CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XXIII., No. 135.—JUNE, 1876.

Copyright: Rev. I. T. Hecker. 1876.

GERMAN JOURNALISM.[97]

The universal hymn of journalistic praise, sung throughout the civilized world with hardly a discordant note, is of itself no mean evidence of the power of the press. “Great is journalism,” says Carlyle. “Is not every able editor a ruler of the world, being a persuader of it?” From France M. Thiers declares that the liberty of the press is theoretically and practically the most necessary of all; and was it not our own Jefferson who solemnly affirmed that he would rather live in a country with newspapers and without a government than in a country with a government but without newspapers? Did not the great Napoleon himself stand in greater awe of a newspaper than of a hundred thousand bayonets? “Give me but the liberty of the press,” cried Sheridan, “and I will give to the minister a venal House of Peers; I will give him a corrupt and servile House of Commons; I will give him the full sway of the patronage of office; I will give him the whole host of ministerial influence; I will give him all the power that place can confer upon him to purchase up submission and overcome resistance; and yet, armed with the liberty of the press, I will go forth to meet him undismayed; I will attack the mighty fabric he has reared with that mightier engine; I will shake down from its height corruption and bury it amidst the ruins of the abuses it was meant to shelter.”

But we do not propose to treat our readers to a dissertation written in the style of him who declared that, were the starry heavens deficient of one constellation, the vacuum could not be better supplied than by the introduction of a printing-press. We fully recognize, however, the very great power of the press which controls public opinion, and indeed often makes it. Nothing is unimportant which throws light upon the constitution and workings of this “Fourth Estate,” into whose hands the destinies of modern nations and civilization seem to have been delivered; and it is for this reason that we take pleasure in bringing to the notice of the readers of The Catholic World the work of Professor Wuttke on German Journalism and the Origin of Public Opinion.

It would be difficult to find a more curious or instructive book. For years connected with the press himself, a leader of the “great German party,” and the author of several valuable historical and philosophical works, Herr Wuttke has brought to his present task the thoroughgoing and painstaking conscientiousness of a German professor. He is wholly in earnest; neither smiles nor laughs; does not even stop to give smoothness and polish to his phrase, but without remorse or fear invades the editorial sanctum, and pours upon its most hidden mysteries the profane light; holds them up before vulgar eyes, and leaves not the suspicion of a doubt but that he is resolved to tell all he knows. His courage no one can deny. The enterprise to which he has devoted himself was full of perils, none of which were hidden from him.

German newspapers before the revolution of 1848 were chiefly of a literary character. Their columns were filled with criticisms of books, philosophical and theological discussions, æsthetic treatises, accounts of travel, entertaining stories, and theatrical notices. Scarcely any attention was paid to events of the day, and least of all to those of a political character. The explanation of this anomaly is simple. The governments of Germany exercised a rigorous censorship over the press, and allowed nothing to be published which might

With this view Von Manteuffel, the Prussian minister, established in Berlin a “Central Bureau of the Press,” which stood in intimate relations with the government and received from the “Secret Fund” a yearly support of from forty to fifty thousand thalers. With this money the pens of a crowd of needy scribes were bought, who for twenty or thirty thalers a month agreed to write articles in support of the views which the director of the Bureau should inspire. The next step was to make an opening for these articles in the columns of journals in different parts of the kingdom. This was not difficult, as the contributions were well written, by persons evidently thoroughly informed, and were offered at a nominal price, or even without pay. On the 9th of March, 1851, the director of the Bureau sent a circular to “those editors and publishers of the conservative party with whom he has not at present the honor of holding personal relations,” in which he promised, with special reference to his connection with the Ministry of State, to send them from time to time communications concerning the real condition of political affairs, in order to furnish them indispensable materials for the successful prosecution of their labors. This assistance was to be given free of cost, and many editors were eager to avail themselves of it without inquiring with much care into its special significance. In this way the “Central Press-Bureau” wove a network of lines of communication over the whole kingdom, which, however, was carefully hidden from public view. It also kept up constant intercourse with the representatives of Prussia at the various European courts, which enabled it to give tone to public opinion on foreign affairs as well as on matters at home. Through the influence of the government, and by spending money, the Bureau gradually succeeded in introducing its agents into the offices of many newspapers, and occasionally in getting entire control of this or that journal. By this cunning policy the Prussian government was able to lead the unsuspecting public by the nose.

