Chapter XXVI: Prologue (2)

628, Bible, Italian, 316, 331 folios. Venice, N. Jenson. 1471.
649, Bible, Italian. Venice, Bolognese, 1477.
652, New Testament, French. Lyons, Buyer, 1477.
653-4, Old Testament, Dutch. Delf, Zoen, 1477.
669, Psalms, Dutch, Delf. 1480.
688, Bible, Italian. Venice, 1487.
690, Bible, Bohemian. 1488.
706, Psalms, French (Polyglot). Paris, 1509.
725, Bible, French. Paris, Petit, 1520.

The language of Sir Thomas More leads us to believe that some one of the Catholic versions of the New Testament at least was printed; but if so, the copies were suppressed so completely that none has reached our times. The mere fact that no copy is now known does not prove that none ever existed, when we consider the wholesale destruction by law of all Catholic books of devotion.

These are not all the vernacular Bibles issued in that period, but, as they stood there in the South Kensington Loan Collection, they furnished an irrefragable proof that printing originated in Catholic times; that the church was the first to use and encourage it; that she multiplied editions of the Bible in Latin, the habitual language of the church, then the language of learning and science, as well as in German, Italian, Dutch, French, and Bohemian; she printed, too, as a copy here showed, the Bible, Pentateuch, and Psalms in Hebrew, the Bible and Psalter in Greek and Chaldee, and an Arabic Psalter. (See 682, 691, 706, 711, 718, 720, 721.) Catholic writers have frequently referred to these early-printed Bibles and portions of Scripture in the vernacular; but to cite Panzer or some other bibliographer is far different from referring to a copy of the book. Here in the Caxton collection the very volumes stood to speak for themselves, and the catalogue attests the fact that they were there, tells us who owns each copy, its condition and state. What as a Catholic argument seemed vague and hazy thus took solid form, and became too substantial to doubt.

Now, how does Mr. Stevens endeavor to elude the force of this array of solid proofs? It is absolutely comical to see to what straits he is put. The following platitude, false statement, and false deduction is about as curious as the Caxton celebration itself:

“As the discovery of America was the greatest of all discoveries, so
the invention of the art of printing may be called the greatest of
all inventions. But no sooner had Columbus reported his grand
discovery through the press than the pope assumed the whole property
in the unknown parts of the earth, and divided it (_sic_) all at
once between the two little powers in the Peninsula, wholly
disregarding the rights and titles of the other nations of Europe.
The same little game of assumption has been tried, from time to
time, with regard to this great invention, but the press has a
protective power within itself which the church can smother only
with ignorance and mental darkness.”

The figures are somewhat confused, and we cannot exactly picture to our minds the church, with the two pillows of ignorance and mental darkness which Mr. Stevens can doubtless supply from his well-furnished store, trying to smother a protective power. The smothering of the children in the Tower was nothing compared to it. As for the “little game of assumption,” we think the gentlemen of the Reformation have played it long and successfully. But we admit that we do not see what right and title the nations of Europe had in the unknown parts of the earth, or whence they derived any right and title. So far as we have read, no right or title was claimed except when based on discovery, and then it was in the known and not in the unknown. Spain and Portugal carried their rival claims to the Holy See as a recognized tribunal, and the line of demarkation in their attempts at exploration was a wise and peace-establishing provision. It did not operate, and was not intended, to exclude the subjects of the pope, France, Germany, Denmark, or England from exploring.

The whole question is foreign to the subject of printing—so foreign that none of the Columbus letters, or the bull of Alexander VI., was thought worth obtaining for the Caxton exhibition. We have looked carefully through the catalogue, and, if they are there, they have certainly escaped us.

The array of books presented here shows that Luther could not have received the education he really did in his monastery, making him conversant with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, without being aware of the existence in print of many of the more than a thousand editions in all languages that had already issued from the press. It is not pretended that Luther obtained his knowledge of languages by a miraculous gift; he acquired them in the monastic schools, and his attainments are a proof of the extent of their curriculum.

One of the great objects of the exhibition was to show the earliest English Protestant editions. Tyndale’s New Testament, supposed to have been printed at Worms by Peter Schöffer in 1526, was represented by the very imperfect copy owned by the dean and chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and by the Antwerp edition of 1534; by the London edition of 1536, which had also at the end the “Epystles taken out of the Olde Testament what are red in the church after the use of Salsburye upon certen dayes of the year.”

But the great pride of the exhibition was a series of Coverdale’s Bibles and Testaments, over which Mr. Stevens indulges in most rhapsodical eulogy. “Let no Englishman or American,” he exclaims, “view this (765) and the six following Bibles without first lifting his hat, for they are seven extraordinary copies of the Coverdale Bible, containing, with one important exception (the Marquis of Northampton’s copy), all the variations known of the most precious volume in our language.” We cannot altogether share his raptures over this Bible, “faithfully and truly translated out of Douche and Latyn into English.” Stevens sneers at the Rhemish Testament as “a secondary translation from the Vulgate,” but Coverdale’s, translated out of “Douche and Latyn” into English, elicits no such sneer. According to his theory, set forth at great length, this edition is due to “Jacob van Meteren, of Antwerp, printer and proprietor, and probably the translator, by whom Coverdale was employed to edit and see the work through the press,” and he gives Antwerp as the place of publication. The edition was bought by James Nicolson, of Southwark. Though Mr. Stevens elsewhere represents the English people at this time as hungering and famished for an English Bible, he admits “that the English printer and publisher seems to have had as much trouble in working off his books as Simmons had in selling Milton’s _Paradise Lost_, if we may judge by the number of new titles and preliminary leaves found in different copies.” It contains a long and fulsome dedication to Henry VIII. and his dearest just-wife, in some copies “Anne” (Boleyn), in others “Jane” (Seymour). The Bible bearing the name of Thomas Mathew as translator (London: Grafton & Whitchurch, 1537) he ascribes to the famous John Rogers, and maintains that it too was printed by Van Meteren at Antwerp.

