to satisfy himself of the truth where doubts were raised, we should call it noble in Mr. de Vere thus to spurn the example of so many gifted writers of his time whose great ambition seems to be to pander to the vices around them. Indeed, not the least interest attached to this drama lies in the treatment, by a calm, poetic, yet deeply philosophic mind, of the momentous struggle which it portrays—the struggle ever old yet ever new between church and state.

The drama is in five acts. The first opens at Westminster with the election of Thomas to the primacy, embraces his resignation of the chancellorship and first rupture with the king, and ends beautifully and solemnly with his consecration as Archbishop of Canterbury. This act is very interesting. It plunges at once _in medias res_. Not a line is wasted, and so natural is the coloring that one lives and moves among the men of long ago as completely as in Shakspere. Becket’s friends and foes come and go, and have their say about the new prelate and his appointment to the “Rome of the North.” Naturally, the appointment to such a see still filled men’s minds while the memory of Anselm lived,

“Stretching from exile a lean, threatening arm”

against the first Henry. It is plain from the start that Becket’s mitre is not to be wreathed with roses. Even were the king a tamer soul, the new archbishop leaves enemies behind him—time-serving prelates who hate an honest man, others who envy him his place, nobles, knights, and rascals who have felt his strong hand while chancellor. The scene shifts to Normandy and shows us Henry’s court at Rouen, presided over by his perfidious and vicious queen, Eleanor, whose bitter tongue ever fans the flames that threaten Becket, whom she hates. Here we see Henry at his best, when, as he thinks, all is going well with his scheme.

“Thomas, Archbishop—
That hand which holds the seal, wielding the staff—
The feud of Crown and Church henceforth is past.
… Henceforth I rule!
None shares with me my realms.”

Here we have, too, a thrilling picture of his wrath when this pleasant scheme is at once knocked to pieces by Becket’s resignation of the chancellorship. And now the fight begins.

In the second act come up the memorable scenes at Northampton with the question of the “Royal Customs.” In these trying scenes, where king and prelate enter the lists against each other, the dramatist has exhibited a power worthy the occasion, and, to our thinking, they are the finest in the drama. We can only glance at them and pass on. The forces are marshalled: on the one side the power of the king with the bandit nobles—for most of them were little else—and the craven prelates; on the other Becket, his oath, and his conscience. The scene between Becket and the bishops, where they strive to break down his resolution, is admirable, as showing the inner character of the man, the steadfast churchman, military half, who has not yet quite lost that outspoken scorn he used so freely while still in and of the world. His brief replies are full of negative meaning, and, when he does break forth, the scorn of the king is puny beside his words.

“My lords, have you said all? Then hear me speak.
I might be large to tell you, courtier prelates,
That if the Conqueror’s was an iron hand,
Not less ‘twas just. Oftenest it used aright
Its power usurped. _It decked no idiot brow
With casual mitre: neither lodged in grasp
That, ague-stricken, scarce could hold its bribe,
The sceptres of the shepherds of Christ’s flock._”

And never were there nobler words than these:

“Bishops of England!
For many truths by you this day enforced,
Hear ye in turn but one. The church is God’s:
Lords, were it ours, then might we traffic with it;
At will make large its functions, or contract;
Serve it or sell; worship or crucify.
I say the church is God’s; for he beheld it,
His thought, ere time began; counted its bones,
Which in his book were writ. I say that he
From his own side in water and in blood
Gave birth to it on Calvary, and caught it,
Despite the nails, his bride, in his own arms.
I say that he, a Spirit of clear heat,
Lives in its frame, and cleanses with pure pain
His sacrificial precinct, but consumes
The chaff with other ardors. Lords, I know you.

* * * * *

To-day the heathen rage—I fear them not;
If fall I must, this hand, ere yet I fall,
Stretched from the bosom of a peaceful gown,
Above a troubled king and darkening realm,
Shall send God’s sentence forth. My lords, farewell.”

And surely Becket might have spoken this:

“My king I honor—honoring more my God;
My lords, they lie who brand mine honest fame
With fealty halved. With doubly-linked allegiance
He serves his king who serves him for God’s sake;
But who serves thus must serve his God o’er all.
I served him thus, and serve.”

