Volume 25 / Part 1 — SIX SUNNY MONTHS. BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC. CHAPTER XIV. THE RAVEN AND THE DOVE. CONCLUSION. (continued 3)

He took a house in Münster and made it his home for thirteen years, living there through the winter and spending his summers at a country-house a few miles out of the city, at Lütjenbeck. His children’s studies were his first care. Greek being his favorite study, he made each of his sons a good Greek scholar, and kept up his own studies by a repeated round of all the great authors, read successively with each of his many boys. Ernest and Andrew, the sons of his first marriage, were his first pupils, and his own teaching was supplemented in languages and history by a French emigré, the Abbé Pierrard, and in philosophy by some professors resident in Münster. Stolberg did not neglect the physical education of his boys, and would no more dispense with the daily walk, ride, or swim than he would with the studies. His sons were good shots, too, and in the summer he and they spent most of their time in the open air. Their mother writes of them that they are “truthful, generous, and good-hearted,” and “that their tender respect for their great father increases day by day.” She was herself a patient and judicious teacher, and fully recognized how much harm is done to children, and the “quiet workings of God’s influence disturbed in them, by the expectation of hurried development and individuality.” Stolberg was already beginning his literary work in the interests of religion and education, and in 1801 was translating St. Augustine’s De Vera Religione. The early Fathers were his favorite spiritual reading; also the Greek Testament and the Hebrew version of the Old Testament. He wisely resolved to lead a retired life, and not enter into what is called society; but he gathered round him a circle of real friends, in intercourse with whom he spent many hours, especially in the evenings. Among these were Princess Gallitzin, to whom we owe the suggestion that produced Stolberg’s great work, The History of the Religion of Jesus Christ; Prince Fürstenberg, an old man of very exemplary life; Kellermann, his friend and pupil, and the tutor of his younger sons for sixteen years—a priest who was the model of his order; some of the cathedral 537chapter, learned and enlightened men; and many young people, friends of his children, among whom the latter afterwards found wives and husbands, in all cases happily acceptable to their parents. Whoever has read the real-life idyl of A Sister’s Story will see some likeness between the home of the La Ferronays and Stolberg’s happy home. Indeed, his friends were part of his family, and admission to his intimacy became the ambition of all such in Münster as had minds beyond the common run, and aspirations beyond those of fashion, politics, and frivolity. Stolberg’s dislike to the loss of time involved in ordinary visits and the inanities of society is thus described by himself in 1810:

“I am growing more unfit from year to year for large gatherings. Intercourse with friends, like the leaves of the Sibylline books, is more precious the less time it occupies and the less often it recurs. To hear social chatter for more than an hour affects me so that I feel much like a dead donkey.... How true are Lavater’s words: 'Even the circle of good souls seldom gives me a new impulse, and a thousand trivial pleasures rob me of true enjoyment. Only solitude can shadow and cool my spirit, thirsty and weary from the company even of loved ones; only solitude can give what no friend can offer—a new consciousness and new life, and a feeling that God loves me.’”

This country life which was such a relief and yearly joy to the whole family is charmingly described in Stolberg’s letters. His garden, his hay-field, his children’s play; his walks in the beech, oak, and maple woods; the squirrels in the trees, the favorite kid of his little girls, the nightingales, the blossoming fruit-trees that suggested to him the saying that the “apple-tree did not eat of the apple”; the grottos, rocks, valleys, castles, torrents of the neighborhood of Stolberg; the old family house which he had not seen for twenty-eight years, and upon which he prided himself as a possession that had been in the family for a thousand years; the beauties of the Erzgebirg, and the Bohemian hills that lean against it; the Scotch or Norwegian-like scenery, wild and grand, of these mountains with their narrow, fruitful valleys and green meadows, fringed with dark pine woods—are all described with that heartiness and enthusiasm which real lovers of the country know, but which, as Stolberg says, so many others pretend to, while in reality they see in nature nothing but a cold show, a theatre decoration. “They look complacently as into a peep-show at the sunrise and the heavens, but their heart does not swell within them nor their eyes grow dim.” He was as fond of childish games, especially of blowing soap-bubbles, as he was of beautiful scenery, and counted it a sign of soul-health when he was in the frame of mind to enjoy such games. And now that we have before us the picture of the man in his domestic life, who in his public, political, literary, and social life was of so much importance and had so wide an influence, we will keep mostly to his own letters, which give full vent to his opinions on the important events of the time, and show him forth as emphatically of the old school, a model Christian, a thorough gentleman, but a man of his own generation; impatient of novelty, a great admirer of the English constitution, but a scornful contemner of the mushroom constitutions of the Continent; a hot Légitimiste, but a patriotic German; an uncompromising and somewhat irrational 538foe of Napoleon, over and above his mere national antagonism against the great and successful warrior—for instance, he believed that “Napoleon’s greatness was kneaded out of the abjectness of Europe,” forgetting that a man’s greatness may lie precisely in the art of taking advantage of a weakness inherent in an adversary, and seizing the right moment to overwhelm small minds with his stronger one; a firm believer in the necessity of his own order, but an “aristocrat” with lofty and beautiful theories of what aristocracy consists in; in a word, a great Christian and a thorough man.

Besides his Greek and Hebrew studies, he was fond of English history and literature, and knew French and Italian well; Milton and Young were his favorite English poets, though he often quotes Shakspere too, and one of his works, second only to the History of Religion, was the Life of Alfred—a man whom he looked upon as a heroic model, and whose example he wished to dwell upon as a guide to his sons through life. He also translated the whole of Ossian. His letters relating to his home-life, his losses and those of his relations, the death of his sons and son-in-law, and of many dear friends, full as they are of Christian manliness and resignation, and of moral axioms that might be taken as mottoes, we will pass by, as they have less of individuality than his letters containing opinions on religion, politics, and literature, as well as expositions of theories of his own, all strongly and conscientiously held. He firmly contradicted a current misconception in his time—and, indeed, a not unfrequent one now—of the intolerance of the Catholic Church.

“Only for those who confess Catholic truth,” he writes, “and yet consciously keep aloof from the Catholic communion, is there no hope of salvation. Of others who err in all good faith, my church teaches me to believe that they are her members, though unknowingly. God allows many honest Protestants to remain in error, and to fancy that the Catholic Church, that truly merciful mother, is intolerant against those outside her pale. It is not the true spirit of that church to persecute, curse, or burn the erring. Infallible in her doctrine, as were also the teachers who sat in Moses’ seat, she still cannot preserve all her members free from imperfections in their acts—not even the pope, nor, in the old dispensation, the high-priest.”

In another letter he says:

“Far be it from me, as it is from every Catholic who knows the spirit of his church, to doubt that among Protestants also there are and have been holy souls—holy in the sense in which all true children of God are holy; ... but my church teaches me to look upon these as unconscious members of the true, though to them unknown, church.”

“Overberg, of whose rarely beautiful catechism thirty thousand copies have been sold, especially for schools and children, expresses himself very pleasingly on this subject. No well-instructed Catholic has any objection to make to this, but even no half-taught Catholic can, on the other hand, mistake other altars for that altar of sacrifice which Malachi prophesied of, and will hold all other altars only for such as they really are.... Among unlearned Protestants (and, as I said before, among a few learned ones) there are very many whom the spirit of Protestantism as such has not touched, who have never been disturbed, because they have found in Holy Scripture a full rest and contentment, and lean with heartfelt love on Jesus Christ, doing for love of him all they do, in fullest confidence, and what flesh and blood would never teach them to do. Plants that bear such fruit as this I can only hold to come from roots watered by the Heavenly Father himself. You believe [he is addressing Sulzer, of Constance] that the number of such souls is small; and such a belief grieves me, for I think that it drives 539many away and discourages them. And, indeed, such hard suppositions as you make and insist upon having categorically answered lead to embittering results. I speak from experience. For seven years did I seek for truth with an upright heart, after God first put it into my heart to seek. After seven years’ search was I led, through circumstances that God overruled, to know and confess the truth. Others have sought longer and more anxiously, and have not found what I did, but they serve God in the simplicity of their hearts better than I do, and will assuredly find the truth in the kingdom of light and truth....”

“You see,” he says to his brother, “that I am not intolerant. But I hope to God that I shall never be tolerant in the newest sense of the word—that is, indifferent, lukewarm, fit to be spat out of the mouth of Jesus Christ.”... “Do not let,” he says to his son Caius at Göttingen University, “yourself be led away from the rock-founded church by the many good and worthy Protestants you meet. Among all in error are many who are individually children of God, but they have no church, no sacrifice, no priesthood, no Eucharist. The helter-skelter union of both Protestant bodies (the Lutheran and the Calvinist) must give serious scandal to the earnest souls in both, and will, I hope, lead many into our church.”

Of the difference between feeling and truth he says:

“Certain sensations may be real to one person and unreal to another. Not so with facts and doctrine. It is the peculiar character of the true religion that as it must be the same in all ages, so must every man be equally able to understand and embrace it.... I could not believe in a true religion which it would not be possible for every human being to believe in.... He leads some through rough paths, others through smooth ones; some towards truth, some through error. The way of error, as such, is not His way, although he is always ready to unfold the truth, to be beforehand with, and to meet half way, the upright soul who in all simplicity holds an erring belief.”