Whilst confiding readers throughout the land were receiving the views of their favorite journals as the honest expression of public opinion, these newspapers were in fact only the whispering-galleries

Another contrivance for working up public opinion was the “Lithographic Correspondence-Bureau,” which is a French invention. This is an agency for the manufacture of correspondence from all parts of the world, at home and abroad, which is lithographed and sent to journals that are willing to pay for it; and nearly all of them find this the cheapest and easiest method of keeping abreast of the times.

As the men who found these Bureaus are chiefly intent upon making money, and live, moreover, in salutary awe of the government, they generally find it advisable to place themselves at its disposition. The correspondence-agency of Havas-Büllier in Paris was Orleanistic under Louis Philippe, and Napoleonic under the Empire. In return it obtained the monopoly of “lithographic correspondence”; so that, during the reign of Louis Napoleon, France received its knowledge of the foreign world through the single channel of this Bureau, which was carefully supervised by the government. This was too excellent a device not to find ready acceptance in Berlin, and in the most natural way in the world the “Lithographic Correspondence-Bureau” was placed alongside the “Press-Bureau”; the journals which had already fallen under the influence of the latter yielded without resistance to the seductions of the new ally, and thus became to a still greater extent the tools of the government. In this way the “eunuchs of the court and press” were in position deliberately and with malice to falsify and pervert public opinion, which soon came to mean the utterances of the herd of venal scribes in Berlin who had sold themselves, body and soul, to the “Press-Bureau.” One of the five sins which, according to Confucius, is unpardonable, is from under the mantle of truth to scatter broadcast lies which are hurtful to the people; and this is the charge which Professor Wuttke brings against the crowd of German newspaper-writers.

Telegraphy, which was first introduced into Germany in 1849, led to further improvements in the art of manipulating the press. The “Correspondence-Bureau” of Havas-Büllier became a telegraphic agency and furnished despatches free of charge to the Parisian journals, in order to prevent the starting of a rival business; and when, notwithstanding, the Agence Continentale was organized, it was suppressed by Persigny, the Minister of State, who by this means was enabled to control the publication of telegrams in all the leading journals of France. In Italy the Stefani Agency, at Turin, rendered similar services to the government of Victor Emanuel; sending out the most shameless falsehoods to the four corners of the earth, and carefully suppressing whatever the authorities wished to conceal from the public. These despatches were printed in the leading journals of Europe and America as coming from unsuspected sources, when they were in fact the “cooked” telegrams of the secret agents of Cavour and the Revolution.

In 1850 Reuter established his telegraphic Agency in Aix-la-Chapelle, Continentale Telegrafenkompagnie, and then entered into a combination with Reuter and Havas, through which they controlled the telegraphic despatches furnished to the press of all Europe. To have the latest news was a journalistic necessity; and yet to maintain special agents in the great centres, and to pay the high rates for sending special telegrams, would have been too heavy a burden. Nothing remained, therefore, but to take the despatches of the Agencies which were now in league with one another.

In Prussia nearly all the telegraphic lines, most of which were put up during the reaction after the revolution of 1848, were in the hands of the government; and this, of itself, was sufficient to place the Agencies at its disposal. And in point of fact, it is no secret that in Prussia there exists a censorship of the telegraph, and that the government decides as to the despatches which the newspapers shall receive. Whoever will take the trouble to weigh this matter will see what a terrible instrument for the perversion of public opinion is thus placed in the hands of the state. A despatch has always in its favor the force of first impressions. When, after days or weeks, explanations follow, they are passed over, new events having already preoccupied public attention. All the world reads the telegram; comparatively few pay any attention to the later-coming corrections of inaccurate or false statements.