But we could quote all this magnificent scene.

In the third act Becket escapes to France, visits the exiled pontiff at Sens, and finally takes refuge at Pontigny. The calm of this holy and peaceful abode seems to permeate this portion of the drama, offering a happy relief after the late fierce storms. There he abides, “musing on war with heart at peace,” and his spirit, without slackening in its strong purpose, grows insensibly calmer, milder, and more humble. From this dwelling he is driven forth by order of the king, only, as the king himself bitterly says, to “stand stronger than before.” The persecution is turning against the persecutor, who confesses in words Shakspere might have written:

“I have lit my camp-fires on a frozen flood,
Methinks the ice wears thin.”

But he is a man as full of device as resolution, and at his back are men still fuller of device. The plot thickens, and at last even Rome seems to fall from the archbishop, and give him over to the power of his enemies. Something of the old fierce spirit leaps up, and Rome itself is not spared, until he is reminded by John of Salisbury, his tried and faithful friend, of the Pope that

“Who sits there
Sits on God’s tower, and further sees than we.”

Whereupon Becket breaks out into a speech full of beauty and of truth, which we regret our limited space forbids us to quote. At the end of it the two cardinals enter to endeavor to find a way for patching up a peace between the archbishop and the king. It must be borne in mind that in those days the church was in sore straits: the pope in exile at Sens; an anti-pope backed by all the power of the German emperor. As Cardinal Otho truly says:

“A mutinous world uplifts this day its front
Against Christ’s Vicar! Save this France and England,
I know not kingdom sound.”

And here was Becket, the champion of the church, doing, in the eyes of many, what best he could to drive England also into the enemy’s camp. All these circumstances render the intellectual and spiritual duel between the archbishop and the cardinals one of intense interest, which again confirms what we noted in _Alexander the Great_, that Mr. de Vere has the true dramatic instinct of bringing together at the right place and right time opposing elements. It is the clash of contraries that imparts greatest interest to a drama, and the right working of the conflict that shows the dramatist’s skill. The contrast between the plausible, keen, politic, Italian nature, as it would be called by some, of Cardinal William, and the straight, unbending, single-minded nature of Becket, who is so rooted in his position that nothing but death could tear him from it, is perfect. The cardinal builds up a very strong case in a negative manner against the archbishop. He hints at mistakes on the latter’s part; he counsels yielding here and there, or rather puts it to Becket why such and such might not be instead of such and such. In fact, his Eminence shows himself a thorough diplomat in cases where the issue was not a duel to the death. It would be amusing, were it not something of a far higher order, to see how Becket, with a strong, straight sentence or two, cuts mercilessly, half scornfully, through the cardinal’s fine-spun webs one after the other as they appear, scarcely giving them time to rise. Cardinal William is at length nettled into breaking quite through the diplomatic ice, and bids the archbishop resign. Becket refuses to listen to any voice but that which proceeds from the chair of Peter, and with this the act closes.

The fourth act opens with a beautiful scene between the nun Idonea and the aged Empress Matilda, whose character, small part as it plays in the drama, seems to us one of the most finished of all. Henry is back in England, only to find

“All’s well; and then all’s ill: who wars on Becket
Hath January posting hard on May,
And night at ten o’ the morn.”

On the other hand, Becket, with half-prophetic eye, seems to see the beginning of the end. After each new struggle, each new humiliation, he rises greater because humbler, leaving the dross behind him. Here is his own estimate of himself:

“Once I was unjust.
The Holy Father sees as from a height;
I fight but on the plain: my time is short,
And in it much to expiate. I must act.

(_After a pause._)

I strove for justice, and my mother’s honor;
For these at first. Now know I that God’s truth
Is linked with these as close as body and soul.”

