Chapter XX: Front Matter (20)

The organs of English opinion have been very faithful in their allegiance to Prince Bismarck, who is such an experienced cultivator of public opinion. They are the bitter foes of the Papacy and the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, they have some pretensions to principle, and, when there is no escape out of the difficulty, call white white, and black black. At all events they do not always call black white. In Germany, then, according to Mr. Froude, “liberty, spiritual and political, has thriven in spite of the Catholic Church’s most desperate opposition.” While the struggle of the German government with the Catholics had as yet not much more than half begun the English _Pall Mall Gazette_ discovered that

“There is no parallel in history to the experiment which the
German statesmen are resolutely bent on trying, except the
memorable achievement of Englishmen under the guidance of Henry
VIII.... Like all these measures, the new law concerning the
education of ecclesiastical functionaries, which is the most
striking of the number, will apply to all sects indifferently,
but, in its application to the Roman Catholic priesthood, it
almost takes one’s breath away.”

It may be only natural to find the apologist of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth describing the revival in modern times of “the memorable achievement of Englishmen” under Henry VIII. as “liberty, spiritual and political.” Yet the same “experiment” takes away the breath, not only of so cool a journal as the _Pall Mall Gazette_, but of a much cooler and more influential journal still.

“The measures now in the German Parliament, and likely to become
law,” says the London _Times_, “amount to a secular organization
so complete as not to leave the Pope a soul, a place, an hour,
that he can call entirely his own. Germany asserts for the civil
power the control of all education, the imposition of its own
conditions on entrance to either civil or ecclesiastical office,
the administration of all discipline, and at every point the
right to confine religious teachers and preachers to purely
doctrinal and moral topics. Henceforth there is to be neither
priest, nor bishop, nor cardinal, nor teacher, nor preacher, nor
proclamation, nor public act, nor penalty, nor anything that man
can hear, do, or say for the soul’s good of man in Germany,
without the proper authorization, mark, and livery of the
emperor.”

Mr. Froude is perfectly correct in saying that such measures have been carried “in spite of the church’s most desperate opposition,” but whether he is equally correct in styling the same thing “liberty,” spiritual or political, we leave to the judgment of honest readers. The London _Spectator_, writing at the same period, was in sore trouble as to the event.

“Is an age of the world,” it asks, “in which few men know what
is truth or whether there be truth, one in which you would ask
statesmen to determine its limits? We suspect that a race of
statesmen armed with such powers as Prussia is now giving to her
officials would soon cease to show their present temperance and
sobriety, and grow into a caste of civilian ecclesiastics of
harder, drier, and lower mould than any of the ecclesiastics
they had to put down.... To our minds the absolutism of the
Vatican Council is a trifling danger compared with the growing
absolutism of the democratic temper which is now being pushed
into almost every department of human conduct.”

We shall have occasion to show the results of the work of these “civilian ecclesiastics” on the Protestant Church in Germany, particularly in Prussia. Even at this early stage of the struggle the London _Times_ confessed:

“We do not anticipate any retrogression in the development of
Prussia, but it seems inevitable that there should be some check
in the progress of change, some slackening in the audacity of
legislation, some disposition to rest and be thankful.”

Of the same measure the Prussian correspondent of the London _Times_ wrote:

“The Catholic dignitaries are not the only ecclesiastics opposed
to the bill. The new measures applying not only to the Catholic
Church, but to all religious communities recognized by the
state, the Ober-Kirchenrath, or Supreme Consistory of the
Protestant Church in the old provinces, has also thought fit to
caution the crown against the enactment of these sweeping
innovations.”

“The official papers openly accuse the Protestant clergy of
becoming the allies of the Ultramontanes,” says the _Pall Mall
Gazette_ (April 12, 1873). “Herr Von Gerlach no longer stands
alone as a Protestant opponent of the chancellor’s policy.”

“This rough-and-ready method of expelling Ultramontane
influences ‘by a fork’ can hardly fail to suggest to a looker-on
the probability that, like similar methods of expelling nature,
it may lead to a reaction. Downright persecution of this sort
(we are speaking now simply of the Jesuit law), unless it is
very thorough indeed—more thorough than is well possible in the
nineteenth century—usually defeats itself,” says the _Saturday
Review_.

But why multiply quotations? Surely those given are enough to show that the leading organs of English opinion, representing every stripe of thought, are quite agreed as to what name should be given to what Mr. Froude calls the “liberty, spiritual and political,” in Germany. We leave the case confidently in their hands; and Mr. Froude apparently thinks the verdict has gone against him. He deplores the fact that “free England and free America ... affect to think that the Jesuits are an injured body, and clamor against Prince Bismarck’s tyranny. Truly, we are an enlightened generation” (p. 136).

What is here true of Germany is true also of Russia, Austria (in great measure), Italy, Switzerland, and other lands. So that if Catholicity is really reviving, as Mr. Froude alleges, it is reviving under the very shadow of death, and in face of the combined opposition of the most powerful governments. A revival under such circumstances ought to extort the admiration of Mr. Froude, who is as true a hero-worshipper as Carlyle, even if he be about equally happy in his selection of heroes. In the “Preliminary” to _The English in Ireland_ Mr. Froude propounds his theories of might and right:

“A natural right to liberty, irrespective of the ability to
defend it, exists in nations as much as, and no more than, it
exists in individuals.... In a world in which we are made to
depend so largely for our well-being on the conduct of our
neighbors, and yet are created infinitely unequal in ability and
worthiness of character, _the superior part has a natural right
to govern; the inferior part has a natural right to be
governed_; and a rude but adequate test of superiority and
inferiority is provided in the relative strength of the
different orders of human beings. Among wild beasts and savages
might constitutes right. Among reasonable beings right is for
ever tending to create might” (vol. i. pp. 1, 2).

