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LEVIA-PONDERA 




Photo : Whitfield, Cosser &> Co. 

JOHN AYSCOUGH 

(THE RIGHT REV. MONSIGNOR BICKERSTAFFE-DREW, K.H.S. 
PROTONOTARY APOSTOLIC) 



1 






LEVIA-PONDERA 



AN ESSAY BOOK 



BY 



JOHN AYSCOUGH 




LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 

39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 

NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 
1913 

All rights reserved 






TO HIS EMINENCE 

THE LORD CARDINAL BOURNE 
ARCHBISHOP OF WESTMINSTER 

My Lord Cardinal, 

It was with great diffidence that I ventured on so bold 
a measure as seeking your leave to dedicate my book to Your 
Eminence. That I should wish to have the great honour of 
seeing your name associated with a work of mine was, perhaps, 
more natural than modest or pardonable : and no doubt it would 
have been more discreet to wait till I should have had something 
less inadequate to offer you. But my impatience was stronger 
than my discretion; and so I offered what I had, rather than 
delay in the hope of being able, in some problematic future, to 
produce a worthier offering. 

Your Eminence's kindness has chosen rather to reward my 
goodwill than punish my presumption. And I can only give 
my sincere gratitude in return. No one could have been more 
conscious than myself of the justice of the decision, had your 
Eminence simply told me that in such a volume as this there 
could be nothing to render it a suitable offering to a Prince of 
the Church. 

It is a mere bundle of essays, and mould never have been 
a book at all but for the strong advice of others whose literary 
opinion would carry with Your Eminence as much weight as it 
does with me. 

Why, then, should so great a name as yours have been sought, 
to set in the Dedication ? On the principle, as I hope Your 



vi DEDICATION 

Eminence may feel, that leads a child to offer, lovingly, very 
trumpery gifts to a father. The gifts may be absurd enough, 
but the father's kindness will not scan them with cold criticism. 
They are all the giver has, and all that he who accepts them 
will see in them is the affection they express. Their value is not 
in themselves, but in the understanding and generosity of him who 
receives. 

It is more than thirty years that I have known Your Eminence, 
and, if your high station has removed me from recent inter- 
course, neither it nor lapse of time has weakened my memory 
of the affectionate respect of those far-off days. When the 
August Head of our Church called you to the highest place 
a Catholic in England can hold, and the Red Seal of the 
Holy Father's trust and approval was set upon Your Eminence 
and your work, no one could have felt more proud and glad 
than I. 

When, not long ago, Your Eminence spoke to me some words 
of most generous encouragement, it was with very keen gratitude 
that I heard them, and learned from them that in your high place 
you had still leisure to note the goodwill of those who, in a 
narrower sphere and humbler manner, were trying to serve the 
cause Your Eminence has most at heart. Perhaps it was then 
that, being unable to express my sense of your kindness, thus 
taken unawares, I conceived the desire of doing it in this clumsy 
fashion. 

Begging the blessing of Your Eminence, 
And kissing the Sacred Purple, 

I am, My Lord Cardinal, 

Yours most respectfully, 

JOHN AYSCOUGH. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

SIR WALTER 1 

A SCAMP'S PROBATION ....... 12 

" THE ENTAIL " : AN APPRECIATION .... 29 

THE LEDDY o' GRIPPY ...... 64 

FICKLE FAME ........ 103 

KING'S SERVANTS . . . . . . . .113 

AN ESSAY ON ESSAYISTS . . . . . .131 

A NOVELIST'S SERMONS 

PARALLELS ......... 149 

LOYALISTS AND PATRIOTS . . . . . .164 

TIME'S REPRISALS. 176 

CAUSE AND CURE ........ 187 

THE SHOE AND THE FOOT . . . . . 197 

OF OLD WAYS 207 

SciENTi.(E INIMICI . . . . . . . .215 

LAXITY OR SANCTITY ....... 227 

EVERYDAY PAPERS 

PRESS AND PUBLIC ....... 

ON BOOK BUYING ....... 

OF DISLIKE OF BOOKS ....... 

ATMOSPHERE AND ANTIDOTE ..... 

ON SITTING STILL ....... 

Til 



viii CONTENTS 

PAGE 

DIABOLICAL TREES ....... 269 

FOOTNOTES 274 

"Tnis PUBLIC CONSCIENCE" 278 

STATE AND CONSCIENCE ...... 283 

EMPIRE DAY 287 

DUTY AND DISCIPLINE . . . . . . .291 

ON DECADENCE 297 

MESSRS. HOOLIGAN AND TURVEYDROP .... 301 

Two PESSIMISMS ........ 305 

PEACE AND PEOPLES ....... 309 

DRESS AND CLOTHING ....... 314 

OF CATHEDRALS . . . . . . . .318 

OF STONE SERMONS AND WHITE ELEPHANTS . . 323 

AN ADMIRATION NOTE ...... 328 

WHY NORWICH? 333 

COLD PORRIDGE ........ 337 

OF WEAKER BRETHREN . . . . . .341 

THE ROMAN ROAD 345 

OF SAINTS AND WORTHIES ...... 350 

OF GREAT AGE ...... . 356 

MARE'S NESTS AND MUCH BOASTING . . . . S6l 

OF LAPSE AND LOSSES . . 366 



LEVIA-PONDERA 



SIR WALTER 

NEARLY thirty years ago I had an opportunity of visit- 
ing Abbotsford, and for the next ten years I never 
had any doubt of my deep regret that I had not 
clutched greedily at the chance and forced it into a 
fact, to remember ever after; during the rest of the 
intervening time I have not been so sure. Of course it 
matters much less being disappointed in a great man's 
things than finding the great man himself an anti- 
climax, as has happened to some literary pilgrims who 
have found in his shrine the object of their worship, 
still alive and speechless. Certainly there would have 
been no disappointment if one had lived long enough 
ago to find one's self face to face with Sir Walter Scott : 
none who did were ever disappointed. And it is likely 
that most of those who go to Abbotsford now so 
fortify themselves with the determination to be more 
than satisfied that wild horses (proverbially persuasive) 
would not draw from them any admission that there 
has been anything lacking. But so much good resolu- 
tion is a supererogation when we are pretty sure we 
shall not need it for practical purposes. 

I permit myself to believe that Abbotsford would 
disappoint me. As a lady devoted to Newman ob- 

A 



2 SIR WALTER 

served, after reading Mozley's Book of Reminiscences 
of the Oxford Movement: "I knew it would be dis- 
appointing, and it is." 

Abbotsford became baronial at a bad moment; at 
least half a century too soon, or four centuries too late. 
No self-respecting architect of fifty or sixty years later 
would have sanctioned the architecture of the armoury, 
or even that of the study; and pretty as the whole 
affectation is, it was an affectation all the same. 

Of the hundreds of thousands who take the place in, 
in their round of Scottish sights, only a few, perhaps, 
really care enough about Scott to mind. I care so 
much that I would mind. 

Some time ago there was a correspondence in the 
Satv/rday Westminster Gazette, with as many columns 
in it as there are in the Parthenon, dealing with the 
question: "Do boys read Walter Scott?" The only 
thing it established was that if they don't they ought 
to ; which several of us guessed before. If it had 
proved, as it certainly did not, that the author of the 
Waverleys has passed out of fashion with youthful 
readers, that would only be showing that schoolboys 
have not a first-rate taste in fiction. To Sir Walter's 
position in literature, it could make no difference 
whatever. Boys are often very clever, sometimes 
nearly as clever as they imagine themselves, but they 
are not to be our judges as to the best sort of fiction, 
for their own judgment is not final. Nor was Sir 
Walter Scott's works intended for them. So kindly a 
man would rejoice that any book of his should give 
pleasure to any one, however youthful, but he certainly 
did not imagine he was producing a series of boys' 
books. 

Among the letters above alluded to, there were 



SIR WALTER 3 

several which picked out The Talisman and Ivanhoe 
as being indeed excellent, very much to the exclusion 
of the author's other works. Such a judgment would 
suffice to show the value of the criticism. No true 
lover of Scott likes to remember that he ever wrote 
them ; and no true lover of Scott ever reads them after 
the first time. Of course they contain fine passages, or 
Scott could not have written them ; nevertheless, they 
are showy, wordy, tedious, stagey. 

The true Scott-reader goes on reading him con- 
tinually; nobody who loves reading could read The 
Talisman or Ivanhoe often. He would say Ivanhoe 
is tolerable, The Talisman intolerable. Kenilworth is 
ever so much better than Ivanhoe, but ever so much 
worse than Woodstock, and nearly as bad as Anne of 
Oeierstein. Woodstock, The Fortunes of Nigel, and 
Peveril of the Peak are much on a level, and that a 
very high one. The Abbot and The Monastery stand 
lower, but do not stand low compared with any novels 
other than Scott's. 

And then we come to the long list of those glorious 
books of which the true lover of Scott thinks when he 
thinks of Scott. Let us group them at first, higgledy- 
piggledy, then sort them : Waverley, Rob Roy, Red- 
gauntlet, The Antiquary, Guy Mannering, The Heart 
of Midlothian, The Pirate, The Bride of Lammermoor, 
A Legend of Montr ose, Old Mortality, The Surgeon's 
Daughter, The Black Dwarf, The Fair Maid of Perth. 

The more truly you love Scott the more certain will 
you be that these are his real books, and that for a 
very simple reason. In these he treats of what he 
knew, as no one else before or since has known Scot- 
land ; and those which treat of times nearest to his 
own are by far the best. For that latter reason, having 



4 SIR WALTER 

put it in, let us now leave out, The Fair Maid of Perth. 
Scott was in love with medievalism, and especially 
with its trappings ; but with the exception of its 
trappings it may be questioned whether he knew as 
much of it as he thought. Feudalism dominated his 
retrospect of the Middle Ages, and of feudalism he 
knew the terms, and perhaps the costumes. But side 
by side with feudalism in the Middle Ages, and much 
above it, stood the Catholic Church, and of the 
Catholic Church Scott, with all his genius and his 
knowledge, was extremely, almost entirely, ignorant. 
For his interest in the Church was never more than 
antiquarian. 

However clever a writer may be, if he can regard 
Mediaeval Christianity only from outside, and only 
from a Georgian standpoint, he is bound to blunder. 
The outside view of the Catholic Church Scott had, 
and he had a keen eye for the picturesque, so he could 
describe vividly; but even in description he came 
appalling "croppers" as we shall instance presently. 
Blunders apart, those descriptions were not always 
fine; melodramatic, stagey, verbose when intended to 
be grandiose, they lacked the one thing description 
imperatively demands, truth and reality. 

The real influence of the Church in the Middle Ages 
was never revealed to this man of genius, for revelation 
is accorded not to talent but to sincerity ; and in this 
matter Scott was not sincere but opportunistic. He 
did not grasp the heart of the Middle Age; for its 
heart was its faith ; he had merely read of its behaviour, 
which was sometimes queer and sometimes scandalous, 
as was the behaviour of the admired Primitive Age, as 
has been that of the age enlightened by all the pure 
beams of Scott's beloved Reformation. Of its slang 



SIR WALTER 5 

he reproduced or excogitated fearsome quantities, which 
make his paladins in The Talisman talk as no man 
ever could talk and be permitted to live ; of its 
costumes he had whole wardrobes at disposal, what it 
ate with, and what weapons it slew its adversaries or 
brethren in arms withal, he knew as well or better than 
his purpose required ; but how it thought he had not 
the least idea. 

Thus The Fair Maid of Perth lives inasmuch as it is 
Scott's : and is woodenish in so far as it is particularly 
mediaeval. 

Incomparably better than any other mediaeval romance 
of his is Quentin Durward ; and half its charm is due 
to the Scots element in it : the other half to the ex- 
cellence of the tale, the rapidity and freshness of the 
action. 

But now let us joyfully turn from his half-successes, 
which would have been splendid successes for any one 
else, to the realm where he reigns alone. He is known 
as the author of Waverley, and had he written nothing 
else he would have deserved all his fame, and perhaps 
have kept it, though it is not certain that all deserved 
fame becomes immortality. Nevertheless, Waverley is 
not by any means equal to the others in its group, as 
we have taken leave to arrange our group. It was 
altogether novel when it appeared : its theme was 
romantic and yet real, its inhabitants were alive and 
interesting ; but it has nothing approaching the interest 
and vitality of Rob Roy, which in turn has to yield 
even to The Pirate. There are characters in Rob Roy 
better, perhaps, than any in The Pirate ; there are less 
convincing characters in The Pirate, it may be, than 
some of those in Rob Roy, but as a tale The Pirate is 
more of a book. One great personage in it, Norna of 



the Fitful Head, I confess strikes me as a preliminary 
study for Meg Merrilees in Guy Mannering, and nothing 
like so fine; only Scott could have prevented her 
from being a bore, and it took him all his time. She 
was too Mumbo-jumbo, and her lunacy was really not 
called for. If she was determined to go mad she 
should have done something horrible on purpose ; her 
father's death was so entirely accidental that so clever 
a woman must have been aware of it. Mordaunt's 
father was sharp enough to know that he was a bore, 
out and out, and that was why he shut himself up in 
Sumburgh Castle. But the Yellowleys are delightful, 
especially the lady, and the Pirate himself was inter- 
esting in spite of his goodness. Scott does not insist 
on his teaching Sunday-School in the final chapters as 
Ballantyne did with a far naughtier pirate in the days 
of our own youth, when nobody asked us in the news- 
papers whether we could read Scott or no. 

Redgauntlet is so excellent that we wonder it is not 
commonly mentioned as one of Scott's best books ; but 
perhaps that is because it begins in a series of letters. 
Scott, however, repents quite early and the story tells 
itself presently in plain narrative. 

