Volume 26 — VOL. XXVI., No. 153.—DECEMBER, 1877.

MR. FROUDE ON THE “REVIVAL OF ROMANISM.”^[66]

“Why is Protestantism standing still while Rome is advancing? Why does Rome count her converts from among the evangelicals by tens, while she loses to them, but here and there, an exceptional and unimportant unit?” (“Revival of Romanism,” sect. i. p. 95).

These questions, asked by Mr. Froude in his latest-published volume, are not new. They have been asked by many any time within the last quarter of a century. They are being asked with more urgency, if not more alarm, every day. They are questions worthy of an answer, if an answer can be given to them; worthy, certainly, of all consideration from serious-minded men. For, if founded in fact, they point towards a reversal of the three centuries of Protestant history; to the failure of Protestantism as a satisfactory system of belief; and, if not to a general return of Protestant nations to the Catholic Church, at least to the speedy and final approach to what keen writers and observers have long seen coming—to wit, the general 574recognition that between Catholicity and infidelity there stands no debatable ground for Christian men.

The suspicion has been gradually growing up in the Protestant thinking world—a suspicion that is fast hardening into a certainty—that Catholicity is advancing with giant strides, while Protestantism is surely, if sullenly, receding; worse still, that in spite of all Protestantism can do, in the pulpit, in the press, in the government, in the world at large, Catholicity is bound to advance, and the process of damming it up and shutting it off seems hopeless. “How to compete with the aggressions of Romanism” was, in various forms, one of the chief subjects of debate before the Evangelical Alliance assembled a few years back in this city. A similar subject excited the recent Pan-Presbyterian assembly at Glasgow. Indeed, it is safe to say that, wherever a Protestant assembly of any kind meets for amicable consultation and discussion, that everlasting skeleton in the closet, “Romanism,” will be exposed 575to view to remind the pleasant gentlemen assembled that they are doomed to die.

This is only a sign of the times. The times were, half a century ago, when such a sign was not visible; when Catholicity, as a real, living, active power, was, so far as Protestant countries were concerned, dead and damned beyond hope of redemption. There was a horror at the very mention of the name of Rome; a universal Protestant shudder at the thought of the pope; but Rome and the pope were things exploded with the Gunpowder Plot and other dark horrors of a by-gone day. In England the chief vestige of Catholicity and Catholic memories left showed itself in the annual celebration of Guy Fawkes’ day and the loyal burning of the pope in effigy.

To-day how changed is the position of Catholicity, not in England only, but in all English-speaking peoples; not in all English-speaking peoples only, but throughout the civilized world! Catholicity has experienced a vast “revival,” to use Mr. Froude’s expression; and to any one who has read Mr. Froude it will be easy to imagine how that writer would handle such a theme. Mr. Froude dislikes many things in this world, but of all things he dislikes Catholicity. It is hard for him to write calmly on any subject; on this particular subject he raves, even if he raves eloquently. His admirers, among whom for many things—particularly for the good service his peculiarly violent temper has done the Catholic cause—we beg to be numbered, will scarcely accuse him of that passionless tone that is supposed to belong to blindfolded and even-balanced justice. It is not passing beyond the bounds of fair 576criticism, but simply stating what ought now to be a sufficiently-established fact, to say that whenever Catholicity or anything belonging to it crosses Mr. Froude’s vision that vision is seared; the man is at once attacked by a species of literary insanity—a Popomania, so to say—that renders him incapable of cool judgment, and leads him to play havoc with all the instincts of good sense, the laws of logic, the impulses of good nature, and, we are sorry to add, the rules of honesty. Indeed, no man better than he affords an example of the remark of a keen French writer that “it is the happiness and the glory of Catholicity to be always served by its adversaries; by those who do not believe in it; ay, by those who pursue it with the bitterest animosity.”^[67]

These, however, are only so many assertions on our part. Mr. Froude will afford us ample opportunity of justifying them.

We have no desire to be unjust to Mr. Froude. Indeed, he is so unjust to himself that an avowed enemy could wish for no better weapons of attack than those supplied by Mr. Froude against himself. It is singularly true that Mr. Froude is generally the best refutation of Mr. Froude. Still, to a man of his way of thinking, the questions set at the head of this article, which he so boldly puts and honestly attempts to face, must be in the last degree not only exasperating but seriously alarming. To a man who can see nothing more fatal in this world than Catholicity, the confessed advance of Catholicity, in face of, in spite of, and over all obstacles, must seem like the 577spread of a pestilence of the deadliest kind—a mental and moral pestilence: a darkness of the understanding, a deadening of the heart, a numbing of all man’s fine, free, and ennobling qualities, a wilful renouncing of

“The mighty thoughts that make us men.”

Of course we laugh at so preposterous an idea; but Mr. Froude has persuaded himself that Catholicity is all this, and we are trying our best to regard him honestly and as being honest. Nor does he stand alone in his persuasion. There are many who go with him in his estimate of Catholicity, and we have them in view quite as much as he in whatever we may have to say. And the first thing we have to say is this: Is there really a “revival of Romanism”? In what and where is it reviving? Of course we reject the term Romanism, as applied to Catholicity. Still, a wilful man may as well have his way, especially where his wilfulness costs nothing. We have a more important controversy with Mr. Froude than a quarrel over names and a haggling over words. If Romanists we must be from his point of view, why Romanists, in the name of peace, let us be, to the extent at least of an article. Some statisticians estimate us at 200,000,000. We can afford to be called names once in a while.

Surely Mr. Froude is mistaken. If it be true, as a very high authority^[68] assured us a few years ago, that “in the kingdom of this world the state has dominion and precedence,” Catholicity, as a whole, fares very badly in the kingdom of this world, however high it may rank in the next. And strange as it may appear to Mr. Froude 578and to Prince Bismarck, Catholics have a singular liking for their own place in this world; they lay claim to at least as lawful a share of the things of this world as do Protestants; and they utterly and stubbornly refuse to live on sufferance. The attempt to make Catholics exist on sufferance, go a-begging for their lives, so to say, and eat and drink, and work and sleep, and play and pray by the gracious favor of certain princes of this world, occasions all the trouble between Catholics and the states governed by such princes. So when a “revival of Romanism” is talked about we naturally look to see how Catholics stand in the world; and the look is not encouraging.

The “kingdoms of this world” are all, or mostly all, dead-set against Catholicity. The Catholic Church is proscribed in Germany; proscribed in Russia; tied down in Austria and Italy; hounded in Switzerland; vexed and tormented in Spain and the states of South America. Looked at with the eyes of ordinary common sense, and from a merely worldly standipoint, the Catholic Church, under these governments, which are so strong and powerful, and play so large and important a part in the world, is in about as bad a condition as its worst wisher could desire. By the governments mentioned, with some inequality in the degree of severity, Catholicity is regarded and treated as at once a secret and an open foe, whom it requires every device and strain of the law and the resources of government to put down. What Emerson, in one of his latest and best utterances, has said of the assertion of “moral sentiment” is here exactly true of Catholicity: “Cities 579go against it; the college goes against it; the courts snatch at any precedent, at any vicious forms of law to rule it out; legislatures listen with appetite to declamations against it, and vote it down. Every new assertion of the right surprises us, like a man joining the church, and we hardly dare believe he is in earnest.”^[69]

The press is not only against it of its own accord, but is suborned to be against it. Its supreme Pastor has literally scarcely a roof to cover him in the states that through almost all the centuries of the Christian era belonged to the church, and such a roof as he has hangs on the word of a royal^[70] robber, who, in turn, holds what he has and what he has so ill-gotten by the slenderest of tenures—the breath of a mob. The city that witnessed the divinization of paganism, its awful and just overthrow, the long agony of the Catacombs, the building up of Christendom on the pagan ruins, the glories of the “ages of faith,” is to-day one of the chief centres of the new paganism, which has for its deity nihilism. In all the world to-day no royal crusader is to be found to draw his sword for Christ and Christ’s cross. The race of Charles Martel, of Pepin, of Charlemagne, of Pelayo, of Godfrey de Bouillon, of St. Louis of France, of Scanderbeg, of Sobieski, of Don Juan of Austria, the race of heroes whose swords wrought miracles at Poitiers, at Jerusalem, at Acre, at Rhodes, at Malta, at Vienna, at Lepanto, seems to have died out, though a foe as terrible to Christianity as was ever 580the old pagan North and the Moslem South and East besieges and threatens now the citadel of the city of God. It is, perhaps, characteristic of the age that the only one to assume the title of royal champion of the cross should be the present Russian emperor. It is, perhaps, equally characteristic of the wicked assumption that it should have met with so fearful and unexpected a response at the hands of the wretched remnant of a power that true Christianity had crippled, and would have smote to the dust had not the division of Christendom lent allies from within the camp to the ancient foe. Does it not look like a just retribution?