As we are not now examining Mr. Froude’s theories on government, we only call attention to the very hazy nature of the views here expressed on a subject which of all things should be clear and definite. He uses the word _right_ without telling us what he means by it, whether or not it has an absolute meaning and force. He speaks of “the superior part” and “the inferior part” without informing us in what sense the terms are used. Superior in what? Inferior in what? To any rational mind it is plain that, just because of the inequality of human beings “in ability and worthiness of character,” there must, under a divine dispensation, which Mr. Froude does not deny, be absolute rules of right and wrong for all alike, a moral code which shall extend to and determine all rights, natural or acquired. If not this, right and wrong become convertible terms, and right and might of course follow suit, which is really the outcome of Mr. Froude’s theory—a doctrine that impregnates and inspires all his writings.

“There neither is nor can be an inherent privilege in any person
or set of persons to live unworthily at their own wills, _when
they can be led or driven into more honorable courses_; and the
rights of man—_if such rights there be_—are not to liberty, but
to wise direction and control” (p. 2).

A very plausible-looking doctrine, but a very dangerous one as here laid down. An example will serve to show the mischievous and vicious nature of it. According to Mr. Froude, to be a Catholic is “to live unworthily.” The comment suggests itself.

“Individuals cannot be independent, or society cannot exist.... The individual has to sacrifice his independence to his family, the family to the tribe,” etc. Why so? Would it not be truer as well as nobler to say that the individual _uses_ his independence for his family?

“Necessity and common danger drive families into alliance for
self-defence; the smaller circles of independence lose
themselves in ampler areas; and those who refuse to conform to
the new authority are either required to take themselves
elsewhere, or, if they remain and persist in disobedience, may
be treated as criminals” (p. 4).

Quite independent of the nature and claims of the “new authority,” so far as Mr. Froude enlightens us.

“On the whole, and as a rule, superior strength is the
equivalent of superior merit.... As a broad principle it may be
said that, as nature has so constituted us that we must be ruled
in some way, and as at any given time the rule inevitably will
be in the hands of those who are then the strongest, so nature
also has allotted superiority of strength to superiority of
intellect and character; and in deciding that the weaker shall
obey the more powerful, she is in reality saving them from
themselves, and then most confers true liberty when she seems
most to be taking it away” (pp. 4, 5).

We hold that “superiority of strength” belongs to “superiority of intellect and character,” but not in Mr. Froude’s sense. This sense is obviously that expounded by the third Napoleon in the preface to his _Julius Cæsar_—viz., that once Cæsar is established, it is a crime to go against him under any circumstances; which is equivalent to saying that whatever is, is right. It is forgotten by, or not known to, these writers that man is prone to evil from childhood; that the good has always a hard battle to fight; that it does conquer by force of “superiority of intellect and character,” but that it is often, and for a long time, borne down by the physical superiority of brute strength. The history of Christianity is the strongest instance we can offer of the truth of our position. Christianity has been struggling upwards for nineteen centuries; to human eyes it was often at the point of death; on those whom it subdued it conferred superiority of intellect and of character—a superiority which they sometimes turned against itself—and to-day it is struggling as fiercely as ever.

However, let us gauge Mr. Froude by his own standard: that superiority of strength goes with superiority of intellect and of character. It is a very convenient theory as so stated; but it is apt to work two ways. So long as it works for Mr. Froude it is very natural and explicable. As soon, however, as it turns to the opposite side it is to Mr. Froude a “phenomenon.” We are as little inclined to underrate as to overrate success, though very far from accepting it as the standard of right. One thing, however, will be conceded by all men: what succeeds in face of the most strenuous, long-sustained, and powerful opposition; in face of wealth, position, possession, numbers, resources, education, tradition—in a word, of all that goes to form and mould and fix peoples and their character, their history, their mode of thought, their national bent—what, we say, succeeds in face of all this must have something in it very much resembling Mr. Froude’s “superiority of intellect and of character.” It must have an immense vital force and strength and reality within it. It is hard for any man not to acknowledge that under such circumstances success approves itself; that it came because it deserved to come.

But this is just Mr. Froude’s “revival” of Catholicity—a fact which for him has no adequate explanation.

“The tide of knowledge and the tide of outward events,” he says,
“have set with equal force in the direction opposite to
Romanism; yet in spite of it, perhaps by means of it, as a kite
rises against the wind, the Roman Church has once more shot up
into visible and practical consequence. While she loses ground
in Spain and Italy, which had been so long exclusively her own,
she is gaining in the modern energetic races, which had been the
stronghold of Protestantism. Her numbers increase, her
organization gathers vigor. Her clergy are energetic, bold, and
aggressive. Sees long prostrate are re-established; cathedrals
rise, and churches, with schools, and colleges, and convents,
and monasteries. She has taken into her service her old enemy,
the press, and has established a popular literature. Her
hierarchy in England and America have already compelled the
state to consult their opinions and respect their pleasure;
while each step that is gained is used as a vantage-ground from
which to present fresh demands. Hildebrand, in the plenitude of
his power, was not more arrogant in his claim of universal
sovereignty than the present wearer of the tiara.”