In this most interesting story Scott's hankering after 
the Royal Stuarts betrays itself again, a hankering, we 
permit ourselves to fancy, more sincere, as it was 
certainly more natural, than his rather fulsome lauda- 
tions of their Hanoverian heir. Perhaps he would 
have urged that the Stuarts appealed to him merely as 
romantic properties, on account of their picturesque- 
ness; and Charles Edward was undoubtedly more 
picturesque than the Prince Regent or his dismally 
perverse father. But I suspect there was an attraction 
for Scott in the Royal Stuarts deeper-lying than the 



SIR WALTER 7 

mere obvious fact of their romantic value, though to 
no one was such a romantic value more appealing than 
to him ; they represented not only the exiled dynasty 
of England, but theirs was the ancient, royal house of 
Scotland, and that mattered much more to the great 
Scots romanticist. Scotland was mainly the theatre 
of their final tragedy, and if the throne of Scotland 
alone could have contented them for a while, it might 
well have happened that the thrones of England and 
Ireland would have been added in due time. The 
hurried advance to Derby was, perhaps, only less ill- 
advised than the hasty retreat thence. The position of 
the Regent, Charles Edward, in Scotland was strong 
enough to have become far stronger; if the Prince of 
Wales had, after publishing his father's manifesto, sat 
firm in Edinburgh, and awaited its results, thousands 
of those who were hesitating would have made up their 
minds to give in their adhesion to the cause which 
they knew was that of loyalty and patriotism; and 
time would have been given to the loyalists of Wales, 
England, and Ireland to gather their wits together, and 
to organise their aid with some mutual understanding 
and confidence. 

It is no matter of conjecture, but historical fact, that 
large and important forces were at work for the Stuart 
cause, and were actually ready when their readiness 
was too late ; that they were late was not entirely their 
fault, there had been too much hurry, not only in the 
disastrous resolution to retreat from England, but also 
in the precipitate though chivalrous resolve to push 
into it. 

Scott, as I imagine, thought of Charles Edward as of 
one who might very easily have been his king de facto, 
who barely missed it, and missed it so gloriously that 



8 SIR WALTER 

he could not help dwelling on it ; whether he cared that 
Charles was undoubtedly king de jure I cannot tell. 
But it seems to me plain that Scott was at all events 
Scot enough to prefer the idea of a Scots monarch 
in Scotland to that of a Hanoverian sovereign in 
London. 

In the group we have ventured to make of his 
greatest novels there is an inner group of the very 
greatest : The Antiquary, Guy Mannering, The Heart 
of Midlothian, and The Bride of Lammermoor. In 
these four all his best qualities are at their best : no 
real Scott-reader is ever tired of reading them, and 
every reading makes them more dear and more 
admired. They are the four walls of Scott's monument 
in the hearts of his lovers all the world over. Famili- 
arity does not lessen their charm, or weaken their hold, 
but strengthens it. For my own part I could read 
through to the last page of any one of them and turn 
back to the first and read on again with undiminished 
delight. I do not think the fascination of any of them 
depends much on the hero. Lovel is not the attraction 
in The Antiquary, nor the Master of Ravenswood in 
The Bride of Lammermoor ; in The Heart of Mid- 
lothian there is no hero at all, and in Guy Mannering 
the office is put into commission. In The Heart of 
Midlothian is the finest of all Scott's heroines ; but in 
the other three the heroines could be left out and the 
books lose nothing. Lucy, in The Bride of Lammer- 
inoor, is as anaemic as Amelia in Vanity Fair, and 
neither so interesting nor so pathetic. One may want 
to box Amelia's ears, but she had ears, if she hadn't 
eyes; Lucy had nothing but good looks miraculously 
existing in space, without any particular human identity 
to support them. 



SIR WALTER 9 

Miss Wardour in The Antiquary is better, because she 
does exist, though her existence does not matter much 
to anybody but Mr. Lovel; she was quite a proper 
young woman for him to marry, but he might have 
married her in the Morning Post just as well as in The 
Antiquary. Julia Mannering is far better ; she can be 
pert, and her father required more pertness than he 
often got from her; she can he lively, and her good 
looks are not a mere assertion of the author's; the 
reader can picture her, and the picture is natural, 
pleasant, and animated. But the interest of Guy 
Mannering does not depend on her lover, and she and 
her young man, who is a nice young man and very 
pretty-behaved, might have arranged their affairs else- 
where and the book have been as fascinating without 
them. 

Jeanie Deans has a different position altogether ; she 
and Diana are Scott's best heroines, and The Heart of 
Midlothian could not get on without her; the real 
story in the book is the story of her journey to London. 
There .are characters in The Heart of Midlothian as 
impossible to do without as any in the other books of 
this group, but the book does not depend on them as 
the others do really depend on their "minor char- 
acters." Nor is the interest we feel in Jeanie Deans the 
interest we may have in her own rather mature love 
story, but rather in spite of it. Mr. Butler was, no 
doubt, an excellent minister; as a lover he is not 
engrossing. It would, no doubt, be esteemed a heresy 
to say that these four best books of Scott's would have 
got on very well if there had been no loves of heroes 
and heroines at all. It is my own opinion, but ordinary 
readers will probably not share it. 

When Bingley, in Pride and Prejudice, talked of 






10 SIR WALTER 

giving a ball, his sister perceived that Darcy was 
reading a book, and did not fancy he cared much for 
the idea of dancing. 

"I should like balls much better," she cried, "if they 
were carried on in a different manner ; but there is some- 
thing insufferably tedious in the usual process of such a 
meeting. It would surely be more rational if conver- 
sation instead of dancing made the order of the day." 

" Much more rational, my dear Caroline, I dare say," 
her brother objected, " but it would not be near so 
much like a ball." 

Perhaps the public will maintain that if Sir Walter 
had left the love affairs of his heroes and heroines out 
of these four novels, they might have been just as 
good, but not nearly so much like novels, 

There remain after these four greatest books other 
four, as Scott himself would have said: A Legend of 
Montrose, Old Mortality, The Black Dwarf, and The 
Surgeon's Daughter, which we also included in our own 
group of favourites. They are much shorter than any 
of the novels we have mentioned above, and for that 
reason, chiefly, they are not commonly classed among 
the author's " important " works. Their brevity is all 
I can urge against them. They are otherwise quite 
worthy of ranking with more admired books of Scott's. 
Personally I would say that they are equal in bulk of 
interest to the interesting part of some of their more 
favoured brethren ; for not all of Rob Roy is particularly 
interesting, nor all of Redgauntlet, and even- The Heart 
of Midlothian need not be begun at the first chapter 
nor continued to the last. No true Scott-reader can 
dispense with them ; and The Black Dwarf has a sombre 
power that is sometimes missed in other places where 
Scott showed more apparent intention to achieve it. 






SIR WALTER 11 

As we mentioned Diana Vernon parenthetically 
above, as being in our opinion one of his two finest 
heroines, let us say one word more about Rob Roy; 
the family at Osbaldistone Hall was, we take leave 
to feel assured, far nicer than Scott chooses to 
allow that was just his "whiggery." As for Helen 
MacGregor, whose pedigree is not given, we are con- 
fident that the blood of Norna of the Fitful Head ran 
in her veins; in their Ossianic moments the family 
resemblance is ponderously close. 

We also mentioned above that Scott, whose interest 
in the Catholic Church being merely that of an 
antiquary, lacking sympathy and sincerity, left him 
without the true key to the spirit of the Middle 
Ages, fell occasionally into queer blunders even when 
attempting nothing more than description. An in- 
stance of this occurs in one of the four books which 
we believe all fervent admirers of his admire most. 

In the second volume of The Antiquary there is a 
flagrantly picturesque account of the midnight obse- 
quies of the Catholic Countess of Glenallan. The priest, 
dressed in " cope and stole, held open the service-book " 
(the breviary as we are informed on the next page) 
" another churchman in his vestments bore a holy- 
water sprinkler and two boys in white surplices held 
censers with incense," and the dirge goes on " until a 
loud Alleluia, pealing through the deserted arches of St. 
Ruth, closed the singular ceremony." Singular, indeed. 
Sir Walter Scott was undoubtedly the only human 
being who ever heard an Alleluia, however loud, in 
the funeral offices of the Catholic Church. 






A SCAMP'S PROBATION 

IT is odd to note how lightly the English critic has, 
for the most part, leaned upon the faults of Henry 
VIII, and how heavily he has dealt with the memory 
of Charles II. One, indeed, had the great merit of 
being a Tudor, and the other was so ill-advised as 
to be a Stuart. Tudor despotism has never deeply 
scandalised even the devout Constitutionalist, because 
it was successful : Stuart unconstitutionalism shocks 
everyone, because it failed ignominiously. When 
monarchs go about disregarding popular liberties, they 
are unpardonable should they fail. 

To compare one historical character with another is 
always a seductive employment, though it does not 
always lead to much. A comparison between Henry 
VIII and Charles II does not obviously suggest itself, 
yet in one particular it is justified by a queer resem- 
blance in their circumstances ; and the divergence of 
the event allows pretext for a little praise of a man 
who has never been overpraised. 

The idea of comparing Henry and Charles could 
not be suggested by their portraits. Henry in his 
youth was attractive, fair, and blonde. Even in his 
youth Charles was ugly, black, and lean. Henry 
became heavy and fat, his body ponderous and un- 
gainly, much too big for his legs : his face, no longer 
comely, grew coarse and bloated, and he was florid 
and ruddy. His later portraits suggest neither distinc- 



12 



A SCAMPS PROBATION 13 

tion nor high breeding. Charles had a ? singularly 
graceful figure, light and active ; his face, in spite of 
its harsh lines, was interesting and clever ; and no one 
could have looked more well-bred. For all his plain- 
ness he had, as people used to say, " so much counten- 
ance." Nor was there in their circumstances more 
than one important parallel ; of that we shall speak 
presently. Both, indeed, succeeded to a crown to 
which for a time neither seemed destined, but the 
cause was not the same. Henry was born a younger 
son, and only became heir-apparent after Prince 
Arthur's death, when he was himself eleven years old : 
at nineteen the peaceful death of his father made him 
king. Charles was also a second son, but his older 
brother had not survived his birth, and he was heir- 
apparent from his own. At nineteen the execution of 
his father made him king de jure, but he was an exile, 
and for eleven years England was no longer a kingdom : 
his chance of reigning appeared, during a long time, 
more than problematical. 

Henry was born in the old religion, his parents both 
belonged to it, and he was bred in it. Charles was 
born of a Protestant father, baptized in the English 
Church, and brought up in it. Charles I was High 
Church, and had apparently, for some time, dreams of 
an Anglican reunion with Rome, but he had no idea 
of becoming a Catholic himself, and he was determined 
none of his sons should follow their mother's religion. 

Henry had a weakness for theology, and wrote the 
famous treatise, against Luther, on the Seven Sacra- 
ments, which gained him, from Leo X, in 1521, the title 
of Defender of the Faith ; in later life his fondness for 
monks was like Tom Tulliver's for birds he liked 
throwing stones at them. Charles II was not ecclesi- 



14 A SCAMPS PROBATION 

astically-minded, and wrote no tracts : but he hated 
seeing helpless priests and friars falsely accused and 
persecuted, and, at considerable risk to his own popu- 
larity, tried to stop it. 

Henry and Charles were both vicious, both sensualists : 
but Henry, we hear, was virtuous in youth, and Charles 
was not ; his first illegitimate son was born to him 
when he was not more than sixteen. Henry certainly 
had at first been destined to the priesthood, and his 
early teaching was in good and wise hands. Charles 
had a silly wiseacre for his first governor, and for his 
second a notorious scamp, without faith or morals ; at 
twelve he was in command of a troop of horse, and at 
fifteen he was a general, living the reckless life of a 
cavalier soldier. 

Henry had a taste for matrimony and indulged it 
six times ; Charles only married once, and his wife had 
the good fortune to survive him. Both were bad and 
faithless husbands, but Charles was neither brutal 
nor cruel ; if he tired of his wife he stuck to her, and 
neither brought her to the scaffold nor divorced her. 

No attempt will be made here to defend Charles's 
morality: no human being who reverences purity, or 
even decency, can defend it, Not a word can be said 
in defence of it ; it was, plainly, too bad to bear speak- 
ing of. It cannot even be urged in mitigation that he 
was no worse than his contemporaries ; for, if his court 
was flagrantly and shamelessly bad, it was chiefly 
because of his own flagrant and shameless example. 
But if it is impossible to extenuate Charles II's vices, 
there is no necessity for insisting upon them, because 
they never have been extenuated, and they always 
have been insisted upon. Henry's vices did not make 
him unpopular with his contemporaries, nor have they 



15 

much injured him with posterity. Nor did those of 
Charles ever make him unpopular while he lived, for 
he was, in fact, extremely popular; but they have 
ruined him in history. Henry broke with the old 
Church and died under her ban ; Charles laid his dying 
head upon her breast, and with his dying lips sought 
to obtain, from her promises of mercy, all the consola- 
tion and hope his misspent life so sorely needed. In 
the verdict of England it could not be counted to him 
for righteousness. Henry had been the enemy of 
France, and it was so counted to him ; Charles had 
been her friend, and worse: for he was her tool and 
her pensioner. 

So much must be laid to the charge of Charles, and 
so little of it can be explained away, or softened, that 
it is an office of justice, as well as of charity, to point 
out one important matter in which he compares most 
favourably with his more-admired predecessor. Of his 
wit and his good-nature we do not intend to speak: 
that he was witty all bore witness, but his wit was foul. 
He was extremely good-natured, but he was more 
indolent : and his indolence usually got the upper hand 
when they came in conflict. He was much more grate- 
ful to those who had served him than kings are wont 
to be, and he was most grateful to those who had 
befriended him in adversity, as was natural in so 
clever and so shrewd a man : for services rendered to a 
sovereign in prosperity are more apt to eye rewards 
than to deserve them. 