The Catholic Church stands between two revolutions—the revolution from above and the revolution from below. Both alike have decreed its death. The Herods, the Pilates, and the rabble, foes in all else, are friends in this. Delenda est Roma Catholica!

This is no fancy picture. We are not speaking now of the church in herself—that consideration will come later—but of the church as she stands towards governments, or rather as they stand towards her. Even where some comparative freedom is allowed her it is doled out gingerly and grudgingly, or given under silent or open protest. The erection of a free Catholic university in France—that is, a university independent of the government: a government accused, too, of “clericalism”—is the signal for the French “republicans,” as writers on this side of the water insist on calling them, to be up in arms. Men laugh to-day at the English Ecclesiastical Titles Act and the turmoil created by it. Yet it moved liberal England in 1850 till the country rocked with the tumult of it. Its author was a 581liberal leader. He is still living, we believe, though it is hard to think of Earl Russell living and not using his well-remembered voice. At all events he was living a few years ago, and we heard him then—liberal as ever. He had promised to preside at a meeting at Exeter Hall, London, to express sympathy with Prince Bismarck and the German government in their contest with the Catholic Church—a contest that we shall have occasion to refer to in another place. At the last moment Earl Russell “caught a bad cold” and could not appear, but his place as chief speaker was nobly taken—by whom? By a free American citizen, the Rev. Joseph P. Thompson, D.D., formerly of the Church of the Tabernacle in this city; and his closing advice to Prince Bismarck—an advice thrice repeated—was to “stamp out” Catholicity.

These individual instances are only straws, but straws that betoken a great deal of wind somewhere. Such liberty as the Catholic Church has is only conceded to it when and where the very character and stability of the governments necessitate its concession. Under such circumstances, then, does it not sound strange and startling to be alarmed at a “revival of Romanism”?

So much for the dark side of the picture; and there is no denying that it is dark indeed. There is light, however, and the light is very strong and lovely. If the race of royal men and heroes whose swords were ever ready to be drawn in the cause of Christ seems to have quite died out, the race of true Catholics has not died with them. Royalty, at its best even, was generally and almost necessarily a treacherous ally to the church. 582The kings have gone from the church, but the people remain. In face of this universal, protracted, bitter, and resolute opposition to Catholicity on the part of so many great states, we find the church, as in the days of the apostles, adding daily to her number “those that should be saved.” Here, too, we find, as in all Christian history, the greatest and sharpest contrasts—those contrasts that it baffles human ingenuity to explain. The Catholic Church is to-day strongest where, according to human calculation, she ought to be weakest, and weakest where she ought to be strongest. She flourishes best in what three centuries of almost total estrangement have made to her foreign soil. This it is that so puzzles Mr. Froude.

“The proverb which says that nothing is certain but the unforeseen was never better verified than in the resurrection, as it were out of the grave, during the last forty years of the Roman Catholic religion. In my own boyhood it hung about some few ancient English families like a ghost of the past. They preserved their creed as an heirloom which tradition rather than conviction made sacred to them. A convert from Protestantism to Popery would have been as great a monster as a convert to Buddhism or Odin worship. ‘Believe in the Pope!’ said Dr. Arnold. ‘I should as soon believe in Jupiter’” (p. 93).

This is undoubtedly, in the main, a true picture of the result of three centuries of apostasy in England. As for Dr. Arnold, that learned gentleman probably understated his belief. He would, if anything, much sooner have believed in Jupiter than in the Pope. It would be interesting to know what he thought of, say, George IV., as the supreme head of the church of which Dr. Arnold was so distinguished an ornament, or of Queen Victoria. He 583is as good an example as any of modern refined and intellectual paganism, and his distinguished son is but the natural outcome of the influence of such a man’s character and teachings, as in another way was John Stuart Mill of his father.

“The singular change which we have witnessed and are still witnessing,” pursues Mr. Froude, “is not due to freshly-discovered evidence of the truth of what had been abandoned as superstition” (p. 93). In this, of course, we quite agree with Mr. Froude, though, perhaps, not exactly in the manner he would wish. The truth is the same to-day as it ever was. Superstition is the same to-day as it ever was. Without going into the matter very deeply just here, we merely hint that Mr. Froude’s “singular change” may not be quite so singular as he imagines. The change to which he alludes is the return of a great body of the English-speaking people to or towards what for three centuries England and England’s colonies had been educated to consider superstition, darkness, idolatry even. Certainly Rome has not changed within this period, as it will be seen Mr. Froude, with passionate vehemence, insists. We only throw out the hint, then, that possibly what was abandoned as superstition turns out on closer inspection not to have been superstition at all. Truth may be slow in coming, but once come it is very hard to close one’s eyes to it. For men who have eyes there is no exercise so healthy and manful as honestly to face a great difficulty. The modern keen spirit of investigation we are far from considering an unmixed evil, if, indeed, it be an evil at all. The closest inquiry is compatible with the firmest and 584most whole-hearted faith. The objections of sceptics to the doctrines of the church are, when not borrowed from the objections of the doctors of the church, puny in comparison with them. On men, however, who do not believe at all, the spirit of inquiry, when united to earnestness of purpose, is working good. Many nowadays, who have every whit as profound a distrust of Catholicity as Mr. Froude, are not content with taking for granted all that they have been taught to believe of Catholics and Catholicity. They go to Rome; walk about in it, read it, study it, much as they would enter upon the investigation of a disputed question in science; and, having examined to their hearts’ content, many of them stay in Rome, while most come back with at least respect for what they formerly detested and abhorred.

It is impossible even to mention a few of the names of distinguished Catholics within the century, many of them converts, and not be struck by their mental and moral eminence. The world cannot afford to sneer at men like Görres, Count von Stolberg, Frederic Schlegel, Hürter, Ozanam, Lacordaire, Montalembert, Louis Veuillot, Balmez, O’Connell, Brownson, Ives, Anderson, Bayley, Wiseman, Newman, Manning, Faber, Ward, Marshall, Allies, Mivart, and a host of others almost equally eminent, who were born leaders of men or of thought, who came from many lands, who filled every kind of position, and who, led by many different lights, traversing many stormy and dark and difficult ways, came at last to Rome, to rest there to the end as loyal and faithful children of the church. It is men like these who ennoble the human race and who 585leave a rich legacy of thought and act to all peoples and to all time. To say that such men, most of whom came from without, went deliberately over to the old “superstition” because it was superstition will not do. They found what they had esteemed darkness to be light.

This modern spirit of investigation has done and is doing another great service to the Catholic cause: it is helping to unravel the tangled skein of history, to explore dark places and drag buried truth to light. Lingard’s History of England, for instance, really worked, or more properly began, a revolution in English thought—a revolution which, unconsciously, Scott’s novels and poems helped greatly to popularize. The work set on foot by Lingard and the method adopted have been well followed up by others, and by non-Catholics. Men came to try and look at things dispassionately and fairly. The result was that certain rooted English opinions and prejudices began slowly to give way. The “glorious Reformation,” for instance, and the “great Reformers” in England appeared on closer inspection to be neither quite so “glorious” nor quite so “great” as before. It requires very exceptional mental, not to say moral, courage nowadays to present Henry VIII. as a reformer of religion, or “good Queen Bess” as really good, or as one whose “lordly nature was the pride of all true-hearted Englishmen.”^[71] And like in character to the leaders were those who went with them in their measures of reform. The Reformation itself has come to be regarded by all intelligent minds, whatever be their estimate of Catholicity, 586as at least not an unmixed good. “The religious reform,” says Guizot,^[72] “which was the revolution of the sixteenth century has already been submitted to the test of time, and of great social and intellectual perils. It brought with it much suffering to the human race, it gave rise to great errors and great crimes, and was developed amidst cruel wars and the most deplorable troubles and disturbances. These facts, which we learn both from its partisans and opponents, cannot be contested, and they form the account which history lays to the charge of the event.” The constant revelations coming to light through the publication of secret papers and such like make it perfectly plain that reform, to have been at all effectual, should have begun with the “Reformers” themselves. As an evidence of how thoroughly the sham and rottenness of the Reformation have been exposed, we find Sanders’ much-derided Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism now accepted on all sides as only too true.