Prussia, then, through her “Central Press-Bureau,” her “Correspondence-Bureau,” and her “Telegram-Bureau,” succeeded in getting control of the leading German journals, which, while keeping up the appearance of independence and honesty, were either in her pay or under the influence of her agents. Public opinion in Germany was at her mercy; so that, after she had made the most thorough preparations for the war of 1866, she found no difficulty in having it proclaimed throughout the fatherland that Austria had been arming and was ready to fall upon her in order to rob her of Silesia. The newspapers even lent themselves, when the war had begun, to the publication of a spurious address to the army by Benedek, the Austrian leader, in which there was not one word of truth, but in which he was made to speak in a way that could not fail to arouse the indignation of the Prussian soldiers. This forged document was circulated by the press and read by the captains to their men as soon as they had entered Bohemia.

The creation of the new empire has not improved German journalism. The “Press-Bureau” has enlarged the circle of its activity, while the government has invented other means not less effective for controlling the newspapers. “We care not for public opinion,” said a high official in Berlin some months ago; “for the entire press belongs to us.” Prussia has German public opinion, in so far as it is allowed to find expression, in her keeping. After the war with Austria the annual secret fund of the “Press-Bureau” was increased to 70,000 thalers; but Reptilienfond). A vocabulary of slang has been invented to designate the hired scribes of the Bureau and their operations. Bismarck calls them “my swine-herds” (meine Sauhirten). To write for the “Press-Bureau” is to take mud-baths (Schlammbäder nehmen); and the writers themselves, who are classified as “officious,” “high-officious,” “half-officious,” and “over-officious,” are called “mud-bathers” (Schlammbäder), and they devour the “Reptile-fund.” The instructions issued by the directors for the preparation of articles for the different journals are styled “wash-tickets” (Waschzettel). The directors who are not immediately connected with the Bureau are known by the name of “Piper” (Pfeifer), which, in the jargon of Berlin, has a peculiar and by no means flattering signification.

As the buzzards fly to the carcass, so gathered the hungry German scribes around the “Reptile-fund”; but their pens were cheap and the “Press-Bureau” was able to feed a whole army of them, and yet have abundant means to devote to other methods for influencing public opinion. Its machinations are, of course, conducted with the greatest secrecy. All manner of blinds are used. Its agents assume in their articles a style of great independence, deal largely in loud and captious epithets, occasionally even criticise this or that measure of the government, and ape the ways of honest and patriotic men. The “Central Press-Bureau” itself is pushed as far out of sight as possible; stalking horses and scarecrows are put forward; and the institution is made to appear as only a myth. But the Cave of Æolus is in Berlin, and the winds which are let loose there blow to and fro, hither and yon, through all Germany, starting currents in other parts of the world. In this cave the old snake-worship of so many ages and peoples still exists, and the god is the “Reptile-fund.” Out of this cavern are blown the double-leaded leaders which fall thick all over the land, and always, as if by magic, just in the right place. False reports eddy through the air; stubborn facts are pulled and bent and beaten until they get into the proper shape. The light which is permitted to fall upon them is managed as skilfully as in an art-gallery or a lady’s drawing-room. With the aid of the “Reptile-fund” the “Press-Bureau” found little difficulty in extending its business of buying up journals, paying sometimes as high as a hundred thousand thalers for a single newspaper; and where this could not be done money was freely Germania newspaper, that to accuse an editor of being in the pay of the “Press-Bureau” is not a criminal offence, since it does not in the public estimation tend to lower his character.

Occasionally, in spite of the greatest care, the secrets of the Bureau are betrayed. Thus in February, 1874, a circular was sent to various journals, and amongst others to the Neue Wormser-Zeitung, with the offer to furnish from the capital, first, a tri-weekly original article on the political situation; second, original political and diplomatic advice from all the departments of the government, also three times a week; third, a short but exhaustive parliamentary report; fourth, special correspondence from other capitals (written in Berlin); fifth, original accounts of foreign affairs, drawn from the special sources of the Bureau; and, sixth, a short daily, as well as a more lengthy weekly, exhibit of the Berlin Bourse. For these services nothing was demanded; but, that the thing might not appear too bald, it was stated that the editor should fix his own price. Now, it so happened that when this circular was received by the Neue Wormser-Zeitung that paper was in the hands of Herr Westerburg, a Social Democrat, who straightway took the public into his confidence.