It seems certain that this scapegrace prince was a 
good fellow: which of course does not imply that he 
was good. He had also much more claim to the title 
of gentleman than George IV: how Charles would 
have treated a wife like Caroline of Brunswick we can 



16 A SCAMPS PROBATION 

only surmise, but we can surmise without uncertainty 
that he would not have treaied her as she was treated 
by Mrs. Fitzherbert's husband. Charles II' s portrait 
is that of an ugly man, but it is unmistakably that of 
a gentleman ; and the face, harsh and forbidding as it 
is usually called, is intensely interesting : none the less 
so from its invariable melancholy. The portrait of the 
First Gentleman in Europe can interest no one except 
a student of poses and deportment : its serious simper 
is more repulsive than any scowl, and it suggests a wax 
dummy rather than a man if wax dummies could tell 
lies and betray other dummies silly enough to trust in 
them. It is not, however, with George IV and his treat- 
ment of his queen that we wish to compare Charles II 
in his behaviour towards Catherine of Braganza, but 
with Henry VIII and his behaviour as a husband. 

Catherine of Aragon had been Henry's wife for many 
years ; and her conduct as a wife and queen had been 
faultless. She had borne him several children, of whom 
one survived, and that one outlived her father : there 
was no question of the succession involved, as there 
was in the case of Charles II and his childless wife. 
For there was no reluctance to accept Princess Mary 
Tudor as her father's heir, and, until he suggested it, 
no one imagined there could be the least flaw in her 
claim. Her religion was the same as his own, and 
was that of the realm. Whereas the next in succession 
to Charles, were he to leave no lawful issue, was a 
brother unpopular with those who would become his 
subjects, a convert to Catholicity at a time when 
England had long renounced the ancient faith, and 
widely suspected of an obstinate determination to bring 
it back. But Catherine of Aragon was six years 
older than Henry; she had no beauty, and the king 



A SCAMPS PROBATION 17 

was tired of her. Of the delicacy of conscience pre- 
tended by him as an excuse for seeking divorce, we 
need say no more than that it did not prevent him 
from taking as his mistress the woman he wanted 
before he married her, whom he married before 
Cranmer pronounced the divorce, and whom he ruth- 
lessly beheaded three years later whom, within three 
months of his marriage with her, he had warned " to 
shut her eyes to his unfaithfulness, as her betters had 
done, for he could abase yet more than he had raised 
her." The day after her execution he married Jane 
Seymour ; and less than three months after her death 
he married Anne of Cleves, whom he divorced in half 
a year in July 1540. His fifth wife he beheaded 
eighteen months after his marriage with her. and his 
sixth had the good luck to survive him. 

Charles II in one way treated his wife as badly as 
any man could treat the woman he had married : that 
is in the matter of unfaithfulness. But he did not 
behave to her with brutal cruelty, nor did he divorce 
her : and to this last course he was urged repeatedly 
and strongly. An important clause in the marriage 
contract remained unfulfilled, for the immense dowry 
agreed upon was never paid. But poor Catherine's 
great failure was in bringing no heir to the crown. 
Her religion made her many enemies in England, and 
Charles would have found nothing easier than to rid 
himself of her if he would but have consented. Henry's 
divorce from Catherine of Aragon was a most unpopu- 
lar measure with his subjects, by whom his religious 
scruples were not appreciated; by whom, too, the queen 
was liked and respected. A divorce between Charles 
and Catherine of Braganza would have been popularly 
approved, and it was persistently urged upon him. 

B 



18 

Charles was certainly not a good man : had he been 
as bad as Henry he would have yielded. He liked his 
wife, but he had never loved her ; she was not beauti- 
ful, and she was not always complaisant : she could 
make scenes, and she could give trouble. She had 
cause, if ever woman had, for jealousy and indignation, 
and she showed both very early in her reign. Charles 
was angry, but he had heart enough and conscience 
enough not to respect her the less. It was her des- 
perate yielding that half lost her that respect. Then 
there came one disappointment after another in the 
matter of an heir. Repeatedly the queen said there 
was to be one, and as often it came to nothing. Mean- 
while those most opposed to the Catholic Duke of 
York became more and more resolved that he should 
never reign, and more and more open in their sug- 
gestions that the king should get rid of his wife, and 
marry another. There were all sorts of pretexts to 
advance besides the real one that the poor queen was 
childless some urged that even the necessary dis- 
pensation from the Pope had never been obtained, 
or had been granted only after the marriage had taken 
place; that Catherine had not responded in the 
marriage service ; that the king had plighted his troth 
but she had not. And it was remembered that Charles 
before the marriage, while Catherine was still in 
Portugal, had stipulated that if the articles of the 
marriage treaty were not all performed the marriage 
should be null and void and they had not all been 
fulfilled. It is not our point, however, to try and 
see what sort of a case against the royal marriage those 
might have made out who were eager to dissolve it : 
the point is merely to remind ourselves that they were 
eager, and that they could and would have succeeded 



A SCAMPS PROBATION 19 

but for one obstacle. The queen was quite powerless 
to help herself, as powerless as Catherine of Aragon 
had been: at one time she was within measurable 
distance of losing not only her crown but her life ; and 
between her and death there stood again but one 
obstacle. In both cases the obstacle was the same : 
the honest resolve of her faithless scamp of a husband 
to save her from either divorce or death. 

Even in the Tudor age Henry was not the more 
admired by his subjects for the bloody justice he 
caused to fall on Anne Boleyri and Catherine Howard. 
Had Charles merely stood aside and left Catherine of 
Braganza to the fate prepared for her by those who 
invented and engineered the Popish Plot, there can 
be no doubt he would have been himself more popular 
and more secure. His manly determination that no 
harm should come to the wife he had neglected and 
dishonoured by his infidelities by no means made him 
more popular at the time. His stiffness in the matter 
only made those who had gone crazy about the plot 
hint that the king himself was shielding those who 
were plotting. Catherine stood in grave peril. Titus 
Gates swore that her own physician, Sir George Wake- 
man, had been offered 10,000 to poison the king's 
medicine, and that the queen was in the scheme. 
Later he swore that he had heard her say she would 
help Sir George to poison Charles. On November 
28, 1678, Oates and Bedloe brought these charges 
against the queen before the Parliament. " I, Titus 
Oates," that miscreant cried aloud at the Bar of the 
Commons, " accuse Catherine, Queen of England, of 
high treason." We may wonder what Henry VIII 
would have done had such charges been brought 
against a wife who had borne him no child; had he 



I 

20 A SCAMPS PROBATION 

been without an heir ; had the next in succession been 
obnoxious to the country, and the wife in question 
been as helpless and friendless as was Catherine of 
Braganza, and one who had vehemently resented her 
husband's infidelities and made scenes. What Charles 
did was to send at once for the queen from Somerset 
House, whither she had withdrawn from court in 1674, 
when the Duchess of Portsmouth was in the zenith of 
her popularity. He brought Catherine back to White- 
hall, and fixed her in her apartments next his own. 
He took pains to prove his entire trust in her, and 
respect for her, by the most careful marks of honour 
and attention. "If the king had given way in the 
least Queen Catherine would have been very ill-used," 
says Roger North, " for the plotters had reckoned on 
his weakness with regard to women, and nattered him 
with the hopes of having an heir to his dominions." 
" I believe," said Charles, " they think I have a mind 
for a new wife, but I will not suffer an innocent woman 
to be wronged." 

Gates was put in prison and kept under guard, till 
the king was himself charged with muzzling a witness, 
and obliged to let the miscreant out again. Charles 
himself examined him and proved him to be a liar, 
and a clumsy one, on more than one occasion. Mean- 
while Titus Gates' accomplice, Bedloe, stuck to it that 
Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey had been murdered by the 
queen's servants in the queen's house ; at first saying 
that he was smothered with pillows, then that he had 
been strangled with a linen cravat. It does not matter 
to us here that this informer was a felon lately come 
out of Newgate, and that 500 reward, offered for the 
discovery of the murderer or murderers, naturally 
appealed to him. It did not matter to the hatchers 



A SCAMPS PROBATION 21 

of the plot : on his evidence three of Catherine's 
servants were executed, one of them a Protestant. 
What concerns us is that if Charles had been a villain 
as well as a scamp, he might have been rid of his wife 
without himself lifting a finger. It was not only Gates 
who offered him the chance. A Mrs. Elliott was sent 
to the king on October 23, 1678, and informed him 
that the queen was concerned in the plot against his 
own life. He heard her with displeasure and im- 
patience. When the woman had the insolence to add 
that she thought he would have been glad to part with 
her majesty on any terms, Charles turned fiercely on 
her, and had her removed from his presence, saying 
angrily, " I will never suffer an innocent lady to be 
oppressed." Everybody wanted him to believe in the 
plot, and he would not oblige them, though he was 
quite able to see how greatly it would have been 
counted to him for righteousness. It was he who 
proved the absurdity and falsehood of Gates' evidence 
against Catherine. Indolent, easy-going, and scape- 
grace as he was, he behaved throughout like a loyal, 
conscientious gentleman. When it seemed, for the 
moment, that even the sovereign's championship of 
the queen's innocence of any plot against the sovereign's 
own life might be unavailing, he took secret precautions 
for her removal from England, if such a measure 
should prove necessary to her safety. But Charles 
was not only steadfastly resolved against such a crime 
as that of ridding himself of his wife by allowing her 
enemies to take her life : he was equally steadfast in 
refusing to avail himself of the milder remedy of 
divorce. 

Long before the Popish Plot suggestions had been 
made to the king in reference to getting rid of the 






22 A SCAMPS PROBATION 

queen ; Buckingham urged it upon Charles, one of his 
schemes being that Catherine should be kidnapped 
and spirited away to the American plantations, where 
she would be well treated but no more heard of. Her 
husband could thus obtain a divorce on the plea of his 
wife's desertion of him. Bishop Burnet, who was the 
profligate Buckingham's dependant, is authority for 
this delightful story. Charles rejected the proposal 
with horror. But Burnet himself was willing to play 
Cranmer to Charles II's Henry VIII. The future 
Bishop of Salisbury concocted a brace of tracts on 
polygamy and divorce, and tied them together under 
the name of A Solution of Two Gases of Conscience. 
His own conscience as a minister of the gospel he 
seems to have held in complete solution. The an- 
nulling of marriage on account of the wife's childless- 
ness may, he teaches us, " be easily justified both before 
God and man." His talents, had he been at leisure 
to write thus a hundred and forty years later, might 
have recommended him to the favourable notice of 
Napoleon I. As for polygamy, he was even more ingeni- 
ous and even less correct. Before the Fall, he allowed, 
one woman was meant for one man ; a handsome ad- 
mission when one remembers that for the one man in 
existence, there was only one woman available at the 
period in question. Things had, however, changed 
since. Disease and other disabilities had supervened. 
Monogamy might be the more perfect, but polygamy 
was noway sinful. Even in the new law there was 
no " simple and express discharge of polygamy " : and 
he himself saw " nothing so strong against polygamy as 
to balance the great and visible hazards that hang 
over so many thousands if it be not allowed." This 
successor of the Apostles was certainly one born out of 



due time too late for his talents to be available 
against Catherine of Aragon, too early for them to be 
used against Josephine. Those talents did not, how- 
ever, recommend him to Charles II. Instead of making 
Burnet a bishop he, later on, turned him out of the 
Chapel Royal. It was to William III this would-be 
Cranmer owed his mitre. 

But there were always plots against Catherine's posi- 
tion as queen, though the arch-plotter might change. 
In 1671 the Duke of York had made open avowal of 
his conversion to the Catholic Church : the Parliament 
answered, early in 1673, by passing the Test Act, which 
required all naval and military officers to receive the 
sacrament in the Church of England, and to sign the 
declaration against Transubstantiation : this obliged 
the king's brother to resign the office of Lord High 
Admiral, which he had filled with ability and distinc- 
tion. His second marriage with a Catholic princess, 
Maria d'Este, daughter of the Duke of Modena, sug- 
gested to the Parliament two measures, in both of 
which it failed : one was an Exclusion Bill, by which 
the Duke of York should be declared incapable, on 
account of his religion, of succeeding to the crown ; the 
other was a renewal of the project of the king's divorce. 
In the Commons one Vaughan was to move that 
without a Protestant queen there could be no security 
for the Protestant religion. Charles, always needy, 
was to be bribed by the offer of 500,000 if he would 
provide himself with a Protestant consort. He only 
heard of it when the day for the bringing forward of 
this motion was fixed. Here was a fine chance for 
him. Money he always was in want of: the divorce 
could have gone merrily on, and it would have been by 
none of his contriving. He at once declared that if his 



24 A SCAMFS PROBATION 

conscience would let him divorce his wife it would let 
him murder her. 

This beautiful scheme had been hatched by Shaftes- 
bury : its failure did not discourage him. His irritably 
mischievous brain presently devised another. Of all 
Charles' sons the Duke of Monmouth was the most 
popular, and he was regarded as a Protestant champion. 
Monmouth himself seems to have been cajoled and 
managed by the evil Achitophel. To Charles himself 
the matter was opened. The king was reminded that 
Monmouth was his eldest son, which he knew, if 
Shaft esbury did not, was untrue, his eldest son being 
another James, James de la Cloche du Bourg de Jarsey. 
That James was a Catholic and useless for Shaftesbury's 
purpose. The king was flattered by being told of 
Monmouth's popularity and cleverness : he had much 
affection for his children, though they had no business 
to exist. If Charles would agree to give his bastard 
to England as heir to her throne, it could be managed 
quite simply : he would merely have to declare that 
he had been married to Lucy Walter, and Shaftesbury 
would himself provide witnesses to swear to it. Charles 
undoubtedly believed himself to be Monmouth's father : 
Shaftesbury must have known that it was at least as 
likely that the Protestant duke had no royal blood at 
all, but was probably the son of Colonel Robert Sidney. 
When the king heard this disgusting and infamous pro- 
posal, he was amazed at its iniquitous effrontery. " I 
would liefer," he said, "see James [Monmouth] hung 
up at Tyburn than entertain such a thought." 