Certain it is that a great idol of English Protestantism, if not quite overthrown, has been very much battered and bruised of late by iconoclasts who in other days would have knelt and worshipped before it. Protestant England is built on the Protestant Reformation; but if that turns out to have been on its religious side so very bad an affair, what becomes of those who pinned their faith to it? That is a thought that is working in men’s minds, and working good. That reform was needed in the church and kingdom of England prior to the Reformation no man will dispute. But real reformation 587should not be a sweeping out of one devil to introduce seven more unclean.

While the truth of history was thus slowly forcing its way out, there came a sudden shock to the mind of the English people—a shock so severe and stunning in its first effects as almost to lead to a reaction and a turning again into the old ruts. This was the deliberate desertion of all pretensions to alliance with the early church by some of the leaders—“the ablest” Mr. Froude styles them—of the Tractarian movement. These became converts to the Catholic faith, and, in the slang of the day, “went over to Rome.”

The falling away of these men from the Anglican Church can only be likened to a revolution, a yielding of some buttress of the British Constitution, which was thought to be as impregnable, as solid, as lasting as England itself. And yet “the intellect which saw the falsehood of the papal pretensions in the sixteenth century sees it only more clearly in the nineteenth,” says Mr. Froude. Possibly enough; a distinction, however, is to be drawn at “intellect.”

“More than ever the assumptions of the Holy See are perceived to rest on error or on fraud. The doctrines of the Catholic Church have gained only increased improbability from the advance of knowledge. Her history, in the light of critical science, is a tissue of legend woven by the devout imagination.”

We have thus far only quoted from the first of fifty-four pages, and already we pause to take breath. Mr. Froude has a peculiar manner of putting things. Such wholesale and sweeping assertions are only to be answered in a 588volume or by a simple denial. Of course, if the Catholic Church is all that Mr. Froude unhesitatingly sets her down to be, there is an end of the whole question. In that case the “revival of Romanism” is really a grave danger to the world; nay, the very existence of “Romanism”—i.e., of Catholicity—is a menace to human society. If the “papal pretensions” are “falsehood”; if “the assumptions of the Holy See” “rest on error and fraud”; if “the doctrines of the Catholic Church have gained only increased improbability from the advance of knowledge”; and if “her history is a tissue of legend,” men who commit themselves to the defence of such a monstrosity set themselves at once beyond the pale of civilization. Were Mr. Froude writing of the Turks or of the Mormons he could scarcely use language more strongly condemnatory. It is probable that, with his generous impulses, he would find “extenuating circumstances,” did he think any needed, for Mormon or Turk, which he could not concede to a Catholic.

When Mr. Froude visited this country recently on his ill-judged and, to him, disastrous mission—for a mission he called it—a critic (in the New York World, we believe) described his style, very happily it seemed to us, as feminine. Women are not supposed to sit down to serious questions of wide and general import as calmly and judiciously as men. They argue from the heart rather than the head. They like or they dislike, and woe betide the person or the cause that they dislike! Argument is thrown away on them. They make the most astounding statements with the easiest confidence; they have a happy faculty 589of inventing facts; they contradict themselves with placid unconsciousness, and everybody else with scornful rigor; for logic they have not so much a disregard as a profound contempt, and take refuge from its assaults in thin-edged satire. This, of course, is only true of them when they are out of their sphere and dealing with matters for which they have a constitutional incapacity.

Mr. Froude, however, is just this. Take any one sentence of those last quoted; look at it calmly; weigh it in the balance, and what do we find? Take this one: “The doctrines of the Catholic Church have gained only increased improbability from the advance of knowledge.” With this confident statement he leaves the matter. There is no doubt, no hesitation, no reservation at all on his part. A reasonable man will ask himself, however: “Is this stupendous statement true?” “The doctrines of the Catholic Church! What! all of them?” Apparently so; Mr. Froude, at least, makes no exception. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth,” is the primary article of the Catholic Creed. Has that only “gained increased improbability from the advance of knowledge”? Mr. Froude would hardly say so; indeed, in more places than one he takes occasion to sneer at the modern scientific gospel. Even if Mr. Froude himself said so, his Protestant readers who make any pretensions to Christian faith would scarcely agree with him. Belief in the Trinity of God is another doctrine of the Catholic Church; in Jesus Christ the God-Man, the Redeemer of the world; in the Holy Ghost; in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. 590All these are doctrines of the Catholic Church. Does Mr. Froude pretend to say that they have all been swept away by “the advance of knowledge”? If he did not mean to say this—as, indeed, we believe he did not—why did he say it? What are we to think of him? Is this sober writing and a right manner of approaching a serious question? In p. 93 he tells us that “the doctrines of the Catholic Church have gained only increased improbability from the advance of knowledge.” In p. 95 he has already forgotten himself, and tells us that “the Protestant churches are no less witnesses to the immortal nature of the soul, and the awful future which lies before it, than the Catholic Church,” which is the strongest kind of concession of what he had just before denied; and forgetting himself again, he tells us in a third place (p. 141) that the Protestant ministers “are at present the sole surviving representatives of true religion in the world.” This is only one of a multitude of instances in which Mr. Froude allows himself to run away with himself. Passion and prejudice narrow his mental vision, until at times it becomes so diseased as to result in moral as well as mental obliquity.

The same thing is observable in the sentence immediately following the passage last quoted: “Liberty, spiritual and political, has thriven in spite of her [the Catholic Church’s] most desperate opposition, till it has invaded every government in the world, and has penetrated at last even the territories of the popes themselves” (p. 94).

Even Mr. Froude cannot absolutely blind himself to facts; at least, he cannot alter them. He 591may hate the Catholic Church as much as he pleases—and it pleases him to hate her very much—but the fact of his hatred cannot convert the persecution of her children into “liberty, spiritual and political.” Nor are we at all begging the question in giving the name of persecution to the treatment that Catholics are receiving at the hands, if not of “every government of the world,” at least of those previously enumerated. It is the word, as we shall show, applied to the anti-Catholic legislation in Germany by candid Protestants, countrymen of Mr. Froude, too, who hate the church and the Pope just as resolutely as he, but with more apparent show of reason. It is too late in the day to argue about this matter. There is no longer question to an honest mind as to whether the Catholics in Germany are or are not persecuted. There may still be question as to whether or not the persecution be necessary, but there is no dispute as to the fact. To talk of the “spiritual liberty” of Catholics in Germany to-day is simply to talk nonsense. But, lest there should be any possible doubt regarding the matter, it may be as well to freshen men’s memories a little on a point that is intimately connected with our whole subject; for what covers Germany covers every land where the struggle between the Catholic Church and the state is being waged.

The organs of English opinion have been very faithful in their allegiance to Prince Bismarck, who is such an experienced cultivator of public opinion. They are the bitter foes of the Papacy and the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, they have some pretensions to principle, and, when there is no escape out of the difficulty, call white 592white, and black black. At all events they do not always call black white. In Germany, then, according to Mr. Froude, “liberty, spiritual and political, has thriven in spite of the Catholic Church’s most desperate opposition.” While the struggle of the German government with the Catholics had as yet not much more than half begun the English Pall Mall Gazette discovered that

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

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

“The measures now in the German Parliament, and likely to become law,” says the London Times, “amount to a secular organization so complete as not to leave the Pope a soul, a place, an hour, that he can call entirely his own. Germany asserts for the civil power the control of all education, the imposition of its own conditions on entrance to either civil or ecclesiastical office, the administration of all discipline, and at every point the right to confine religious teachers and preachers to purely doctrinal and moral topics. Henceforth there is to be neither priest, nor bishop, nor cardinal, nor teacher, nor preacher, nor proclamation, nor public act, nor 593penalty, nor anything that man can hear, do, or say for the soul’s good of man in Germany, without the proper authorization, mark, and livery of the emperor.”