Indeed, in Stolberg’s experience, the difference between lukewarm and conscientious Protestants was fully shown; for the former reviled him for his change of religion, while the latter approved of his following what he looked upon as truth. Other misconceptions of Catholic doctrine he also combated, and greatly enlightened many of his friends on the Catholic belief in the justifying merits of Christ. Holy Scripture was a source from which he considered spiritual light to come, but, as he observed, “the learned have not yet been able to see that the healthy eye, like the concave mirror, gathers into one point all the scattered rays, while they split and split until the last particle of light is lost in shadow.” Elsewhere he says:

“He who is careless of Holy Writ is careless of the life of the soul, and he is happy if he becomes conscious, were it only now and then, of the fact that the world, whether with its pleasures or its wisdom, offers him nothing but what is poisonous to the immortal spirit.”

His advice to his son Ernest, who left home in 1803 to join the Austrian army, is full of the true Christian spirit. He recommends him to practise every virtue that would make a man perfect, and goes into many details which, of course, we cannot follow here, but this sentence is almost a compendium of the whole:

“A true Christian cannot find true freedom nor true unsolicitude but in the possession of a good conscience. Where the conscience is tender and watchful it watches alike over every act; and the more we pay attention to it, so much the more does it become, notwithstanding the violence it at first does to nature, a principle of our life which puts us in harmony with ourselves, and therefore makes us truly free.”

Elsewhere he says, speaking to another youth, a friend of his sons:

“Lassitude and a want of courage increase the strength of the enemy; and 540discontent concerning the post to which God has appointed us is unseemly in any brave man, much more in a foremost fighter. Not the wish that 'everything were otherwise,’ but the resolve always to act well and bravely—or, as Holy Writ says, 'to walk before God and be perfect’—can make men of us. That wish unnerves us; this resolve strengthens us and gives us a might which remains with the weapons of the fighter even on the other side of the grave. He who has done and suffered much does not dream of soiling his crown with tears, while he who has as yet found no opportunity of doing or suffering has still less a right to weep.”

The melancholy which the French have aptly called “la maladie du siècle”^[89] was abhorrent to Stolberg—that unmanliness and cowardice of mind which became fashionable through the writings of atheists, and which in many phases has spread itself into our present literature as well as our practice. He also writes concerning the same thing:

“Every human being has his own history to work out, and that this should be thoroughly done does not depend upon the amount of talent he has, but upon the will which few bring to it unconditionally and in a cheerful spirit.”

Stolberg was of a healthier school and generation; he did not see the beauty and sentiment and romance of passion running riot, misunderstood natures, morbid hearts, vain strivings, and all the paraphernalia of a moral sick-bed. For instance, the baneful and unreal excitements of the theatre were very dangerous in his eyes, and the evil custom which even good and well-meaning people fell into of countenancing private theatricals, and letting even their young children take part in them, was a great sorrow to him. One of the evils he deprecated was the rousing of a false sympathy with imaginary woes, which ended by undermining true sympathy with our neighbor’s actual troubles; another, the vanity which play-acting fostered in young people, and the excitement which rendered them unfit for serious study and work. It also destroys the simplicity of the soul and that modesty which is the chief adornment of young souls, especially of a girl’s soul.

“Young girls,” he says, “when they have once overcome their shyness, long after the same excitement, and are always wishing to be playing a part. The truthfulness of their nature is soon lost; seeming overcomes being, every acted feeling destroys real feeling; the heart becomes cold for reality, and is only to be aroused by supposed passion.”

Public theatricals he looked upon as equally dangerous, and even wrote against them, praising Geneva for having, until it became French, refused to allow the erection of a theatre within the limits of its territory. “The special charm of the stage,” he says, “lies in its flattery of our lusts, our vanity, and our laziness.” We have often heard fine theories advanced as to the mission and morality of the drama, but as long as practice belies these theories it is impossible to look upon them otherwise than as a well-meaning Utopia. Stolberg saw the real harm done, and not the imaginary good which some high-minded and exceptional artists would fain do.

The atheistical and deist philosophy of the eighteenth century and early part of the nineteenth were naturally repugnant to such an upright mind as Stolberg. He hated the wilful groping in the dark after a truth which the “philosophers” might have found in the Gospels, 541had they had the fairness to admit these on an equality, at least, with other so-called “proofs.” He called Steffen and Schleiermacher at Halle the “new Gnostics,” and compared their systems to the vain effort of the fabled Danaides to pour the ocean through a sieve.

“The name of Gnostics sounds ominous,” he says, “and brings to mind the Gnostics of the first centuries, with many of whose beliefs, indeed, the wisdom of our newest sages astonishingly coincides. Under their treatment even realities dissolve themselves in shadow, while they give to shadows the form and appearance of realities.”

Jacobi was at that time a very prominent leader of philosophy in Germany, and Stolberg mentions him many times in his correspondence with various persons, evidently as a representative man. At one time this teacher, the friend of Goethe, a sort of Medici among his disciples near Düsseldorf, where he had a beautiful house, and still more beautiful garden—now the property of the town and the appropriate scene of artists’ banquets and popular fêtes—confessed himself, in the midst of his philosophy, “a very beggar” in the true learning of the Spirit. Stolberg often alluded to this, and, when the master’s pride had long distanced the frame of mind in which this acknowledgment had been made, wrote of him: “Poor Jacobi! he was richer indeed when he called himself poor as 'a beggar.’” In 1812 he writes:

“I have just read Jacobi’s last pamphlet. The one before the last On a Wise Saying of Lichtenberg, seems to me in the highest degree satisfactory. That on The Recension (Jacobi cannot help putting odd and often trivial titles to his works) has also excellent points, but the whole seems to me loose, and a windy toying with views which he borrows from Christianity, the whole system of which, however, he, as far as in him, the puny mortal, lies, seeks to weaken and annihilate. While he praises the god-like Plato, he seems to forget that this philosopher, or rather Socrates in his platonic Phædrus, evidently longs, as a hart after the fountains of waters, for a god-given revelation whose very possibility itself Jacobi, on the contrary, strives to reason away.”

Schelling’s answer to Jacobi, however, equally displeased Stolberg, and he accuses him of making Jacobi appear, “through certain wiles of speech, now an atheist, now a fanatical dreamer,” and of taking credit to himself for

“Having been the first clearly to prove the existence of God. His God has been from all eternity the greatest Force, which contained within itself, in potentia, but not in actu, that goodness and wisdom which it developed in later ages. He falls thus into Count Schmettau’s error, of a god who has raised himself from a lower state to the highest, which theory one might compare with the career of a field-marshal who has risen by degrees from the ranks.... Evidently Schelling is a man of much mind, but of overweening vanity. He speaks of Christianity with respect, and probably believes in the divine mission of Christ, whose system, however, it was reserved for him—Schelling—fully to explain. He sent this paper of his to Perthes (Stolberg’s publisher), and told him he wished me to read it, and that I should then have quite another idea of what his philosophy was, and discover that he did not hold the views I attributed to him.”

At another time he writes:

“The deplorable frivolity of these times is one of their worst signs. I find it the saddest of all. Would that one could hope,

“When the hurly-burly’s done,

When the night is past and gone,”

that things would come right again. But moral nights are not as physical ones. The latter bring us dreams which the dawn of day dispels. The moral 542nights are full of the feverish dreams of mankind, and they have no certain limit as to time. They go crescendo from error to folly, until the awakening at the end of a completed, comet-like course of misery.”

We have mentioned Stolberg’s warm love of his country. Prince Francis Fürstenberg said of him during the time of the humbling of Germany under the yoke of Napoleon: “I know, and have known in my long life, many of the noblest men in the nation, but I saw none surpass Stolberg in genuine love for the Fatherland. His German and imperial heart is pure as gold and shines like a diamond.” The epithet imperial sounds odd to our ears; it is an allusion to his belief that the Empire of Germany, such as it existed just before the Congress of Vienna, was the proper representative and bulwark of the nation. He blamed the Emperor Francis very strongly for laying down his time-honored dignity later on, and contenting himself with a local title which severed his interests materially from those of Germany at large. He also saw in this withdrawal of imperial authority and protection over non-Austrian countries a danger to the Catholic faith, and a possible interference of Protestant powers in the communications between Catholic German states and the Holy See. But concerning the ever-vexed question of the Rhine frontier his patriotism was quick and hot; he wished that in the new partition at the Congress Alsace and Lorraine should be given back to Germany, and lamented the injudicious behavior by which some of the German troops had spoilt the evidently favorable state of mind of the Alsatians during part of the disturbances on the frontier.

“Eighteen months ago,” he writes in 1815, “the Alsatians were very well disposed, came to meet our troops with flags and received them with ringing of joy-bells; then came the Bavarians, the Badeners, and so on, and behaved so as to make them hate us. We all talk of our wish to reunite our once torn-away brethren with Germany, but we have angered them instead and are burning their towns and villages. My hair stands on end and I could weep tears of blood at the thought.”