The Latin-English Testament bearing Coverdale’s name (London 1538), which he repudiated on account of its errors, or perhaps the correction of some of his errors, and that really issued by him at Paris in the same year, were both in the exhibition, as well as that issued also in 1538 at London bearing the name of Johan Hollybushe as translator. These are very curious as being, we think, the only Latin-English Testaments ever issued, giving the Vulgate and a translation based upon it. No other has, to our knowledge, ever appeared in the lapse of more than three centuries since that year, 1538. As Caxton’s Psalter was perhaps the first book of the Vulgate printed in England, these Testaments of Nicolson were the last portion of the Vulgate printed there for more than two hundred and fifty years, when the edition printed for the exiled clergy of France made its appearance. Unfortunately we do not find a copy of that edition in the list of those included in the exhibition.[84]

The first Testament professing to be translated directly from the Greek is that numbered in the catalogue 864, issued by Gaultier, 1550; and the first Bible from the Hebrew and Greek is that printed at Geneva by Rowland Hall in 1560. This shows how the people in England clung to the Vulgate. On the Continent Luther had abandoned it for such Hebrew and Greek texts as he could find, and so led the way to the host of errors that prevail to this day; but in England the versions were all based on the Vulgate, occasionally represented as compared with the Greek. It was not, indeed, till 1611 that the Church of England, by the translation then issued, formally abandoned the Vulgate, as the Calvinists had previously done. Mr. Stevens’ sneer at the Rhemish Testament of 1583, as being a secondary translation, applies with equal force to nearly all the English Protestant editions then in the hands of the people. Now that the Greek and Hebrew texts have by the aid of the best manuscripts been restored to some degree of purity and accuracy, Protestant scholars are revising the translation of 1611, and the one remarkable fact appears constantly that every change made to bring them to correspond to correct texts brings them back to the early translations from the Vulgate.[85]

This fact of English adherence to the Vulgate shown in the collection of Bibles at the Caxton celebration goes far towards exploding another Protestant myth and legend; and that is that England welcomed the Reformation with open arms, that the whole nation went over to the new ideas, and that Catholicity was generally abandoned. This is inculcated in a thousand ways in all the histories and popular literature of the day, if not squarely asserted. The Caxton collection shows that for nearly a century the people of England clung to the old Latin Vulgate as a standard, and that translations from it alone were read officially in the churches. And to this day the Book of Common Prayer is based on the Vulgate. Although Henry VIII. broke off from Rome, he knew the temper of the people. The English nation was in a manner bereft of its wonted leaders. The civil wars of the Roses had swept away most of the old nobility, and had brought to the surface the worst, most unscrupulous and grasping adventurers. What this class was who clustered around the spendthrift Henry VIII. we can easily see by a study of our times, after our experience of civil war. They were men to whom nothing was sacred; men determined to grasp and hold rank and wealth at any cost to the state or conscience. The people, bereft of their old leaders, of the time-honored noble families, could not effectively resist the set of new men. To these the church offered a splendid field for plunder. The ill-concerted insurrections against them were put down with merciless severity. Yet the attachment of the people to the old faith remained. Every step of Henry VIII. was gradual. In his reign the Mass and other offices of the church were maintained. Even in the reign of his boy son the unscrupulous men who coined a new faith and worship did not venture to go too far from the old forms. Like the Chinese emperor, they sought to destroy all trace of Catholic worship by committing to the flame every book in England that could keep it alive. What havoc they made we can learn and imagine from a view of the Caxton collection. Mary’s reign was too short to undo the mischief, and Elizabeth threw her whole influence into the scale against the church, and, against her own convictions, upheld the Anglican establishment as organized in her brother’s name, and finally gave it form and power; but even she did not dare to bring it to the standard of the French, Swiss, Dutch, and Scotch Protestants. The Church of England, in obedience to the old Catholic instincts of even those who submitted to force, retained much of the old form, and non-jurors, Puseyites, Tractarians, Ritualists are simply natural products of this old element.

Yet, with all the power of Henry, Somerset, Elizabeth, the mass of the English people had not become Protestant or ceased to be Catholic. One of Harper’s Half-Hour Series is not likely to over-state the Catholic side; yet Dr. Guernsey, in his _Spanish Armada_, says:

“At the middle of the reign of Elizabeth the population of England
numbered something less than five millions. Of these, according to
the estimate of Rushton, one-third were Protestants and two-thirds
Catholics. Lingard, with less probability, thinks that about
one-half were Catholic. The Italian Cardinal Bentivoglio reckoned
the zealous Catholics at only one-thirtieth part of the nation,
while those who would without the least scruple have become
Catholics, if the Catholic religion should be established by law,
were at least four-fifths of the whole; and Macaulay thinks this
statement very near the truth. We think a more accurate
apportionment would be that one-fourth of the population were
decided Protestants, another fourth decided Catholics, while the
remaining half—the majority of them with a leaning to the old
faith—were quite content with whatever form of religion should be
ordained by the civil authorities for the time being.”