How true is this we all know. It only required a Luther to make of Henry II. a Henry VIII., and he had not stood so long in doubt as did the latter. The plot deepens. What an admirable touch it is that shows him, when the gravest news arrives from England, falling back a moment on his happier days at hearing of a smart retort given by his old pupil, the youthful prince! At last the king and Becket are brought together, and again in this long, historic meeting Mr. de Vere rises fully and easily to the level of the event. The inner vein of deceit for which he was marked shows through the monarch’s speech, and once a lurid burst of passion flashes forth like lightning and as quickly disappears. This prolonged scene, at the end of which the mask is almost openly thrown off by the king, ends the act, and is a fitting preparation for the consummation which is to follow.

The fifth act opens with preparations for the return of the archbishop to England. His heart and those of his friends are filled with the gloomiest forebodings. Ill-rumors thicken around them. Becket himself, in a speech of wonderful beauty and pathos, describes the “sinking strange” at his heart as, standing still on the French coast, he looks towards England. It is the flesh asserting itself and gaining a momentary victory over the spirit. He sails at length, and history tells us how he was received. It was a matter of life or death to his foes. There was only one end to a contest with a man of his stamp—either submission on their part or death to him. The drama hurries on towards the catastrophe. The queen fans the flame. As Lisieux says:

“Year by year
She urged his highness ‘gainst my lord the primate;
Of late she whets him with more complicate craft:
She knows that all she likes the king dislikes,
And feigns a laughing, new-born zeal for Becket,
To sting the royal spleen.”

The short scene in which the barbed words of the queen draw a contrast between Becket’s triumph and the king’s humiliation is one of the many dramatic gems set in this drama. So graphic is the scene as she rises on the throne, cup in hand, and cries:

“A toast, my lords! The London merchant’s son:
Once England’s primate—henceforth King of England!”

that we scarcely need Leicester to tell us:

“Behold her, Lisieux!
_That smile is baleful as a winter beam
Streaking some cliff wreck-gorged; her hair and eyes
Send forth a glare half sunshine and half lightning._”

At last falls that memorable feast of St. Stephen, and the end comes.

“The man is changed. Seldom he speaks; his smile
Is like that smile upon a dead man’s face,
A mystery of sweetness.”

The saint is already looking beyond this world. Standing at the window, as we are told he stood, he looks out and beholds the ground robed in snow. Here is how his poet makes him speak of it:

“How fair, how still, that snowy world! The earth
Lies like a white rose under eyes of God;
May it send up a sweetness!”

What other poet in these days could give us so pure and perfect an image as that—a flower plucked, surely, from the paradise of poets? The sweetness is sent up. It rises from the martyr’s blood.

Such is an outline of this drama. The character, of course, on which the attention fastens chiefly is that of Thomas à Becket, and we think that in the portrayal of this great character Mr. de Vere is as happy as in his Alexander. Becket is a very easy man to write about, but a most difficult one to set living and real before us. In him for a long time the layman and the clerk struggled for mastery. There is no possible doubt that up to the time of his elevation to the primacy he was a man who lived in, and to a very great extent of, the world. He rejoiced in pomp and pride, in large retinues, in splendid appointments, in ostentatious display. He was not at all averse to showing that the arm of the cleric could tilt a lance with the bravest knight. Yet through all the temptations of such a life as his he undoubtedly retained his purity of heart, a right sense of his true vocation, and an honesty of purpose that never swerved. Certain it is that, in procuring his appointment as primate, Henry thought he had, if not exactly a tool, a devoted friend and a sensible man, who would not forget the favors his monarch had showered on him, and would be troubled by no such nice scruples as vexed his predecessor, Anselm. Becket had shown himself to be a keen-eyed, resolute, active, honest minister, with no sordid touch in his nature, with an intense sense of duty to his king and country. Indeed, had he not been a Catholic cleric, in days when clerics lawfully assumed many a civil office, there can be little doubt that he would have been pronounced, even by Protestant historians, to be one of the best and truest English chancellors that ever held the seals.