Early in the century, a few weeks after his conversion, Stolberg wrote thus to Princess Gallitzin:

“True patriotism embraces the highest good of the people in all things: the blessings of faith, those of law, of freedom, and of morals. It can never follow the path of forcible overthrows and of revolution, nor covenant with an outside enemy, nor lend itself to the service of injustice, even when a seeming and momentary advantage is to be gained by such service. What a disgrace for us Germans is the Franco-mania that reigns among us—the cap-in-hand alliance with the Corsican adventurer, who is spreading horror and desolation among us and knows no right but that of the sword. What undermines all our strength, and will sink us even lower and lower, is not only the jealousy and spirit of aggrandizement current among the German states against the empire and the emperor, the fawning on the French with the hope of getting their help to win new slices of territory, but far more the weakened character of the whole people, and their want of moral energy and good feeling—the result of the unbelieving philosophy and immoral literature that have unnerved the nation.”

Just as impartially he condemned in after-years, when German patriotism had spread with a sudden rush from the field into literature, the “coarse Teutonism” which rejected every refinement of foreign origin, maligned every foreign custom, and made patriotism ridiculous by enjoining upon it to be no less than rabid. He then defended all that was reasonable and applicable 543to German life, all the praise-worthy customs, books, and improvements that fashion had turned suddenly against. He had earned a good right to be independent; for four of his sons fought in the different German armies that overwhelmed Napoleon after the retreat from Moscow, and one, his son Christian, a brave boy of eighteen, died at the battle of Ligny. His two sons-in-law also, fathers of large families of young children, were in the national army, and the greatest enthusiasm was felt by all the members of the family, old and young, for the cause which Stolberg called “ours, God’s, Europe’s, mankind’s, and the right’s.”

In 1815 he wrote: “True German feeling it is to welcome all that is noble and good, out of all ages and nations, as our own. Every one now, with narrow minds, is Nibelungen-mad, barbaric-mad”; and concerning his Life of Alfred he says:

“Alfred belongs to us, and therefore do I wish to hold him up to the veneration and imitation, and for the teaching, of my children. But not only do Alfred and his people belong to us; we should also make our own all that is great and noble in the life of all nations, yet without losing thereby our own individuality.”

In 1805 the decree freeing the serfs in the Duchy of Holstein went into effect, and Stolberg congratulates his brother Christian on this happy event; naturally, the greater event of the abolition of negro slavery in the British West Indies was a great joy to him, and he rejoiced the more that the Illuminati, his special aversion, lost thereby their best weapon against England, and that the French Declaration of the Rights of Man could be unfavorably compared with the English constitution, on account of a contradictory law, at that time still in force, forbidding the liberation of the negroes in French colonies to be even mentioned before the legislature. The alliances, dictated by fear or by interest, of German sovereigns with Napoleon were a subject of great grief and indignation to him, and he looked upon England with almost exaggerated admiration because she withstood the conqueror. He said “Pitt would save England against Europe’s will,” and his confidence in the general policy of the English statesman was unbounded. He had, too, a kind of historical admiration, if we may so call it, for the English form of government, which alone he thought proper for freedom, but which he did not believe fit for the wants of every nation, indiscriminately, on the Continent. It strikes us, however, that the fact of the English constitution, in its then state, being nearly a hundred and fifty years old had somewhat blinded his mind to the facts—according to his theory, rather suspicious, to say the least—of the change of dynasty in 1688; for the Stuarts in England were surely as legitimate sovereigns, from his point of view, as the Bourbons in France, whose least advances, in the person of Louis XVIII., towards the modern spirit so incensed and disgusted Stolberg; and when he said that “England alone stood in the breach” against Napoleon, he forgot that she considered it her interest to withstand him, and that a deeply-rooted prejudice egged on the nation against him. If he had seen anything of the unreasoning panic which the threatened invasion caused among the English, he would have been less ready to jest at the falling 544through of the scheme, which he called “an expedition to gather mussels along the British shores.” It has often been so, we think, among Continental statesmen and thinkers: they look upon England with exceptionally favorable eyes and weigh her doings in special balances, forgetting the lawless and riotous disturbances that she experienced earlier than other countries, after which she settled into the solid, steady, conservative, law-abiding, slow-to-be-moved nation which she had been for over a hundred years when the French Revolution suddenly broke out. Stolberg, much as he praised England, almost refused to see any good in the chaos of new ideas that were seething pell-mell together; he saw nothing but the evident godlessness, selfishness, pride, and cruelty which marked that era; and, indeed, he, the man of another age, the lover of a lofty ideal which we shall mention presently—the man who said that “all politics hinged on the Fourth Commandment”—could hardly be expected to allow that out of such confusion God could glean anything worthy of being offered to himself.

Stolberg often called Germany the “heart of Europe,” and wrote an ode with that title; but he would not allow with the innovators that the “philosophy” of the age was the true source of the influence his country should have on the Continent. Allied to this false idea of many Germans was the affected custom, in the early part of the century, of using the French language instead of the mother-tongue, even in the nearest domestic intercourse—a fault which the Russians also fell into, but which at present they have seen the folly of and have nearly successfully remedied. Stolberg heartily hated and despised this foreign intrusion into German home-life.

“Even in my younger days,” he says with scorn, “I can remember hearing of a gifted German girl being reproached by German women with being 'affected’ enough to write 'German’ letters.... Germans now write to each other, brother to brother, husband to wife, in French.... Is that not to estrange one’s self from one’s nearest and dearest? nay, even from one’s self?”

His relations and correspondence with well-known people of his day furnish us with his opinions on many of the writers, savants, statesmen, and philosophers, the reigning and rising public men. Of the historian Johann Müller he says:

“No one ever seized the true spirit of history so early in life as he did.... His life is very interesting; it is true he showed a good deal of vanity, but also so much cheerful good-humor that one does not feel inclined to be hard upon him for the former. His plan of study, as he arranged it for himself, and the scrupulous way in which he followed it out, seem to me truly noteworthy.... What a comprehensive spirit, what feeling and sympathy for the true, the good, and the beautiful! How early, too, he broke loose from the unwisdom of the philosophy of the times, and how deep a religious spirit remained firm in him in the midst of many disturbances, since he so clearly understood the history of the world by the light of that Providence whose finger he was always tracing in it! He once said very beautifully that Christ was the key to the world s history.”

In 1807 he gives the following opinion of Alexander von Humboldt:

“I know Humboldt personally. He has much understanding, much liveliness, much industry. But is he not inclined to be too much enslaved by the German à priori tendency and by a love of the scientific form? Is he strong enough not to let himself be carried away by the method of modern criticism, which tends to violent disruption from 545all that has gone before, instead of tracing out the great analogies on the path of simple observation? Is he quite free from a delicate and imperceptible charlatanism? Years may have matured him, but such maturing seldom takes place when the quick strides of science make it difficult for wisdom to keep up with her.”

Of Frederick Schlegel’s poetry, and that of others in the Dichtergarten (or “Poet’s Garden,” a collection of fugitive songs by various poets), he writes:

“The rarer and the more beautiful is the noble, religious spirit that breathes through the Poet’s Garden, the more do I wish that its authors might put forth all their strength. And so it would be, if it were not for a particular theory which lies at the bottom of the poetry—a theory whose foundation I do not know, but whose evident peculiarity strikes the eye, bewilders the reader, forces the Muse, and in its purposed negligence of language goes so far as even to disfigure it. The Muse craves freedom above all things, if she is to express what comes from the innermost of our heart or our mind. Every trace of art lames poetry, and theory often misleads, because it is born of human philosophy, while poetry is something divine. Therefore poets always succeed best in rhythm where the inspiration is great and noble, and the quickly-passing images, thoughts, sensations only group themselves well and naturally when they are conjured up by an infallible, all-subduing inspiration, without the poet knowing how it happens.”

Of Niebuhr’s Roman history he writes, in 1812—not, perhaps, in the sense that most of the readers of that work will endorse:

“I marvel at the deep learning, and often at the penetration, of our friend; but who will read him? What a bulwark of tedious researches, the result of which is often nothing more than a learned outwork! It is strange that, with this fault of historical pedantry, he could not avoid the contrary one of reasoning à priori, so common to the German professors. There is much understanding in the book, and in a few places one is pleasantly surprised at its spirit; but this spirit is neither a joyful nor a certain one. He fails in simplicity. From this springs his heavy style, despite his choice use of words. He is too forward in making hypotheses and foregone conclusions; for instance, his open partisanship with the plebeians leads him to make false and hasty judgments. His pragmatical tendency makes him unjust even to Livy, and he has no appreciation of the noble amiability of Plutarch. Yet, with all these faults, he must ever remain a valuable historian—not a star of the first magnitude, but still too good to be a mere famulus,^[90] to gather material for great historians. Among other things, he lacks the art of managing his style so as to appear to be led by it and yet to make it convey exactly what the writer pleases. But concerning his principles, some of which, however, I do not endorse, his conscience always appears as it is, noble and tender, while his love of truth follows him even on his hobby—hypothesis.”