The newly-acquired provinces of Prussia were a favorite field for the operations of the Berlin Bureau. General Manteuffel, in 1866, suppressed the Schleswig-Holsteinische Zeitung, and handed the country over to the reptile-press. In Alsace and Lorraine also journals were suppressed, and others established, by the government. In these provinces the independent press has wholly disappeared, with the exception of two tame and unimportant sheets. In fact, if we except the Catholic and a few Social Democratic newspapers, there is hardly a journal of any weight in the German Empire in which the press-reptile is not found. “I know,” wrote to Professor Wuttke an author well acquainted with the circumstances—“I know few German newspapers in which there is not a mud-bather.” For even passing services the Bureau is ready to pay cash. Chaplain Miarka, the editor of the Katholik, has declared publicly that he was offered 7,500 thalers on condition of consenting to write in a milder manner during the elections.

The working up of public opinion through the press extends far beyond the boundaries of the German Empire. The proceedings of the court in the trial of Von Arnim in 1874 developed the fact that he, whilst representing Prussia at the Tuileries, had entered into relations with various journals of Paris, Vienna, and Brussels; and it is generally understood that 50,000 thalers were placed at the disposition of Herr Rudolf Lindau for the purpose of manipulating the Parisian press. Through these and similar means an opening for the articles of the “Press-Bureau” was made in English, French, and Belgian newspapers; and these articles, which Indépendance Belge, of those who take care of the Hour, and of others whose duty it is to furnish articles to the Italian and Scandinavian newspapers.”[98] To hold the English in leading strings, Berlin had, in 1869, a North Germany Correspondence, and then, under the supervision of Aegidi, the director of the “Press-Bureau,” a Norddeutsche Correspondenz, which is still the chief source from which both English and American journals draw their information on German affairs. The attempt made from Berlin to buy Katkoff’s Journal of Moscow was defeated by the incorruptibility of the proprietor.

The reptile-press, of course, ignores and strives to hush whatever may throw light upon the dark workings and intrigues of the “Press Bureau”; and no better instance of its power in this respect can be given than the history of Professor Wuttke’s book on German journalism. Its existence was not recognized by the press-reptiles; its startling revelations were ignored or received in profound silence; and so successful was this policy that a year after the publication of the work only three hundred copies had been sold; and it is chiefly through the efforts of a Catholic newspaper—the Germania—and of Windthorst, a leader of the party of the Centrum, that it has finally been brought to public notice and has now reached a third edition. In the German Parliament, on the 18th of December, 1874, Windthorst took Professor Wuttke’s book with him to the speaker’s stand, and, in a powerful address against any further grant of the “Secret Fund” (Reptilien-fond), made special reference to this work, which he characterized as “conscientious” and full of startling revelations which leave room to suspect even worse things. A year before (December 3, 1873) the same speaker declared in the Prussian Landtag that in Germany the government had nearly succeeded in getting entire control of the press; that the influence of the “Reptile-fund” was already noticeable in foreign countries, particularly in the newspapers of Vienna; and that the attempt had been made to establish a “Reptile-Bureau” in connection with the London embassy; and when this was found not to work well, a “Press-Bureau” for England, France, and Italy was organized in Berlin. These charges, made in public parliamentary debate, were allowed to pass without contradiction, although Aegidi, the director of the Central Bureau, was a member of the Assembly and present during the discussion.

Eugen Richter, the member for Hagen, brought forward other accusations of like import on the 20th of January, 1874. We have already given an example of the uses to which the Prussian government puts the reptile-press, in the instance of the forged army address attributed to Benedek, and published throughout Germany at the outbreak of the war with Austria in 1866.[99] Similar services were rendered by the “mud-bathers” at the time of the crisis with [100]

When, just at the beginning of the war, the French army made an attack on Saarbrücken, the reptile-press spread the report that they had reduced the city to ashes; and this infamous falsehood made a deep impression throughout Germany. A similar lie had been propagated at the commencement of the Austrian war. On the 27th of June, 1866, the Prussians were driven from Trautenau by General Gablenz, and forthwith the reptile-press raised the cry that the citizens of Trautenau had poured from their houses hot water and boiling oil on the retreating soldiers; and the government lent itself to the spreading of this detestable calumny by dragging off the mayor of Trautenau, Dr. Roth, to prison, where he was detained in close confinement nearly three months.[101]