This glowing passage suggests a variety of comments. In the first place, taking it as a statement of facts, it is, coming from Mr. Froude, a most marvellous testimony to the power and growth of the Catholic Church within the present century. Let us venture to paraphrase his outburst, and see how it runs:

Here are you whom we thought dead and buried under your weight of superstition, idolatry, absurdity, and fraud, an old fossil of mediæval times, deserted, neglected, despised, and contemned by the intelligence, wealth, and worth of the age, suddenly leaping into new life, and by a single miraculous stride coming right abreast of, if not ahead of, your foes. What have we that you have not? Energy is ours, yet you surpass us. Numbers are ours; you are stealing them from us. Knowledge and learning are ours; your teachers put ours to shame. We stole your sees, your cathedrals, your monasteries, your convents, your schools, your universities—all that you had of beautiful, and holy, and intellectual. You ask them not back, but set to work to build them anew. Ours is stolen property; yours is built on the free offerings of the poor. We invaded the domain of English literature; it was all ours; we poisoned its wells to you; we invented the newspaper to perpetuate the falsehoods that we wove about you. You have found an antidote to the poison; you win over our brightest intellects; you make a literature of your own which we are compelled to admire and read. You face us at every turn, and we may as well confess that you beat us at many.

This is really Mr. Froude’s picture, not ours. His words mean this or nothing. Will it not occur to anybody that for a church built on “superstition,” “falsehood,” “fraud,” “error,” “a tissue of legend,” etc., etc., Mr. Froude’s is indeed a strange showing—so strange that if the church were the direct opposite of all that he asserts it to be, it could hardly hope for more signal or deserved success? Does it ever occur to Mr. Froude that he may by some remote possibility be mistaken in his estimate of the Catholic Church? that it, if not right altogether, may at least be righter than he thinks?

To some minds, to many and to greater and broader minds than Mr. Froude’s, the doubt has suggested itself. Some, like Macaulay, face it, acknowledge the wonder of it, make no attempt to explain the wonder, and stand without for ever, still wondering. Others draw nearer and examine more closely, and finally enter in. Here is how Mr. Froude views it:

“What is the meaning of so strange a phenomenon? Is the progress
of which we hear so much less real than we thought? Does
knowledge grow more shallow as the surface widens? Is it that
science is creeping like the snake upon the ground, eating dust
and bringing forth materialism? that the Catholic Church, in
spite of her errors, keeps alive the consciousness of our
spiritual being and the hope and expectation of immortality? The
Protestant churches are no less witnesses to the immortal nature
of the soul, and the awful future which lies before it, than the
Catholic Church. Why is Protestantism standing still while Rome
is advancing? Why does Rome count her converts from among the
evangelicals by tens, while she loses to them, but here and
there, an exceptional and unimportant unit?” (p. 95).

Mr. Froude has put questions here each of which would take a volume to answer. We leave them to be pondered over by those for whom they are chiefly intended, and of whose conscientious consideration they are well worthy. For ourselves, we can have no doubt as to the answer to be given to each, but we are more concerned at present with Mr. Froude’s reply.

First among the causes which he assigns as having “united to bring about such a state of things” is the Tractarian movement in the Anglican Church, resulting from the “latitudinarianism of the then (1832) popular Whig philosophy.”

“The Whigs believed that Catholics had changed their nature and
had grown liberal, and had insisted on emancipating them. The
Tractarians looked on emancipation as the fruit of a spirit
which was destroying Christianity, and would terminate at last
in atheism. They imagined that, by reasserting the authority of
the Anglican Church, they could at once stem the encroachments
of popery and arrest the progress of infidelity. Both Whigs and
Tractarians were deceiving themselves. The Catholic Church is
unchanging as the Ethiopian’s skin, and remains, for good and
evil, the same to-day as yesterday.”

Yes; “the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever” is the church of God. It cannot be the church of God and be otherwise. If there was any deception Mr. Froude lays it at the right door. These men were “deceiving themselves.” The church gave no intimation of change, made no promises, held out no concessions, thought of no compromise in matter of teaching. She cannot do so; it is not in her power to do so.

It was the liberal philosophy that was chiefly instrumental in bringing the change about. Men had to choose between the fixed doctrines of the Catholic Church and the shifting doctrines and intolerable pretensions of the Anglican Church. They rejected both; they rejected revelation; they looked at man himself, and attached to him certain natural rights which are as well expressed in our Declaration of Independence as anywhere. They would, if they could, strike out the Catholics, as was attempted here. But it was impossible. They could not do it and be true to themselves and their principles. If liberty of thought, freedom of conscience, and the right to worship or not to worship God in your own way be natural rights of man, they necessarily attach to all, whether a man call himself Catholic, Protestant, Jew, or Nihilist. It is a political and practical impossibility in these days of divided and clashing beliefs to profess liberty, yet seal the door to any special form of worship; and Catholicity of all beliefs is dreaded, because, when free and untrammelled, it has the tendency and the force to assimilate and receive all into its bosom. The result of this partial concession of freedom to Catholicity in England is thus pictured by Mr. Froude:

“The Tractarians’ principles led the ablest of them into that
very fold against which they had imagined themselves the most
efficient of barriers. From the day in which they established
their party in the Anglican communion a steady stream of
converts has passed through it into the Catholic ranks; while
the Whigs, in carrying emancipation, gave the Catholics
political power, and with power the respect and weight in the
outer world which in free countries always attends it.”

It is the attainment of this power by Catholics that Mr. Froude so bitterly resents. It would be more satisfactory if he told us plainly what he would have done to Catholics. Would he deny them votes? To deny them votes is to deny them political life. And would he deny votes to Catholics only? Or would he grant votes, but compel them to use them in one way, and, if in one way, in which way? In a word, would he allow Catholics to exist at all as Catholics, would he force them into the old state of political slavery, or would he openly force them into Protestantism under the persuasion that Protestantism, no matter of what stripe, was better for them? Though he shrinks from saying so himself, the latter seems to be the only fair practical conclusion to be drawn from his words, and in passages already quoted he has given us the grounds on which he would act, and feel justified in acting: “The superior part has a natural right to govern the inferior part.” It is plain as between Protestantism and Catholicity which Mr. Froude considers “the superior part.” “The inferior part has a natural right to be governed.” “There neither is nor can be an inherent privilege in any person or set of persons to live unworthily at their own wills, _when they can be led or driven into more honorable courses_.”