At a day’s notice this man, by the express command and desire of the king, is sent back to his real duty—the tending of Christ’s fold. He obeyed against his will, foreseeing already something of the issue. But the fashion of the world is not brushed off in a day, however changed may be the heart and conduct. To-day he is the gay and brilliant chancellor of England, highest in the favor of his king; to-morrow, primate of England, and appointed to that post, as he knew, to betray it. The man is not yet a saint—very far from it; and in his seizing of this character just as the robes of the world were falling from him and he had donned the livery of heaven; in his awakening to the new and tremendous responsibility that had fallen upon him; in the gradual taming of his fiery and impetuous spirit; in the struggle between personal love for his royal master, pity for the disasters necessarily brought upon the kingdom by his action, and his clear conception of duty throughout all; in the slow braying of this spirit in the mortar of affliction until speck by speck all the dross was shaken and cast out, and the whole man left clean and pure for the sacrifice—in all this Mr. de Vere has shown the skill of a great artist. The obvious temptation for a Catholic in treating such a theme was to make Becket a saint too soon. Mr. de Vere has not fallen into this mistake, and the result adds largely to the effect of the drama. Not till the very last scene do we feel that Becket lives already above this world, and only awaits his translation. The night before his death the flesh still urged flight when he knew that death was coming surely and swiftly. And when the curtain drops for the last time on that terrible scene of the outraged sanctuary and the murdered archbishop, then do we surely feel that the spirit of a saint and martyr has flown to heaven.

The conception of Henry is almost equally good. The following picture of him will be remembered:

“Your king is sudden:
The tidings of his march and victory reach us
Like runners matched. That slender, sinewy frame,
That ardent eye, that swift, onstriding step,
Yet graceful as a tiger’s, foot descending
Silent but sure on the predestinate spot—
From signs like these looks forth the inward man.
Expect grave news ere long.”

Excellent foils to Becket and to each other are Becket’s two fast friends, John of Salisbury and Herbert of Bosham. The contrast between the two is well drawn by themselves:

“JOHN OF SALISBURY. Herbert, you jar me with your ceaseless triumphs,
And hope ‘gainst hope. You are like a gold leaf dropped
From grove immortal of the church triumphant
To mock our church in storm! For manners’ sake,
I pray you, chafe at times. The floods are out!
I say the floods are out! This way and that
They come a-sweeping.

“HERBERT. Wheresoe’er they sweep
The eye of God pursues them and controls:
That which they are to him, that only _are_ they;
The rest is pictured storm.”

A mightier hand than Mr. de Vere’s might own so graphic a picture as this:

“Go where I might, except among the poor,
‘Twas all one huge conspiracy of error,
Conspiracy, and yet unconscious half;
For, though, beneath, there worked one plastic mind,
The surface seemed fortuitous concurrence,
One man the hook supplying, one the eye,
Here the false maxim, there the fact suborned,
This the mad hope, and that the grudge forgotten.
The lawyer wrote the falsehood in the dust
Of mouldering scrolls; with sighs the court-priest owned it;
The minstrel tossed it gaily from his strings;
The witling lisped it, and the soldier mouthed it.
These lies are thick as dust in March.”

And the “reptile press” had not yet come into being!

There is not a weak line in this drama. It will be welcomed by all Catholics as a glorious illumination of the history which it pictures. Our boys should dwell on it in the schools. From no book can they gather a better idea of one of the most marked epochs in English history. It will, like _Alexander the Great_, bear reading and rereading, disclosing each time new beauties of thought and expression. Many of the speeches set one’s veins a-tingling, so vivid and real are they. The pictures of churchmen are a study. There is the prelate courtier, the prelate politician, the false ascetic, the blasphemous apostate, the timid prelate, who trembles between his conscience and his king. In striking contrast to these stand out Becket and his true men, while to and fro among the cleric gowns stalk the stalwart nobles, half-bandits, most of them, sick in turn of prelate and king. Mr. de Vere makes masterly use of these many opposite elements, groups, parts, and rearranges them with the highest dramatic effect.