If this was the state of England in the middle of Elizabeth’s reign, after all connection with Rome had been broken off for two generations, all Catholic books committed to the flames, the Mass and the priesthood outlawed, how impossible to believe that the English people went as a body into the Reformation! If only one-fourth were then decided Protestants, how many were Protestants when Coverdale’s Bible was issued?

If England became Protestant, it was simply because the English people were dragooned into it by penal laws steadily and persistently applied. The decided Protestants from choice were few and their descendants are comparatively few. The mass of English Protestants are the descendants of cowards who yielded up their faith and their convictions to save property, liberty, or life. The poorest Irish Catholic has a noble ancestry of men who suffered confiscation, imprisonment, hunting like wild beasts, death itself, rather than abandon the faith they sincerely believed, and it is certainly not for the sons of poltroons to despise them.

The Caxton collection thus, by showing the adherence to the Vulgate till a Presbyterian king came to the throne, shows how reluctantly England accepted Protestantism, and dispels many of the fine theories with which Mr. Stevens mystifies the subject.

The collection had some editions of special interest to us Catholics, yet it lacked many which we would expect to find in so pretentious a series of books. The Gutenberg Bible, that glory of the church, we have already noted. Few of our readers were or could well be present at the London exhibition, but when the Lenox Library opens in New York they will be able to see a fine copy of this first of printed books—proof that in Catholic times, when the church was undisputed mistress of Europe, the first work deemed entitled to the honor of being reproduced by the new invention was the Bible. A Catholic can point to it, and say: “That is the first book ever printed; it is our Catholic Bible, printed by the Catholic men who invented the art of printing.”

The Caxton collection contained also the first edition issued in the city of Rome in 1471, as well as the wonderful Polyglot of the great Cardinal Ximenes, and the Polyglot Psalter of Bishop Giustiniani with the first sketch of the life of Columbus. The Bible issued as a standard by Pope Sixtus V. in 1590 is represented by Mr. Stevens, most strangely, as “the first complete Latin edition published by papal authority.” He does not tell us in what respect the previous Latin Bibles were incomplete, or explain how none of them had any papal authority. This Sistine edition was contributed by Earl Spencer, as well as a copy of the edition issued under Pope Clement VIII., 1592, and the edition of the Septuagint from the Codex Vaticanus, issued at Rome in 1586. The Rhemish New Testament, 1582, and the Old Testament printed at Douay in 1609-10, were also there, but Mr. Stevens is clearly in error in saying: “It is a remarkable circumstance that, though these volumes bear the dates of 1609 and 1610 they had not reached the hands of the translators of the 1611 version when their long preface was written. There is distinct allusion to this work, as if to disclaim any knowledge of it.” Yet there is intrinsic evidence that they availed themselves of it before they put their own to press. Readings both in the Old and New Testament which had been preserved through the series of Protestant translations were abandoned in the King James Bible, and Douay renderings substantially, if not literally, adopted.

The King James Bible, of course, figures in the collection. But the question as to which is the _editio princeps_, the standard for those who bow down to that version, is a knotty one. There is a “Great He Bible” and a “Great She Bible”—two issues of the same year 1611 distinct through every leaf. Catholics will wonder at this distinction of sex in Bibles, and it may be well to state that in the endeavor to determine which of the two was the one originally issued by the translators, scholars found a discrepancy in Ruth iii. 15, one reading: “He measured six measures of barley, and laid it on her, and He went into the city,” while the other reads, “She went into the city”; and as each of these, although varying from each other in many places, was taken as a standard for subsequent editions, these Protestant Bibles are all He and She Bibles to those who wish to know from which of the two 1611 editions they sprang. Mr. Stevens decides that the He Bible, evidently incorrect in its rendering, was the original one.

He sets at rest another point in regard to this King James Bible, and that is the myth or fable of calling it “The Authorized Version.” He says: “We do not find any authority for calling it the _Authorized Version_, the words ‘appointed to be read in churches’ meaning not authorized, but, as explained in the preliminary matter, simply how the Scriptures were pointed out or ‘appointed’ for public reading.” In other words, to make the Bible go down with the people of England, who still clung to many old Catholic ideas, the epistles and gospels for the Sundays and many of the holidays of the year, as read from time immemorial in the Mass, were indicated or appointed in this Bible. This makes the King James Bible, whether a “Great He Bible” or a “Great She Bible,” a document to prove how slow the English people were to go over to the Reformers, and how they clung to what little they could grasp of their old Catholic faith and devotion. Mr. Stevens does not like it for this very reason, and wants the title _purified_ by leaving out “appointed to be read in churches”; but leaving it out now will not destroy the force of the phrase as it stands on both the He and She Bible of 1611. He claims the King James as the Bible of all English Protestant churches. It has become so; but it was not so originally. He is historically wrong when he says: “It never was any more the Bible of the Church (_i.e._, of England) than of the Puritans.” It certainly was. Unfortunately there was no copy in this Caxton celebration of “The Souldier’s Pocket Bible: Printed at London by G. B. and R. W. for G. C., 1643,” or we could refer him to that constant companion of Cromwell’s soldiers to show that the Puritans stuck to the Geneva Bible as late as the time of the Commonwealth, and left the King James and the Bishop’s Bibles to the malignants. He knows the early writings of his own New England divines too well not to be aware that their sermons and tracts quote the Geneva and not the King James. The incorrect editions of the Geneva, and the appointment of king’s printers in the reign of Charles II. with the exclusive right of printing Bibles, stopped the issue of any but the King James, and it thus superseded the Geneva, and people took it as a matter of necessity, not of choice or preference. It is simply absurd to make it appear that the King James version was at once accepted and adopted generally.