There is no subject on which the organs of the “Press-Bureau” are more united or more eloquent than the necessity of keeping up the full strength of the standing army; nay, they have gone so far as to demand that the Reichstag shall consent to take from the representatives of the people the right to legislate on military affairs during the next seven years. But before taking this step, hitherto unheard of in the history of constitutional government, it was necessary to manipulate public opinion, so that the members of parliament might seem to be compelled to this decision by the will of the people themselves. With this view packed meetings were gotten up in various parts of the empire which the telegraph lyingly announced to the world as very numerously attended and unanimous in demanding the seven-year enactment; but the popular gatherings which were held to protest against this violation of constitutional rights were passed over in dead silence, and their action, consequently, did not become known outside of their own immediate neighborhood. The reptile-press acted in full harmony with the “Telegraph-Bureau.” The Spener’sche Zeitung, in Berlin, went so far as to declare that no protests had been heard, whereupon the Provinzial-korrespondenz exclaimed that the movement, which had proceeded from the depths of the nation’s heart with unexpected power, should force the Reichstag to yield to the demand of the government.

As a part of the same programme, the “Press-Bureau” just a year ago raised the cry that France was buying horses, and that in less than three months she would declare war on Germany. On the same day and at the same hour this startling announcement was made in Frankfort, in Leipzig, in Stuttgart, and other cities. The following day hundreds of newspapers

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

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

For five years now Bismarck’s venal press has poured the full tide of its wrath upon the bishops and priests of Germany. Here was a subject upon which the reptiles could distil their venom to their hearts’ content. What magnificent opportunities were here offered to the “mud-bathers” to hunt through the sewers of the centuries and to wallow in the mire of the ages; to revive Luther’s vocabulary and refurbish the rusty weapons that for hundreds of years had lain idle and hurtless! What an open field was here in which to ventilate historical calumnies, to produce startling effects by the dramatic grouping of striking figures; to bring out the light of the golden present by causing it to fall upon the dark and bloody background of the past! And what divine occasions for indignation, wrath, horror, word-painting to cause the hair to stand on end and the eyes to start! Here Dresdener Volksbote (April 17, 1873): “Minorities must keep silence.”

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

But, for the honor of journalism, a portion of the German press has remained closed against the insidious power of the “Reptile-fund.” No Catholic newspaper has lent itself even covertly to this conspiracy against truth and liberty; and it must be admitted, too, that the socialistic journals have refused the government bribes; their circulation, however, which is not large, is confined almost exclusively to the laboring classes, and their influence is but little felt. The power of the Catholic press in Germany is of recent growth. In the early part of the present century the only periodical of any weight devoted to the defence of the interests of the church in Germany was the Theologische Quartalschrift, founded in 1819 as the organ of the Tübingen professors. Twenty years later Joseph Görres established in Munich the Historisch-politischen Blätter, which soon caused the influence of his powerful mind to be felt throughout the fatherland, and which, under the editorial management of the historian Jörg, is still to-day one of the ablest reviews in Germany. The censorship of the press which, prior to the revolution of 1848, was maintained in all the German governments, was exercised in a way that rendered Catholic journalism impossible. No sooner, however, had the Parliament of Frankfort proclaimed the liberty of the press than the Catholics hastened to take advantage of it by creating newspapers to advocate their religious interests. The bishops and priests, in obedience to the earnest exhortations of Pius IX., threw themselves into the work with a will; the people followed their example; press-unions were formed and a large number of Catholic newspapers sprang into life. Bismarck’s persecution of the church gave yet greater force to this movement and increased both the number and the circulation of Catholic journals. In the new German Empire there are to-day two hundred and thirty newspapers devoted to the interests of the church. The Augsburger Wochenblatt has a subscription list of thirty-two thousand; the Mainzer Volksblatt, one of thirty thousand. Twelve thousand copies of the Germania (in Berlin) are

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

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

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

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

“The only man,” said Carlyle of Bismarck—“the only man appointed by God to be his vicegerent here

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

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

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

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

SOME FORGOTTEN CATHOLIC POETS.