The general tendency of English poetry in these days is downwards. It has gained nothing; it has lost much. It is least strong in its highest, the dramatic form. Without pretending to be at all dogmatic in mere literary criticism, we take this last statement to be indisputable. The failure, however, is not from lack of effort. There is surely some strange fascination about the drama. It would not be at all hazardous to say that nine out of every ten men with any literary pretensions, if they have not actually written dramas, have at least had the ambition and intention at some time or another to write them. What may be the precise reason for this general tendency towards that peculiar form of literature, unless it is that so very few succeed in it, we do not know, and do not care to inquire just now. The unattainable, however, always possesses a strong fascination for aspiring minds; and as the dramatic literature of all countries is that which, though the least in quantity, has fastened itself most upon the hearts of the people, it is at least a worthy ambition which aims at this royal road to fame. The discovery of the North-west Passage has not been a more fatal lure to mariners than the drama to literary adventurers. Even men of approved position in other branches of literature, poets of fame, novelists whose names were household words, statesmen and philosophers, have failed at this last fortress that fame seems to hold only for her most favored sons. Here no art can win an entrance; the sweetest strains cannot charm the locks asunder, the profoundest thoughts cannot melt them. Nature and nature only holds the key.

A glance at a few of the writers of the century will reveal how true is this. Even Byron with his passionate soul, his strangely mixed nature, his bitterness and sweetness, his loftiness of thought and expression combined, his marvellous power over words, has written dramas which as poems are splendid, but as dramas wretched. Shelley was the only poet of his day who produced a really dramatic work, but its revolting subject unhappily removes it from clean hands. The lesser lights of our own day have each in turn attempted a like flight only to meet with disaster. Who thinks of Browning’s _Strafford_ now? Who has cast a second glance at Swinburne’s _Chastelard_ or _Bothwell_? Notwithstanding the “gush” with which it was at first hailed by some English critics, Tennyson’s _Mary Tudor_ has fallen flat, both on the stage and off it, and honest men have come to the conclusion that it rather detracts from than adds to the well-earned and well-worn fame of the author. The only good purpose it has served was to bring to light a real drama on the same subject by the father of the author whose latest work now claims our attention. Of that we shall have something to say at another time. Even that proverbial philosopher, Mr. Tupper, was seized with the inspiration in this centennial year of ours, and we heard something of a drama wherein George Washington was to figure as the hero, but it faded out of sight before it had well appeared. Sad to say, our own Longfellow’s _Spanish Student_, the only drama he ever published, happens to be about the worst of his productions. Mr. Disraeli even, in his wild youth, perpetrated a drama which was presented some years since at a second or third class London theatre, and, we believe, almost ruined the management. At all events it failed. And Bulwer Lytton’s best known drama is not one-fiftieth part as good as his poorest novel.

Bold then is the man who would tread this royal road which is strewn with so many a brave wreck. Rash the man who, with name and fame established, with the well-won laurels of a lifetime on his brow, would add a final and a crowning leaf plucked from this garden of death. Happy the man who, in face of the thousand dangers that beset his path, goes on his way boldly, grasps and holds the prize that a thousand of his fellows have missed. Mr. de Vere has won this prize. His dramas are dramas and nothing else. They are not verses stitched together without a purpose and a plan. They are not mere description; they are instinct with _act_. We hope and believe that one who has accomplished so much and so well in so short a time may, as we do not doubt he can, do much more. The prizes to be won in this, to Mr. de Vere, new field are as many as the aspirants; but the winners are few. As Catholics we are proud of such a poet. As readers and observers we rejoice in these degenerate days at seeing so resolute a return to loftier thoughts and purer, to great conceptions, to real English, which is free at once from the affectation of the archaic and from the flimsy jingle that tries honest ears, to a right depicting of scenes and events that have stirred the world.

[210] _St. Thomas of Canterbury._ A Dramatic Poem. By Aubrey
de Vere, author of _Alexander the Great_. London: Henry S.
King & Co. 1876. (For sale by The Catholic Publication
Society.)

THE PRISONER OF CHILLON.