The collection did very little in showing the various modifications of the Douay Bible. After the edition of 1635 there was scarcely anything in the Caxton exhibition—no copy of Nary’s New Testament, which is certainly remarkable enough. The first edition of the Protestant Bible printed in Ireland dates only from 1714, and certainly a Catholic Testament printed, in spite of penal laws and persecution, in 1719, only five years later, ought to have found a place there. There was no copy of Witham’s New Testament or of Challoner’s first Testament, or of the first edition of his Bible. Nor does Geddes appear. America is not at all represented. Not a copy of Eliot’s Indian Bible, or of Sauer’s German Bible, or the Congress Bible, or the first Catholic Bible of 1790; the Bay Psalm Book stands almost alone.

The Bibles sought for on account of curious renderings or strange blunders were pretty well represented, such as Matthews’ Bug Bible: “Thou shalt not nede to be afraid for any bugges by nyghte,” Ps. xci. 5. The second Genevan, 1562: “Blessed are the place-makers,” Matt. v. 9. Bishop’s Bible, 1568: “Is there no tryacle in Gilead?” Jerem. viii. 22. The Wicked Bible, London, 1631: “Thou shalt commit adultery.” Cambridge Bible, 1638: “Whom _ye_ may appoint,” Acts vi. 3, for _we_. The Vinegar Bible, 1717: “The Parable of the Vinegar.” Oxford Bible, 1807: “Purge your conscience from _good_ works,” instead of “_dead_,” Heb. ix. 14. Oxford Bible, 1810: “Hate not ... his own _wife_,” for life, Luke xiv. 26. Still these are of no value except as cautions against typographical blunders. But among the curious Bibles and Testaments we were surprised to see no copy of the now rare negro English Testament, published in London in 1829, _Da Njoe Testament va wi Masra en Helpiman Jesus Christus_. The Rev. Sydney Smith immortalized it, and _Notes and Queries_ in 1864 devoted some space to it. Renderings like these from a copy before us: St. Matthew, vi. 7, “En effi oeni beggi, oene no meki soso takkitakki, leki dem Heiden, bikasi dem membre, effi dem meki foeloe takkitakki, Gado so harki dem,” or vi. 11, “Gi wi tideh da jamjam va wi,”[86] are certainly as curious as anything exhibited.

An ingenious gentleman like Mr. Stevens might perhaps have deduced from it a proof that Caxton was a follower of Wickliffe, or that the Catholic Church showed no respect for the Word of God.

A catalogue of books such as we have taken up seems to afford little scope for any but dry bibliographical notes, but the Caxton celebration has its lessons that can be gleaned even from a catalogue, and if our readers have followed us we think that they will admit that the attempt to make Caxton other than a pious Catholic was a delusion; and the exclusion of the Catholic element, and the attempt to make Caxton a fulcrum for the exaltation of Protestantism, a failure.[87] As Catholics we may be grateful for the unintentional evidence the collection afforded of the fact that the Catholic Church protected and preserved the Bible, made men esteem and desire it, gave it to the newly-invented art of printing as the first work to issue, fostered the publication of the original texts, the authentic Vulgate, and of translations in the vernacular; as well as incidentally of proof that the Luther romance was a figment, and proof that the Reformation was forced on the English people, that they clung to the Bible, liturgy, and dogmas of the Catholic Church with the utmost tenacity, and that they lacked only the courage of Ireland and Poland to have maintained their country Catholic.

Footnote 76:

_Caxton Celebration_, 1877. Catalogue of the Loan Collection of
Antiquities, Curiosities, and Appliances connected with the art of
Printing, South Kensington. Edited by George Bullen, Esq., F.S.A.,
Keeper of the Printed Books, British Museum. London, Trübner; xix.-472
pp.

_The Bibles in the Caxton Exhibition. MDCCCLXXVII._; or, A
Bibliographical Description of nearly one thousand representative
Bibles in various languages chronologically from the first Bible
printed by Gutenberg in 1450-1456 to the last Bible printed at the
Oxford University Press the 30th June, 1877.... By Henry Stevens
G.M.B., F.S.A., M.A., etc. London: H. Stevens. 1877. 8vo, pp. 151.

Footnote 77:

Office of the Blessed Virgin, with other prayers.