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

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

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

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

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

“The Catholic dignitaries are not the only ecclesiastics opposed to the bill. 594The new measures applying not only to the Catholic Church, but to all religious communities recognized by the state, the Ober-Kirchenrath, or Supreme Consistory of the Protestant Church in the old provinces, has also thought fit to caution the crown against the enactment of these sweeping innovations.”

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

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

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

What is here true of Germany is true also of Russia, Austria (in great measure), Italy, Switzerland, and other lands. So that if Catholicity is really reviving, as Mr. Froude alleges, it is reviving under the very shadow of death, and in face of the combined opposition of the most powerful governments. 595A revival under such circumstances ought to extort the admiration of Mr. Froude, who is as true a hero-worshipper as Carlyle, even if he be about equally happy in his selection of heroes. In the “Preliminary” to The English in Ireland Mr. Froude propounds his theories of might and right:

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

As we are not now examining Mr. Froude’s theories on government, we only call attention to the very hazy nature of the views here expressed on a subject which of all things should be clear and definite. He uses the word right without telling us what he means by it, whether or not it has an absolute meaning and force. He speaks of “the superior part” and “the inferior part” without informing us in what sense the terms are used. Superior in what? Inferior in what? To any rational mind it is plain that, just because of the inequality of human beings “in ability and worthiness of character,” there must, under a divine dispensation, which Mr. Froude does not deny, be absolute rules of right and wrong for all alike, a moral code which shall extend to and determine all rights, natural or acquired. If not this, right and 596wrong become convertible terms, and right and might of course follow suit, which is really the outcome of Mr. Froude’s theory—a doctrine that impregnates and inspires all his writings.

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

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

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

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

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

“On the whole, and as a rule, superior strength is the equivalent of superior merit.... As a broad principle it may be said that, as nature has so constituted us that we must be ruled in some way, and as at any given time the rule inevitably will be in the hands of those who are then the strongest, so nature also has allotted 597superiority of strength to superiority of intellect and character; and in deciding that the weaker shall obey the more powerful, she is in reality saving them from themselves, and then most confers true liberty when she seems most to be taking it away” (pp. 4, 5).

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

However, let us gauge Mr. Froude by his own standard: that superiority of strength goes with superiority of intellect and of character. It is a very convenient theory as so stated; but it is apt to work two ways. So long as it works for Mr. Froude it is very natural and explicable. As soon, however, as it turns to the opposite side it is to Mr. Froude a “phenomenon.” 598We are as little inclined to underrate as to overrate success, though very far from accepting it as the standard of right. One thing, however, will be conceded by all men: what succeeds in face of the most strenuous, long-sustained, and powerful opposition; in face of wealth, position, possession, numbers, resources, education, tradition—in a word, of all that goes to form and mould and fix peoples and their character, their history, their mode of thought, their national bent—what, we say, succeeds in face of all this must have something in it very much resembling Mr. Froude’s “superiority of intellect and of character.” It must have an immense vital force and strength and reality within it. It is hard for any man not to acknowledge that under such circumstances success approves itself; that it came because it deserved to come.

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

“The tide of knowledge and the tide of outward events,” he says, “have set with equal force in the direction opposite to Romanism; yet in spite of it, perhaps by means of it, as a kite rises against the wind, the Roman Church has once more shot up into visible and practical consequence. While she loses ground in Spain and Italy, which had been so long exclusively her own, she is gaining in the modern energetic races, which had been the stronghold of Protestantism. Her numbers increase, her organization gathers vigor. Her clergy are energetic, bold, and aggressive. Sees long prostrate are re-established; cathedrals rise, and churches, with schools, and colleges, and convents, and monasteries. She has taken into her service her old enemy, the press, and has established a popular literature. Her hierarchy in England and America have already compelled the state to consult 599their opinions and respect their pleasure; while each step that is gained is used as a vantage-ground from which to present fresh demands. Hildebrand, in the plenitude of his power, was not more arrogant in his claim of universal sovereignty than the present wearer of the tiara.”

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

Here are you whom we thought dead and buried under your weight of superstition, idolatry, absurdity, and fraud, an old fossil of mediæval times, deserted, neglected, despised, and contemned by the intelligence, wealth, and worth of the age, suddenly leaping into new life, and by a single miraculous stride coming right abreast of, if not ahead of, your foes. What have we that you have not? Energy is ours, yet you surpass us. Numbers are ours; you are stealing them from us. Knowledge and learning are ours; your teachers put ours to shame. We stole your sees, your cathedrals, your monasteries, your convents, your schools, your universities—all that you had of beautiful, and holy, and intellectual. You ask them not back, but set to work to build them anew. Ours is stolen property; yours is built on the free offerings of the poor. We invaded the domain of English literature; it was all ours; we poisoned its wells to you; we invented the newspaper to perpetuate the falsehoods that we wove about you. You have found an antidote to the poison; you win over our brightest intellects; you make a literature 600of your own which we are compelled to admire and read. You face us at every turn, and we may as well confess that you beat us at many.

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

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

“What is the meaning of so strange a phenomenon? Is the progress of which we hear so much less real than we thought? Does knowledge grow more shallow as the surface widens? Is it that science is creeping like the snake upon the ground, eating dust and bringing forth materialism? that the Catholic Church, in spite of her errors, keeps alive the consciousness of our spiritual being and the hope and expectation of immortality? The Protestant churches are no less witnesses to the immortal nature of the soul, and the awful future which lies before it, than the Catholic Church. Why is Protestantism standing still while Rome is advancing? Why does Rome count her converts from 601among the evangelicals by tens, while she loses to them, but here and there, an exceptional and unimportant unit?” (p. 95).

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

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

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

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

602It was the liberal philosophy that was chiefly instrumental in bringing the change about. Men had to choose between the fixed doctrines of the Catholic Church and the shifting doctrines and intolerable pretensions of the Anglican Church. They rejected both; they rejected revelation; they looked at man himself, and attached to him certain natural rights which are as well expressed in our Declaration of Independence as anywhere. They would, if they could, strike out the Catholics, as was attempted here. But it was impossible. They could not do it and be true to themselves and their principles. If liberty of thought, freedom of conscience, and the right to worship or not to worship God in your own way be natural rights of man, they necessarily attach to all, whether a man call himself Catholic, Protestant, Jew, or Nihilist. It is a political and practical impossibility in these days of divided and clashing beliefs to profess liberty, yet seal the door to any special form of worship; and Catholicity of all beliefs is dreaded, because, when free and untrammelled, it has the tendency and the force to assimilate and receive all into its bosom. The result of this partial concession of freedom to Catholicity in England is thus pictured by Mr. Froude:

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

It is the attainment of this power 603by Catholics that Mr. Froude so bitterly resents. It would be more satisfactory if he told us plainly what he would have done to Catholics. Would he deny them votes? To deny them votes is to deny them political life. And would he deny votes to Catholics only? Or would he grant votes, but compel them to use them in one way, and, if in one way, in which way? In a word, would he allow Catholics to exist at all as Catholics, would he force them into the old state of political slavery, or would he openly force them into Protestantism under the persuasion that Protestantism, no matter of what stripe, was better for them? Though he shrinks from saying so himself, the latter seems to be the only fair practical conclusion to be drawn from his words, and in passages already quoted he has given us the grounds on which he would act, and feel justified in acting: “The superior part has a natural right to govern the inferior part.” It is plain as between Protestantism and Catholicity which Mr. Froude considers “the superior part.” “The inferior part has a natural right to be governed.” “There neither is nor can be an inherent privilege in any person or set of persons to live unworthily at their own wills, when they can be led or driven into more honorable courses.”