It may be interesting to give the opinion of some of the same men on Stolberg himself as a historian and writer. The History of Religion, which was his great work, and which he mainly attributed to the suggestion, encouragement, and interest of Princess Gallitzin, became a topic of discussion and interest all through Germany. Many were brought by it to the Catholic Church, and of these most wrote to him first, asking advice and making confidences, before they read further or asked instructions from a priest. It was a source of deep thankfulness to him that he had thus been the means of making others share in the same blessings and peace which he had won through the grace and leading of God. But his History was no controversial work; it was very comprehensive, and embraced the whole subject of true religion from the beginning of the world, tracing 546the connection between Judaism and Christianity; the fulfilment of the prophecies in Christ; the spirit of aloofness from the world, first symbolized in the national exclusiveness of the Hebrews, and then proved in the persecutions under the Roman emperors in the struggle between Christianity and heathendom; and, lastly, the gradual, onward sway which the truth at last won over error, and which, speaking in a certain sense, culminated in the conversion of Constantine. Here Stolberg ended his history, feeling that his life would not be spared much longer, and that he had done his work, so far as he felt called upon by God to witness to the truth that was in him. The unhappy struggles, rents, and abuses of later church history he left untouched; surely there were counterparts to them in earlier days, but no such embittering could come from a relation of the old heresies and divisions as would have sprung from even the most impartial discussion of recent and more local ones. Schlegel took the greatest interest in this work, and of the least important part he spoke thus admiringly:

“I am especially delighted at the strength and simple beauty of your style; whoso compares it with what is called nowadays the art of representing things will easily discover where is to be found the true source of even this beauty.”

Again, of the second part of the history (it was divided into fifteen parts) he says:

“I found myself much steadied and strengthened by the whole, and particularly enlightened by the exposition on the Hebrew belief in the immortality of the soul and on the Mosaic code. May you in the future of your work, as often as opportunity allows, return to and dwell upon the immortality of the soul. It seems to me the path by which mankind at present can best be led towards truth, better than by any other teaching regarding the Godhead.”

He then says that pantheism and a vague sentimentality had perverted everything distinctly Christian into an empty shadow-form, but that few were so absolutely dead to all higher feeling as not to distinguish between the “real personal immortality, and the mere metaphysical image of it, without a hereafter, and without a continuance of the memory.”

“Bring vividly before them the true personal immortality, and you will often find those whom you had thought most spiritually dead and careless to be palpably roused. To me the doctrine of the Trinity is the central point of Christianity, and therefore the foundation and source of all my convictions, views, and aspirations.... The unfolding and representation of this secret of love (the Trinity) I have found to permeate every doctrine, principle, and even custom or rubric of the Catholic Church; although even in her pale many good individuals are less impressed with the divine spirit of the whole than with some one or other literal regulation.”

Johann von Müller wrote thus of Stolberg’s work:

“It is not a lukewarm, sham impartial church history, in which one is uncertain what relation it bears to Jesus of Nazareth, but the work of a man who knows what he believes, and would fain move all men to believe as he does. Not a church history critically weighing the Messiahship of Jesus from the Old Testament against his Godhead from the New, but the work of a man who sees everywhere and at all times Him who was and is, and is to come, and to whom all power is given in heaven and on earth. Lastly, it is not a worldly representation of the deceits and time-serving devices through which Christianity crept into the world, and is still able to maintain herself, the humble handmaid of statecraft, in these our enlightened times, but the confession and outpouring 547of soul of a man to whom the whole world is nothing in comparison with the Saviour of the world. Of the latter he speaks so that whoever loves him must love this book, and he who knows nothing of him will learn from this book what Christians possess in him. Therefore, reader, if thou art a reed, driven before the learned wind of our modern writings, look to this rock, and see if it has not a foundation in the needs of mankind and the love of the Godhead; and thou who knowest not Christianity, come and see what it is, as thy forefathers felt it, as it is yet, mighty in every childlike heart; and thou who believest, come hear, and enjoy, and rejoice thy heart with the word of life.”

Claudius spoke of the book being read by thousands, and of its “undoubted influence in strengthening the Christian faith among the German people.” A person in comparatively private life, Major Bülow, a stanch Bible man, said that Stolberg’s History of Religion had been a “welcome surprise to him, although the style was not always clear to his understanding, and he was only fearful lest the author should not live long enough to finish it.”

Joseph de Maistre spoke thus of the work in his Recueil de Lettres, p. 23:

“New researches and discoveries, and the progress of the art of tracing all up to the first sources, may correct or supplement much in his history, may bring a new light to bear on many of his opinions—for the work, in spite of its foundation on, and buttressing by, much study of a high order, is not meant to be an exhaustive scientific work; but I doubt if any, in our century at least, will surpass the author of this history in pure love of God and mankind, love to Christ and his church, and in pure and truly creative spirit. How striking also are his observations on the circumstances of our time, his opinion on the persecution of the church by the spirit of this world, on false teachers, on the marriage tie, and the sanctity of oaths, and many like things!”

Stolberg was rejoiced by these commendations, but more encouraged than rejoiced. Mere vanity was far from him; he thanked God that he had been able to supply “what these oft-repeated praises of good and single-minded men proved to him to have been really a want.”

The ideal which we have alluded to, and which was a great characteristic of Stolberg’s mind, was that of the mission and duties of an aristocracy. He believed that, in the abstract, the existence and allowed influence of such a class was an instinct inborn in man, and that it was only when the aristocracy was false to its own principles that the people could grow antagonistic to it. His theories on the subject were beautiful, noble, poetic, but in his time there had been so much evil practice that such theories were nearly swamped under it. It was natural to his character, however, to lean more on the theory than the practice, and to consider the latter an excrescence and abuse which might be done away with, and the ideal thereby reinstated in its first dignity. At first sight his theory seems simply a feudal, mediæval, romantic one, the dream of a man proud of his own order, and nursed in prejudices such as no change in political relations de facto could uproot but if we look closer into it, it becomes a very different and far more worthy thing—namely, a belief in the essence of chivalry, a standard of conduct such as King Arthur’s, a translation into altered forms and circumstances of the Gospel rules of charity, courtesy, and patience. Here are some of his own sayings on the subject, on which he reasoned in a way so far removed from either fanaticism or vanity that we 548place his explanations here as something wholly special to himself, and quite different from the ordinary rhapsodies about the necessity of various grades of classes:

“The ideal of the aristocracy^[91] is not weakened through the unworthiness of many who are of noble birth. On the contrary, the just scorn which follows these men redounds to the honor of their class, of which one cannot become unworthy without being despised by all. Nature gives the aristocracy neither more understanding nor more physical strength than she does to other classes; it takes its worth wholly from an ideal, but not a mistaken ideal. This, like all that is great in mankind, is founded upon the sacrifice of all that is lower for the sake of attaining the highest.

“The aristocracy must give up every mercantile and lower traffic. Three things were entrusted to its keeping—agriculture, of which kings have not been ashamed, statesmanship, and the defence of the Fatherland.

“As an ennobled countryman the aristocrat can pursue the most necessary, the oldest, and the most innocent work with better results than the peasant, because he has more means, more insight, and can better afford the danger of an occasional failure. His experience and example teach and encourage the common countryman, whom it is the beautiful and holy duty of the nobleman to enlighten and to protect, and whose well-being, morals, and temporal and eternal good it is his duty to further by every means in his power. This business is one which, if he wishes to be respected as a nobleman, he has no right to evade or neglect; except temporarily, if he is chosen as a representative of his province—a business to which he has also a special call as a citizen of the state. He must and ought, however, to take part in the government, even if he be not chosen by his province; and either as a magistrate or only as a land-owner he can take a prominent part in it. The defence of his country devolves upon no one so strongly as upon the nobleman. This is a worthy and beautiful duty of knighthood. It is well for that state where the aristocracy, as such, is called to the defence of the Fatherland as leaders of their own country people, whose patrons they are in times of peace, whose heads, judges, mediators, example, and benefactors they should be at all times. The old, fair relations have been rent by false representations, but they are not effaced.... The aristocracy has an inner worth, no matter how unworthy are many of its members. Neither royal nor priestly anointing can preserve from moral corruption! Of how much less avail are mere human, outward means to preserve the spiritual existence! Indeed, they often soil it. Let every one who is of knightly standing strive to prove by his actions that the ideal of knighthood lives in him, in noble simplicity, in courteous behavior, in quick willingness to give blood and lands for the Fatherland. His example will not remain without fruit. He will be far from looking upon certain virtues as virtues of his condition, and neglecting to practise others or superciliously leave them to other classes. If we hold fast to our knightly calling, the essence of knighthood will remain to us. The shell of the thing renews itself from time to time.... Whatever is worthy of respect in knighthood has come from self-sacrifice.... In order to keep pace with the century, the nobleman must be the equal of the citizen in knowledge, whenever the two meet in the same field. If he neglects this, he will see the burgher reigning as a cabinet minister and himself reduced to the honor of waiting in the king’s ante-chamber by virtue of his birth. And even in war, the knight’s proper field, how can the nobleman boast of his superiority to one who knows more than he does of the science of war? If the knight covets intellectual superiority, he must not seek it in emulation so much as in brave and silent self-sacrifice. The life of his fathers must teach his heart this lesson: Be worthy of thy fathers, whether the world acknowledge thy worth or no.^[92] A thirst after approbation does not behove a knight, but steady reliance on his strength and his intentions.... The present hatred of the aristocracy is a fever 549which will soon be spent.... It remains for us, each in his own circle, to maintain a lofty ideal and to spread it abroad—that is, a true spirit of religion and that spirit of brave self-denial, of earnest courage, and discreet worth which should mark the aristocracy—and at the same time to encourage among ourselves a desire not to be behindhand in such knowledge and in such strivings as elevate the heart, adorn the mind, and make us fitter for the callings that specially beseem us.”