Footnote 78:

The clown appears early in “What you Will.” It has become the fashion
to call our Catholic institutions, schools, etc., _sectarian_, because
apparently the _sects_ are bitterly opposed to them; and institutions
in which the Protestant sects have complete control and enforce their
views are called _non-sectarian_. No one would imagine that “religious
sectarianism” here is a euphemism for “Protestant intolerance.”

Footnote 79:

We have always indulged the hope that the use of the Sarum Missal on
some patronal feast will be permitted in the primatial church of
England, as the Ambrosian and Mozarabic are in Italy and Spain, to
show conclusively that we are the identical body who used that liturgy
before the Reformation.

Footnote 80:

While writing we read the following from Blades’ _Life of Caxton_ to a
Catholic girl in her teens: “No. 57. Death-Bed Prayers. A Folio
Broadside:

“From the language of these prayers it is evident that they were
intended for use by the death-bed. They were probably printed in this
portable form for priests and others to carry about with them.
Although short, their interest is great, and the reader may not be
displeased to read them in the following more modern dress than that
of the original:

“‘O glorious Jesu! O meekest Jesu! O most sweetest Jesu! I pray thee
that I may have true confession, contrition, and satisfaction ere I
die; and that I may see and receive thy holy body, God and man,
Saviour of all mankind. Christ Jesu without sin; and that thou wilt,
my Lord God, forgive me all my sins, for thy glorious wounds and
Passion; and that I may end my life in the true faith of all holy
church.’”

“What a stupid man!” exclaimed my young hearer. “That is not any
prayer for a priest to say by a dying person; it’s a prayer for a
happy death, and is it not a beautiful one?’” She was certainly right,
and a Catholic child could teach many of these people.

Footnote 81:

To the same purport is this colophon on Bartholomæus’ _De
Proprietatibus Rerum_, issued by Wynken de Worde about 1495:

“And also of your charyte call to remembraunce
The soule of William Caxton, first prynter of this boke,
In laten tongue at Coleyn, hymself to auance
That every wel disposyd man may theron loke.”

Footnote 82:

Stevens admits that there was no necessity for actually doing the
printing of Bibles in England. “The educated of England, however, were
not ignorant of the Scriptures, for Coburger, of Nuremberg, and
probably other Continental printers, had established warehouses in
London for the sale of Latin Bibles as early as 1480, and perhaps
earlier.”

Footnote 83:

The Paulist Library in New York might have sent a fine copy of the
ninth edition, printed in 1482, the very year Luther was born.

Footnote 84:

We have never seen the Latin Bible printed by Norton at London, in
1680, but think that the text of the Vulgate was not followed.

Footnote 85:

The natural history and topography of the 1611 Bible are ludicrously
incorrect, because they abandoned the Vulgate and translated at
random. Yet the Vulgate was translated from the Septuagint, and
revised in the Holy Land by St. Jerome with the aid of Jewish scholars
who knew the geography and natural history of the country. The
Septuagint was made in Egypt, while Hebrew was still the language of
the nation, by men thoroughly acquainted with their native country.
Was it not sheer madness for gentlemen in England in the seventeenth
century, with a mere smattering of Hebrew, to think that they could
render geographical and zoölogical terms more accurately? Is not their
presumption the real matter to be sneered at?

Footnote 86:

Written according to Dutch rather than English. This is very odd.
_Beggi_ is _pray_; _takkitakki_ is much _talkee_ (say); _jamjam_ is
_yam_ (bread). “Give we to-day the yams for we!”

Footnote 87:

Like Caxton, a Catholic, the writer has, like Caxton, written,
translated, edited, printed, and published, and has had for years
behind his chair in his dining-room an engraving of Caxton examining
his first proof-sheet. His interest in Caxton is, therefore, almost
personal.

MALCOLM, KING OF SCOTLAND, TO HIS WIFE, ST. MARGARET.

I.

God speed thee, sweet, in all thy tasks of love,
The daily round of thy heart’s majesty—
Thy dear lips opened unto clemency—
My Margaret, my pearl all price above;
My little kingdom, where as king I reign
O’er lands so fair I might with gladness give
All earthly state in these alone to live
Where nothing base doth holy ground profane.
My queen, my Atheling, true noble one,
That wearest on thy Saxon brow a grace
Wherein all loyal hearts can true love trace
To this north land the misty hills do crown.
My rose-lipped daisy, lighting Scotland’s sod
With happy faces lifted up to God.

II.

God speed thee, sweet; my heart so singeth e’er,
As grows more dear among our poor thy fame
With every day. O Lady, true of name,
Giver of bread to all beneath thy care,
My royal-hearted queen and flawless pearl,
How shall my sin-stained prayers for thee avail,
That dost least fault with innocent tears bewail?
Meek daisy, whose white petals do unfurl
From soul wherein all golden visions shine!
So near to God thou seem’st, and pray’st so well,
The book I kiss whereon thy pure eyes dwell,
So grows my prayer the words that have been thine,
So surely grows it sweeter in His ear,
Tuned to the music of thy singing clear.

III.