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

And here we come to our final consideration in the present article. 604Mr. Froude’s observations amount practically to this: Set Catholicity and Protestantism side by side; give them each perfect freedom; Catholicity will infallibly gain, Protestantism will as infallibly lose. “The phenomenon,” he says plaintively, “is not confined to England.... In America, in Holland, in Switzerland, in France, wherever there is most political freedom, the power of Catholics is increasing.”

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

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

If the fault lie with political freedom itself, that with it the power of Catholics increases, what are we to say or do? That political freedom and Catholicity go hand in hand is the obvious comment, and that it is impossible to check the advance of Catholicity without at the same time contracting political freedom. We submit that this is the plain and logical deduction to be drawn from Mr. Froude’s words. It is no trick of verbiage. The fact is to himself a “phenomenon.” We are giving now no opinion of our own, but simply translating Mr. Froude, when we say that by his concession—Protestantism cannot stand by the side of Catholicity in a free air. It must go to the wall. 605This we have to reconcile with his other statement that “liberty, spiritual and political, has thriven in spite of her [the Catholic Church’s] most desperate opposition, till it has invaded every government in the world.” Where it has really invaded governments, by his own confession, “the power of Catholics is increasing.” Where it is cut off, there is Catholicity strangled, so far as human power can strangle it. But we shall show that even there it is the only religion with any vitality in it, and that all forms of religion which claim the name of Christian suffer with the Catholic Church and lose by her losses. We have thus far only treated the “revival” in a general way. In a future article we shall, in company with Mr. Froude, examine the specific causes which he assigns for the “revival.” sp 2

Copyright: Rev. I. T. Hecker. 1877.

606

TO F. W. FABER.

Amico, io vivendo cercava conforto

Nel monte Parnasso;

Tu, meglio consigliato, cercalo

Nel Calvario.

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

I.

True poet of all mountain sight and sound,

Of barren glen where mighty echoes wake,

Of eagle-haunted, crag-o’ershadowed lake

Where loneliness in silent state sits crowned

And shares her kingdom with no shallow heart:

True lover of all nature’s solemn ways,

The columned forest’s wind-waked song of praise—

Sad chords wherein all deepest joy hath part—

True reader of the primrose’ golden tale,

Finding its glow but shadow of a light

Wherein who seeks may find the Infinite,

That doth its mystery so in least things veil—

A seer thou seem’st in thy high mountain place,

E’er with all holiest visions face to face.

II.

Yet wandering content in lowlier ways,

By brambly lane and lawn-embroidered mere,

By quiet river in whose waters clear

The clustering willows and tall towers gaze

Of minster-town whose ancient bells ring out

And trail their music through thy thoughtful rhyme

Like far-off echoes of an older time

When trembled in their peal no note of doubt.

607Landless, yet holder of a royal fief

In all the beauty by rich nature wrought—

Each blossoming hedge-row with an earldom fraught,

Wide duchies bound in every golden sheaf—

Thine the unchallenged tenure of the whole,

By right divine of unstained poet-soul!

III.

Still hearkening ever to that low heart-beat

Of sorrowing earth, whose flowers fade in death,

Whose silver-threaded rills grow faint for breath,

Whose wounded birds cry out beneath thy feet.

Not deaf thy human ear to any plaint

Of our sad mother whom her sons make weep—

Breaking with cries of hate her quiet sleep,

Crowding in sunless ways their brothers faint.

Nor dumb thy poet-voice to speak her woe—

She that hath shivered when mankind stood mute

Or flung harsh words of evilest repute,

Veiling her face her Maker’s cross below.

With filial love thy heart ’gainst hers is laid

Who rears the hills, in keeping holds the dead.

IV.

Like cleansing waters touched with heavenly grace

Thy mountain-consecrated words are shed,

Lifting our souls to light unshadowèd,

Guiding our footsteps in the holy trace

Of Him who yet shall make the hills a way—

Exalted paths trod by the clean of heart,

Shrines for the holy-minded set apart

Wherein profaner feet unheeding stray.

All nature wins true loving from thy song—

Fair not alone with her e’er-changing grace,

But, lighting each dear feature of her face

The thought of love enduring, pure and strong—

True poet, in Parnassus’ shadow still

Feeling the loadstone of blessed Calvary’s hill.

V.

To that sad mount how eloquent a guide!

Not Hybla’s blossoms could so fair beguile

The wandering bees as thy entreating wile

Faint souls to climb that seeming arid side.

608With strength thou lead’st from seraph-haunted cave

Where Infinite Might with infinite loving smiled

From frail, sweet lips of Holy Mary’s Child;

Anon where pitying palm-trees shadow gave

To ease the weary exile of their Lord;

On through the humble toil of patient years—

Till, mingling with the Magdalen our tears,

Our heart’s poor vase of precious ointment poured—

We stand, God’s Mother near, with woe beside

The love-pierced feet of Jesus Crucified.

VI.

The sweetest refuge any soul can know!

Where all complaining stills its idle voice,

And trembling joy bids sorrow soft rejoice

Finding the living wand, whose staff below

The living waters lie like mountain spring

Defiled not in its source, whose shining face

Gives to e’en homely herbs a resting-place,

With heaven’s blue for their bright shadowing.

Pure, living source! wherein who drinks shall thirst

Not any more. Blest cup of Love Divine!

About whose stem the thorny wreath doth twine,

Grown soft for us since He hath borne it first.

Cool draught! wherein no hidden drop of gall

Makes heaven bitter, and earth’s promise all.

VII.

Shall poets change for bay the crown divine

Wreathing the head of Him about whom throng

Life’s tenderest flowers, who holds art’s perfect song

In his pierced hands?—pure gift in holiest shrine!—

From whose rent side the consecrating flood

Doth cleanse the poet’s thought from earthly stain,

Him king anointed o’er a grand domain

By true inheritance of royal blood;

In whose wide heart, broken for very love,

Lies master-key to all true harmonies,

So tuned, no base, discordant melodies

Shall jar earth’s music saints shall sing above;

So tuned, may wake in sweetness weakest string,

Immortal anthems loyal echoing.

VIII.

So keyed thy sacred song, O poet true!

With holy joy its very sorrow light,

So glorified with that love infinite

That shines as stars in heaven’s darkest blue:

609Washed clean thy earth-born lays in that pure flood—

Thy cloudy mountains hide no fear save one

Of loving awe; though in dark gorge the sun

Falls not, e’en there the Eternal Dove doth brood.

Thy mountain springs are pure, wherein we dare

Drink as we will, not fearing, so bent down,

We shall lose sight of heaven’s fairer crown

And find but our own likeness resting there.

Fresh with a dew bearing no stain of earth,

Thy hill-paths lead unto our Father’s hearth.

IX.

With thee, my poet, lie our souls at rest

In the soft glory of our Mother’s smile—

The Maid Immaculate, who could beguile

Her God to be a child on her pure breast.

With thee we labor that our little life

Shall learn to lose itself, that it be found

In that far, other life eternal crowned

‘Mid hero-saints whose prayers were ours in strife;

Humbly with thee, our dearest Lord before,

Veiled in the little, pale, and helpless round

Wherewith on earth he chooseth to be crowned,

We bend with love that yearneth to love more.

Fond children, at the Father’s feet we kneel,

Finding the love his Spirit doth reveal.

X.

O poet! more than Crashaw, saint! forgive,

If break my singing in unworthy praise;

Pardon, if uncouth love in stammering lays,

Seeking to thank, but give thee cause to grieve.

Unspoken gratitude is burden sore

When debt so passing strong of love is owed;

Unworthy speaking but augments the load,

Forgiveness making so love’s burden more.

So much to thee I owe! Along my life

Thy words like patient, wingèd seeds are sown,

So long amid the dark and brambles grown,

Yet winning bloom at last despite the strife.

As once for him of Ars thy heart was shrine,

So mine holds thee, O blessed of Love Divine!

610

AMONG THE TRANSLATORS.

VIRGIL AND HORACE—II.