It has been the lot of more than one disreputable character to be glorified by great poets. From Spenser to Tennyson have the praises of “Gloriana” been sung, to the no small detriment of truth, and of far worthier personages than she who, although in some respects a great queen, was guilty of ferocities almost beyond the capabilities of man, and of prolonged and calculating cruelties contrary to the very nature bestowed by God on woman. Again, Satan himself is portrayed in Milton’s stately poem as a being more magnificent than malignant. He “hates well” certainly, but his own utter hatefulness, and the base ingratitude to his Creator of which he is the first example, is sufficiently veiled to incline one to feel something akin to admiration or pity for the arch-rebel against God, the crafty seducer and pitiless destroyer of the souls of men.

Passing over other instances of false renown, and undazzled by the halo of romance cast around the “Prisoner of Chillon” by Lord Byron’s melodious lines (it would be more plain-spoken than polite to write this word, as here it ought to be written, _i.e._, without the _n_), let us examine, by the sober light of history, into the merits of this more-than-doubtful hero, rendered by his captivity a person of interest, although there is every proof that the story of his arrest, in violation of a safe-conduct granted him by the duke of Savoy, is an invention.[211] Still more, however, does Bonivard owe his celebrity to Lord Byron, who apparently knew nothing of the “Prisoner” whose imaginary sufferings he sang, beyond his name, his Protestantism, and the fact of his imprisonment. The poem opens with a string of fictions, among which it is amusing to read that Bonivard was loaded with chains for the religion of his father, and that the said father had died on the rack, a martyr to a creed he refused to abjure, etc.

But imagination has had the upper hand long enough. Certain of our contemporaries abroad having recently referred to the “Prisoner of Chillon” as a martyr for liberty of conscience, it is time to bring down from his pedestal this Calvinist apostate, pointed to by Protestants as one of their models of virtue, and who, we readily allow, turns out to be a fitting companion to similar “models” even more famous in their annals.

The Bonivards were an old _bourgeois_ family of Chambéry, who from the thirteenth century had possessed a certain extent of feudal property. Thus they were subjects of the princes of Savoy, whose worst enemies were then the Genevese and Swiss. Now, it was under the protection of these latter that Bonivard, himself a Savoyard, came, in the vain hope of preserving the rich revenues of his priory of Saint Victor, to plant his batteries against his native country. At Geneva, he took his place among the first promoters of the freedom of the future republic, but no sooner did the Reformation become a movement of importance, from the standing of some of its leaders, than Bonivard disappears from the front, and falls into a lower rank; since, although a writer of some power and possessed of real talents, he was utterly lacking in energy and dignity of character, as also in firmness and consistency of purpose. In proof of this, it is enough to observe the continual applications for money with which he harassed the council of Geneva, while he was at the same time playing fast and loose between Savoy and Geneva, in the first place, and afterwards between Geneva and Berne, according to the advancement of his own interests, self being apparently the sole object of his worship. This “vain and versatile beggar”[212] was called by one of the chiefs of the republic, the “_Stultus_ M. de Sans-Saint-Victor.”

Dr. Chapponnière, a Protestant, says that “Bonivard, exalted by some as a hero and a martyr for liberty, and by others charged with every vice, merited neither the excess of honor he received on the one hand, nor of condemnation on the other.” With regard, however, to this verdict, which would represent Bonivard as a man of simple mediocrity, we put the following questions: Was not François de Bonivard a traitor to his religion, which he abandoned? to his ecclesiastical character, which he violated? to his country, which he injured to the utmost of his power? to history, which he falsified? and lastly, to his _wives_, whom he deceived, and one of whom he abandoned to torture?

The “Prisoner of Chillon” had earned his detention in that fortress by fifteen years of open revolt against his lawful sovereign; and if, by reason of his six years of imprisonment he is to be accounted a great man, it is but just to allow his fourth wife, Catherine de Courtaronel, to share his greatness. Like him, she apostatized; like him, she quitted her convent and broke all her vows; like him, she was driven out of Geneva because of her evil life; like him, she was allowed to return thither on promising amendment; with him she lived, for some time unmarried, until the two were compelled by the Genevese authorities to submit to a marriage ceremony; like him, she was accused of adultery, and, more unfortunate than he, was made, by the application of frightful tortures, to avow herself guilty of the crime (which, however, has not been proved), her husband making no attempt whatever to save her from the torture. In consequence of the confessions thus extorted, she was condemned to be drowned; the sentence being duly executed.