May that brave saint, sweet wife, whose name is thine,
Whose virgin feet unharmed on dragons fell,
Keep thee in grace with Him thou lov’st so well
Till that far day when shall thy beauty shine
With that light glorified her features wear.
Blessed light! fair even now encircling thee
When, bowed thy soul in fond humility,
Thou kneelest, of thy God possessed, at prayer.
Ah! love, with Christ, our Lord, forget not me
Who tread this tangled pathway here below
With eyes more dim than thine and feet more slow;
So, when in life eternal we are met,
I still may wear my pearl, my Margaret!

HAVE WE A NOVELIST?

Scarcely fifty years have elapsed since Sydney Smith contemptuously asked: “Who reads an American book?” John Bull was delighted at this sneering query of the witty Dean of St. Paul’s. It was so agreeable an _exposé_ of the literary poverty of a formidable rival. It was so very consoling to find a weak point in the young giant who had twice beaten him in war. Could Sydney Smith rise to-day from his grave in Kensal Green he would witness a marvellous change. The time has passed when he might triumphantly ask: “Who reads an American book?” The time has passed when John Bull might gloat over the poverty of American literature. We have a literature—a noble literature—of which any nation might be proud. We may confidently reverse the celebrated query of the wittiest of English divines, and ask: “Who does _not_ read an American book?” Who does not read the histories of Prescott? Who does not read the charming writings of Irving? Who does not read the wonderful tales of Hawthorne, the poems of Longfellow, of Bryant, of Poe?

Our literary temple, like Aladdin’s palace, is glorious; but, like Aladdin’s palace, it is also incomplete. While our literature is full and splendid in poetry, in history, and in science, it has been strangely wanting in what Prescott calls “ornamental literature”: the romance. The deficiency is more particularly remarkable when we consider the magnificent field which this country offers to the novelist. Our government, our institutions, our society, our national manners, the vice and extravagance of our great cities, our political corruption, the enterprising spirit of our people, the rapid change of fortune in our commercial cities, where the born beggar often dies a millionaire, life at our watering-places—all present interesting and inexhaustible subjects for the romance-writer. No country in the world affords such strong and striking contrasts of character as the United States. Here we have the gay and mercurial Frenchman, the practical and plodding German, the generous and improvident Irishman, the reserved Englishman, the proud Spaniard, and last, but by no means least, the eager, calculating American, with his brain of fire and his heart of ice.

Certainly there is no lack of materials; the workers alone are wanting; the harvest is abundant, but the laborers are few. We want a Thackeray to expose the heartless extravagance of our best society; a Dickens to turn our hearts in generous sympathy towards the poor and suffering; a Bulwer to polish the manners of our people, and illustrate the noble truth that knowledge is power, money only its handmaiden. Within a dozen years this trio of novelists has passed away, and they have left no successors. Except a few chapters in Thackeray’s _Virginians_, and some absurdly nonsensical scenes in Dickens’ _Martin Chuzzlewit_, the works of the great English novelists are entirely foreign: the characters, manners, scenes—all foreign to us. But they are read here with as much pleasure as in England. The Americans are a nation of readers—men, women, and children, all read. The majority of our men read newspapers almost exclusively. Seven-eighths of the novel-reading of this country is done by women. The statistics of any popular library will show that three novels a week form the average of these fair readers.

With so great and constant a demand for novels, why have we no novelist among us?—a great novelist, a national novelist, an essentially American novelist, as Bulwer and Thackeray are essentially English. As there can be no effect without a cause, there must be a cause for this deficiency in our literature. There are two: _American publishers_ and _American readers_. While an English magazine scarcely ever publishes an article by an American writer, there is not a great English novelist of the last quarter of a century who has not written for one or other of the American magazines. Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, George Eliot, Trollope, Miss Muloch, etc., etc., have written more or less for our periodicals. Literature, like love, must be encouraged or it languishes and dies. In addition to the want of encouragement given to American novelists by our publishers is the fact that American novel-readers affect to despise American novelists. The novel-reading ladies who frequent circulating libraries, demanding with one voice “something new,” who prefer Miss Braddon to George Eliot, and Mrs. Henry Wood to Thackeray, say they “cannot read American novels.” And yet three of the most popular novels of the last three years have been American, viz.: _Infelice_, _One Summer_, and _A Question of Honor_. We have seen an American lady take up _The American_, by Mr. Henry James, Jr., and throw it down, saying, “The name is enough.” We have seen ladies decline one of the charming stories of Mr. Aldrich or Mr. Howells, and carry off in triumph the last production of Mary Cecil Hay or the voluptuous “Ouida”! If Americans refuse to read American novels, who will read them?

The indiscriminate and almost universal novel-reading now practised is a striking and alarming feature of American life, when we consider the tone and character of so many of the modern novels. Judged by them, divorces, elopements, intrigues, and other crimes against society are the normal attendants of modern civilization. They play a conspicuous part in most of the “popular novels” of the day. Yet such books are eagerly devoured by young girls, whose minds are keenly susceptible to their dangerous influence. An insidious poison is thus infused which often fatally corrupts the youthful imagination. Bad books are the devil’s own instruments for the ruin of souls. As it is impossible to deny the fact that novels form the staple reading of a majority of the world, it is important that they should be not only pure but above suspicion.