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

Like all the sayings of that most delicate and spirituel of critics, this is so far true that most translations of Horace will be found, we think, to be the work of men advancing in life, and, in the majority of cases, to have grown up insensibly through a number of years. One does not sit down to a version of the Odes as to a version of the Æneid, beginning at the first line and going religiously through in order to the end. No; but we pick out an ode here and there, as the mood takes us and that fits the mood—some gay Ad Amphoram or Ad Asterien when we are young and sprightly, calidus juventâ; a nobler Ad Augustum or Ad Calliopen when we are older and graver, in the 611time of whitening locks—riding in the cars, it may be, walking in the street, smoking the after-dinner cigar; everywhere, in fact, that solitude gives us a chance to entertain the best of all good company. We turn it into such English as we can muster, and print it perhaps, or, better still, put it away in our portfolio; Horace must have had a prophetic eye on his coming translator when he gave that soundest of poetic counsels—unless Punch’s “Don’t” be sounder still:

“Nonumque prematur in annum

Membranis intus positis”—^[73]

we put it away to be taken up again and again, lingered over fondly, touched up and polished, until the exact word is found for every elusive epithet, the precise equivalent for every tantalizing phrase, and the entire ode lies before us, its foreign garb bagging, indeed, a little here and there, but fitting as snugly as our art can make it, and we are content. That is a moment of such supreme satisfaction, of such tranquil triumph, as life but rarely yields. Less than any other that dabbles in ink has your true Horatian the fever of the type. His virtue is really—what virtue, alas! so seldom is in this perverse world—its own reward. Like Joubert, il s’inquiète de perfection bien plus que de gloire; to have hit upon what he feels to be a happy rendering is glory enough; enough that he and Horace should share his exultation; a felicitous adjective will put him 612in good-humor for a week. And so, before he well knows it, his portfolio is nearly full, and the notion first dawns upon him—the duty it almost seems—of sharing his good fortune with his fellows. “Rather would I have written the Quem tu Melpomene semel or the Donec gratus eram tibi,” cried Scaliger, “than to be king of Aragon.” Rather would I make a perfect translation of these or any other of the Odes, cries our Horatian, than to be king of all Spain, with all Cuba libre to boot—

“Quam si Libyam remotis

Gadibus jungas et uterque Pœnus

Serviat uni.”^[74]

Somewhat in this wise, we fancy, have most versions of Horace come to be and to be printed; certainly, we incline to think, all the best versions. Thus, too, partly for the reason M. Sainte-Beuve gives, partly from the poet’s universality and the charm which lies in the very difficulty of the task—an impossibility Johnson called it, but it is one of those “sweet impossibilities” which ennoble failure—do we count so many renderings of single odes by famous men. There are few names eminent in English letters or statesmanship that are not thus allied to the genial Venusian—names, too, of the most diverse order. Not only poets like Cowper and Montgomery, 613Chatterton and Byron,^[75] essayists like Addison, or dramatists like Congreve, Rowe, and Otway, but grave historians such as Mitford and Merivale, judges like Lord Thurlow and Sir Jeffrey Gilbert, philosophers like Atterbury and Sir William Temple, bitter satirists like Swift, tender sentimentalists like “Namby Pamby” Phillips, professors and prime ministers, doctors and divines, lords and lawyers, archdeacons and archtraitors, have joined in paying court to the freedman’s son. In his ante-room, or atrium, prim John Evelyn is jostled by tipsy Porson humming somewhat huskily one of the bacchanalian lyrics to a tune of his own (perhaps the Ad Sodales, i. 27, which that learned Theban has rendered with true Porsonian zest—a little too much so to quote); Warren Hastings there meets Edmund Burke in friendlier contest than at the bar of the House of Commons; Dr. Bentley takes issue with Archdeacon Wrangham over a doubtful reading; Mr. Gladstone leads a poetic opposition to Lord Derby in Englishing the Carmen Amabœum. In that modest cœnaculum we can greet these great men all on a familiar and equal footing, made one of them for the nonce by the fellowship of a common taste—nay, may even flatter ourselves that here, at least, we are at their level; that our poet’s door may even be opened to us sooner than to the tallest and wisest among them. It is true greatness has no prerogative in Horace; the meanest may win to his intimacy, be admitted to his 614penetralia, sooner than the mightiest. Of all the distinguished names we have quoted, few would have had much distinction as translators alone, though Bishop Atterbury’s versions, especially that of the Ad Melpomenen, iv. 2, are deservedly famous. Hastings’ translation of the Ad Grosphum, written during his passage from Bengal to England in 1785 (he was going home to the famous trial), merits notice for its curious adaptation to his Indian experiences:

“For ease the slow Mahratta spoils

And hardier Sikh erratic toils,

While both their ease forego....

“To ripened age Clive lived renowned,

With lacs enriched, with honors crowned,

His valor’s well-earned meed.

Too long, alas! he lived, to hate

His envied lot, and died too late

From life’s oppression freed.”

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

“No fears his peace of mind annoy

Lest printed lies his fame destroy

Which labor’d years have won;

Nor pack’d committees break his rest,

Nor avarice sends him forth in quest

Of climes beneath the sun.”

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

Within the past twenty-five or thirty years many complete versions of the Odes have been put forth, including those of H. G. Robinson, the Rev. W. Sewell (printed in Bohn’s Library), Lord Ravensworth, Mr. Whyte Melville, Mr. Theodore Martin, the late Prof. Conington, and the late Lord Lytton. Of these, Mr. Martin’s, which we should 615feel inclined to pronounce upon the whole the best, and the most notable Lord Lytton’s, have alone been reprinted here. In giving this pre-eminence to Mr. Martin’s work we are perhaps influenced by a strong individual liking, amounting even to a prepossession, in its favor, dating from that very potent time Sainte-Beuve speaks of—“le temps des études qui nous étaient chères.” When it first fell into our hands it was the only version we had yet seen which at all reproduced, even to a limited degree, for us its original’s charm. By many Prof. Conington’s translation, easy, fluent, and in the main faithful—just what, from his Æneid, one might expect it to be—will be preferred to Mr. Martin’s, which it certainly surpasses in single odes. As to the worst there need be no such doubt. The Rev. Mr. Sewell’s is not, perhaps, the worst possible version of the Odes, as one is half tempted to believe who remembers how it was recommended to the readers of the Dublin University Magazine long ago—how we relished that literary execution with all boyhood’s artless delight in slaughter! Time, alas! soon sobers that youthful vivacity of temper, and, better than Æsop, teaches us to respect the frogs whom it loves to revenge in kind. No; the possibilities and varieties of badness in this direction are unhappily too great for that; but it is as bad as need be—as need be, let us say, for admission to Bohn’s Library.^[76] Great indulgence is certainly to be extended to translators of Horace; much is to be forgiven them; but one must finally draw 616the line, and probably most Horatians would feel like drawing the line at the Rev. Mr. Sewell.

It was in the process of pointing out this fact to that gentleman, in a review of his book in the magazine mentioned, that Mr. Martin some twenty years ago put forth, we believe, the first specimens of his own translation, which was completed and published some years later. Its success was immediate and deserved; for its positive no less than its comparative merits were great. Mr. Martin was one of the first to discern, or at least to put in acceptable practice, the true theory of translating the lighter odes—“a point of great difficulty,” as he truly says. “They are,” he adds, “mere vers de société invested by the language, for us, with a certain stateliness, but which were probably regarded with a very different feeling by the small contemporary circle to whom they were addressed. To catch the tone of these, to be light without being flippant, to be playful without being vulgar, demands a delicacy of touch which it is given to few to acquire, even in original composition, and which in translation is all but unattainable.” The graver odes have their own difficulties; but the skilful translator handles them more easily, we fancy, than the gay fluttering swarm of laughing Lydias and Neæras that flash athwart their statelier pomp like golden butterflies through the Gothic glooms of summer woods—butterflies whose glossy wings, alas! lose something of their down and brilliance at every, even the lightest and most loving, touch. The thought of a poem is always easier to transplant into other speech than its form. Ideas are essentially the same, whatever tongue interprets them—Homer’s 617Greek or Shakspeare’s English; but the infinite delicate shades of beauty or significance added to them by the subtle differences of words, by that beauty of their own and intrinsic value which, as Théophile Gautier puts it—himself a master of language—words have in the poet’s eyes apart from their meaning, like uncut and unset jewels, the deftest, most patient art of the translator toils in vain to catch. They vanish in his grasp like the bubble whose frail glories dazzle the eyes and mock the longing, chubby fingers of babyhood; to render them is like trying to paint the perfume of a flower.