We must interpret Mr. Froude by himself, and, judging him by his own words, we are led irresistibly to the conclusion that had he the power he would do all that has been done in the past, and even go beyond it—for all measures have thus far proved ineffectual—to destroy Catholicity from the face of the earth.

And here we come to our final consideration in the present article. Mr. Froude’s observations amount practically to this: Set Catholicity and Protestantism side by side; give them each perfect freedom; Catholicity will infallibly gain, Protestantism will as infallibly lose. “The phenomenon,” he says plaintively, “is not confined to England.... In America, in Holland, in Switzerland, in France, _wherever there is most political freedom_, the power of Catholics is increasing.”

Well, what of it? The fault, still following Mr. Froude, if fault there be, must rest either with Catholicity, or with Protestantism, or with political freedom. If with Catholicity, it is its fault that “wherever there is most political freedom” its “power is increasing.”

If with Protestantism, it is _its_ fault that, where Catholicity is placed on an equal political footing with it, its power decreases, while the power of Catholicity proportionately increases; and it is to be borne in mind that the power of numbers in the distinctively Protestant countries is altogether against the Catholics.

If the fault lie with political freedom itself, that with it the power of Catholics increases, what are we to say or do? That political freedom and Catholicity go hand in hand is the obvious comment, and that it is impossible to check the advance of Catholicity without at the same time contracting political freedom. We submit that this is the plain and logical deduction to be drawn from Mr. Froude’s words. It is no trick of verbiage. The fact is to himself a “phenomenon.” We are giving now no opinion of our own, but simply translating Mr. Froude, when we say that by his concession—Protestantism cannot stand by the side of Catholicity in a free air. It must go to the wall. This we have to reconcile with his other statement that “liberty, spiritual and political, has thriven in spite of her [the Catholic Church’s] most desperate opposition, till it has invaded every government in the world.” Where it has really invaded governments, by his own confession, “the power of Catholics is increasing.” Where it is cut off, there is Catholicity strangled, so far as human power can strangle it. But we shall show that even there it is the only religion with any vitality in it, and that all forms of religion which claim the name of Christian suffer with the Catholic Church and lose by her losses. We have thus far only treated the “revival” in a general way. In a future article we shall, in company with Mr. Froude, examine the specific causes which he assigns for the “revival.” sp 2

Copyright: Rev. I. T. HECKER. 1877.

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TO F. W. FABER.

Amico, io vivendo cercava conforto
Nel monte Parnasso;
Tu, meglio consigliato, cercalo
Nel Calvario.

—Chiabrera’s epitaph at Savona. From the title-page of Father Faber’s
_Poems_.

I.

True poet of all mountain sight and sound,
Of barren glen where mighty echoes wake,
Of eagle-haunted, crag-o’ershadowed lake
Where loneliness in silent state sits crowned
And shares her kingdom with no shallow heart:
True lover of all nature’s solemn ways,
The columned forest’s wind-waked song of praise—
Sad chords wherein all deepest joy hath part—
True reader of the primrose’ golden tale,
Finding its glow but shadow of a light
Wherein who seeks may find the Infinite,
That doth its mystery so in least things veil—
A seer thou seem’st in thy high mountain place,
E’er with all holiest visions face to face.

II.

Yet wandering content in lowlier ways,
By brambly lane and lawn-embroidered mere,
By quiet river in whose waters clear
The clustering willows and tall towers gaze
Of minster-town whose ancient bells ring out
And trail their music through thy thoughtful rhyme
Like far-off echoes of an older time
When trembled in their peal no note of doubt.
Landless, yet holder of a royal fief
In all the beauty by rich nature wrought—
Each blossoming hedge-row with an earldom fraught,
Wide duchies bound in every golden sheaf—
Thine the unchallenged tenure of the whole,
By right divine of unstained poet-soul!

III.

Still hearkening ever to that low heart-beat
Of sorrowing earth, whose flowers fade in death,
Whose silver-threaded rills grow faint for breath,
Whose wounded birds cry out beneath thy feet.
Not deaf thy human ear to any plaint
Of our sad mother whom her sons make weep—
Breaking with cries of hate her quiet sleep,
Crowding in sunless ways their brothers faint.
Nor dumb thy poet-voice to speak her woe—
She that hath shivered when mankind stood mute
Or flung harsh words of evilest repute,
Veiling her face her Maker’s cross below.
With filial love thy heart ’gainst hers is laid
Who rears the hills, in keeping holds the dead.

IV.

Like cleansing waters touched with heavenly grace
Thy mountain-consecrated words are shed,
Lifting our souls to light unshadowèd,
Guiding our footsteps in the holy trace
Of Him who yet shall make the hills a way—
Exalted paths trod by the clean of heart,
Shrines for the holy-minded set apart
Wherein profaner feet unheeding stray.
All nature wins true loving from thy song—
Fair not alone with her e’er-changing grace,
But, lighting each dear feature of her face
The thought of love enduring, pure and strong—
True poet, in Parnassus’ shadow still
Feeling the loadstone of blessed Calvary’s hill.

V.

To that sad mount how eloquent a guide!
Not Hybla’s blossoms could so fair beguile
The wandering bees as thy entreating wile
Faint souls to climb that seeming arid side.
With strength thou lead’st from seraph-haunted cave
Where Infinite Might with infinite loving smiled
From frail, sweet lips of Holy Mary’s Child;
Anon where pitying palm-trees shadow gave
To ease the weary exile of their Lord;
On through the humble toil of patient years—
Till, mingling with the Magdalen our tears,
Our heart’s poor vase of precious ointment poured—
We stand, God’s Mother near, with woe beside
The love-pierced feet of Jesus Crucified.