The Catholic press cannot too strongly condemn the scope and influence of the novel of to-day. While Scott and Miss Edgeworth are neglected, the vile trash of Rhoda Broughton and Mrs. Forrester is eagerly sought. The good old habit of reading history, travels, biography, essays, etc., is almost entirely abandoned. “We want something new and exciting,” is the general cry; “history and biography are too deep.” And so they go on from week to week, from month to month, and from year to year, reading nothing but novels, and filling their minds with nonsense, if nothing worse. While we condemn indiscriminate novel-reading, we do not condemn novels indiscriminately. There are a few that can be read without detriment either to morals or religion, and these, we are sorry to say, are the novels that modern readers pronounce “flat.”

During the century of our national existence we have had three genuine American novelists: Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Gilmore Simms. The first of this trio possessed great natural gifts and enjoyed a liberal education. The singular advantages which nature so lavishly bestowed upon Brockden Brown prevented him from being a popular novelist. He was a pure idealist. He lived in a world of his own. His beautiful and fertile imagination created beings which never could exist in this world, and these he made the heroes and heroines of his strange stories. They may please the intellectual few, but they possess no interest for the uncultivated many. If Brown’s talents had been properly directed, if he could have kept his soaring imagination fixed on the earth, and been satisfied with describing men and things as they really exist, his would have been a lasting fame. But, as it is, he is not now read by one in ten thousand, nay, in ten times ten thousand. Cooper is second to Brown in point of time and superior to him in point of popularity. He threw a charm, a grace, and an interest around the life and character of the American Indians which appear inconsistent in the light of recent experience. In his sea-stories he succeeds where the greatest novelist signally failed. Cooper enjoyed a high reputation during life, but his novels now rank with the writings of Mayne Reid, and are almost exclusively read by boys. Simms’ stories of the Revolution and the border life in the South that succeeded the struggle for independence are excellent in their way. His Revolutionary romances afford glimpses of generous devotion to patriotism and an ardent zeal in the cause of liberty which Americans might read with profit at the present day.

But those novelists belong to the past—the dead and buried past. We want the present time described—the living, breathing, busy present. There never was an age, there never was a country, that afforded such scope for the novelist as this age and country. Our cities are swarming with an eager, reckless, enterprising population, presenting an infinite variety of characters, each occupied with his own particular pursuits of ambition, pleasure, or wealth. Take New York as the representative city of America. There are to be found the best and the worst features of our civilization; the most unbounded wealth and the most squalid poverty; the most exquisite culture and refinement and the most degraded and abandoned of the human race. Is not our society as vain, frivolous, false as that English society which Thackeray satirized so unmercifully? Have we no Vanity Fair, no heartless Becky Sharps, no selfish George Osbornes, no wicked old Steynes, no disreputable Rawdon Crawleys?

Our country is the last of nations in point of time, but the first in all material prosperity. Like Minerva, it sprang into existence fully equipped for a career unparalleled in the annals of the world. Other nations have taken a thousand years to reach the position which the United States took at one bound. We have more than realized the dream of Plato. But let us not imitate the philosopher of Greece, and banish poetry and pure fiction from _our_ republic. Let us not hang the sword of Damocles over the imagination, but let it be purified. Let us not employ the scissors of Atropos to cut the threads of fictitious narrative, but let it be purged of its present loose and dangerous tendency. Sir Walter Scott declared novels to be “a luxury contrived for the amusement of polished life, and the gratification of that half-love of literature which pervades all ranks in an advanced stage of society, and are read much more for amusement than with the least hope of deriving instruction from them”; yet _Ivanhoe_ throws more light upon the personal character of Richard Cœur de Lion, _Kenilworth_ informs us more particularly about the court of Elizabeth, the _Fortunes of Nigel_ gives us a better insight into the private life of King James, than we derive from Hume. By his poems and novels Scott threw a perpetual charm over the bleak hills of Scotland; he made its ruined abbeys as interesting as the ruined castles of Germany; he made its lakes the favorite resort of thousands of summer tourists. Author of the most celebrated novels that were ever written, Scott was unjust to the children of his mind when he spoke slightingly of novels. It should be remembered that he also spoke unfavorably of the literary profession—a profession by which he made a million dollars and an immortal name.

When the author of _Waverley_ spoke disparagingly of novels that kind of literary composition was almost in its infancy, certainly in its childhood. Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Goldsmith were the only great names in that department of English literature. It was almost an uncultivated field, but the reaper was at hand, whose harvest should be abundant, whose reward great. The lordly halls of Abbotsford still stand, the magnificent result of novel-writing. For every novel written during the time of Scott there are at least one hundred written now. The novels published during the last fifty years are far more numerous than all the novels that had previously existed in the world. A hundred years since pamphlets were written to promote the success of a political measure, to show that “taxation” was “no tyranny,” to overthrow a minister, etc. Now, when Disraeli wants to convince the country of his political sagacity, he writes a novel; when Dickens wanted to show up a crying injustice to the poor he wrote a novel; when Thackeray wanted to expose the shams of English society he wrote a novel. The age of pamphlets is gone, the age of novels has succeeded. Statesmen write novels, soldiers write novels, clergymen, lawyers, doctors—all professions, all classes and both sexes, write novels, and still the novel-reading Olivers “ask for more.” Any person who visits a fashionable circulating library upon a Saturday afternoon will see how great is the demand for _new_ novels.