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

Our present business, however, is not with these or with any who, being dead, have friends and followers

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

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

So utter, even ludicrous, a bouleversement of hopes so passionate—and there is nothing a poet longs for so passionately as remembrance after death, unless it be recognition in life—may touch the sourest cynic. It may be as Milton says in his proudly conscious way: Si quid meremur, sana posteritas sciet. But what comfort is it to our undeserving to know that a sane posterity is justified in forgetting it? Good poetry, like virtue, is its own reward. But the bad poet, outcast of gods and men, and of every bookseller who owns not and publishes a popular magazine; the Pariah of Parnassus, the Ishmael of letters, with every critic’s hand against him, heu! fides mutatosque deos!—for the base uses of other bad poets, his rivals—if to this martyr we cannot give consolation, we surely need not grudge compassion.

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

as well they might. Yet, despite this notable achievement, Nahum (Nahum, O Phœbus! was his name) has long since ceased to fill the

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

Here are two of the shining master-strokes:

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

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

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

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

should be less generally intelligible than such Latin as this:

But so it was, and so it was to be long after. In 1718 Bysshe, in his Art of Poetry, “passed by Spenser and the poets of his age, because Comus or Il Penseroso. But Pope was a gleaner of the old English poets; and he was here pilfering from obsolete English poetry without the least fear or danger of being detected.” Pope certainly was a proficient in his own “art of stealing wisely.” “Who now reads Cowley?” he asks, and answers his own question in the lines he borrowed from him.

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

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

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

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

The “mad, mery wit” which won for Heywood, the epigrammatist, the favor of Henry VIII. and his daughter Mary seems vapid enough to us. Perhaps it was like champagne, which must be drunk at once, and, being kept for a century or two, grows flat and insipid. The Play called the four P’s, being a new and merry Enterlude of a Palmer, Pardoner, Poticary, and Pedlar, would scarcely run for a hundred nights on the metropolitan stage. His Epigrams, six hundred in Number, which were thought uproariously funny by his own generation, ours finds rather dismal reading. We somehow miss the snap of even that wonderful design, his Dialogue containing in effect the number of al the Proverbes in the English tongue, which all England was shaking its sides over long after Shakspere had flung his rarest pearls at its feet. Heywood’s great work is an allegory entitled, The Spider and the Flie, “wherein,” says a polite contemporary, “he dealeth so profoundly and beyond all measure of skill that neither he himself that made it, neither any one that readeth it, can reach to the meaning thereof.” It is a sort of religious parable, the flies representing the Catholics, and the spiders the Protestants, to whom enter presently, dea ex machinâ, Queen Mary with a broom. Heywood “was inflexibly attached to the Catholic cause,” and when, the broom-wielder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A cockle-shell weathers the storm that wrecks a frigate, and a nursery rhyme has outlived Etheridge’s poetry and Morley’s erudition. If widespread renown be a test of merit, The Merry Tales of the Madman of Gotham must be a work of genius. “Scholars and gentlemen” temp. Henry VIII. “accounted it a book full of wit and mirth,” and the scholars and babies of three VIII. He was the original of the stage Merry-andrew, “going to fairs and the like, where he would gather a crowd, to whom he prescribed by humorous speeches couched in such language as caused mirth and wonderfully propagated his fame.” He wrote, besides the Merry Tales, The Mylner of Abington, a satire called the Introduction of Knowledge, and various medical works giving curious details of the domestic life of the time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

roars lusty Ben Jonson, brimful of sack and loyalty.