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

“Daffodils

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty,”

and try to change or misplace a single word. One feels instantly that any change would be fatal; it almost seems, with such passages, as though noble thought and perfect word had been waiting for each other from all time until the high-priest of Apollo should come to wed them. To quote Sainte-Beuve again—the critic who wishes to instruct his readers can scarcely quote him too often: “Je conçois qu’on ne mette pas toute la poesie dans le métier, mais je ne conçois pas du tout que quand il s’agit d’un art on ne tienne nui compte de l’art lui-même et qu’on déprécie les parfaits ouvriers qui y excellent.”^[77] 618Yet it is none the less true that a poem in which the idea is paramount is more susceptible of translation than one whose form is the chief element of its charm. One can imagine Wordsworth’s fine sonnet on Milton, “Milton, thou shouldst be with us at this hour,” being turned into Latin with comparatively little loss; indeed it has been so turned by one of the most accomplished of English scholars—Dr. Kennedy—into Alcaics of which the purity and finish make a fitting casket for that gem of poetry; though even here one feels the wide difference between the original of that immortal line,

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

and the Latin

“Mens tua lumine

Fulgebat, ut sidus, remote,”

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

Much the same is it to attempt to transfer to an English translation 619aught of the peculiar grace which invests Horace’s lightest lyrics with a charm we feel but cannot analyze, which resides in the choice of epithets, the arrangement of words, the cadence of the rhythm, the metrical form, and which yet is something more than any or all of these. The noble thought which lies embodied in the Justum et tenacem propositi virum we may not despair of rehabilitating, with somewhat of its proper majesty, in our own vernacular; but the shy, fugitive loveliness of that wildwood picnic to which the poet bids us, to forget the cares of life,

“Quo pinus et ingens albaque populus

Umbram hospitalem consociare amant

Ramis, et obliquo laborat

Lympha fugax trepidare rivo”

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

“Where the pale poplar and the pine

Expel the sun’s intemperate beam;

In hospitable shades their branches twine,

And winds with toil, though swift, the tremulous stream”;

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

“Where near a purling Spring doth glide

In winding Streams, and softly chide

The interrupting Pebble as it flows”;

or in Prout?—

“While onward runs the crooked rill,

Brisk fugitive, with murmur shrill”;

or in Lord Lytton?—

“Wherefore struggles and murmurs the rill

Stayed from flight by a curve in the shore.”

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

“Where runs the wimpling brook, its slumb’rous tune

Still murmuring as it runs to the hush’d ear of noon.”

It is passages such as this especially 620which have caused Horace to be called the untranslatable.

To come from theory to practice, it is in the lighter odes, and in those parts of all the odes the beauty of which in the original lies chiefly in expression, that all Horace’s translators have most conspicuously failed. Take Milton’s Ad Pyrrham, for example (Ode v.). The Ad Pyrrham is not only one of the most charming but also one of the most difficult of the minor odes, and for that reason among the oftenest translated. It is one of the many mitten-pieces wherein the inconstant bard seems to have taken a somewhat ostentatious delight in celebrating the numerous snubbings he had to put up with from the no less inconstant fair who were the objects of his brief and fitful homage. In it, as in the Ad Neæram (Epod. xv.) and the Ad Barinen (Carm. ii. 8), reproaches to the lady for her perfidy are mingled with self-gratulations on the poet’s own lucky escape and sinister warnings to his rival—the time-old strategy and solace of the discarded lover the world over. He has been shipwrecked, he says, on that treacherous sea of love; but having, the gods be praised! made shift to scramble ashore in safety, and got on some dry duds, sits in gleeful expectation of seeing his successor get a like ducking. The poem is simply a piece of mock heroics, for the counterpart of which we must look to such minglings of cynicism and sentiment as we find in the poetry of Praed and Thackeray and Locker, or, to a less degree, in many of Béranger’s lighter songs. The difference between the modern poets and the ancient is that in the former the sentiment is real, veiled under an affectation of cynicism: in the latter it is precisely the reverse. 621But, bearing that difference in mind, the translator may find in the methods of the poets named some hints for the handling of such odes as the Ad Pyrrham.

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

“What slender youth bedewed with liquid odors

Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave,

Pyrrha? For whom bind’st thou

In wreaths thy golden hair?

“Plain in thy neatness,” etc.

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

“Always vacant, always amiable

Hopes thee.”

It is the suggestion not of Horace but of Milton here that is pleasant; it is because Milton’s natural English style is a highly Latinized 622and involved style that these oddities of his translation strike us less than in another. Sometimes, too, oddly enough for so good a scholar, he falls short of the full sense of his original. Potenti maris deo, the commentators tell us, means, not “the stern god of sea,” but “the god potent over the sea”; and “plain in thy neatness” for simplex munditiis misses the entire significance of the latter word, which implies something of grace and beauty. “Plain in thy neatness” suggests rather “Priscilla the Puritan maiden” than Pyrrha of the dull-gold hair. Ben Jonson’s

“Give me a look, give me a face

That makes simplicity a grace,”

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

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

“What slender youth besprinkled with perfume

Courts you on roses in some grotto’s shade,

Fair Pyrrha? Say for whom

Your yellow hair you braid.

623“So true, so simple! Ah! how oft shall he

Lament that faith can fail, that gods can change,

Viewing the rough black sea

With eyes to tempests strange,” etc.

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

“I the false light forswear,

A shipwreck’d mariner”;

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

“For whom are bound thy tresses bright

With unconcern so exquisite?”

and

“Though now the sunshine hour beguiles

His bark along thy golden smiles,

Trusting to see thee for his play

For ever keep smooth holiday,”

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

“In thy grotto’s cool recesses,

Dripping perfumes, lapped in roses,

Say what lissome youth reposes,

Pyrrha, wooing thy embrace?

Braid’st for whom those tawny tresses,

Simple in thy grace?

“Ah! how oft averted heaven

Will he weep, and thy dissembling.

And, poor novice, view with trembling

O’er the erewhile tranquil deep,

By the angry tempest driven,

Billowy tumult sweep;

“Now who in thy smile endearing

Basks, with foolish fondness hoping

To his love thou’lt e’er be open,

To his wooing ever kind,

Knowing not the fitful veering

Of the faithless wind?

624“Hapless they rash troth who plight thee!

On the sacred wall my votive

Picture, set with pious motive,

Shows I hung in Neptune’s fane

My wet garments to the mighty

Monarch of the main.”

It may be said that this sly spirit of badinage which lurks, or to us, at least, seems to lurk, in the shadows of the lighter odes, like some tricksy Faun peering and disappearing through the thickets of Lucretilis, it is impossible to seize; that when we try it “the stateliness of the language” interposes itself like a wall, and we find ourselves becoming vulgar where Horace is playful, flippant where Horace is light. Doubtless this is so; what then? Because it is an impossibility, shall any loyal Horatian balk at it? It is just because of these impossibilities that translations are always in order, and will, to a certain extent, always be in demand. Translations of other poets pall; it is conceivable that a version of Virgil might be produced which human skill could not better. But no such thing being conceivable of Horace, every fresh version is a whet to curiosity and emulation; each separate ode hides its own agreeable secret, every epithet has its own individual surprise. Let there be no talk, then, of impossibilities; for our own part, to paraphrase what Hallam says of Lycidas, we look upon the ability to translate such odes as the Ad Pyrrham, so as to demonstrate their impossibility, a good test of a man’s capacity to translate Horace at all.