Having failed in two attempts to oust Catherine from 
the throne, Shaftesbury's efforts were bent in a more 
sombre direction, and the Popish Plot followed. From 
this also she was, as we have seen, saved by her bus- 



A SCAMFS PROBATION 25 

band. When the Plot had done its bloody work, and 
the queen was seen to be strong in the king's loyal 
protection, Monmouth again became the pawn to be 
played. In 1679 he was encouraged by the Protestant 
party to figure as Prince of Wales ; he had the three 
feathers painted on his coach ; his health was publicly 
drunk with royal honours by the title of Prince of 
Wales, and he paraded himself before the Protestant 
mob as their hope and leader, all uncovering to him 
as to a prince of the blood. 

Charles, however, was determined in no way to con- 
nive at so monstrous an injury to the rights of his wife 
and of his brother : and on March 31, 1679, he pub- 
lished a proclamation from Whitehall as follows : " To 
avoid any dispute which may happen in time to come 
concerning the succession to the Crown, the King 
declares in the presence of Almighty God that he 
never gave or made any contract of marriage, nor was 
married to any woman whatever but to his present 
wife, Queen Catherine, now living." Charles had by 
no means forgotten Shaftesbury's insolent proposal of 
the year before, and, in the High Court of Chancery, 
he proceeded to record that " On the word of a King 
and the faith of a Christian he was never married to 
Mrs. Barlow, alias Walter, the Duke of Monmouth's 
mother, or to any woman whatsoever, besides the now 
Queen." 

Another attempt to destroy Catherine's position as 
lawful queen had failed: and again the failure was 
due to the firmness and conscience of the king. But 
the efforts against her swayed up and down like a see- 
saw, from schemes against the legality of her marriag e 
to plots against her life. 

On July 9, 1679, a month after Charles had registered 



26 A SCAMPS PROBATION 

his protest in Chancery as to his never having married 
Monmouth's mother, or anyone but the queen, his 
brother wrote to the Prince of Orange that some new 
plot against Catherine would be sure to be laid. And 
not many days later a servant of Monmouth's came to 
Shaftesbury and his committee and declared that in the 
previous September, when he was at Windsor, he had 
heard Hankinson, of the queen's chapel, bid her con- 
fessor have care of the four Irishmen he had brought 
along with him "to do the business for them." The 
Privy Council moved that the queen should stand her 
trial, but Charles indignantly refused to allow "so 
injurious aspersion on so virtuous a princess." This 
was in the summer of 1679. In November the Exclu- 
sion Bill was thrown out, and Shaftesbury, then in the 
Lords, moved for a Bill of Divorce, which by separating 
the king and Queen Catherine, might enable him to 
marry a Protestant consort, and thus leave the crown 
to legitimate issue. This he affirmed was the "sole 
remaining chance of security, liberty, and religion." 

Achitophel's love of religion was notorious : it was 
edifying to see him, who had been so lately willing to 
see Colonel Sidney's son on the throne of England, 
thus eager for the descent of the crown to legitimate 
issue. Here was another chance for Charles to be rid, 
without any efforts of his own, of a childless wife, who 
had often quarrelled with him, and whom he did not 
love, though he liked and respected. But, if he did not 
love her, he had a manly pity for her defencelessness, 
and pity is akin to love in hearts that are not base. 
Shaftesbury' s motion was warmly seconded by the 
Earls of Salisbury and of Essex, and by Lord Howard 
of Ettrick ; had the king allowed himself to be supposed 
favourable or neutral, Catherine's fate, as queen, would 



A SCAMPS PROBATION 27 

have been sealed. But Charles was by no means 
neutral. He took the pains of seeing each peer 
severally, showed his anger and disgust plainly, and 
begged each lord to vote against the wicked measure. 
There was no mistaking his earnestness and righteous 
horror. The lords did as he wished, and the shameful 
bill was discarded. 

Once again Charles showed his determination that no 
injustice should be done to his brother, whatever his 
interference might cost himself in the way of popularity. 
On March 26, 1681, the Exclusion Bill was brought up 
again by the Parliament at Oxford. On the 28th, while 
the Commons were all agog with eagerness to push it 
through, the king came down. He had hastily donned 
his state robes, and had himself carried to where the 
Parliament was sitting in a chair, with curtains close 
drawn. Without escort or attendance, he entered the 
Lords Chamber, and took his seat upon the throne, 
bidding the Commons be called to the Bar. They 
came hurriedly, and he briefly told them that proceed- 
ings so ill begun could end in no good, and forthwith 
dissolved the Parliament. As stoutly had Charles 
stood faithful to the lonely queen throughout her dark 
hour. Through all the evil days of the Plot he kept 
her close to him, studiously showing his deep respect 
and full confidence. Her last accuser, Fitzharris, who, 
like the others, had trumped up against her charges of 
conspiring to poison her faithless husband, Charles 
himself detected, as he had detected the others, in false 
witness : and he himself was brought, by the king's 
orders, to trial for high treason. He was found guilty 
and condemned to death, and Charles flatly refused any 
pardon for the false accuser of his wife. 

What we have said has been said briefly and 



28 A SCAMFS PROBATION 

hurriedly. What Charles II did, to his great and un- 
dying honour, has not been puffed out or magnified ; but 
it amounts at least to this : that a man confessedly a 
scamp and a scapegrace had a conscience, though it 
was not overworked; that there were temptations he 
could resist ; that when it came to persecuting an ill- 
used and helpless woman, he would not hold any hand 
in the game, whatever he might seem to stand to win 
by it : but laid aside his habitual indolence to work in 
her defence. That he would purchase neither popu- 
larity nor personal gratification and profit at the cost of 
baseness, or by consenting to let injustice be done to 
wife or brother. That, where a much-glorified king 
failed, he, who has never been glorified at all, did not 
fail. Not once but on many different occasions, there 
came to him an easy chance of doing, or allowing to be 
done, something which would have been convenient to 
himself and he would not : it was too bad for him 
potuit transgredi, et non est transgressus : facere 'mala 
et non fecit. 



" THE ENTAIL " : AN APPRECIATION 

EEALLY great reputations have a vitality which enables 
them to survive that on which they were originally 
grounded. 

Thus Johnson's was assured by his written works 
long before Boswell had given the man himself and 
his talk to all the world ; but, though Johnson's reputa- 
tion has suffered no diminution, the number of those 
who now read the works themselves is probably not 
great. Miss Jenkyns preferred them to Dickens, but, 
then, she would neither read Dickens nor listen when 
Captain Brown " poor, dear, deluded man " would 
try to read him aloud to her ; and of the very many 
who prefer Dickens to Johnson there are few who ever 
read even JRasselas, and if possible, fewer still who 
have read London, or The Vanity of Human Wishes. 
It makes no difference : Johnson is as famous as when 
people were praising and quoting both of those majestic 
works, and his fame is not confined to the immense, 
and not decreasing, number of those to whom Boswell 
is ever dear, or to that, perhaps, less numerous body 
who still read and delight in the doctor's own Towr 
to the Hebrides. Swift, who took care never to go 
to the Hebrides, and had no Boswell, is still a giant 
among the giants of literature, and few there be who 
read him. And yet the vigorous life of his fame is not 
to be explained by the mere fact that very great 
writers have taken him for theme. That he failed to 



30 "THE ENTAIL 11 : AN APPRECIATION 

extort a bishopric from Queen Anne can hardly sur- 
prise us ; he did not fail in exacting from his con- 
temporaries a fame so overtopping that it is little 
attenuated now, though more than two centuries and 
a half have passed since sceva indignatio ceased to tear 
his angry heart. 

Johnson, we may believe, was greater than any- 
thing he wrote ; Swift's writing was as great as himself, 
and would suffice for his portrait if we had no other. 
It does him no injustice, and almost anything a bio- 
grapher might say of him ;would seem unjust were not 
his work there to sanction it. 

Fear should cast out perfect love, and it would not 
appear difficult to have feared Johnson ; nevertheless, 
he was loved, and is loved by many now. Swift one 
could only fear, and he is fearful still. His hatred of 
mankind was sincere, and he made no exception in his 
own favour. The only tribute he asked of men was 
their admiration and their hate, and it is hard to refuse 
him either. 

Almost all fame carries with it admiration, and 
almost all admiration includes some touch of affection. 
Swift's huge, but not inflated, fame has never been 
warmed by any such touch. It is the phenomenon of 
an intellect untempered by humanity, the apparition 
of an armed head, without a heart or even a stomach 
to make it human. And it is not littled by neglect, 
any more than was Swift himself. 

What is true of him, and of Johnson, is true of 
many others, of Bacon for one. His fame is much 
wider than the circle of his readers, and may be greater 
than all he wrote. It weathers even the silly storm 
stirred about his name in a teacup by the lady with 
the frightful name who extorts from him a blushing 



"THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 31 

admission of his having " written Shakespeare." Oddly 
enough, it has not yet been discovered that Virgil was 
the real author of the Divine Comedy, the manuscript 
of which Dante basely converted to his own mediaeval 
uses, and made the vehicle of local and personal ani- 
mosities. " If and when " the twentieth century shall 
ever have worked out its own plentiful fooleries it may 
have leisure for the discovery : that enfant terrible is 
at present too deeply engaged upon original matter. 

If one may back-skip so far to such trivial purpose, 
Sappho affords a fine instance of great fame surviving 
that on which it must have been based : though her 
undoubted claims on the score of personal impropriety 
will keep it alive during the present age at least. 
Meanwhile let it rest on a piece. 

Richardson's reputation stands on too much : the 
pedestal is by far too big for the statue : and he would, 
for me, be all the more welcome to it if it stood on 
a great deal less I do not say the less the better, but 
much less would have been much better. If Johnson 
had not made up his mind that Richardson was moral 
and Fielding wasn't, the former novelist might have 
been less illustrious and posterity been as much enter- 
tained. All the same Richardson could undoubtedly 
have written a good novel or so if he had chosen 
other themes and kept his characters less under his 
own thumb. The Bookseller and the Prig in Soots 
would have done for titles, and the treatment should 
have been autobiographical ; all the correspondence 
between his characters should have been committed to 
the flames, and when his heroines wallowed in reflec- 
tions his great gifts of decorum should have forbidden 
him to look on. If there were humbugs in his time 
Richardson must ere this have had to answer for it. 



32 "THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 

Fielding was certainly not a humbug, and he was 
anything rather than a prig ; neither did he think of 
posing as one in the interests of the public. He did 
not pose at all, nor did Tom Jones, who might, on 
occasion, have behaved like somebody else without 
damage to his character. He was not a modest young 
man, but he was, at any rate, free from the prurient 
modesty of Richardson's young women, and he might 
have been better than he was if Fielding had perceived 
anything amiss in him. Fielding, I imagine, could 
have made him much worse and have thought no 
worse of him. No one doubts that Fielding deserves 
his fame, but what we may doubt is that the number of 
his readers bears any proportion to it. 

The same may be said of those whose fame is, as it 
should be, immensely greater. Macaulay, no doubt, 
could learn Paradise Lost by heart while he was 
shaving, and would read it again after tea in spite of 
knowing it by heart ; but there is too much reason to 
fear that few now read that august epic of damnation, 
while all treasure Milton's fame as a national possession, 
and it is as great as ever, though it is exceptional to see 
Paradise Lost in the hands of them that go down to 
the earth in tubes or occupy their business in motor- 
' buses. It would probably be as great as ever even if 
Comus and Lycidas 'and the Ode on the Nativity had 
never been written, as they will forever be read with 
an amaze of admiration and delight. 

Dante is much greater than Milton, as much greater 
as the Divine Comedy is greater than Paradise Lost* 
and his fame is greater even in England, yet there are 
not ten Englishmen who ever read ten cantos of the 
Inferno, even in a translation, for ten thousand who 
have read Lycidas and have read it with a personal 



"THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 33 

joy not dictated by mere submission to criticism or 
convention. Dante's fame, and his right to it they do 
take on trust, with a just, though in them eccentric, 
admission of the principle of authority. 

That is what all we have written comes to the 
fame of the great is independent of the knowledge of 
the little : and greater than the proofs of it that some 
of the great themselves have given. In some cases 
the reputation may have been overstrained : in the 
best it is justified by the men themselves, whose visible, 
or legible, work was only a part of themselves, and 
must have been less than they. Of course, all great 
fame is not that of letters, but the realm of letters is, 
on the whole, less contentious than those other realms 
in which the great bear sway. Even such as are great 
themselves do not always esteem correctly the great- 
ness of others : Macaulay, for instance, never dreamed 
that Newman was a greater man than himself, not 
because he placed himself too high, but because he 
placed Newman almost nowhere : the single fact that 
the Oratorian was one was enough to throw him, for 
Macaulay, into a false perspective. Theology was to 
Macaulay a dead language, and the only one that 
bored him. 

Carlyle over-esteemed Mirabeau, and no doubt 
Heine under-estimated Wellington, as almost all 
Wellington's countrymen and contemporaries under- 
estimated Napoleon. Whether Napoleon himself had 
a just appreciation of Wellington we can hardly decide, 
for he did not always pronounce the same judgment, 
and he said what he chose to say without any special 
reference to what he thought. 

Burke was a greater orator than any speech of his 
would of itself prove, and his fame outlives his oratory, 

c 



34 "THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 

of which little is now read by anyone, and nothing by 
the vast majority of those who hold him famous. 