VI.

The sweetest refuge any soul can know!
Where all complaining stills its idle voice,
And trembling joy bids sorrow soft rejoice
Finding the living wand, whose staff below
The living waters lie like mountain spring
Defiled not in its source, whose shining face
Gives to e’en homely herbs a resting-place,
With heaven’s blue for their bright shadowing.
Pure, living source! wherein who drinks shall thirst
Not any more. Blest cup of Love Divine!
About whose stem the thorny wreath doth twine,
Grown soft for us since He hath borne it first.
Cool draught! wherein no hidden drop of gall
Makes heaven bitter, and earth’s promise all.

VII.

Shall poets change for bay the crown divine
Wreathing the head of Him about whom throng
Life’s tenderest flowers, who holds art’s perfect song
In his pierced hands?—pure gift in holiest shrine!—
From whose rent side the consecrating flood
Doth cleanse the poet’s thought from earthly stain,
Him king anointed o’er a grand domain
By true inheritance of royal blood;
In whose wide heart, broken for very love,
Lies master-key to all true harmonies,
So tuned, no base, discordant melodies
Shall jar earth’s music saints shall sing above;
So tuned, may wake in sweetness weakest string,
Immortal anthems loyal echoing.

VIII.

So keyed thy sacred song, O poet true!
With holy joy its very sorrow light,
So glorified with that love infinite
That shines as stars in heaven’s darkest blue:
Washed clean thy earth-born lays in that pure flood—
Thy cloudy mountains hide no fear save one
Of loving awe; though in dark gorge the sun
Falls not, e’en there the Eternal Dove doth brood.
Thy mountain springs are pure, wherein we dare
Drink as we will, not fearing, so bent down,
We shall lose sight of heaven’s fairer crown
And find but our own likeness resting there.
Fresh with a dew bearing no stain of earth,
Thy hill-paths lead unto our Father’s hearth.

IX.

With thee, my poet, lie our souls at rest
In the soft glory of our Mother’s smile—
The Maid Immaculate, who could beguile
Her God to be a child on her pure breast.
With thee we labor that our little life
Shall learn to lose itself, that it be found
In that far, other life eternal crowned
‘Mid hero-saints whose prayers were ours in strife;
Humbly with thee, our dearest Lord before,
Veiled in the little, pale, and helpless round
Wherewith on earth he chooseth to be crowned,
We bend with love that yearneth to love more.
Fond children, at the Father’s feet we kneel,
Finding the love his Spirit doth reveal.

X.

O poet! more than Crashaw, saint! forgive,
If break my singing in unworthy praise;
Pardon, if uncouth love in stammering lays,
Seeking to thank, but give thee cause to grieve.
Unspoken gratitude is burden sore
When debt so passing strong of love is owed;
Unworthy speaking but augments the load,
Forgiveness making so love’s burden more.
So much to thee I owe! Along my life
Thy words like patient, wingèd seeds are sown,
So long amid the dark and brambles grown,
Yet winning bloom at last despite the strife.
As once for him of Ars thy heart was shrine,
So mine holds thee, O blessed of Love Divine!

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AMONG THE TRANSLATORS.

VIRGIL AND HORACE—II.

“Traduire Horace, et surtout le traduire en vers, est même devenu, depuis soixante ou quatre-vingts ans, et chez nous et en d’autres pays, une sorte de légère infirmité morale, et de douce maladie qui prend régulièrement un certain nombre d’hommes instruits au retour d’âge; c’est une envie de redevenir enfant, adolescent, de se reporter au temps des études qui nous étaient chères.” To translate Horace, says Sainte-Beuve, above all to translate him in verse, has become within the last sixty or eighty years, both in France and abroad, a kind of venial moral infirmity, a sort of mild fever, which periodically seizes a certain number of educated men as they find themselves growing old; and it has its source in the longing to renew our youth, to live over again the time of studies we were fond of.

Like all the sayings of that most delicate and _spirituel_ of critics, this is so far true that most translations of Horace will be found, we think, to be the work of men advancing in life, and, in the majority of cases, to have grown up insensibly through a number of years. One does not sit down to a version of the _Odes_ as to a version of the _Æneid_, beginning at the first line and going religiously through in order to the end. No; but we pick out an ode here and there, as the mood takes us and that fits the mood—some gay _Ad Amphoram_ or _Ad Asterien_ when we are young and sprightly, _calidus juventâ_; a nobler _Ad Augustum_ or _Ad Calliopen_ when we are older and graver, in the time of whitening locks—riding in the cars, it may be, walking in the street, smoking the after-dinner cigar; everywhere, in fact, that solitude gives us a chance to entertain the best of all good company. We turn it into such English as we can muster, and print it perhaps, or, better still, put it away in our portfolio; Horace must have had a prophetic eye on his coming translator when he gave that soundest of poetic counsels—unless _Punch’s_ “Don’t” be sounder still:

“Nonumque prematur in annum
Membranis intus positis”—[73]

we put it away to be taken up again and again, lingered over fondly, touched up and polished, until the exact word is found for every elusive epithet, the precise equivalent for every tantalizing phrase, and the entire ode lies before us, its foreign garb bagging, indeed, a little here and there, but fitting as snugly as our art can make it, and we are content. That is a moment of such supreme satisfaction, of such tranquil triumph, as life but rarely yields. Less than any other that dabbles in ink has your true Horatian the fever of the type. His virtue is really—what virtue, alas! so seldom is in this perverse world—its own reward. Like Joubert, _il s’inquiète de perfection bien plus que de gloire_; to have hit upon what he feels to be a happy rendering is glory enough; enough that he and Horace should share his exultation; a felicitous adjective will put him in good-humor for a week. And so, before he well knows it, his portfolio is nearly full, and the notion first dawns upon him—the duty it almost seems—of sharing his good fortune with his fellows. “Rather would I have written the _Quem tu Melpomene semel_ or the _Donec gratus eram tibi_,” cried Scaliger, “than to be king of Aragon.” Rather would I make a perfect translation of these or any other of the _Odes_, cries our Horatian, than to be king of all Spain, with all _Cuba libre_ to boot—

“Quam si Libyam remotis
Gadibus jungas et uterque Pœnus
Serviat uni.”[74]

Somewhat in this wise, we fancy, have most versions of Horace come to be and to be printed; certainly, we incline to think, all the best versions. Thus, too, partly for the reason M. Sainte-Beuve gives, partly from the poet’s universality and the charm which lies in the very difficulty of the task—an impossibility Johnson called it, but it is one of those “sweet impossibilities” which ennoble failure—do we count so many renderings of single odes by famous men. There are few names eminent in English letters or statesmanship that are not thus allied to the genial Venusian—names, too, of the most diverse order. Not only poets like Cowper and Montgomery, Chatterton and Byron,[75] essayists like Addison, or dramatists like Congreve, Rowe, and Otway, but grave historians such as Mitford and Merivale, judges like Lord Thurlow and Sir Jeffrey Gilbert, philosophers like Atterbury and Sir William Temple, bitter satirists like Swift, tender sentimentalists like “Namby Pamby” Phillips, professors and prime ministers, doctors and divines, lords and lawyers, archdeacons and archtraitors, have joined in paying court to the freedman’s son. In his ante-room, or _atrium_, prim John Evelyn is jostled by tipsy Porson humming somewhat huskily one of the bacchanalian lyrics to a tune of his own (perhaps the _Ad Sodales_, i. 27, which that learned Theban has rendered with true Porsonian zest—a little too much so to quote); Warren Hastings there meets Edmund Burke in friendlier contest than at the bar of the House of Commons; Dr. Bentley takes issue with Archdeacon Wrangham over a doubtful reading; Mr. Gladstone leads a poetic opposition to Lord Derby in Englishing the _Carmen Amabœum_. In that modest _cœnaculum_ we can greet these great men all on a familiar and equal footing, made one of them for the nonce by the fellowship of a common taste—nay, may even flatter ourselves that here, at least, we are at their level; that our poet’s door may even be opened to us sooner than to the tallest and wisest among them. It is true greatness has no prerogative in Horace; the meanest may win to his intimacy, be admitted to his _penetralia_, sooner than the mightiest. Of all the distinguished names we have quoted, few would have had much distinction as translators alone, though Bishop Atterbury’s versions, especially that of the _Ad Melpomenen_, iv. 2, are deservedly famous. Hastings’ translation of the _Ad Grosphum_, written during his passage from Bengal to England in 1785 (he was going home to the famous trial), merits notice for its curious adaptation to his Indian experiences:

“For ease the slow Mahratta spoils
And hardier Sikh erratic toils,
While both their ease forego....

“To ripened age Clive lived renowned,
With lacs enriched, with honors crowned,
His valor’s well-earned meed.
Too long, alas! he lived, to hate
His envied lot, and died too late
From life’s oppression freed.”

Another verse had perhaps a still more personal application; there is but a trace of it in the Latin:

“No fears his peace of mind annoy
Lest printed lies his fame destroy
Which labor’d years have won;
Nor pack’d committees break his rest,
Nor avarice sends him forth in quest
Of climes beneath the sun.”

The fashion of fitting Horace to contemporary persons and events was much in vogue in Hastings’ time and earlier. Creech tells us in his preface that he was advised “to turn the Satyrs to his own times.” It was carried out to the fullest extent in the well-known _Horace in London_ of Horace and James Smith.

Within the past twenty-five or thirty years many complete versions of the _Odes_ have been put forth, including those of H. G. Robinson, the Rev. W. Sewell (printed in Bohn’s Library), Lord Ravensworth, Mr. Whyte Melville, Mr. Theodore Martin, the late Prof. Conington, and the late Lord Lytton. Of these, Mr. Martin’s, which we should feel inclined to pronounce upon the whole the best, and the most notable Lord Lytton’s, have alone been reprinted here. In giving this pre-eminence to Mr. Martin’s work we are perhaps influenced by a strong individual liking, amounting even to a prepossession, in its favor, dating from that very potent time Sainte-Beuve speaks of—“_le temps des études qui nous étaient chères_.” When it first fell into our hands it was the only version we had yet seen which at all reproduced, even to a limited degree, for us its original’s charm. By many Prof. Conington’s translation, easy, fluent, and in the main faithful—just what, from his _Æneid_, one might expect it to be—will be preferred to Mr. Martin’s, which it certainly surpasses in single odes. As to the worst there need be no such doubt. The Rev. Mr. Sewell’s is not, perhaps, the worst possible version of the _Odes_, as one is half tempted to believe who remembers how it was recommended to the readers of the _Dublin University Magazine_ long ago—how we relished that literary execution with all boyhood’s artless delight in slaughter! Time, alas! soon sobers that youthful vivacity of temper, and, better than Æsop, teaches us to respect the frogs whom it loves to revenge in kind. No; the possibilities and varieties of badness in this direction are unhappily too great for that; but it is as bad as need be—as need be, let us say, for admission to Bohn’s Library.[76] Great indulgence is certainly to be extended to translators of Horace; much is to be forgiven them; but one must finally draw the line, and probably most Horatians would feel like drawing the line at the Rev. Mr. Sewell.