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

In this time of inspiration, with all England, from prince to peasant, bursting into song and three-fourths Catholic, we find from Spenser to Cowley a scant dozen, or, counting Shakspere, at most a baker’s dozen, of Catholic poets worth naming. And Shakspere, in spite of Charles Butler’s ingenious theory and its spirited revival by Mr. George Wilkes, we can scarcely claim. That great poet’s religious creed, like other important features of his life, must no doubt remain always matter of conjecture. If he was a Catholic, his creed was probably no more than a tradition, strong enough to keep his pages free from the pictures of dissolute monks and nuns in which most of his contemporary playwrights delighted, but far from the fervor which sent Southwell to the scaffold, or the sincerity which, in a milder age, made Sherburne welcome poverty and disgrace. Omitting Shakspere, then, our muster-roll is but short. For this there were many reasons. In those days there was other work for Catholics than verse-making; the church needed martyrs, not minstrels, and the blood-stained record of the English mission tells how intrepidly the need was met. Southwell and Campian are only two of a brilliant band almost equally gifted, equally heroic. The life they led promised little for polite letters. Hunted like wild beasts, in hourly danger of the most cruel and ignominious death; sleeping, when they slept, in hayricks or the open fields; studying, when they caught a breathing-spell for study, in caves and thickets—many of these noble youths have left behind them proofs of a genius which, under happier auspices, would have borne abundant fruit. Southwell’s poems, composed in the intervals of thirteen rackings, reveal a spirit of uncommon force and beauty. Campian is known to have written at least one tragedy, Nectar and Ambrosia, performed at Vienna before the Emperor Rodolph. It must be remembered, too, that both of these dauntless missionaries were cut off in the very flower of their age, Southwell being thirty-two and Campian forty when executed. Francis Beaumont, cousin and namesake of the dramatist, was a Jesuit and a poet. So was Jasper Heywood, son of the epigrammatist. He translated several tragedies of Seneca, and is said by some to have been one of the one hundred and twenty-eight priests executed by the clement Elizabeth. He is one of Cibber’s Poets. Ellis Heywood, his brother, also a Jesuit, though he left behind him a prose work in Italian, is not known to have written in verse. Of Crashaw, whose fortune it was to live at a time when the storm of persecution had spent its fiercest fury,

These were all priests. But outside of the priesthood Catholics found work in other directions which left little leisure for literary pursuits. Chidiock Titchbourne, whose talents and unhappy fate the elder Disraeli has feelingly commemorated, was one of “an association in London of young Catholic gentlemen of family who met at the house of Mr. Gilbert, in Fetter Lane, and took care of Jesuits.” Thomas Habington, an associate of Titchbourne in this enterprise, and who, if not a poet himself, was at least the father of a poet, narrowly escaped hanging for concealing in his house the Jesuits Garnett and Oldcome, accused of complicity in the Gunpowder Plot. Dymoke, the champion of England, apparently the same who translated Il Pastor Fido, won the title to a more glorious championship by dying (1610) in the Tower, where he had been imprisoned for his resolute refusal to conform. Dr. Lodge, a most charming poet as well as an eminent physician, we find in “the list of popish recusants indicted at the sessions holden for London and Middlesex, February 15, 1604.” It is of interest to note en passant that with Dr. Lodge was indicted for the same cause “Ambrose Rookwood, of the army.” Twenty months later Ambrose Rookwood, of the army, expressed his opinion of this treatment by engaging in the Gunpowder Treason. At a later period we have Sir Edward Sherburne, a scholar and poet of no mean pretensions, resigning offices of large emolument rather than betray his faith. Certainly, under the last of the Tudors and the first of the Stuarts a Catholic poet may be said to have cultivated his art under difficulties.

The obstacles in the way of Catholics, then and long after, not only for obtaining culture but the rudiments of learning, were indeed enormous. Classed by legislative enactment with “forgers, perjurers, and outlaws,” they were denied education for themselves or their children, except at the cost of conscience or of ruinous penalties. Their liberty they held at twenty days’ notice; their lives at a moment’s purchase. At any hour of the day or night their houses were open to the invasion of ruffianly pursuivants, searching ostensibly for “Mass-books” and other “popish mummeries,” but prone to confound recusant jewels or broad gold pieces with the relics of superstition; and for such robberies they had absolutely no redress. In the courts of justice they found not only no protection, but renewed oppression. To use a phrase often misused, they had really no rights which a conforming subject was bound to respect, and their freedom, their fortunes, nay, their lives, were at the mercy of the rapacity or the malice of their Protestant neighbors. Much of their time they spent in going to and from prison; they crowded the common jails in such multitudes that many new ones had to be opened for the sole accommodation of these hardened malefactors; and their estates were impoverished to pay for the privilege, not of going to their own church—that was denied them in any event—but of staying away from one