It will be readily understood from the foregoing quotations that Stolberg had not much sympathy with a scheme which some German noblemen had started—that of a new knight-union or society. He deprecated the publicity such a step would necessarily bring upon them, and saw in it only a hollow, childish plan of defiance, a foolish revival of old customs as powerless in practice as a return to the weapons of the ancient knights, a protest against firearms and the altered arts of warfare. His enthusiasm was always dignified and reasonable; it had no touch of sentimentality and “playing at” things. To the last his character remained the same. Forgiving and temperate as regarded any wrong done personally to him, he could not brook the distortion of truth, and was in the act of replying to a libellous pamphlet of Voss, of Heidelberg, destined to spread among the public distrust of Stolberg’s sincerity in his conversion, when his last sickness overtook him. He had just finished the Life of St. Vincent of Paul, which he had written instead of the autobiography that his friends strongly urged him to write. He had objected that he felt no call from God to do so, and that, unless one wrote with the view of God’s call, vanity and self were too apt to become the leading motive in the work. He commended St. Augustine’s Confessions because they were evidently inspired by love of God’s honor only, and a monument of thankfulness to the One who called such a sinner to repentance. In St. Vincent he saw a man of modern times whom one could hold up as a model not too exalted and extraordinary, yet thoroughly humble, perfect, and holy, to men of his and future generations.

Stolberg died December 5, 1819, at the age of seventy, at Sondermühlen, a country-house for which he had, four years before, exchanged his favorite Lütjenbeck, when French domination was in the ascendant and he had become an object of suspicion to the French spies in Münster.

What his death was to his family can be easily imagined; it was hardly less to a large circle of friends, acquaintances, and even strangers who knew him only by name and by his works, but whose reliance on his advice, example, and opinion had long been their best and surest standard of duty.

550

FROM THE HECUBA OF EURIPIDES. A free translation. BY AUBREY DE VERE.

[The Chorus of Trojan Women lament their Captivity.]

STROPHE I.

Breeze of the ocean, fresh and free!

Whither, O whither wilt thou bear

The Exile, and her great despair?

Thou speed’st, and I must speed with thee!

Say, must some Dorian haven be

The home of Troy’s unhappy daughters?

O unbelovèd home!—or where

The father of most lovely waters,

Apidanus, goes winding by

The fruitful meads of Thessaly?

ANTISTROPHE I.

Or 'mid those isles of old renown,

Haply bright Delos’ sea-born glades,

Where deathless palms and laurels spread

Above their own Latona’s head

Green boughs (commemoration holy

Of that twin-birth that lit their gloom):—

There must I weep a captive’s doom?

There sing, with gladsome native maids,

Extorted song and melancholy

To Dian’s silver bow and crown?

STROPHE II.

Perchance, a slave in Athens pining,

On tap’stried walls these hands must trace

Minerva’s awful steeds and car

Still radiant from the Ten Years’ war;

Or blazon there the Titan race

Beneath the Thunderer’s wrath oppressed,

And every godlike head declining

Upon the thunder-blasted breast.

551ANTISTROPHE II.

Alas my people, and alas

My fathers, and my country’s shore!

And thou, O Troy—’tis Fate’s decree—

Farewell! I see thy face no more!

Alas for thee, alas for me!

Above thy head the plough shall pass:—

Worse fate is mine, o’er ocean’s wave,

The conqueror’s plaything, and his slave.

THE TRUE IRISH REVOLUTION.

The Irish people, albeit much given to intermittent spasms of insurrection, are at present as peaceable, and apparently as contented, as the contending passions of local politicians and the intrigues of imperial statesmen will allow them to be. The constabulary, in their rifle-green and burnished accoutrements, continue to be the envy and terror of the unsophisticated peasant; the queen’s writ runs unobstructed in the remotest parts of the island; “the castle still stands, though the senate’s no more”; and, save the sharp crack of a rifle at Dolly-mount or the more death-dealing fowling-piece of the sportsman, no warlike sound disturbs the quiet slumbers of the weary sentinel or the superserviceable stipendiary magistrate.

And yet a revolution has been in progress in Ireland and in Irish affairs elsewhere for the last three-quarters of a century as beneficent in its effects and as tangible in its benefits as if blood had flowed in torrents and the pure atmosphere from shore to centre of the land had been polluted by fumes of villainous saltpetre. We mean that within the memory of men now living a radical though gradual change has taken place in the manners, habits, and tastes of the Irish people, but more particularly in their literature, which after all is the best evidence of a nation’s ability to think correctly and express accurately what their minds are capable of conceiving.

Looking back to the condition of Ireland at the beginning of the century—her domestic legislature annihilated and seven-eighths of her people unrepresented in the imperial Parliament—beyond broken relics and dim memories of a glorious past, it can be said truthfully that she had no literature whatever, or rather no literature save what was alien and hostile in tone and spirit. There were no native authors except those who had earned pelf and unenviable notoriety by decrying Ireland’s nationality, maligning her faith, and holding up to the contempt and ridicule of the world the faults and foibles of her unlettered peasantry. But, even had there been men of a different character, they could not have found either encouragement or patronage; for the mass of the population, thanks to the Penal Laws, could not read English, and one-half at least could not even speak it.

552The consequence, therefore, was that every young Irishman who felt the spirit of literary ambition stir within him, as soon as he had attained manhood, hastened to pack up his scanty wardrobe and turn his face toward London—then as now the great intellectual focus of the United Kingdom. The pioneers of this movement were generally men little fitted to represent their country. They were merely adventurers, without principle or honor, facile and versatile, and in some instances even educated, but, from previous training and association, just such tools as Grubb Street publishers loved to handle and the lowest class of Britons delighted to patronize. They were the originators of the “Denis Bulgruddery” and “Paddiana” school of so-called comic literature, and were useless if they did not caricature in the grossest manner, on the stage and in the newspapers and periodicals, their Catholic fellow-countrymen. With them a priest was an ignorant and low-bred tyrant; the peasant his abject, superstitious slave. This worthless class, while it did much to destroy the moral effect produced by men of a preceding generation, like Goldsmith, Coleman, O’Keefe, Sheridan, Burke, Barry, and other distinguished Irishmen, did more to instil into the popular mind of England that utter misconception of Irish character and insensate hostility to the Catholic religion of which we find at the present day such marked traces even among fairly intelligent men.

Those mercenaries were followed by others of a higher order of intellect and of greater pretensions, of whom Crofton Croker and Sheridan Knowles may be considered to have been the representatives. The drama, poetry, and prose fiction of every description employed their attention alternately, and in each they proved true to the baser instincts of their nature and the traditions of the faction whence they had sprung. They were stanch no-popery men of the Orange stripe, and, having a Protestant, English audience to gratify, they were consistently and virulently anti-Catholic and anti-Irish. When they wished to delineate their co-patriots, whether before the foot-lights or in the pages of cheap novels, they invariably divided them into two classes: the high-spirited, accomplished Protestant gentleman, and the low, grovelling, ignorant papist. Thus for many years did they thrive on bigotry and fatten upon treason to the land that was unfortunate enough to have given them birth. It was only natural that England should have viewed with complacency the caricatures of a faith she had so long and so strenuously proscribed, and a people whom she had robbed of the last vestige of independence; but it is humiliating to reflect that the works of such libellers were up to a recent period popular in Ireland, and that their comedies and farces “have kept the stage” even to our own day.

There were yet other candidates for fame, who, tired of the provincialism of Irish towns, or impatient of the restraints which their peculiar calling in life had placed upon them, sought an English market for their intellectual wares—spoiled children of genius, men like Maginn and Mahony, of much learning and fascinating accomplishments, fitted to have conferred lasting honor on their country, but who, lacking the true spirit of national 553dignity and personal respect, easily fell a prey to one or other of the contending English parties, and sank to the level of those who disgrace the noble profession of letters by making it subservient to the base purposes of political factions. This class contributed much of what is still to be found brilliant and entertaining in English literature, but little that reflects credit on their character as Irishmen.

Following or contemporaneous with them came another and a different school of Irish writers, such as Lever, Lover, Maxwell, and even Carleton; for, though the latter in many of his later works showed a just appreciation of the vast improvement taking place in public taste, his earlier and more popular productions, apart from their occasional touches of true pathos and flashes of genuine wit, were devoted mostly to caricature and exaggeration. Charles Lever, who has written so many books, and who is yet the most read of all the Irish novelists of this century, has been called the best recruiting sergeant the British government ever employed; while Lover may be styled a gifted and versatile buffoon in all save his lyrics. The first’s highest conception of an Irish gentleman was one who broke his arm over a Galway fence, was commissioned in the British army, blundered into all sorts of scrapes and out of them, hated Napoleon, worshipped “Sir Arthur,” charged wildly at Ciudad Rodrigo or Waterloo, and finally—married an heiress. His best Irish peasant does not rise above the grade of Mickey Free or Darby the Blast, while he seemed utterly unconscious of the existence of a very important social element in all agricultural countries—the farming or middle class, always remarkable for their sturdy common sense and practical views of life. It was from this portion of his countrymen and from the hardy mechanics of the towns that Scott drew his best and most enduring portraits of Scotch manliness, shrewdness, and humor.