We have here a terrible pendant to the six years of prison, and one which, this time, can neither be imputed (to quote M. Fazg) to “an infamous duke of Savoy,” nor yet (to quote Bonivard himself) to “a rascally pope.”

This brief sketch, notwithstanding its incompleteness as to details, which would, however, only darkly shade the outline here given, is sufficient to portray the real Bonivard, the avaricious and time-serving apostate, stripped of the interesting fiction which envelopes the Prisoner of Chillon, and to prove his worthiness of a niche by the side of Cranmer, Luther, Calvin, Beza, John of Leyden, and the rest of the reforming race.

[211] See, especially, Spon, _Histoire de Genève_, tom. 1.
pp. 203, 204.

[212] See notice in the _Revue Catholique_ for June, 1876,
by M. Leyret, to whom the present paper is largely
indebted. Those who wish for full information on the
subject will find it in the _Notice sur François de
Bonivard, Prieur de St. Victor et sur ses Ecrits, par
M. le Dr. Chapponniere_ (_Mémoires de la Société
d’Histoire et d’Archéologie de Genève_, tome iv.),
also in the _Matériaux Historiques_ and the _Notices
Généalogiques_ of Galiffe (tome iii.), but above all
in the remarkable work by Canon Magnin, now Bishop of
Annecy, on Bonivard and the Chronicles of Geneva
(_Mémoires de l’Académie de Savoie, 2ème Séries_, tome
iii.) who by even his moderation, as well as the
pitiless logic of facts, crushes the pseudo-confessor.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

SANCTA SOPHIA, OR DIRECTIONS FOR THE PRAYER OF
CONTEMPLATION, ETC. Extracted out of more than Forty
Treatises written by the late Ven. Father F. Augustin Baker,
a monk of the English Congregation of the Holy Order of S.
Benedict; and methodically digested by the R. F. Serenus
Cressy, of the same Order and Congregation. Now edited by
the Very Rev. Dom Norbert Sweeny, D.D., of the same Order
and Congregation. London: Burns & Oates. 1876. (For sale by
The Catholic Publication Society.)

Next in importance to the choice of a spiritual director comes, no doubt, the selection of the kind and quality of spiritual reading proper for individual souls. Ordinarily they go together, and, granting the first choice to have been well made, the second should be left to be determined by it. One advantage, however, a suitable book presents even when compared with a suitable director. It is always accessible, a consideration of some importance, when one remembers how urgently spiritual writers seek to persuade the soul that in case wise direction can be had at no less cost, she should travel “a thousand German miles” to find it. It is true that with certain classes of religious reading, and especially with that class to which the _Sancta Sophia_ belongs, there is danger that indiscreet readers may mistake their own needs, and nourish pride on what is proper food for humility only. Another peculiarity belonging to them is one which we hardly know whether to class as an advantage or a disadvantage. Put into the hands of mature readers for whom they have been esteemed suitable on account of some natural tendency to introversion, and possibly of converts, to which class, by the way, the author of the _Sancta Sophia_ himself belonged, we have observed these charts of the more interior ways of spiritual life to create a temporary difficulty almost as serious as those they were intended to remove. The clearness and certainty with which the road is pointed out, and the obstacles to be surmounted described, fill the mind at first with such a sense of security as one feels who places himself in charge of an experienced guide to travel to regions by report well known but as yet unvisited. The objects of faith assume a new vividness, and the soul, beholding its own struggles and its own weariness reflected in the page before it, takes up its line of march with new vigor and readiness to endure what its predecessors also have endured. But it will be strange if its enemy do not avail himself of the very weapons used against him to raise the contrary difficulty, and to suggest that the very accuracy with which the internal conflict is described shows that nothing has been really achieved by the spiritual writers except the dissection of the soul itself, and that, considered as evidence for the existence of anything beyond its own struggles, their works are simply worthless. However, to “well-minded souls,” as Father Baker would say, such temptations against faith are not in reality more dangerous than any other, and may, with the help of prayer and prudent counsel, be fled from even while their immediate occasion is retained and put to its uses. For such souls, once firmly grounded in Catholic faith and with a natural predisposition for “the internal ways of the Spirit,” we know no better guide than the _Sancta Sophia_, now so happily reprinted. No doubt it is not adapted to general reading; the caution of the Benedictine father, Leander à St. Martino, is as necessary to-day as when it was prefixed to the earliest editions of the work. These instructions, he said, “are written precisely, and only for such souls as by God’s holy grace do effectually and constantly dedicate themselves to as pure an abstraction from creatures as may with discretion be practised; … consequently, for such as abstain from all manner of levity, loss of time, notable and known defects, vain talk, needless familiarity, and in a word do take as much care as they can to avoid all venial sins and occasions of them, and all things which they shall perceive or be warned of, to be impediments to the divine union of their souls with God.”