Books which were, in the last century, read in mixed assemblages of young ladies and gentlemen could not now be read by old ladies in the privacy of their closets. Apropos of which is a story out of Lockhart’s _Scott_: “A grand-aunt of mine,” said Sir Walter, “was very fond of reading, and enjoyed it to the last of her long life. One day she asked me, when we happened to be alone together, whether I had ever seen Mrs. Behn’s novels. I confessed the charge. Whether I could get her a sight of them? I said, with some hesitation, I believed I could; but that I did not think she would like either the manners or the language, which approached too near that of Charles II.’s time to be quite proper reading. ‘Nevertheless,’ said the good old lady, ‘I remember them being so much admired, and being so much interested in them myself, that I wish to look at them again.’ To hear was to obey. So I sent Mrs. Aphra Behn, curiously sealed up, with ‘private and confidential’ on the packet, to my gay old grand-aunt. The next time I saw her afterwards she gave me back Aphra, properly wrapped up, with nearly these words: ‘Take back your bonny Mrs. Behn; and, if you will take my advice, put her in the fire, for I found it impossible to get through the very first novel. But is it not,’ said she, ‘a very odd thing that I, an old woman of eighty and upwards, sitting alone, feel myself ashamed to read a book which, sixty years ago, I have heard read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society of London?’”

Although a vast improvement has taken place in the tone of novels generally, yet there are many still written which should not be read, and many are read which should not be written. It is a striking and lamentable fact that the worst novels of the day are written and read by women. The miss scarcely in her teens reads books which her grandmother would be ashamed to read. As the pampered palate of the epicure can only enjoy food highly seasoned, so the vitiated minds of modern readers can only enjoy highly seasoned novels; mysterious murders, mad marriages, runaway matches, terrible secrets, awful mysteries, hidden perils, etc., are required to stimulate their jaded taste. As a person who feeds only on dainties will soon have the dyspepsia, so a person who reads only highly-seasoned novels will have a sort of mental dyspepsia. Scenes are described, circumstances are mentioned, conversations retailed, vices introduced into modern novels which would cause any man to be banished from decent society who should so far forget himself as to allude to them. Yet such things are read without blushing by young ladies, such books are discussed by ladies and gentlemen without shame. If our young ladies are to read nothing but novels, in the name of modesty let not their literary food be corrupt and corrupting; let not their virgin minds be filled with foul images; let not their Christian souls be soiled with even a thought of vice.

Queen Anne could not enjoy her breakfast unless the _Spectator_ was by her plate. Were Addison alive now and writing the _Spectator_, we doubt whether Queen Victoria would have it with her morning meal. Times change, and kings as well as commons must keep pace with their age. Gibbon’s vanity was gratified that his history was in every lady’s boudoir and discussed in every fashionable drawing-room in London. Were Gibbon writing in this present year of grace, we do not think the _Decline and Fall_ would deprive the last novel of its “pride of place” in my lady’s boudoir. About twenty-two years ago Macaulay received that famous £20,000 check from the Messrs. Longman for a volume of his _History of England_, of which more than twenty-six thousand five hundred copies were sold in ten weeks. Macaulay’s History was even more popular than Gibbon’s. He said: “I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.” “For a few days” Macaulay’s history did “supersede the last fashionable novel,” but we think we are safe in saying that it will have fewer readers this year than a new novel by “Christian Reid” or Mrs. Alexander. Take the average girl of the period, question her about her reading, and what is the result? She averages six novels a week—three hundred a year. Certainly much in point of quantity, but how about the quality? Has she read the _Spectator_, the _Vicar of Wakefield_, Macaulay’s _Essays_? No. They would be as tiresome to her as the compliments of an old beau—as old-fashioned as last year’s bonnet.

Mme. Roland when a girl slept with a volume of Plutarch’s _Lives_ under her pillow. Our girls, who are more interested in contemporary society than in the lives of illustrious Greeks and Romans, put the last novel under their pillow, that they may continue the first thing in the morning the entrancing story of _Theo_, which “tired nature” compelled them to relinquish at midnight. We trust they may never be called upon to display the lofty heroism of Mme. Roland—that their only tears may be those shed over the woes of imaginary heroines, their only sorrows as fictitious as those in the novels they love so well.

Being an unquestionable fact that the reading millions of this last quarter of the nineteenth century devote themselves to novels more than to any other class of literature, novels may be made the means of great and universal good. We all know how rapturously the third tier applauds lofty moral sentiments; how enthusiastically the “gods” of the gallery sympathize with virtue in distress; how the protector of innocence is cheered and the villain hooted. Let this natural feeling of the human heart be turned to account in novels. We have all laughed over that inimitable scene in _The Rivals_ between Lydia Languish and Lucy, her maid, who has been sent to the circulating library for some _late novels_. Do not some of Lydia’s favorites suggest the names of popular novels that are in daily request at _our_ fashionable circulating libraries?—the _Reward of Constancy_, the _Fatal Connection_, the _Mysteries of a Heart_, the _Delicate Distress_, the _Tears of Sensibility_. Have we not the _Fatal Marriage_, the _Empty Heart_, a _Woman’s Heart_, the _Curse of Gold_, the _Mysterious Engagement_, a _Clandestine Marriage_, etc.? Judging from the books they read, our girls must believe with Mrs. Malaprop that “thought does not become a young woman.”