Lover, though tender and natural in verse, was singularly unfortunate in his choice of subjects and altogether false in his attempts to develop them. He also ignored the “middle classes,” and substituted for gentlemen sentimental non-entities, and for the free-spoken, light-hearted, and withal poetical plebeian, blundering boobies full of chicane and deception. We can scarcely believe that the man who wrote Treasure Trove and Handy Andy could have conceived such pathetic songs as “The Angels’ Whisper” and “The Fairy Boy.”

Still, the works of these authors, though exhibiting many glaring defects, were a great improvement on those of their predecessors, and consequently they have not yet been consigned to the oblivion which has enshrouded the productions of the bigots of the previous era.

But the revolution in Irish literature had commenced long before their advent, and the credit of initiating it belongs to one who was not only universally admired and applauded during his life, but whose fame continues to augment as time rolls along, and the memory of his extraordinary efforts in behalf of his faith and country becomes brighter and more enduring. That man was Thomas Moore, the son of humble Catholic parents, who, on account of his religious belief, was refused a fellowship in the only university of which his native country could then boast. Naturally disgusted at such ostracism, 554Moore, at the age of twenty-three, went to London, and entered upon that brilliant career in poetry and prose which has indelibly stamped his name on the history of the literature of the nineteenth century. Never was the force of genius better exemplified than in the life of Moore. A plebeian, a Catholic, and an Irishman in the strongest sense of those terms; without condescending to apologize for, or attempting to palliate, the facts of his station and belief; with scarcely a friend or acquaintance in the great metropolis, and no recognition in the world of letters, the poet rose amid an aristocratic, Protestant, and anti-Irish community to a position equal to the most gifted of Scotland’s and England’s men of genius, and in his Melodies far surpassed any lyrics that have been written in our language since or before his time. In 1808 the first part of that unequalled collection of songs appeared, and each successive instalment but added to the popularity of the preceding. From the first they became fashionable, and consequently popular. They were sung in the drawing-rooms of princes and in the cottage parlors of the shop-keeper and tradesman. Persons of every rank in life who knew little of Ireland, and that little not to her credit, listened entranced to “Remember the Glories of Brian the Brave” or “Oh! blame not the Bard,” and began to think that a country that could produce such airs and so sweet a poet could not after all be considered very barbarous. It was but a poor concession, yet under the circumstances a most valuable one. It was the first blow struck against the solid wall of prejudice with which English society had surrounded itself.

Next to Moore we place John Banim, the principal author of the Tales of the O’Hara Family. Banim, like Moore, sprang from the ranks of the humbler classes and sought in London a field for his rare genius which was denied him at home. Though a dramatist of no mean order, his reputation rests principally on his novels, many of which, like the Boyne Water, Crohoore of the Bill-Hook, The Priest-Hunter, and The Fetches, are works of real power, interspersed here and there with pleasantry and humor, but always moral, dignified, and true to nature. The sale of Banim’s tales and shorter stories from their intrinsic merit, and perhaps somewhat on account of their novelty, was very extensive in England, and helped to increase the good feeling towards the Irish people which the lyre of Moore had first called into being.

In Gerald Griffin, afterward the humble Christian Brother, Banim found not only a friend but a powerful auxiliary. Griffin, of all the writers of fiction in the English language, was the purest and most actively moral. If we search all his works—and they fill nine or ten volumes—we will not find an expression or an innuendo to offend the most sensitive. The writings of the great English novelists of this century, like those of Scott, Thackeray, and Dickens, cannot be said to be positively immoral, though the author of the justly-celebrated Waverley Novels often exhibited marked prejudice, and sometimes downright bigotry; while his later rivals, when not satirical or trifling, can at best claim but a negative morality for their teachings and tendencies. But the genius of Griffin sprang from a pure Catholic heart filled with love for all 555his kind, and consequently he wrote with a sense of religious responsibility, and in a spirit of justice and rectitude rarely to be found so thoroughly developed in a writer of fiction in our days. His works have had a great influence on the popular mind of both countries. But, though he first wrote in England, his sole and absorbing object was to benefit his countrymen. When satisfied that the germ of his laurels had begun to fructify in a foreign soil, he returned to his home, where, amid domestic pleasures, and in daily communion with the characters he so admirably portrayed and the scenes of natural beauty he so loved to describe, he composed his more important and finished works.

Meanwhile, another and not less important impetus had been given to the rapid change taking place in popular sentiment regarding Irish character and literature, and this was in Ireland itself. The letters of “J. K. L.”—the learned Dr. Doyle—on Catholic Emancipation and the Tithe Question, and those of the present venerable Archbishop of Tuam on similar topics, had thrilled the Irish heart and evoked in it a feeling of national dignity and self-reliance that had long lain dormant; and even the great O’Connell, amid all his professional and political labors, found time to contribute his aid to the new movement. But it was not till after 1840 that the various rivulets combined and assumed the proportions of a mighty flood, which, bursting through the barriers of ignorance and prejudice, overspread the entire land. Then began to appear the theologians and ecclesiastical historians of Maynooth and the antiquarian writers of old Trinity; the fiery ballads of the Nation and the graceful and learned essays of the Dublin Review and University Magazine. Archæological and Celtic societies were formed, the hitherto neglected Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy were brought into public notice, and the musty tomes that were crumbling to dust and decay on the shelves of Trinity College library, after their sleep of centuries, were explored, collated, and vivified. The names of Murray, O’Reilly, Petrie, Todd, O’Donovan, O’Curry, Graves, Wilde, Meehan, McCarthy, Mangan, and a host of other lesser lights, became familiar to the intellectual world by their profound, subtle, or brilliant contributions to the literature of the age. One thing alone was wanting to complete this grand national revival: a Catholic university—and even that soon came, not as a subordinate worker in the common cause, but as the leader of the movement.

Yet, though general education and popular instruction, in their own sphere, kept pace with the mental awakening in the higher departments of learning, strange to say, the stage, generally considered the first to yield to popular impulse, was the slowest and last to acknowledge the improved spirit of the times, and even to this day clings to many of the antiquated and bigoted so-called Irish dramas and comedies with insensate tenacity. Theatrical managers still persist in presenting for the amusement of patrons, a large portion of whom are Irish, the farces and low interludes which fifty years ago were written to gratify the anti-Irish and anti-Catholic feelings of the lowest class of London society. A partially successful effort has been made recently to redeem this gross and fatal error; better, or rather less 556bad, Irish dramas have of late made their appearance, and let us hope the reformation, once set on foot, will be carried out. There is no reason why we should not have Irish dramas as good as Irish poems, tales, and other works of fiction. If people will go to theatres, they ought not be compelled to become interested spectators of outrages on faith and morals, and patrons and supporters of those who commit the outrages.

Still, casting our memory back over the history of Irish intellectual life for more than half a century, it would be scarcely an exaggeration to say that since the Renaissance epoch no country has given such evidence, in so short a time, of mental fertility and activity as that island which was once almost as famous throughout Europe for her learning as for the piety of her children. Ireland has at last a literature which is not only rich in ideas and information, but which is both national and Catholic. Her history, once so obscure and misunderstood, can now be studied with as much ease and satisfaction as any in Christendom; her antiquities, formerly the spoil of the ignorant or the jest of the sceptic, have been collected, arranged, and scientifically explained in a hundred ways; while the lives and actions of her great and holy men, from the earliest ages, have received full, critical, and impartial justice. And as yet we have only seen the beginning! If that be so fair and full of promise, what may not be hoped for from the intellectual future of a keen yet imaginative, brilliant yet conscientious, witty yet harmless in their wit, passionate in the wider sense, yet profoundly religious, people?

THE BRIDES OF CHRIST.

IV. ST. CATHERINE.

“Whom I shall wed,” said Alexandria’s princess, “rare

Of beauty must be, past imagining;

So great I shall not think I have made him king;

More rich, sweet-hearted more, than summer air!”

In dreams she came where courts such state declare

Of Mother and Son enthroned, that worshipping

She knelt, though royal: the Child placed a ring

Upon her finger, and she woke—’twas there!

So Catherine became Christ’s. Again she kneels:

With rose and lily, in white and purple clothed,

No shining host now hails the heaven-betrothed,

But God’s bolt shatters the sharp torture-wheels.

Then Night and angels her pall-bearers are—

The Bridegroom waits on Sinai lone and far.

557

V. ST. MARGARET.

Of all the virgins pure that bear the palm,

There is not any one more meek and mild

Than sweet maid Margaret. Tending while a child

The flocks, she drew near, in the mountain’s calm,

To the Good Shepherd, like a trustful lamb;

She felt that God with man was reconciled;

She saw diurnal victory undefiled

Of light o’er darkness hoist the oriflamme.