Another nice consideration for the translator of Horace is in respect of metre. Undoubtedly the translator who can retain the metrical movement of his original has gained so much towards reproducing his general effect. But with Horace this attempt may as well 625be abandoned at once. The Alcaic and the Sapphic stanza, much less the Asclepiad or the Archilochian, have never yet been, and for obvious reasons never will be, naturalized in our English verse, though poor Percival thought differently, and added one more to a life of failures. Tennyson, in his ode to Milton,

“Whose guardian-angels, Muriel, Abdiel,

Starred from Jehovah’s gorgeous armory,

Tow’r, as the deep-domed empyrean

Rings to the roar of an angel onset,”

gives us, perhaps, as good Alcaics as we have any right to look for in English (though “gōrgĕoŭs” is not a very gorgeous dactyl); yet how different from the Horatian cadence:

“Æquam memento rebus in arduis

Servare mentem, non secus in bonis

Ab insolenti temperatam

Lætitia, moriture Delli.”^[78]

As for Sapphics, whether we take Canning’s Knife Grinder for our model or Mr. Swinburne’s

“All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,

Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,

Yet with lips shut close, and with eyes of iron,

Stood and beheld me,”

we are not much nearer to Horace’s melody:

“Scandit æratas vitiosa naves

Cura, nec turmas equitum relinquit

Ocior cervis, et agente nimbos

Ocior Euro.”^[79]

But, at least, following that rule of compensation with which all good translators are familiar, some attempt may be made to suggest the metrical variety and richness of 626the Odes by a corresponding variety and grace in the English measures of the translation. It is here that the modern translators excel; indeed, it may be said that only within the last hundred years have translators had this adjunct at their command, for it is only during that period that English poets have begun to comprehend and master fully the resources and possibilities of English metre. Not that the earlier poets were at all deficient in the metrical sense; that their ears were not quick to catch the finest delicacies of verbal harmony. Not to mention a host of minor bards who knew how to marry “perfect music unto noble words,” Milton’s lyrics are melody itself. There is scarcely a more tunable couplet in the language than his

“Sweetest Shakspeare, fancy’s child,

Warbles his native woodnotes wild.”

The open vowels and liquid consonants fairly sing themselves. Nor was it for lack of experiment that they failed of

“Untwisting all the chains that tie

The hidden soul of harmony”

in words, as Shelley and Tennyson and Swinburne learned to do later. The attempt to naturalize the classical metres, for example, began at a very early period of our literary history, and many learned treatises were written to prove them your only proper vehicle for English poetry. Perhaps it was the ill-success of these efforts that made our poets so long shy of wandering in their metres away from the beaten track and the simplest forms. Up to the time of Campbell we may say that the iambus and the trochee reigned supreme in English verse; the anapest and the dactyl, of which such effective use has been made by the later poets, were either unknown or contemned. 627Suckling’s Session of the Poets, the metrical intention of which appears to be anapestic, shows what desperate work even the best lyrists could make when they strayed after strange metrical gods.^[80]

It may be said, then, that until within a comparatively recent period Horace could not be properly translated into English verse at all. English verse was not yet ready to receive so noble a guest. Compare Martin’s or Conington’s versions with one of the earlier translations, and the truth of this, we think, will be apparent at once. Creech, indeed, seems to have had a dim notion of the truth, and his version shows a perceptible striving for metrical effect, at least in the arrangement of his stanza; but Creech had too little of the poetical faculty to make the effort with taste or success. Francis for the most part is content with the orthodox measures, and Father Prout was perhaps first to bring to the work this essential accomplishment of the Horatian translator. Prout’s metrical inventions are bold, and often elegant; and his versions, though free, are always spirited, and often singularly felicitous. Among the most striking of his metres is the one he employs for the Solvitur acris hiems (Carm. i. iv.):

“Now Venus loves to group

Her merry troop

Of maidens,

Who, while the moon peeps out,

Dance with the Graces round about

Their queen in cadence;

While far ’mid fire and noise

Vulcan his forge employs,

Where Cyclops grim aloft their ponderous sledges poise.”

628A paraphrase that, not a translation; but not even Horace could find it in his heart to gainsay so graceful a paraphrase. Another effective metrical arrangement which shows off well Prout’s astonishing copiousness of rhyme is that of the Quum tu Lydia (i. 13):

“But where meet (thrice fortunate!)

Kindred hearts and suitable,

Strife comes ne’er importunate,

Love remains immutable;

On to the close they glide ‘mid scenes Elysian,

Through life’s delightful vision.”

Mr. Martin is here somewhat closer and not less skilful in handling his metre:

“Oh! trebly blest, and blest for ever,

Are they whom true affection binds,

In whom no doubts or janglings sever

The union of their constant minds;

But life in blended current flows

Serene and sunny to the close.”

Compare with these Francis, who is scarcely more literal than Prout, and not so literal as Martin:

“Thrice happy they whom love unites

In equal rapture and sincere delights,

Unbroken by complaints or strife

Even to the latest hours of life.”

Is not the advantage in point of poetry altogether on the side of the moderns, and is it not largely due to their superior mastery of rhythm? The passage, it may be said, has been paraphrased by Moore in the lines,

“There’s a bliss beyond all that the minstrel has told,

When two that are linked in one heavenly tie,

With heart never changing and brow never cold,

Love on through all ills, and love on till they die.”

Both Mr. Martin and Prof. Conington have given close and successful attention to this part of their task. But it was left for Lord Lytton to attempt something like a systematic imitation of the Horatian metres. His plan, as set forth in his preface, “was in the first instance to attempt a close imitation of the ancient measure—the scansion being, of course (as in English 629or German hexameters and pentameters), by accent, not quantity—and then to make such modifications of flow and cadence as seemed to me best to harmonize the rhythm to the English ear, while preserving as much as possible that which has been called the type of the original.” Something of this kind, no doubt, Milton had in view in the measure he took for his Ad Pyrrham, and which the Wartons and Professor Conington adapted to the same purpose after him, the latter, however, adding the embellishment or, as Milton himself had called it, the “barbarous jingle” of rhyme. Milton’s measure (well known as that of Collins’ “Ode to Evening”), which consists of two unrhymed iambic pentameters, followed by two unrhymed iambic trimeters—or, to be “more English and less nice,” of two ordinary blank-verses followed by two three-foot verses—resembles Horace’s metre, which the grammarians would tell us is the third Asclepiadian strophe, “rather,” says Prof. Conington, “in the length of the respective lines than in any similarity of the cadences.” Lord Lytton attempted something more, and with only partial success, though the task, it must be owned, was not an easy one. Horace, in the Odes and Epodes, uses eighteen different varieties of metre, ranging from the grave sadness of what is called the first Archilochian strophe, the lovely measure in which one of the loveliest of all the Odes is written (iv. 7)—

“Diffugere nives; redeunt jam gramina campis

Arboribusque comæ,”^[81]

to the quick sharpness of the first iambic strophe in which the poet mauls the unsavory Mævius. And 630not only this, but each of these metres is used by Horace to express widely differing moods of feeling. Thus, the same measure which in the beautiful lament for Quinctilius breathes the tenderest spirit of grief and resignation, serves equally well to guy Tibullus on his luckless loves, to sound “stern alarums” to the absent Cæsar, or to bid Virgil or Varius to “delightful meetings.” The Sapphic rises to the lofty height of the Carmen Seculare or stoops to chide a serving-boy for his super-serviceable zeal; is equally at home with an invocation to the gods or an invitation to dinner; while the Alcaic—what subject is there that in Horace’s hands the Alcaic cannot be made to sing?

This flexibility of the Latin metres Lord Lytton has recognized, and sought to meet by a corresponding variation of his own, “according as the prevalent spirit of the ode demanded lively and sportive or serious and dignified expression.” Thus, for the Alcaic stanza he employs “two different forms of rhythm”; one as in i. 9:

“See how white in the deep fallen snow stands Soracte;

Laboring forests no longer can bear up their burden;

And the rush of the rivers is locked,

Halting mute in the gripe of the frost”;

the other as in i. 34:

“Worshipper rare and niggard of the gods,

While led astray, in the Fool’s wisdom versed,

Now back I shift the sail,

Forced in the courses left behind to steer,”

or, with a slight modification, as in i. 35:

“Goddess who o’er thine own loved Antium reignest,

Present to lift Man, weighted with his sorrows

Down to life’s last degree,