Some reputations have been posthumous, not as 
merely surviving the vogue of that which created them, 
but in a much rarer and more surprising sense as 
actually coming to birth after the death of those 
who, at last, achieved them. One instance is that 
of Chatterton, a more recent instance that of Emily 
Bronte. In her lifetime it never seems to have occurred 
to anyone that she was even equal to her sister, than 
whom she was immeasurably greater ; by many it was 
urged that Charlotte must have been the real author 
of Wuthering Heights, which she was totally incapable 
of writing ; and that Jane Eyre was Charlotte Bronte's 
greatest work was assumed as being without question 
by those who imagined she had written Wuthering 
Heights also. The same estimate of the two books held 
ground for more than a generation after Emily Bronte's 
death : among many it holds ground still ; nevertheless 
the astounding greatness of her work is now being more 
and more perceived, and her fame is surely, if slowly, 
coming to its own. 

Johnson thought Tristram Shandy odd, and said 
that on that account it would not live : to an early 
Victorian public Wuthering Heights may have appeared 
odd and uncouth, too. It considered Jane Eyre im- 
proper, and of doubtful morality ; but it recognised 
that the work was one of genius the incomparably 
higher genius of Wuthering Heights escaped it alto- 
gether. 

Tristram, Shandy is odd enough, but its oddity is 
the author's whim, and it has in it qualities that other 
odd books wholly lack. Peacock was as odd as Sterne, 
but his oddity is about all he has, at all events it 



"THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 35 

smothers all else there might have been. Crazy Castle 
and Headlong Hall are as exotic to this world as the 
Voyage to Laputa, and no dazzle of brilliance can save 
them from being almost tedious and barely readable. 
If Johnson could have handled them he might have 
"looked them over," in a sense not Mr. Tappertit's, 
but he would not have read them. 

Tristram Shandy, besides being odd, is unique ; 
Wuthering Heights is more than unique : it stands not 
only alone but aloof, in an isolation that is as tragic 
as itself, more tragic than its amazing creator. In 
Tristram Shandy there is not a breath of passion } 
Wuthering Heights is all passion, and without one 
touch of that which our novelists of to-day mean by 
it. Heathcliff is as free from animalism as Lucifer 
himself. 

There are passages in Balzac's Pere Qoriot that can 
remind us of nothing short of King Lear : there is not 
a passage in Wuthering Heights that suggests a parallel 
with anything in any other book ever written. Per- 
haps that is why it appeared, to those who saw its 
birth, still-born. It is a mania of criticism to ferret 
out family likenesses. " This book in its best chapters 
reminds us of Thackeray in his worst." " The writer's 
wit proves him to have read Dickens when Dickens 
was straining after it." " Kenelm Chillingly is a 
sincere flattery of Richard Feverel." "Robert Elsmere 
is the result of a lady's indigestion of John Inglesant " 
and so following. 

As there was no acknowledged masterpiece with 
which Wuthering Heights could be compared, it did 
not, for a long time, seem advisable to recognise it as a 
masterpiece at all. 

One posthumous reputation is even yet unborn, 



36 "THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 

though still longer overdue than was that of Emily 
Bronte. John Gait was born at Irvine, in Ayrshire, 
nearly forty years before the birth of Emily Bronte', and 
he died nearly ten years before her. His fame, when it 
arrives, will not rest on his epic poem of The Battle 
of Largs, which no one will ever read again, and which 
he had the sense to want no one to read. It will rest on 
three of his prose works, whereof only two are now read 
at all, and those two but little, and of which that which 
is neglected altogether is by far the best. Besides these 
three he wrote, first, his Letters from the Levant, which 
were noted at the time and are worth attention now, 
and eight pieces of fiction : Sir Andrew Wylie, The 
Provost, The Steamboat, Ringan Gilhaize, The Spae- 
wife, The Omen, Rothelan, and The Last of the Lairds. 
They are not only readable still, but are very worthy 
of being read. They are not so good but what they 
might be improved, and their author himself could 
have improved them, and made them not merely good 
but excellent. They have a shrewd wit, and many 
characters that deserve a fuller and less hurried pre- 
sentment. When Gait wishes to be weird he may be 
too Ossianic, but he does not fail ; when he is content 
to be quaint his success, even in these eight tales, is 
very great. 

But no one to whom Gait is unknown should begin 
with them, lest his real claims should be undervalued. 
Anyone who has learned the value of his best work will 
be glad that they exist, and glad to return to them if 
he can find them, for copies of Gait's books are not 
too easily come by. 

His three longest books are his three best, which is 
not always the case with great writers of fiction. 
George Eliot's shortest was also her most perfect, and 



"THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 37 

her longest is among her most imperfect, though it 
is not her least good. Mrs. Gaskell's shortest work has 
a perfection that sets it by itself and makes it hard to 
realise that the rest, with all their high merit, were by 
the same author. 

John Gait's three long books were The Ayrshire 
Legatees, The Annals of the Parish, and The Entail, 
which we have arranged in the order of their appear- 
ance. 

The first has the demerit of being written in a series 
of letters, like Humphrey Clinker, and in it the young 
man's letters are, like the young man's in Humphrey 
Clinker, the least entertaining. For iny part I hate 
tales so told. Redgauntlet suffers from it, and so does 
even Guy Mannering, though in the latter book Scott 
indulges his characters less, and snatches the pen out 
of their hands with less ceremony. 

But most of the letters in The Ayrshire Legatees are 
uncommonly amusing : Mrs. Pringle's are funnier than 
Miss Bramble's, and of Miss Bramble's we have not 
nearly enough in Humphrey Clinker. Dr. Pringle has 
no counterpart in Mr. Bramble, and he never perse- 
cutes us with essays. The doctor really wrote letters, 
and it was no wonder the Kirk Session of Garnock 
read them aloud in full " sederunt " : they were not 
often, we may fancy, so well entertained. As for the 
doctor's daughter she is, at all events, better company 
than Mr. Bramble's niece. 

To give extracts, or pick out specimens, from the 
letters in The Ayrshire Legatees, must be a very in- 
adequate way of trying to give any just idea of their 
excellence as a whole. No one, to whom Miss Austen 
was unknown, would arrive at any fair estimate of 
her singular perfection by reading any extract shorter 



.. 



38 "THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 

than an entire chapter, and only a whole chapter of 
Cranford would be of any use as a specimen. The more 
equal to itself a book is throughout, the less does it lend 
itself to brief quotation : little slips of allusion are for 
the intimate not for the stranger. To attempt extracts 
from The Ayrshire Legatees is the less necessary that 
the book was reprinted some years ago by the Mac- 
millans with delightful illustrations by Mr. Charles 
Brock. Did not his age (or his lack of it) forbid, one 
would say he must have known Mrs. Glibbans, Mr. 
Micklewham, and the Pringles. 

But with The Entail, by far Gait's greatest work, the 
case is altogether different : no reprint of the book has 
appeared for many years, and copies of it are rarely 
met with. There is no other excuse for the neglect 
of it. How so fine a work of a very peculiar genius 
should have fallen out of all notice, and out of almost 
all remembrance, it is hard to say, and cannot be 
lightly accounted for by merely saying that contem- 
porary taste is bad. There must be a " reading " public 
with very bad taste or there would be no market for 
what is, perhaps, most saleable in latter-day fiction ; 
but there must be another reading public with a more 
healthy appetite, or it would never pay the publishers 
to reproduce, as they are doing, in large quantities, 
nearly every novel that ranks in any way as a classic. 

When The Entail appeared it was not passed over 
in silence, though it appeared when the world might 
almost fairly have pleaded the excuse of preoccupation : 
Sir Walter Scott had taken novel-readers by storm, 
and was still holding the field against all comers. He 
himself read The Entail thrice, and Byron, whose taste 
was not identical with his, also read it three times 
within a few months of its publication. Of one of 



"THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 39 

its characters he said to Lord Blessington, "The por- 
traiture of Leddy Grippy is, perhaps, the most complete 
and original that has been added to the female gallery 
since the days of Shakespeare." Lord Jeffrey, whose 
praise was seldom so impulsive as Byron's blame, and 
never so cordially profuse as Scott's praise, spoke and 
wrote of the new book in terms that were, from him, 
those of high eulogy. 

" Christopher North," himself less universally re- 
membered than he would have liked to foresee, reviewed 
The Entail hi Blackwood soon after it appeared, and 
arrived at the judgment that Gait was " inferior only 
to two living writers of fictitious narratives to him 
whom we need not name, and to Miss Edgeworth." 

It will readily be taken for granted that anything of 
Gait's must be inferior to anything of Scott's or of 
Miss Edgeworth's by those who have never read The 
Entail, and only know their Scott and their Edgeworth 
as George Eliot's auctioneer knew Latin. But it might 
puzzle them to tell us in which of their books either 
Sir Walter or Maria did better than Gait, what he 
did in The Entail. We take leave to think that on 
his own ground Gait was not beaten by Scott, Miss 
Edgeworth, or anybody else. To say that he excelled 
them in the line he chose for himself is not to belittle 
them in theirs, nor does it imply that he was their 
equal, much less their superior : Scott was immeasur- 
ably greater than Gait as a romanticist, as he was 
also immeasurably greater than Miss Edgeworth. It 
is not in romance that she excelled, but in graphic 
and spontaneous preservation of queer, fresh, and 
extraordinarily living characters some of irresistible 
comedy, and a few of quite poignant pathos. Sir 
Walter tells a far better tale, and had many more tales 



40 "THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 

to tell, but those who love him best love him less for the 
tales than for the folk with whom he has peopled them. 

Gait was not a romanticist of a high order, but, in 
The Entail especially, though by no means in The 
Entail only, he created and kept in vivid, consistent 
life a great number of characters as original, striking, 
and real as any in the whole rich treasury of the 
Waverleys, or any in Castle Rackrent and The Absentee. 
They were not borrowed from Scott or from Miss Edge- 
worth, nor suggested by them, or by any other of Gait's 
predecessors or contemporaries. 

Sir Walter never thought of Leddy Grippy, nor of 
Watty: had he thought of them he could not have 
improved them. Scott is fond of lawyers, good and 
bad ; the lawyers, good and bad, in The Entail, are as 
characteristic and, at least, as real and convincing as 
any in all Scott. In The Entail there is one bore, and 
in her the fell disease takes the Ossianic form than 
which none could be conceived more fatal. Norna of 
the Fitful Head had it, though in her the malady had 
become chronic in the last stages of cure. But Mrs. 
Eadie is the only bore in The Entail, and we suspect 
Gait put her in out of deference to a now fortunately 
obsolete fashion. Writers much nearer our own time 
have also bored the public by not realising how soon 
a "phase of contemporary thought" becomes a tire- 
some reminiscence of discarded folly or affectation. 
We have admitted that Gait as a weaver of romance 
does not rank specially high ; nevertheless there is a 
romance in The Entail, though not of the conven- 
tional pattern. It is not the romance of period, or 
circumstance, or apparatus, but the romance of a fixed 
idea, and that idea possesses a man who would appear 
repulsive to any sort of romantic handling. He is not 



"THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 41 

handsome, nor is he, in any sense, noble ; his surround- 
ings are mean, and he is mean ; no glamour of stirring 
times sheds upon him a glow that lay outside himself. 
There is no pathos of a lost cause ennobling ignorance, 
no venturing all in a tragic gamble for a forlorn hope 
that the readers know all along to have been forlorn 
and hopeless. 

Claud Walkinshaw was wholly unlovable as he was 
entirely selfish, but his selfishness was not of a common 
sort. He was a money-grubber, and the greed of 
money made htm shamelessly unjust and intolerably 
cruel, nevertheless he wanted, for himself, neither the 
pleasures money can buy, nor the mere possession of 
the shining yellow friends themselves. He only wanted 
wealth to spend it, but there was only one thing on 
which he could bear to spend it. 

His grandfather was a laird of reduced fortune, to 
whose family for many generations certain lands had 
belonged. The last remnant of the ancient patrimony 
he lost by trying to make a fortune in the Darien 
scheme. At the same time he lost his only son whom 
he had sent out in one of the company's ships. The 
grandson, Claud Walkinshaw, " was scarcely a year 
old when his father sailed, and his mother died of a 
broken heart on hearing that her husband, with many 
of his companions, had perished of disease or famine 
among the swamps of the mosquito shore. The Kittle- 
stonheugh estate was soon after sold, and the laird, with 
Claud, retired into Glasgow, where he rented the upper 
part of a back house in Aird's Close, in the Drygate. 
The only servant whom in this altered state he could 
afford to retain, or rather the only one that he could 
not get rid of, owing to her age and infirmities, was 
Maudge Dobbie, who, in her youth, was bairns-woman 



42 THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 

to his son. She had been upwards of forty years in 
the servitude of his house ; and the situation she had 
filled to the father of Claud did not tend to diminish 
the kindliness with which she regarded the child, 
especially when, by the ruin of her master, there was 
none but herself to attend him. . . ." "The solitary 
old laird had not long been settled in his sequestered 
and humble town retreat, when a change became 
visible both in his appearance and manners. He had 
formerly been bustling, vigorous, hearty, and social ; but 
from the first account of the death of his son, and 
the ruin of his fortune, he grew thoughtful and seden- 
tary, shunned the approach of strangers, and retired 
from the visits of his friends. Sometimes he sat for 
whole days without speaking, and without even noticing 
the kitten-like gambols of his grandson; at others he 
would fondle over the child, and caress him with more 
than a grandfather's affection ; again, he would peevishly 
brush the boy away as he clasped his knees, and hurry 
out of the house with short and agitated steps. His 
respectable portliness disappeared; his clothes began 
to hang loosely upon him; his colour fled; his face 
withered; and his legs wasted into mere shanks. 
Before the end of the first twelve months he was either 
unwilling or unable to move unassisted from the old 
armchair in which he sat from morning to night, with 
his grey head drooping over his breast; and one 
evening, when Maudge went to assist him to undress, 
she found he had been for some time dead. After the 
funeral Maudge removed with the penniless orphan 
to a garret-room in the Saltmarket, where she en- 
deavoured to earn for him and for herself the humble 
aliment of meal and salt by working stockings. In 
this condition she remained for some time, pinched 



"THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 43 

with poverty, but still patient with her lot, and pre- 
serving, nevertheless, a neat and decent exterior. It 
was only in the calm of the Sabbath evenings that she 
indulged in the luxury of a view of the country ; and 
her usual walk on these occasions, with Claud in her 
hand, was along the brow of Whitehill, which she 
perhaps preferred because it afforded her a distant view 
of the scenes of her happier days; and while she 
pointed out to Claud the hills and lands of his fore- 
fathers, she exhorted him to make it his constant en- 
deavour to redeem them. . . ." Every other lesson the 
faithful, good woman tried to teach was coldly learned 
and little remembered: that one lesson became the 
motive-power of the boy's life. As a mere child of 
eleven years old he started pedlar, and grew up " sly 
and gabby," frugal, miserly, laborious, and prudent : by 
the time he was a young man he could have kept his 
old nurse in decent comfort, but he was too eagerly 
saving, and left her alone and unvisited. The kind 
woman, rich then, but herself in fallen fortunes now, 
who had equipped his pack long ago, would inquire 
if he gave Maudge any of his winnings, but the old, 
bed-ridden, dying foster-mother could only say : 

" I hope, poor lad, he has more sense than to think 
o' the like o' me. Isna he striving to make a conquest 
of the lands of his forefathers ? Ye ken he's come 
o' gentle blood, and I am nae better than his servan'," 
then would she turn herself to the wall and implore 
the Father of Mercies to prosper his honest endeavours, 
and that he might ne'er be troubled in his industry 
with any thought about such a burden as it had 
pleased heaven to make her to the world. 