Of Morning. So flashed she, in dungeon drear,

The Cross uplifted, till the Dragon foul

Crouched at her feet, in fear of that white soul.

O Pearl of Antioch, so soft and clear!

O Daisy, with the chaste dew on thy lips!

Thou touchest Christ with stainless finger-tips.

VI. ST. BARBARA.

Dioscorus of Heliopolis

Shut his wise daughter in a lofty tower,

Jealous of lovers; therein, for her bower,

She caused three windows to be made, in this

Her father disobeying, but said: “It is

Through three clear windows that the Almighty Power,

The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, shower

Light on the soul—with light immortal bliss!”

Scourged, by the gold hair dragged, slain by thy sire—

A turbaned heathen!—soft as rosy May,

Yet resolute, and avenged by instant fire,

Christian Bellona! sweet-browed Barbara!

With the Red Mantle of thy fortitude,

Thy Tower and Cannon, be my soul endued!

558

MARSHAL MacMAHON AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS.

The inconveniences resulting from the present system of transmitting political intelligence from Europe to this country for the use of our daily journals are serious. An event of importance occurs to-day in London, Paris, Constantinople, or Rome; the same afternoon we read what purports to be an account of the event in our evening journals, and the next morning we are furnished with a few more details, accompanied often by a leading article hurriedly written and based, as a rule, upon no other information than that contained in the despatches. In twenty-four hours afterwards the event is almost forgotten; and by the time that the letters of correspondents on the spot, or the journals of the locality, can reach us, the incident has become an old story and the interest excited by it in the first place has faded away. This manner of dealing with matters of great importance would be lamentable, even if the information contained in the cable despatches were always correct, full, and uncolored by prejudice; but too often the despatches are models of what they should not be—that is, they are incorrect in matters of fact; marked by omissions of the truth and by suggestions of falsehood; and disfigured, in the majority of cases when the events reported have, or are supposed to have, some relation to the interests of the Papal See, by an ingenious perversion of the real and natural meaning of the incidents which they purport to describe. A heavy responsibility rests upon the conductors of our daily journals in this matter—a responsibility to which we should be glad to see them more sensitive than they now appear to be. They know well enough how it happens that the bulk of their cable despatches from the Continent of Europe is continually affected by an evident animus against the Holy See whenever there is an opportunity to display this feeling; they know well enough why it is that, whenever possible, a coloring hostile to the church, and calculated to excite Protestant or non-Catholic prejudice against her, is given to events.

The greater part of the European despatches of the New York journals is transmitted from London, being made up there chiefly from the despatches of the Reuter Agency, supplemented by the special despatches received by the leading London journals. The Reuter News Agency, which has its ramifications throughout all Europe, and is conducted with admirable skill and good management as a business enterprise, is in the hands of Jews; its agents have peculiar relations with the governments which stand in need of their services, and a system of mutual benefit is kept up between them; in return for the monopoly of official news and other similar favors on the part of the governments, the agents of the Reuter company transmit only such intelligence as is agreeable to the governments, and with such coloring as the governments wish. The 559relations existing between the Italian government and the Reuter Agency are understood to be especially intimate; and certain it is that from no capital in the world has more false and distorted news been sent forth than that which all the world has received from Rome since the Italian occupation of that city. As for the Continental despatches taken from the London journals and sent to New York, it should be remembered that not one of the London daily papers is in the Catholic interest, and that those whose despatches are most frequently sent to us—namely, the Times, the Daily News, and the Pall Mall Gazette—are inspired by a very lively hatred and fear of the church. We believe that the conductors of our own daily journals are for the most part actuated by honest motives. Their heads are sometimes deplorably at fault, but their hearts are generally right; and, with rare exceptions, they are free from the guilt of wilfully misrepresenting facts and designedly deceiving their readers. But too frequently they do permit themselves to be deceived or misled, in the manner we have explained, with respect to the true meaning and co-relation of political events on the continent of Europe.

The facts mentioned are, or should be, perfectly well known in the editorial rooms of all our journals; and it is certainly to be desired that our editors should cease to take their opinions at second-hand, and should begin to exercise their own good and honest judgment upon events as they occur abroad. If they were in the habit of doing this, and if they were furnished with cable information of a correct and uncolored character, they would not, we are certain, have fallen into the error of regarding the recent change of government in France as a wicked, base, and unprovoked conspiracy to destroy the republican institutions of that country, but would have recognized in Marshal MacMahon’s action the wise, absolutely necessary, and not too rapid determination of that ruler to save the republic, if possible, while it is still worth saving, and at all events to save France and society generally throughout Europe from the convulsion, anarchy, and destruction into which the revolutionists were so rapidly and surely dragging them. It is by no means certain that Marshal MacMahon will now succeed in the task before him; he may have waited too long. Nor are we concerned to prove that the motives of the Marshal-President in his dismissal of M. Jules Simon, and in his selection of his present advisers, were unmixed; but we are anxious to show to our readers that his action was necessary, and that the good wishes of Americans who reverence law and order, who detest red-republicanism and communism, who cherish religious liberty, and who dread and abhor tyranny, whether exercised in the name of many or of one, should be on his side. “I am conscious,” said Marshal MacMahon nine days after the dismissal of M. Simon—“I am conscious of having fulfilled a great duty. I have remained, and shall remain, absolutely within the bounds of legality. It is because I am the guardian of the constitution that I acted as I have acted. To attribute to me an intention of assailing the constitution is a misconstruction of my character. The country will soon comprehend that my sole aim is the salvation of France and of the government which she has given herself.”

560We believe that these are sincere and honest words; and we shall have no difficulty at least in showing that Marshal MacMahon could not have acted otherwise than he did, unless he had been prepared to surrender the virtual government of the republic into the hands of men who are leagued together to destroy the rights of property; to degrade marriage; to enslave, if not wholly to overturn, the church; to cut her off from her connection with her earthly head; to reduce her prelates, if they were permitted to exist at all, to the condition of servants of the civil power; to exile her contemplative and teaching orders; to take from her the right of educating her children; and to drag France, ere long, into an alliance with the revolutionary associations in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Spain, and Russia, which dream of establishing on the ruins of religion and of society a new confederation from which God shall be banished, and over which Satan shall rule supreme. Comparatively few of the constituents of the Gambetta party in the French Assembly are aware of the designs of the leaders of this faction; but enough light has within the past few weeks been thrown upon their machinations fully to justify the President in making a firm stand against their further progress.

M. Jules Simon refused to aid the President in executing this determination; and M. Simon was removed to give place to a minister who would co-operate with his chief. So powerful had the Gambetta faction become in the Assembly that the whole of the cabinet followed M. Simon in his enforced retirement from office, and the President was for the moment left alone. The men whom he called to his aid, however, and who, indeed, had encouraged him to dismiss M. Simon, were prompt in taking up the fallen reins of office, and the government, without a day’s delay, began its work of preserving France from her worst foes. The task before them is a most arduous one, and it has been begun none too soon. Let us show how it became necessary that it should be undertaken at all.

The French Assembly was re-convened at Versailles on the 1st of May after the usual Easter recess. During the vacation events had occurred which made it probable that the long-threatened rupture between the Gambetta faction, or Extreme Left of the Chamber, and the conservative elements in the executive department of the government, could not be delayed much longer. The administration had indeed gone to the very furthest point of concession in endeavoring to satisfy the demands of the Left. The consent of Marshal MacMahon had been given to these concessions, but it was known that this assent had been extorted from him with difficulty, and that he was personally of the opinion that the more was given to the Gambettists the more would they ask, and that the true and safe course was that of steady and uncompromising resistance to their unconstitutional and revolutionary demands. The Left, by skilful management of the press in its interest; by the manipulations of the local public functionaries who had from time to time been appointed at its request, or whom it had been able to purchase; by adroit misrepresentations and exaggerations of the policy of the conservative members of the Assembly; and by the not infrequent maladroit utterances 561and acts of certain of the imperialist and monarchical members, had contrived to make an imposing show of their strength in the country as well as in the Assembly. It is no doubt true that, all other things being equal, a large majority of the French people would prefer a republic to any other form of government. But the republic which would satisfy them is not at all the republic which would satisfy M. Gambetta and his friends. The republic which the majority of the French people desire is a republic in which property would be safe; in which law and order would reign; in which God would be respected; and in which the church would be free. The republic of Gambetta would possess none of these characteristics; but Gambetta and his lieutenants had been allowed to assume the attitude of the especial friends and defenders of republican institutions, and many of their members in the Assembly owed their election to the votes of good Catholics and sober citizens. They now felt themselves strong enough to advance further, and to wrest from the administration a still greater share of power.