It was in the process of pointing out this fact to that gentleman, in a review of his book in the magazine mentioned, that Mr. Martin some twenty years ago put forth, we believe, the first specimens of his own translation, which was completed and published some years later. Its success was immediate and deserved; for its positive no less than its comparative merits were great. Mr. Martin was one of the first to discern, or at least to put in acceptable practice, the true theory of translating the lighter odes—“a point of great difficulty,” as he truly says. “They are,” he adds, “mere _vers de société_ invested by the language, for us, with a certain stateliness, but which were probably regarded with a very different feeling by the small contemporary circle to whom they were addressed. To catch the tone of these, to be light without being flippant, to be playful without being vulgar, demands a delicacy of touch which it is given to few to acquire, even in original composition, and which in translation is all but unattainable.” The graver odes have their own difficulties; but the skilful translator handles them more easily, we fancy, than the gay fluttering swarm of laughing Lydias and Neæras that flash athwart their statelier pomp like golden butterflies through the Gothic glooms of summer woods—butterflies whose glossy wings, alas! lose something of their down and brilliance at every, even the lightest and most loving, touch. The thought of a poem is always easier to transplant into other speech than its form. Ideas are essentially the same, whatever tongue interprets them—Homer’s Greek or Shakspeare’s English; but the infinite delicate shades of beauty or significance added to them by the subtle differences of words, by that beauty of their own and intrinsic value which, as Théophile Gautier puts it—himself a master of language—words have in the poet’s eyes apart from their meaning, like uncut and unset jewels, the deftest, most patient art of the translator toils in vain to catch. They vanish in his grasp like the bubble whose frail glories dazzle the eyes and mock the longing, chubby fingers of babyhood; to render them is like trying to paint the perfume of a flower.

Now, it is true enough, whatever iconoclasts like Stendhal may pretend, that in poetry thought cannot be divorced from form; it is the indissoluble union of both that makes the poem. Try to fancy any really great passage of verse expressed in other words, even of the same speech, and you see at once how important form is. Take once more Shakspeare’s

“Daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty,”

and try to change or misplace a single word. One feels instantly that any change would be fatal; it almost seems, with such passages, as though noble thought and perfect word had been waiting for each other from all time until the high-priest of Apollo should come to wed them. To quote Sainte-Beuve again—the critic who wishes to instruct his readers can scarcely quote him too often: “Je conçois qu’on ne mette pas toute la poesie dans le métier, mais je ne conçois pas du tout que quand il s’agit d’un art on ne tienne nui compte de l’art lui-même et qu’on déprécie les parfaits ouvriers qui y excellent.”[77] Yet it is none the less true that a poem in which the idea is paramount is more susceptible of translation than one whose form is the chief element of its charm. One can imagine Wordsworth’s fine sonnet on Milton, “Milton, thou shouldst be with us at this hour,” being turned into Latin with comparatively little loss; indeed it has been so turned by one of the most accomplished of English scholars—Dr. Kennedy—into Alcaics of which the purity and finish make a fitting casket for that gem of poetry; though even here one feels the wide difference between the original of that immortal line,

“Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart,”

and the Latin

“Mens tua lumine
Fulgebat, ut sidus, remote,”

missing, as we do, the “lovely marriage of pure words,” that in the English is itself a poem. But take such a bit of verbal daintiness as George Darley’s “Sweet in her green dell the flower of beauty slumbers,” with its peculiar and _saisissant_ rhythm, the perfection of verbal music; or Tennyson’s “Break, break, break,” where the poetry—and undeniable poetry it is—lies in a certain faint aroma of suggestion that seems to breathe from the very words, and try to reproduce the effect of them in other speech. As well try with earthly tools to rebuild Titania’s palace of leaf shadows and the gossamer, to weave her mantle on any mortal loom out of moonbeams and the mist.

Much the same is it to attempt to transfer to an English translation aught of the peculiar grace which invests Horace’s lightest lyrics with a charm we feel but cannot analyze, which resides in the choice of epithets, the arrangement of words, the cadence of the rhythm, the metrical form, and which yet is something more than any or all of these. The noble thought which lies embodied in the _Justum et tenacem propositi virum_ we may not despair of rehabilitating, with somewhat of its proper majesty, in our own vernacular; but the shy, fugitive loveliness of that wildwood picnic to which the poet bids us, to forget the cares of life,

“Quo pinus et ingens albaque populus
Umbram hospitalem consociare amant
Ramis, et obliquo laborat
_Lympha fugax trepidare rivo_”

—what art can coax away from its native soil? Do we find it in Francis?—

“Where the pale poplar and the pine
Expel the sun’s intemperate beam;
In hospitable shades their branches twine,
And winds with toil, though swift, the tremulous stream”;

or in Creech—though Creech is here luckier than usual?—

“Where near a purling Spring doth glide
In winding Streams, and softly chide
The interrupting Pebble as it flows”;

or in Prout?—

“While onward runs the crooked rill,
Brisk fugitive, with murmur shrill”;

or in Lord Lytton?—

“Wherefore struggles and murmurs the rill
Stayed from flight by a curve in the shore.”

Even Mr. Martin gives it up, and presents us, instead of a translation, with a couplet which is very pretty English verse, but about as far from Horace as can be:

“Where runs the wimpling brook, its slumb’rous tune
Still murmuring as it runs to the hush’d ear of noon.”

It is passages such as this especially which have caused Horace to be called the untranslatable.