So old Maudge died, alone and unhelped by the lad 
who had never known any other mother; but he 



44 "THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 

throve and put money together till at last, as a young 
man, he was able to settle himself in Glasgow as a 
cloth merchant, and in this trade he prospered too, 
so that after some years he was able to buy back the 
farm of Grippy, part of the old estate of Kittleston- 
heugh. Adjoining the lands of Grippy lay those of 
Plealands, whose laird had an only child, Miss Girzy 
Hypel, who was not so specially attractive as to have 
been exactly pestered by the importunities of lovers. 
When her father gave her to understand that he and 
the laird of Grippy had decided she should become 
leddy of that ilk she had no objection, and in due 
course she was married to Claud, and bore him three 
sons and a daughter. In due course also the laird of 
Plealands died, entailing that property on his daughter's 
second son, Watty, which he did because he did not 
think Charlie, her eldest, would be allowed by Claud 
to change the name of Walkinshaw for that of Hypel. 
But as it turned out there was such a flaw in the deed 
as enabled Watty to have the lands and keep his 
father's name. Charlie married, for love, a girl of good 
birth and breeding, but penniless, and old Claud 
secretly disinherited him by a deed of entail of his own 
the entail that gives its name to the book. The 
laird's mixture of motives hi this act of cruelty and 
injustice are given with singular power and insight. 
His eldest son's marriage had bitterly angered and dis- 
appointed him, but it was not out of mere rancour 
or revenge that he cheated him of the inheritance : 
what he could not resist was the temptation to bind 
together the lands of Grippy and Plealands, to which 
he could add those of Kilmarkeckle by marrying Watty 
to Betty Bodle, the only child of the laird of that ilk. 
The scheme was all the more alluring that he saw his 



. 
"THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 45 

way to an exchange of Watty's own estate of Plealands 
for another bit of old Walkinshaw property the Divet- 
hill. If Claud could be said to love anyone, he loved 
his eldest son, the manly, handsome, generous-hearted 
Charlie ; and for poor Watty, more than half daft, he 
had less than a father's natural affection; but no 
human affection could weigh against the laird's life- 
longing which was that there might be again a 
Walkinshaw of Kittlestonheugh. 

On the way home from the lawyer's office where the 
entail had been executed, neither Charlie nor Watty 
understanding aught of its purport, " the old man 
held no communion with Watty, but now and then 
rebuked him for hallooing at birds in the hedges, or 
chasing butterflies, a sport so unbecoming his years," 
for Watty was a strapping young man, big and well- 
favoured, had there been the steady light of reason 
on his comely face. 

In their way they had occasion to pass the end of 
the path which led to Kilmarkeckle, where Miss Bodle, 
the heiress, resided with her father, and the laird 
resolved to put that business in train at once. 

"Watty," he said to his son, "gae thy ways harne 
by thyser, and tell thy mither I'm gaun up to Kil- 
markeckle to hae some discourse wi' Mr. Bodle, so 

that she needna weary if I dinna come hame to my 

j- 
dinner. 

" Ye had better come hame," said Watty, " for there's 
a sheep's head in the pat wi' a cuff o' the neck like ony 
Glasgow bailie's: Ye'll no get the like o't at Kil- 
markeckle, where the kail's sae thin that every pile 
o' barley runs roun' the dish bobbing and bidding 
gude-day to its neighbour." 

Claud had turned into the footpath from the main 
road, but there was something in this speech which did 



46 "THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 

more than provoke his displeasure ; and he said aloud, 
with an air of profound dread, " I hope the Lord can 
forgie me for what I hae done for this fool." 

Watty remembered that the Leedy o' Grippy, his 
mother, had warned him to sign no papers, and he had 
signed only for the guinea his father had promised 
him ; he began now, with obstreperous sobs and wails, 
to weep and cry, "My father and our Charlie hae 
fastened on me the black bargain o' a law-plea to 
wrang me o' auld daddy's mailing." 

For Claud had not dared to tell even his wife of the 
iniquity he proposed against their eldest son, though 
Charlie was not the leddy's favourite indeed, so far, 
she had been taking Watty's part against his father's 
" mislikening." 

Knowing whom he had really cozened, Claud was for 
a few moments overpowered by a sense of shame and 
dread : the idiotcy of the heir he had made had never 
so horribly disgusted him before : it seemed as if the 
hand of heaven had fallen more heavily on him. 

The old man sat down on a low dry-stone wall by 
the wayside and confessed, with clasped hands and 
bitter tears, " that he doubted he had committed a 
great sin." 

It was but a brief glint of repentance. Hearing 
someone approaching, he lifted his stick and moved 
on towards Kilmarkeckle. Before he had gone many 
paces a hand was laid on his shoulder, and he looked 
round. It was Watty, with his hat folded together in 
his hand. 

" Father," said the fool, " I hae catched a muckle 
bumbee; will ye help me haud it till I take out the 
honey blob ? " 

"I'll go hame. Watty, I'll go hame," was the only 



"THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 47 

answer Claud made in an accent of extreme sorrow. 
" I'll go hame. I daur do nae mair this day." 

And he went back with Watty as far as the main 
road, where, having again recovered his self-possession, 
he said : 

" I'm dafter than thee to gang on in this fool gait ; 
go, as I bade thee, hame and tell thy mother no to 
look for me to dinner: for I'll aiblins bide wi' Kil- 
markeckle." 

And he went to Kilmarkeckle and arranged the 
preliminaries of Watty's marriage with Betty Bodle. 
Kilmarkeckle was willing and the young woman was 
not shy. Shyness was no part of her character nor 
timidity. When the Grippy bull broke fence and bore 
down upon the Kilmarkeckle bull, who but she rushed 
forth with a flail to prevent the combat ? 

Nor did Watty dislike the notion of marrying and 
setting up house, as he supposed, on his own account 
at the Plealands. Here is the first chapter of his 
wooing : being taken by his father to ingratiate himself 
with his destined bride, Kilmarkeckle proposed to 
leave the young people alone. 

"We'll leave you to yoursel's," said Kilmarkeckle 
jocularly, "and, Watty, be brisk wi' her, lad; she can 
thole a touzle, I'se warrant." 

This exhortation had, however, no immediate effect ; 
for Walter, from the moment she made her appearance, 
looked awkward and shamefaced, swinging his hat 
between his legs, with his eyes fixed on the brazen 
head of the tongs, which were placed upright astraddle 
in front of the grate ; but every now and then he 
peeped at her from the corner of his eye with a queer 
and luscious glance, which, while it amused, deterred 
her for some time from addressing him. Diffidence, 
however, had nothing to do with the character of Miss 



48 "THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 

Betty Bodle, and a feeling of conscious superiority soon 
overcame the slight embarrassment whicn arose from 
the novelty of her situation. 

Observing the perplexity of her lover, she suddenly 
started from her seat, and advancing briskly towards 
him, touched him on the shoulder, saying : 

" Watty, I say, Watty, what's your will wi' me ? " 

" Nothing," was the reply, while he looked up know- 
ingly in her face. 

" What are fear't for ? I ken what ye're come about," 
said she, " my father has tell't me." 

At these encouraging words he leaped from his chair 
with an alacrity unusual to his character, and attempted 
to take her in his arms ; but she nimbly escaped from 
his clasp, giving him, at the same time, a smart slap 
on the cheek. 

" That's no fair, Betty Bodle," cried the lover, rub- 
bing his cheek and looking somewhat offended and 
afraid. 

" Then what gart you meddle with me ? " replied the 
bouncing girl, with a laughing bravery that soon re- 
invigorated his love. 

"I'm sure I was na' gaun to do you ony harm," was 
the reply, "no, sure as death, Betty, I would rather 
cut my finger than do you ony scaith, for I like you 
weel I canna tell you now weel ; but, if ye' 11 tak' me, 
I'll mak' you the leddy o' the Plealands in a jiffy." He 
took her by the hand, looking, however, away from 
her, as if he was not aware of what he had done. . . . 
Miss Betty was the first to break silence. 

" Weel, Watty," said she, " what are ye going to say 
to me ? " 

" Na, it's your turn to speak noo. I hae spoken my 
mind, Betty Bodle. Eh, this is a bonny hand ; and 
what a sonsy arm ye hae. I could amaist bite your 
cheek, Betty Bodle, I could." 

" Gude preserve me, Watty, ye're like a wud dog." 

She pushed him away with such vigour that he 
collapsed into her father's chair. 



"THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 49 

" I redde ye, Watty, keep your distance. Man and 
wife's man and wife ; but I'm only Betty Bodle and 
ye're but Watty Walkinshaw." 

" Od, Betty" (rubbing his elbow that he had hurt in 
his fall), "ye're desperate strong, woman; and what 
were ye the waur o' a bit slaik o' a kiss ? Howsever, 
my bonny dawty, we'll no cast out for a' that ; for if 
ye'll just marry me, and I'm sure ye'll no get anybody 
that can like ye half so weel, I'll do anything ye bid 
me ; as sure as death I will there's my hand, Betty 
Bodle, I will ; and I'll buy you the bravest satin gown 
in a' Glasgow, wi' far bigger flowers on't than any ane 
in a' Mrs. Bailie Nicol Jarvie's aught ; and we'll live in 
the Plealands House, and do naething frae dawn to 
dark but shoo ane another on a swing between the twa 
trees on the green; and I'll be as kind to you, Betty 
Bodle, as I can be, and buy you likewise a side-saddle, 
and a pony to ride on; and when the whiter comes, 
sowing the land wi' hailstones to grow frost and snaw, 
we'll sit cosily at the chimley-lug, and I'll read you a 
chapter o' the Bible, or aiblins Patie and Roger as 
sure's death I will, Betty Bodle." 

They were duly and soon married, and the descrip- 
tion of their wedding neither Smollett nor Scott could 
have bettered, but Watty's wedded bliss was short- 
lived. Not a year was gone by when one evening, as 
Claud sat on his wonted bench outside the house of 
Grippy, he saw Walter coming. There was something 
unwonted in his appearance and gestures. 

At one moment he rushed forward several steps, 
with a strange wildness of air. He would then stop 
and wring his hands, gaze upwards, as if he wondered 
at some extraordinary phenomenon in the sky ; but 
seeing nothing, he dropped his hands, and at his 
ordinary pace came slowly up the hill. When he came 
within a few paces of the bench, he halted, and looked 

D 



50 "THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 

with such an open and innocent sadness, that even the 
heart of his father throbbed with pity and was melted 
to a degree of softness and compassion. 

" What's the matter wi' thee, Watty ? " said he with 
unusual kindness. The poor natural, however, made 
no reply, but continued to gaze at him with the same 
inexpressible simplicity of grief. 

" Hast t'ou lost anything, Watty ? " 

" I dinna ken," was the answer, followed by a burst 
of tears. 

" Surely something dreadfu' has befallen thee, lad," 
said Claud to himself, alarmed at the astonishment of 
sorrow with which his faculties seemed to be bound up. 

" Canst t'ou no tell me what has happened, Watty ? " 

In about the space of half a minute Walter moved 
his eyes slowly round, as if he saw and followed some- 
thing which filled him with awe and dread. He then 
suddenly checked himself and said : " It's naething 
she's no there." 

"Sit down beside me, Watty, sit down beside me, 
and compose thysel'." 

Walter did as he was bidden, and, stretching out his 
feet, hung forward in such a posture of extreme list- 
lessness and helpless despondency that all power of 
action appeared to be withdrawn. 

Claud rose, and believing he was only under the 
influence of some of those silly passions to which he 
was occasionally subject, moved to go away, when 
Watty looked up and said : 

"Father, Betty Bodle's dead my Betty Bodle's 
dead!" 

" Dead ! " said Claud, thunderstruck. 

" Ay, father, she's dead ! My Betty Bodle's dead ! " 

"Dost t'ou ken what t'ou's saying?" But Walter, 
without attending to the question, repeated with an 
accent of tenderness still more simple and touching : 

" My Betty Bodle's dead ! She's awa' up aboon the 
skies yon'er, and left me a wee wee baby ; " in saying 
which he again burst into tears, and, rising hastily 



"THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 51 

from the bench, ran wildly back towards the Divethill 
House. 