Let us hope that even the strict application of this rule would not too greatly narrow the circle of readers likely to be profited by the reissue of a volume which those well qualified to judge rate as the most solid and valuable work on prayer ever written in the English tongue. A more effectual barrier, perhaps, against indiscriminate readers, is raised by the style of the work itself than by cautions such as these. For while the quaint, sweet sobriety of its manner most happily matches the gravity of its matter, it is marked by an utter absence of all things likely to gratify curiosity simply, and makes no effort to do more than guide souls called to contemplative prayer along the secure road of abnegation and self-denial. Certain blemishes which pertained to the work in its original state are sufficiently guarded against in this edition by notes; and in its present form the _Sancta Sophia_ is undoubtedly better fitted than before both to the needs of the contemplative orders for whom it was originally written, and to those of devout souls living in the world.

MITCHELL’S GEOGRAPHICAL TEXT-BOOKS. Philadelphia: Published
by J. H. Butler & Co.

One of the best proofs of the excellence of these text-books is the continual popularity which they have enjoyed, in spite of the publication of so many competing works by other authors. Of course they have been kept up to the times by additions, and improvements corresponding to the increase of geographical knowledge.

The series consists of eight books, two being occupied with ancient geography, and is progressive, so as to suit every age and capacity. For Catholic schools it is, so far as we can see, not open to any objection, and as good as any set of books not expressly written for them can be.

We are particularly pleased with Prof. Brocklesby’s _Physical Geography_, which forms part of the series. It is full of information for grown persons as well as for the young, is profusely and finely illustrated, as is the rest of the series, and will be found to be a most readable and instructive book.

The maps and charts are throughout the series executed with that clearness and beauty which have always characterized Mitchell’s atlases.

THE LIFE, LETTERS, AND TABLE-TALK OF BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON.

MEN AND MANNERS IN AMERICA ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO. New York.
Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1876.

These two volumes are the first instalments of the “Sans-Souci Series,” intended as a companion to the “Bric-à-Brac Series.” The life of Haydon the artist is full of painful interest. The present volume is a condensation by Mr. R. H. Stoddard of the larger Engglish life.

_Men and Manners in America One Hundred Years Ago_, edited by H. G. Scudder, tells pleasantly enough how men and women lived and moved and had their being in this country a century ago.

Transcriber’s Note:

Obvious printing errors, such as upside down or backwards letters and accent marks, mismatched open and closed quote marks, duplicate words, and incorrect spacing between words, were corrected. Unprinted letters and final stops were added. Alternate and obsolete spellings were left unchanged.

Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like this_.

Footnotes in the text were numbered in order and moved to the end of the article in which the anchor occurs. Footnote anchors in tables were changed to letters. Many table footnotes have multiple anchors. Added missing footnote anchor to [190].

Noted, but left unchanged: Some listings in the Contents are not in alphabetical order.

Spaces were used instead of decimal points to separate dollars from cents and pounds from shillings in “Labor in Europe and America.”

Hyphens occasionally used inconsistently, e.g. text contains both churchyard and church-yard. ‘Home Rule’ when used as a noun has no hyphen; otherwise, it appears as Home-Rule or Home-Ruler.