To come from theory to practice, it is in the lighter odes, and in those parts of all the odes the beauty of which in the original lies chiefly in expression, that all Horace’s translators have most conspicuously failed. Take Milton’s _Ad Pyrrham_, for example (Ode v.). The _Ad Pyrrham_ is not only one of the most charming but also one of the most difficult of the minor odes, and for that reason among the oftenest translated. It is one of the many _mitten_-pieces wherein the inconstant bard seems to have taken a somewhat ostentatious delight in celebrating the numerous snubbings he had to put up with from the no less inconstant fair who were the objects of his brief and fitful homage. In it, as in the _Ad Neæram_ (_Epod._ xv.) and the _Ad Barinen_ (_Carm._ ii. 8), reproaches to the lady for her perfidy are mingled with self-gratulations on the poet’s own lucky escape and sinister warnings to his rival—the time-old strategy and solace of the discarded lover the world over. He has been shipwrecked, he says, on that treacherous sea of love; but having, the gods be praised! made shift to scramble ashore in safety, and got on some dry duds, sits in gleeful expectation of seeing his successor get a like ducking. The poem is simply a piece of mock heroics, for the counterpart of which we must look to such minglings of cynicism and sentiment as we find in the poetry of Praed and Thackeray and Locker, or, to a less degree, in many of Béranger’s lighter songs. The difference between the modern poets and the ancient is that in the former the sentiment is real, veiled under an affectation of cynicism: in the latter it is precisely the reverse. But, bearing that difference in mind, the translator may find in the methods of the poets named some hints for the handling of such odes as the _Ad Pyrrham_.

But how do the translators treat it? Take Milton’s famous version, which everybody knows:

“What slender youth bedewed with liquid odors
Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave,
Pyrrha? For whom bind’st thou
In wreaths thy golden hair?

“Plain in thy neatness,” etc.

—’tis as solemn as a Quaker conventicle. Nor, with reverence be it said _en passant_, is it altogether free from graver faults; undeniably elegant as it is, this translation has had quite as much praise as it deserved. It is full of those Latin constructions Milton loved—“on faith and changed gods complain” for _fidem mutatosque deos flebit_, “always vacant” for _semper vacuam_, “unwonted shall admire” for _emirabitur insolens_, etc.—which are nowhere more out of place than in a translation from the Latin. Some, indeed, claim that they carry with them and impart a certain flavor of the original to those unacquainted with it; but this seems to us a view at once fallacious and superficial. The office of translation into any language is surely to reproduce the original in the idiom of that language as nearly as may be; and though the theory, like all theories, may be pressed to an excess—as we think Mr. Morris has pressed it, for example, in his translation of the _Æneid_—better that than such deformities as

“Always vacant, always amiable
Hopes thee.”

It is the suggestion not of Horace but of Milton here that is pleasant; it is because Milton’s natural English style is a highly Latinized and involved style that these oddities of his translation strike us less than in another. Sometimes, too, oddly enough for so good a scholar, he falls short of the full sense of his original. _Potenti maris deo_, the commentators tell us, means, not “the stern god of sea,” but “the god potent over the sea”; and “plain in thy neatness” for _simplex munditiis_ misses the entire significance of the latter word, which implies something of grace and beauty. “Plain in thy neatness” suggests rather “Priscilla the Puritan maiden” than Pyrrha of the dull-gold hair. Ben Jonson’s

“Give me a look, give me a face
That makes simplicity a grace,”

hits Horace’s meaning exactly, and certainly far more poetically. Indeed, we often find in original English poetry much apter renderings than the translators give us. Prof. Conington knew this when he went to Shakspeare for “fancy free” as an equivalent for this very word _vacuam_ we have been talking of—a perfect equivalent of its association did not make it a little un-Horatian—and to Matthew Arnold’s “salt, unplumbed, _estranging_ sea” for the very best version we have seen of that most puzzling phrase (i. 3), “_oceano dissociabili_.”

This is, perhaps, a digression; but as we set out for a ramble, we have no apologies to make. Conington’s version, in the same metre as Milton’s, only rhyming the alternate lines, is not all so good as “fancy free,” though it gains from its rhyme a certain lightness lacking in that of Milton’s:

“What slender youth besprinkled with perfume
Courts you on roses in some grotto’s shade,
Fair Pyrrha? Say for whom
Your yellow hair you braid.

“So true, so simple! Ah! how oft shall he
Lament that faith can fail, that gods can change,
Viewing the rough black sea
With eyes to tempests strange,” etc.

So true, so simple! We are not much nearer to _simplex munditiis_ than before. Martin is not here at his best, and Francis is unusually successful: “dress’d with careless art” and “consecrate the pictured storm” are felicities he does not always attain. Prout is chiefly noticeable for yielding to the almost irresistible temptation of a false beacon in _intentata nites_:

“I the false light forswear,
A shipwreck’d mariner”;

and Leigh Hunt’s, though but a paraphrase, is surely a very happy one:

“For whom are bound thy tresses bright
With unconcern so exquisite?”

and

“Though now the sunshine hour beguiles
His bark along thy golden smiles,
Trusting to see thee for his play
For ever keep smooth holiday,”

admirably elude, if they do not meet, the difficulties of the Latin. But in none of these, nor in any other rendering we have seen, is there any trace of that _nuance_ of sarcasm or polite banter we seem to taste in the original. The only American version we remember to have met with is not in this respect more successful:

“In thy grotto’s cool recesses,
Dripping perfumes, lapped in roses,
Say what lissome youth reposes,
Pyrrha, wooing thy embrace?
Braid’st for whom those tawny tresses,
Simple in thy grace?

“Ah! how oft averted heaven
Will he weep, and thy dissembling.
And, poor novice, view with trembling
O’er the erewhile tranquil deep,
By the angry tempest driven,
Billowy tumult sweep;