The old man followed and found poor Betty Bodle 
had indeed died in giving birth to a daughter, and to 
her the Divethill must belong, so that the reunited 
Kittlestonheugh property must again be divided. 
Already the old man was scheming how to get the 
better of the Providence that seemed against his 
plans. Watty was pliant, and must marry again, and 
have a son. But Watty's pliancy was changed to a 
witless obstinacy. He was henceforth fiercely sus- 
picious of the rights of his "wee Betty Bodle." At 
first he sat by his dead wife, with hands folded and 
head drooping. 

He made no answer to any question; but as often 
as he heard the infant's cry, he looked towards the bed, 
and said with an accent of indescribable sadness, " My 
Betty Bodle ! " 

When the coffin arrived, his mother wished him to 
leave the room, apprehensive, from the profound grief 
in which he was plunged, that he might break out 
into some extravagances of passion, but he refused ; 
and, when it was brought in, he assisted with singular 
tranquillity in the ceremonial of the coffining. But 
when the lid was lifted, and placed over the body, and 
the carpenter was preparing to fasten it down for ever, 
he shuddered for a moment from head to foot, and, 
raising it with his left hand, he took a last look at the 
face, removing the veil with his right, and touching 
the cheek as if he had hoped still to feel some ember 
of life : but it was cold and stiff. 

" She's clay noo," said he. " There's nane o' my 
Betty Bodle here." 

And he turned away with a careless air, as if he 
had no further interest in the scene. From that 



52 "THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 

moment his artless affections took another direction. 
He immediately quitted the death-room, and, going to 
the nursery where the infant lay asleep in the nurse's 
lap, he contemplated it for some time, and then, with 
a cheerful and happy look and tone, said, "It's a wee 
Betty Bodle, and it's my Betty Bodle noo." He would 
not leave his baby, and when they bade him dress and 
make ready to perform the husband's customary part 
in the funeral he refused to quit the child or take any 
part in the burial. 

" I canna understan'," said he, " what for a' this 
fykerie's about a lump o' yird. Sho'el't intil a hole, 
and no fash me." 

"It's your wife, my lad," said the leddy; " ye'll 
surely never refuse to carry her head in a gudeman- 
like manner to the kirkyard." 

" Na, na, mother, Betty Bodle's my wife ; yon clod 
in the black kist is but her auld boddice ; and when she 
flang it off, she put on this bonny wee new cleiding o' 
clay," said he, pointing to the baby. . . . 

"What's t'ou doing there like a hussy fellow?" 
said Claud. " Rise and get on thy mournings, and 
behave wiselike, and leave the bairn to the women." 

" It's my bairn," replied Watty, " and ye hae nae- 
thing, father, to do wi't. Will I no tak' care o' my 
ain baby my bonny wee Betty Bodle ? " 

" Do as I bid thee, or I'll maybe gar thee fin' the 
weight o' my staff," said his father sharply. . . . The 
widower looked him steadily in the face and said : 

" I'm a father noo ; it would be an awfu' thing for 
a decent grey-headed man like you, father, to strike 
the head o' a motherless family." 

" There's a judgment in this ! " cried Claud, " and if 
there's power in the law o' Scotland, I'll gar thee rue 
sic dourness. Get up, I say, and put on thy mourn- 
ings, or I'll hae thee cognost and sent to Bedlam." 

" I'm sure I look for nae mair at your hands, father," 
replied Walter simply, "for my mither has often tell't 
me, when ye hae been sitting sour and sulky in the 



"THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 53 

nook, that ye wouldna begrudge crowns and pounds to 
make me compos 'mentis for the benefit o' Charlie." 

Every pulse in the veins of Claud stood still at this 
stroke, and he staggered, overwhelmed with shame, 
remorse, and indignation, into a seat. 

The reader needs not to be reminded that the 
wretched father had beggared his first-born altogether 
and given his inheritance to this poor natural. Charlie 
had a son and a daughter of his own now, though 
Watty had a daughter only. Geordie, Claud's third 
son, married too, and after the birth of a daughter 
his wife fell into a sickly state, and no other issue could 
reasonably be expected of his marriage. Claud's 
daughter also married, to the laird of Dirdumwhamle, 
and had a son. And now perhaps we should see ex- 
actly how the Entailer had settled his estates. They 
were, then, entailed in the first instance on Watty, his 
second son, and his heirs male ; then on Geordie, the 
third son, and his heirs male, then upon the heirs male 
of Charlie, his eldest son ; and, finally, failing all 
these, on the heirs general of his daughter Margaret. 

Now the leddy o' Grippy began match-making in 
her own mind, as her husband was always doing ; but, 
alas ! their schemes by no means tallied hers was 
that Margaret's son should, when he was grown up, 
marry Watty's daughter, whereas Claud hoped that 
by the marriage of Charlie's son with Watty's daughter 
the estate might still be kept together in the hands 
of a Walkinshaw. 

Meanwhile Charlie was in debt and tried to borrow 
the not very grievous sum of two hundred pounds 
to put himself right again. He went to Mr. Keelevin, 
the honest lawyer, who had drawn the entail, and had 
drawn it with vehement and solemn expostulation, 



54 "THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 

and saw, probably, no great difficulty in raising so 
modest a sum on his prospects as eldest son and heir of 
an increasingly wealthy father. It was only now that 
he learned he had no prospects and within a few 
weeks he was dead, broken in heart and hope. While 
he was dying Mr. Keelevin went out to the Grippy and 
attacked the old laird again, himself sick and sorry 
now. The entail could not be altered, but Claud had 
"lying siller" in plenty, and the kind lawyer was 
strongly determined to do all he could to force him 
to make, out of it, all possible compensation to his dis- 
inherited first-born. 

The leddy, still ignorant of Charlie's disinheritance, 
was equally resolved to secure a settlement in money 
for herself. Watty was only resolved on one thing 
to sign no paper whatever lest he might injure his wee 
Betty Bodle. 

The news of Charlie's death brought Claud at last 
to a dour and desperate repentance. For his father- 
less grandchildren he did make up his mind to do all 
possible; but Claud's own days were numbered. He 
was already marked for death on the day when he laid 
his first-born in the grave. A day or two later Mr. 
Keelevin appeared at the Grippy with the papers, but 
the laird was speechless, though fully conscious and 
eagerly willing to sign them. Doctor and leddy had 
been summoned, but the former declared Claud's case 
hopeless. The latter arrived, drenched to the skin, 
from visiting her son's widow in Glasgow. And now, 
rushing in, she found the lawyer with his papers, 
looking everywhere for ink and pens. 

" What's wrong noo ? " she cried. " What new judg- 
ment has befallen us ? Whatna fearfu' image is that 



"THE ENTAIL 11 : AN APPRECIATION 55 

that's making a' this rippet for the cheatin' instruments 
o' pen and ink, when a dying man's at his last gasp ? " 

" Mrs. Walkinshaw," said the lawyer, " for heaven's 
sake be quiet. Your gudeman kens very weel what I 
hae read to him. It's a provision for Mrs. Charles and 
her orphans." 

" But is there no likewise a provision for me in't ? " 
cried the leddy. ..." Ye's get neither pen nor ink 
here, Mr. Keelevin, till my rights are cognost in a 
record o' sederunt and session." 

" Hush ! " exclaimed the doctor. All was silent, and 
every eye turned on the patient, whose countenance 
was again hideously convulsed. A troubled groan 
struggled and heaved for a moment in his breast, and 
was followed by a short quivering through his whole 
frame. 

" It's all over," said the doctor. 

When the laird's funeral was over, Geordie, selfish 
and cool as he was, did try to persuade Watty into 
making some provision for their elder brother's widow 
and orphans. 

" If my father," said Walter, " did sic' a wicked thing 
to Charlie as ye a' say, what for would ye hae me to do 
as ill and as wrang to my ain bairn ? Isna wee Betty 
Bodle my first-born, and, by course o' nature and law, 
she has a right to a' I hae ; what for then would ye hae 
me to mak away wi' onything that pertains to her ? 
I'll no' be guilty o' any sic' sin. ' 

Geordie urged that their father had, in fact, intended 
to provide for his daughter-in-law and grandchildren, 
that it was but a chance the bond of provision was not 
signed. 

"Ye may say sae, Geordie," retorted Watty, "in your 
cracks at the yarn-club o'er the punch-bowl, but I 



56 "THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 

think it was the will o' Providence ; for, had it been 
ordain't that Bell and her weans were to get a part o' 
father's gear they would hae gotten't : but ye saw the 
Lord took him to Abraham's bosom before the bond 
was signed, which was a clear proof and testimony to 
me, that it doesna stand wi' the pleasure o' heaven 
that she should get onything. She'll get nothing frae 
me." 

The leddy, in all the pomp of her new weeds, who was 
at the table, with the tenth chapter of Nehemiah open 
before her, here interposed. 

"Wheesht, wheesht, Watty, and dinna blaspheme," 
said she, " and no be ou'erly condumacious ' whosoever 
giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord.' " 

" That," said Watty, " is what I canna comprehend ; 
for the Lord has no need to borrow. He can mak' a 
world o' gold for the poor folk if He likes ; and if He 
keeps them in poortith, He has His ain reasons for't." 

" Ah ! weel I wat," exclaimed the leddy pathetically, 
" noo I find to my cost that my cousin, Ringan Gilhaise 
. . . had the rights o't when he plead my father's will 
on account of concos montis." 

This gave a hint to the wily Geordie, who began 
thenceforth to feel his way to a setting aside of his 
brother, as an idiot, in which case he, as next heir of en- 
tail, would have the management of the estates. Poor 
Watty gave him chance enough. His wee Betty Bodle, 
a premature and sickly child, presently dwindled out 
of life, and Watty stole his elder brother's little girl 
and dressed her in his own bairn's clothes, calling her 
his "third Betty Bodle." And the leddy was now 
against him, for he would give her no money for house 
or board, and he had brought his brother's widow and 
her son to live at the Grippy telling her that, since 
she was finer bred than his mother, she had better 
manage things and be " leddy," as he had no wife of his 



"THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 57 

own. When the young widow perceived that plots 
were afoot against her benefactor she bade him go and 
tell Mr. Keelevin and take his counsel. 

" She has acted a true friend's part," said the lawyer. 
" And I would advise you, Mr. Walter, to keep out of 
harm's way, and no gang in the gate o' the gleds as ye 
ca' them." 

" Hae ye ony ark or crannie, Mr. Keelevin, where a 
body might den himsel' till they're out o' the gate and 
away ? " cried Walter timidly, and looking anxiously 
round the room. 

"Ye shouldna' speak sic havers, Mr. Walter, but 
conduct yourself mair like a man," said his legal friend 
grievedly ; "... tak' my advice and speak till them as 
little as possible." 

"I'll no say ae word I'll be adumbie; I'll sit as 
quiet as ony ane o' the images afore Bailie Glasford's 
house. King William himsei', on his bell-metal horse 
at the Cross, is a popular preacher, Mr. Keelevin, com- 
pared to what I'll be." 

It was too true. There was to be a legal inquiry 
into Watty's mental capacity. Of the first day's pro- 
ceedings, when other witnesses were examined, we need 
say nothing here. Nothing very materially adverse 
was elicited against the poor young man's sanity. 

Next day Watty appeared, dressed in his best, hand- 
some and only showing a reasonable anxiety and 
interest. 

" You are Mr. Walkinshaw, I believe ? " said the 
adverse counsel, Mr. Threeper, when Watty had come 
forward as bidden, and made his slow and profound bow 
to sheriff and jury. 

" I believe I am," said Watty timidly. 

" What are you, Mr. Walkinshaw ? "" 



58 "THE ENTAIL 11 : AN APPRECIATION 

"A man, sir; my mother and brother want to mak' 
me a daft ane." 

" How do you suspect them of any such inten- 
tions ? " 

" Because, ye see, I'm here. I wouldna' hae been 
here but for that." 

" Then do you think you are a daft man ? " 

"Nobody thinks himsel' daft. I daresay ye think 
ye're just as wise as me." 

A roar of laughter shook the court, and Threeper 
blushed and was disconcerted ; but he soon resumed 
tartly : 

" Upon my word, Mr. Walkinshaw, you have a good 
opinion of yourself. I should like to know for what 
reason ? " 

"That's a droll question to speer at a man," said 
Walter; "a poll-parrot thinks weel o' itsel', which is 
but a feathered creature, and short o' the capacity o' 
man by twa hands." 

Mr. Keelevin trembled and grew pale ; and the 
advocate, recovering full possession of his assurance, 
proceeded : 

"And so ye think, Mr. Walkinshaw, that the two 
hands make all the difference between a man and a 
parrot ? " 

" No, no, sir," replied Watty, " I dinna think that 
for ye ken the beast has feathers." 

" And why have not men feathers ? " 

" That's no a right question, sir, to put to the like o' 
me, a weak human creature, you should ask their 
Maker," said Walter gravely. 

The advocate was again repulsed ; . . . . George sat 
shivering from head to foot : a buzz of satisfaction 
pervaded the whole court. 

" Well, but not to meddle with such mysteries," said 
Mr. Threeper, assuming a jocular tone, " I suppose you 
think yourself a very clever fellow ? " 

" At some things," replied Walter modestly, " but I 
dinna like to mak a roos o' mysel'." 



THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 59 

"And pray now, Mr. Walkinshaw, may I ask what 
you think you do best ? " 

" Man ! an' ye could see how I can sup curds and 
cream there's no ane in a' the house can ding me." 

The sincerity and exultation with which this was 
expressed convulsed the court, and threw the advocate 
completely on his beam-ends. However, he soon 
righted, and proceeded : 

" I don't doubt your ability in that way, Mr. Walkin- 
shaw ; and I daresay you can play a capital knife and 
fork." 