Marshal MacMahon was himself irremovable for three years longer, only four years of his Septennate having expired. But it might be possible, in the opinion of the Gambettists, to force him to accept a cabinet which should be dictated by themselves, and which would hand over to them the virtual control of the government. One of the members of the then cabinet, they believed, would be useful to them, and their plans involved his retention. What was the nature of the communications which are said to have taken place in secret between MM. Gambetta and Simon cannot at present be known. Nor can we unveil the mysteries of the correspondence which has been kept up during the last few years between the controlling members of the French Extreme Left and the revolutionary leaders in England and throughout the Continent of Europe. The operations of the secret societies are seldom brought to light until after their work has been accomplished—and not always even then. The once famous “International Society of Working-men” has ceased to exist for all practical purposes; but it, at the best, was only an engine invented and put in motion by men who still are laboring in the secrecy of Masonic lodge-rooms and in the caucus-chambers of hidden political organizations to accomplish the destruction of Christian society and Christian government. It cannot be doubted that a certain solidarity unites the socialists of France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Russia, Spain, and Portugal, and that they have the means of acting together. The Gambetta faction in France by no means stood alone in their recent attempt to gain the upper hand in the administration of the republic; they had the active sympathy and the moral support of their confrères throughout Europe.

Now, the great bulwark of the conservative republic in France is the Roman Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic faith, the Roman Catholic people. So long as the church is free and undisturbed in France—free to pursue her work of educating her children, preserving morality, and saving souls—the French people, of whom all but a small fraction belong to her, will remain tranquil and happy, and 562they would make short work of men who proposed to set up in France a communistic and atheistic republic. They are quite well contented with the republic as it at present exists, and are hopeful of its future; under it the church for the first time has been allowed full right of teaching; and the avidity with which Catholics availed themselves of the privileges conferred by the new university law sufficiently attests at once their intelligence and their zeal. Still, the Catholics in France, like the Catholics throughout the rest of the world, have a sorrow and a grievance; and French Catholics, like all other Catholics, claim the right to express this sorrow and to do what is in their power to redress this grievance. The earthly head of their church is a prisoner in his own city; he has been despoiled of his patrimony and plundered of his crown; his jailers threaten from time to time to deprive him of the little that is left to him; there is positive danger that the freedom of the election of his successor will be assailed, and that the church throughout the world may be subjected, through the malice of her foes at Rome, to the gravest perils. The French Catholics conceive that it is their right and their duty to protest unceasingly against this state of things, and to inspire their government to speak in their name—and, if occasion arises, to act in their name—for the purpose of protecting the Holy Father from further insults and oppression, and of seeking to bring about the peaceable restoration of his independence. In all this they are strictly within the limits of their constitutional rights as citizens of the French Republic.

Let us bring the matter home to ourselves. Suppose that a petition should be drawn up praying President Hayes to instruct our minister at Rome to represent to the government of Italy that nine millions of American Roman Catholics felt themselves deeply aggrieved and injured by certain acts of the Italian government towards the Pope, and that they considered these acts all the more unjustifiable because they were one and all in open and undisguised violation of the promises made by the Italian government to the whole Catholic world; suppose that this petition should be signed by every Catholic man and woman in the United States and sent to the President; would it be said, then, that we were exceeding our rights as citizens, and that we should be punished for our temerity? The President might do as he pleased with the petition; he might act upon it or cast it aside—that would be for him to decide; but could we, as citizens, be blamed and punished for exercising the right of petition in order to make known our feelings upon a matter which touches us so closely? Yet this is all that the French Catholics have done; and it is because of the solidarity of interests and of purpose, of hope and of fear, which exists between the revolutionists and socialists of Italy and of the other Continental nations that the Gambettists in France were spurred up to make this perfectly legitimate action of the French Catholics the pretext for a new and desperate assault upon the liberties of the church in France—an assault under cover of which, and aided by what seems to us very much like treachery on the part of M. Jules Simon, they hoped to compel Marshal MacMahon to capitulate to them.

563The allocution of the Pope issued on the 12th of last March had moved to the very depths the hearts of Catholics in France, as it had moved the hearts of the Catholics of every other land. They felt that it was impossible for them to remain silent after hearing that most pathetic and powerful appeal; they wished that their reply should be as emphatic as possible, and that it should consist of acts as well as of words. They resolved to draw up addresses to the Holy Father; to organize pilgrimages to convey these addresses, with their gifts, to Rome; and to devise means whereby they could express to their own government their anxious wish that it would use its influence with the government of Italy in behalf of the restoration of the independence and freedom of the Pope. Each of these projects was entered into with commendable zeal; and early in April the Bishop of Nevers addressed a letter to Marshal MacMahon, asking him, in the name of his flock, to use the influence of France at the court of King Victor Emanuel and at other courts for the protection of the Pope and for the restoration of his rights. The marshal’s cabinet at this moment were greatly under the influence of M. Jules Simon, the President of the Council; they were imbued with the idea that it would not be safe for them to exasperate the Gambetta faction; and they persuaded the marshal to approve a letter addressed by the Minister of Public Worship to the bishop, in which entire disapproval of his appeal was expressed, with the remark that “the marshal, as a sincere friend of religion, saw with pain the clergy intervening in internal, and still more in foreign, politics.” The Gambettists were encouraged by this mark of weakness on the part of the government, and prepared to push their advantage. But the Catholics did not choose to take their views of duty from the dictates of a Council whereof M. Simon was the chief; and they continued to organize their pilgrimages and to draw up and circulate their addresses to the Pope. On the 19th of April the Bishop of Nevers, not at all disconcerted by the rebuke which he had received from the Cabinet, addressed a letter to the Mayor of the Nièvre, in which he explained to that official what, in his opinion, was the duty of all good Catholics occupying influential positions.

“The Pope being no longer free in Rome,” wrote the bishop to the mayor, “the result is that we ourselves are no longer free in our consciences, and we consequently should use all our influence to obtain a change in such an abnormal state of things, and the restoration to the sovereign of our souls of the independence which he absolutely requires in order to guide us. We must first instil these views in the minds of the population whose interests are confided to us. We must then concert together to cause similar convictions to prevail in the various councils of the country.”

On the 20th, at a cabinet council, the general petitions of the Catholics addressed to the government were taken into consideration, and it was proposed that, in order to silence the complaints of the Gambettists, who were declaiming violently that the circulation and presentation of such memorials would embroil France in a difficulty with Italy, the bishops should be ordered to forbid the further exposure of these petitions in their churches for signature. But the marshal on this occasion displayed a little more firmness and the matter was passed over without action. 564A few days before this an event had occurred in Italy that served to increase the distrust with which Marshal MacMahon already regarded the secret intentions of the leaders of the Left. In Benevento, near Letino, and again near Rome, the government had arrested a number of socialists who, it appears, were engaged in a conspiracy for the establishment of a Red Republic. The papers found on the persons of the arrested men were of the usual inflammatory character, and set forth, among other things, that “man ought not to be subjected to any tyranny, human or divine; that the principle of private property is the climax of infamy, because it creates inequality between men; that the union between men and women ought to be free; and that the state is the denial of the most sacred principles.” The chief leader of the band, who was arrested with about fifty of his adherents, was a young Milanese named Caffiero, a man of wealth and position; and an examination of his papers disclosed the fact that his association was only one of a large number of others spread throughout Europe, and that the names of some of the leading radical republicans of France appeared upon a list which was believed to enumerate the advisers and real leaders of the conspirators. On the 28th of April, however, the cabinet again induced the marshal to make another effort to conciliate the Gambettists, who had redoubled their agitation against the Catholic movement, which had by this time become very general throughout the whole country. On that day the Minister of the Interior issued a circular to all prefects, directing them to discourage the signature of the Catholic protests and petitions by not allowing them to be publicly circulated within their respective jurisdictions. The circular—to which Marshal MacMahon assented after much pressure—instructed the prefects to regard these petitions and protests as “an unjustifiable and illegal interference in the legislative and domestic affairs of a friendly foreign state,” and to do all in their power to suppress them. Gambetta himself could scarcely have said more; but the marshal was quite correct in his opinion that Gambetta would still ask for more. Meanwhile, the mot d’ordre to the Gambettists had gone forth to strike terror into the hearts of their opponents by public manifestations. The students of the Sorbonne were instigated into making violent assaults upon the Catholic universities; on the 1st of May five hundred students assembled in front of the Catholic university in the Rue de Vaugirard, where they insulted the Catholic students and professors by indecent harangues and by singing blasphemous parodies of a hymn to the Sacred Heart; dispersed by the police, they separated only to assemble again before the Jesuit school in the Rue de Shomond, where the same disorderly and disgraceful scenes were repeated until the police arrived and arrested the ringleaders of the mob. In all the cities where the Gambettists were sufficiently numerous manifestations against the church and her liberties were organized; and in some cases the zeal of the disciples so far outran the directions of the leaders that it was with difficulty the latter prevented the former from outrages which would have alarmed and disgusted the whole country.

Affairs were in this condition when the Chambers reassembled on 565the 1st of May. The Left lost no time in bringing forward their guns and forcing the fighting. M. Leblond was put up by them in the Chamber of Deputies to give notice of a question addressed to the government “as to the measures which it proposed to take to repress Ultramontane intrigues.” M. Jules Simon, hastening to comply with the demands of the men with whom, as it now appears, he was secretly in accord, at once replied that the debate on the proposed question could take place on the next day. The Catholic members of the Chamber seem to have already distrusted the sincerity of M. Simon. One of them—the eloquent and fearless Count de Mun—announced that he and those who acted with him insisted upon a clear understanding of the position of the government.