Yet even this untoward time and chilling air yielded blossoms of Catholic poetry which we need not disdain to gather. Some of the daintiest of them have been culled by careful gleaners like Headley and Ellis and Southey, and a stray flower here and there salutes us in the more tasteful modern collections, such as Mr. De Vere’s Selections, Mr. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, or Mr. Stoddard’s Melodies and Madrigals, the latter a gem among its kind. But the bulk of the Catholic poetry of this period is practically unknown. Massinger, luckier than any of his great rivals (for Shakspere was above rivalry), still keeps the stage with a single comedy, A New Way to pay Old Debts. But Shirley, little his inferior in dramatic ability, is, in spite of Dyce’s elegant edition, utterly neglected. He may be said to owe his rescue from oblivion to that one noble song in The Contention of Achilles and Agamemnon, “The Glories of our Blood and State”—a song which alone is worth a library of modern ballads, and which might be called truly Horatian but for a moral elevation which Horace never reached. And even this song, almost his sole slender hold on immortality, Shirley came near losing; for in a spurious compilation of Butler’s posthumous works it is given to the author of Hudibras, and there entitled A Thought upon Death upon hearing of the Murder of Charles I., though anything further from Butler’s style can scarcely be imagined. Ben Jonson—if, in virtue of his twelve years spent in the church and the period of his best work, he may be considered as a Catholic poet at all—“rare old Ben,” in spite of his weighty thought, his pungent humor, his fertile fancy, remains among the authors who are widely talked of and little read. Lodge again, who may dispute with Bishop Hall the honor of being the earliest English satirist, and who, “though subject to a critic’s marginal,” gives evidence of a glow and richness of imagination not common even in that opulent time—Lodge has no literary existence except as one of the wistful shades that flit through the Hades of the cyclopædias. Sir William Davenant has from Southey the distinguished compliment that, avoiding equally the opposite faults of too artificial and too careless a style, he wrote in numbers which, for precision and clearness and felicity and strength, have never been surpassed. Yet who now reads Gondibert, or its notable preface, which inspired Dryden with the germ of dramatic criticism? Sir Edward Sherburne, whom Mr. Dyce calls “an accomplished versifier,” whose translations may even now be read with pleasure, and whose learning was above the average of his learned time, is equally forgotten. Crashaw is remembered less for himself than as the friend of Cowley, whose monody on his death, in Johnson’s opinion, has “beauties which common authors may justly think not only above their attainments, but above their ambition.” Southwell we think of as the martyr rather than as the poet. The verses of Sir Aston Cokayn and his friend Sir Kenelm Digby are not, perhaps, of the sort which the world does not willingly let die; yet Frappolin creduto principe, an adaptation of the same Italian original whence Shakspere took the hint for his prologue to the Taming of the Shrew. His minor poems, too, if they have no other merit, throw some curious side lights on the literary history of the time. The life of Sir Kenelm Digby, “of whose acquaintance,” says Dryden, “all his contemporaries seem to have been proud,” was itself a poem, and certainly one more worthy of being told than that of many of the gentlemen whom Johnson’s vigorous pen has thrust into uneasy and unnatural immortality.

who was rated as the first sonneteer of his time, is as little known as the pure and pensive Habington, the only love-poet of the reign of Charles I. whose pages are without stain. The two last-named writers, however, we may expect to see more noticed, both having been lately reprinted—Constable’s Diana by Pickering, and Habington’s Castara being included in the admirable and wonderfully cheap series of English reprints edited by Mr. Edward Arber.

We had thought to give a few specimens of at least the more obscure of the writers last mentioned. But we have already overstepped our limits and must bring this ramble to an end. The reader who may be tempted for himself to loiter in these unfamiliar ways will meet with much to reward him. “Old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good” he will find in abundance:

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

BY THE AUTHOR OF “PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” “NUMBER THIRTEEN,” “PIUS VI.,” ETC.