" I'm better at the spoon," replied Walter, laughing. 

"Well, I must confess you are a devilish clever 
fellow." 

" Mair sae, I'm thinking, than ye thought, sir. But 
noo, since," continued Walter, "ye hae speer't sae many 
questions at me, will ye answer one yourseP ? " 

" Oh, I can have no possible objection to do that, Mr. 
Walkinshaw." 

"Then," said Walter, "how muckle are ye to get 
frae my brother for this job ? " 

Again the court was convulsed, and the questioner 
again disconcerted. 

" I suspect, brother Threeper," said the sheriff, " that 
you are in the wrong box." 

"I suspect so, too," replied the advocate, laughing; 
but, addressing himself again to Walter, he said : 

" You have been married, Mr. Walkinshaw?" 

" Ay, auld Doctor Denholm married me to Betty 
Bodle." 

" And pray where is she ? " 

" Her mortal remains, as the headstone says, lie in 
the kirkyard." 

The countenance of Mr. Keelevin became pale and 
anxious. George and his counsel exchanged smiles of 
gratulation. 

" You had a daughter ? " said the advocate, looking 
knowingly to the jury, who sat listening with greedy 
ears. 



60 "THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 

" I had," said Walter, and glanced anxiously towards 
his agent. 

" And what became of your daughter ? " 

No answer was immediately given. Walter hung 
his head and seemed troubled ; ne sighed deeply, and 
again turned his eye inquiringly to Mr. Keelevin. 
Almost every one present sympathised with his emo- 
tion, and ascribed it to parental sorrow. 

" I say," resumed the advocate, " what became of 
your daughter ?" 

"I canna answer that question." 

The simple accent in which this was uttered interested 
all in his favour still more and more. 

" Is she dead ? " said the pertinacious Mr. Threeper. 

" Folk said sae ; and what everybody says maun be 
true." 

" Then you don't, of your own knowledge, know the 
fact ? " 

" Before I can answer that, I would like to ken what 
a fact is." 

The counsel shifted his ground, without noticing the 
question, and said : 

" But I understand, Mr. Walkinshaw, you have still 
a child that you call Betty Bodle ? " 

" And what business hae ye wi' that ? " said the 
natural, offended ; " I never saw sic a stock o' impudence 
as ye hae in my life." 

"I did not mean to offend you, Mr. Walkinshaw ; I 
was only anxious, for the ends of justice, to know if 
you consider the child you call Betty Bodle as your 
daughter ? " 

"I'm sure," replied Walter, " that the ends o' justice 
would be muckle better served an ye would hae done 
wi' your speering." 

" It is, I must confess, strange that I cannot get a 
direct answer from you, Mr. Walkinshaw. Surety, as 
a parent, you should know your child ! " exclaimed the 
advocate peevishly. 

" An I was a mother ye might say sae." 



"THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 61 

Mr. Threeper began to feel that hitherto he had 
made no impression. After conferring with George's 
agent he resumed : 

" I do not wish, Mr. Walkinshaw, to harass your 
feelings; but I am not satisfied with the answer you 
have given respecting your child. ... Is the little girl 
that lives with you your daughter ? " 

" I dinna like to gie you any satisfaction on that 
head ; for Mr. Keelevin said ye would bother me if I 
did." 

" Ah ! have I caught you at last ? " 

A murmur of disappointment ran through all the 
court, and Walter looked around cowermgly and 
afraid. 

" So, Mr. Keelevin has primed you, has he ? He has 
instructed you what to say ? " 

" No," said the poor natural, " he instructed me to 
say nothing." 

"Then why did he tell you that I would bother 
you ? " 

" I dinna ken ; speer at himsel' ; there he sits." 

"No, sir! I ask you," said the advocate grandly. 

" I'm wearied, Mr. Keelevin," said Walter helplessly, 
as he looked towards his disconsolate agent. " May 
I no come away ? " 

The honest lawyer gave a deep sigh ; to which all 
the spectators sympathisingly responded. 

"Mr. Walkinshaw," said the sheriff, "don't be 
alarmed we are all friendly disposed towards you ; but 
it is necessary, for the satisfaction of the jury, that you 
should tell us what you think respecting the child that 
lives with you." 

Walter smiled and said, "I hae nae objection to 
converse wi' a weel-bred gentleman like you ; but that 
barking terrier in the wig, I can thole him no longer." 

" Well, then, is the little girl your daughter ? " 

" 'Deed is she my ain dochter." 

"How can that be, when, as you acknowledged, 
everybody said your dochter was dead ? " 



62 "THE ENTAIL": AN APPRECIATION 

"But I kent better mysel' my bairn and dochter, 
ye see, sir, was lang a weakly baby, aye bleating like 
a lambie that has lost its mother ; and she dwined and 
dwindled, and moaned and grew sleepy, sleepy, and 
then she closed her wee bonny een and lay still ; and 
I sat beside her three days and three nights, watching 
her a' the time, never lifting my een frae her face, that 
was as sweet to look on as a gowan in a lown May 
morning. But, I kenna how it came to pass I 
thought, as I looked at her, that she was changed, 
and there began to come a kirkyard smell frae the bed, 
that was just as if the hand o' nature was wishing me 
to gae away ; and then I saw, wi' the eye o' my heart, 
that my brother's wee Mary was grown my wee Betty 
Bodle, and 'so I gaed and brought her hame in my 
arms, and she is noo my dochter. But my mother has 
gaen on at me like a randy ever sin' syne, and wants 
me to put away my ain bairn, which I will never, 
never do. No, sir, I'll stand by her, and guard her, 
though fifty mothers, and fifty times fifty brother 
Geordies were to flyte at me frae morning to night." 

One of the jury here interposed, and asked several 
questions relative to the management of the estates; 
by the answers to which it appeared, not only that 
Walter had never taken any charge whatever, but that 
he was totally ignorant of business, and even of the 
most ordinary money transactions. The jury then 
turned and laid their heads together ; the legal gentle- 
men spoke across the table, and Walter was evidently 
alarmed at the bustle. In the course of two or three 
minutes, the foreman returned a verdict of fatuity. 
The poor laird shuddered, and, looking at the sheriff, 
said, in an accent of simplicity that melted every heart, 
" Am I found guilty ? Oh surely, sir, ye'll no hang me, 
for I couldna help it." 

If any trial scene in fiction is more simply touching 
than this, more life-like and less strained, I can only 
say I do not know where to find it. 



"THE ENTAIL' 1 : AN APPRECIATION 63 

But if poor Watty is the most pathetic figure in The 
Entail, his mother, the leddy, is the most entertaining 
and the most eccentric. It is only after Watty's " trial " 
that she appears in all her glory. Already there have 
been inimitable scenes between her and her husband, 
her and Watty, her and Geordie ; but her full peony- 
bloom is reserved for the second half of this wonderful 
book, of which we have dealt only with the first. If 
we are to deal with her at all, it must clearly be in 
another paper. 



- 



THE LEDDY O' GRIPPY 

ANOTHER APPRECIATION 

IN the former paper dealing with John Gait's Entail 
it was not possible to give the Leddy o' Grippy the 
elbow-room her peculiar qualities demand and her im- 
portance deserves. She takes her place among the 
Dramatis Personce of the book quite early in its course, 
but, as it continues, to Gait himself she becomes more 
and more irresistible, and she gets more and more of 
her own way, to the reader's immense pleasure. There 
is not the slightest necessity for any indication on our 
part of her remarkable talents and qualities, as they 
speak for themselves. 

The reader should, however, in order that he may 
fully understand what share she had in promoting the 
general misery of the piece, be reminded briefly of the 
story set forth in the Entail. 

Claud Walkinshaw was the penniless grandson of a 
broken laird, in whose hands the last remains of a once 
good estate had melted to nothing. The old laird died, 
and the child was supported by the frugal devotion 
of a faithful nurse, from whom he might have learned 
noble lessons of self-sacrifice, from whom he did learn 
only to dedicate his life to the recovery of some part 
at least of the lost inheritance. That there should be 
again a Walkinshaw of the Kittlestonheugh was the 
ambition to which he sacrificed natural justice and 

64 



THE LEDDY O 1 GRIPPY 65 

natural affection. Beginning as a pedlar, he scraped 
together, by the time he was a man, enough to set 
himself up in regular trade : and presently he was able 
to buy back one farm, the Grippy, which had formed 
part of the ancestral inheritance. Now, he resolved to 
marry, and beget children, and entail the property, 
that none of his descendants might have it in their 
power to commit the imprudence which had brought 
his grandfather to a morsel, and thrown himself on the 
world. After maturely considering the prospects of all 
the heiresses within the probable scope of his ambition, 
he resolved that his affection should be directed towards 
Miss Girzy Hypel, the only daughter of Malachi Hypel, 
the laird of Plealands. 

The young woman was his distant kinswoman, and 
her father, who loved law, had come into Glasgow to 
attend the judges' circuit. He came to congratulate 
Claud on the re-conquest of a part of his family estate. 

" I hear," said the laird, " that ye hae gotten a sappy 
bargain o' the Grippy. It's true some o' the lands are 
but cauld; however, cousin, ne'er fash your thumb, 
Glasgow's on the thrive, and ye hae as mony een in 
your head for an advantage as ony body I ken. But 
now that ye hae gotten a house, wha's to be the leddy ? 
I'm sure ye micht do waur than cast a sheep's e'e in at 
our door ; my dochter Girzy's o' your ain flesh and 
blood; I dinna see ony moral impossibility in her 
becoming, as the Psalmist says, ' bone of thy bone.' " 

Claud replied in his wonted couthy manner, " Nane 
o' your jokes, laird me even mysel' to your dochter ! 
Na, na, Plealands, that canna be thought o' nowadays. 
But, no to make a ridicule of sic a solemn concern, 
it's vera true that, hadna my grandfather, when 
he was grown doited, sent out a' the Kittlestonheugh 

E 



66 THE LEDDY CT GRIPPY 

in a cargo o' playocks to the Darien, I might hae been 
in a state and condition to look at Miss Girzy ; but, ye 
ken, I hae a lang clue to wind before I maun think o' 
playing the ba' wi' Fortune, in ettling so far aboun 
my reach." 

"Snuffs o' tobacco!" exclaimed the laird. "Are ye 
nae sib to oursel's ? If ye dinna fail by your ain blate- 
ness, our Girzy's surely no past speaking to. Just lay 
your leg, my man, over a side o' horse flesh, and come 
your ways, some Saturday, to speer her price." 

Finding Miss Girzy within his grasp Claud was in the 
less hurry, and cast about for a wealthier match ; but, 
failing, he determined to take what he could get ; and 
to that end wrote to Plealands, proposing a visit and 
also sent for a tailor to make him a new coat. The 
tailor was an elder of the Tron Kirk, and had much to 
say of the backslidings of the times, but opined that a 
remnant might be saved. 

" Talking," said Claud, " o' remnants, I hae a bit 
blue o' superfine ; it has been lang on hand, and the 
moths are beginning to meddle wi't I won'er if ye 
could mak me a coat o't." 

The coat was made and our lover of forty-seven rode 
forth on his wooing. He was not wont to ride, and his 
hired steed was not much wont to be ridden in his 
fashion. As Claud confessed, " Twa dyers wi' their 
beetles couldna hae done me mair detriment." How- 
ever, he did arrive at Plealands House, and as they went 
into dinner, " Girzy," said the laird, " gae to thy bed and 
bring a cod for Mr. Walkinshaw, for he'll no can thole 
to sit doun on our hard chairs." 

Girzy laughed, and returned with the pillow, which 
she herself placed in one of the armchairs, shaking and 
patting it into plumpness, as she said, " Come round 





I 

THE LEDDY O' GRIPPY 67 

here, Mr. Walkinshaw. I trow ye'll find this a safe 
easy seat. Weel do I ken what it is to be saddle-sick 
mysel'. Lordsake ! when I gaed in ahint my father to 
see the robber hanged at Ayr, I was for mair than 
three days as if I had sat doun on a heckle." When 
dinner was done and Girzy and her mother had left 
them, the two lairds fell to bargaining. 

" Weel, Grippy," said Plealands, " but I'm blithe to 
see you here; and, if I'm no mista'en, Girzy will no 
be ill to woo. Isna she a coothy and kind creature ? 
She'll mak you a capital wife. Man, it would do your 
heart good to hear how she rants among the servan' 
lasses. Lazy sluts that would like nothing better than 
to live at heck and manger, and bring their master to 
a morsel ; but I trow Girzy gars them keep a trig house 
and a birring wheel." 

"No doubt, laird," replied Claud, "but it's a com- 
fort to hae a frugal woman for a helpmate; but, ye 
ken, nowadays it's no the fashion for bare legs to come 
thegither. The wife maun hae something to put in 
the pot as well as the man ; and although Miss Girzy 
mayna be a' thegither objectionable, yet it would 
still be a pleasant thing, baith to hersel' and the man 
that gets her, an ye would just gie a bit inkling o' 
what she'll hae." 

" Isna she my only dochter ? That's a proof in test 
that she'll get a'. Naebody needs to be telled, man." 

" Vera true, laird ; but the leddy's life is in her lip, 
and, if ony thing were happening to her, ye're a hale 
man, and wha ken's what would be the upshot o' a 
second marriage ? " 

" That's looking far ben," replied the laird. 

However, he and Claud came to terms, and, in little 
more than a month, Miss Girzy was translated into the 



68 THE LEDDY CT GRIPPY 

Leddy of Grippy. In due course she blest her husband 
with a son, Charles, and on him the Grippy was at first 
entailed, but not the Plealands, for the grandfather 
would only settle it on a son of his daughter's who 
should take the name of Hypel, and of that Claud 
would not hear yet. So that when Watty arrived the 
Plealands was entailed on him all of which has been 
told in our former paper. 

At first the leddy was fonder of poor Watty than of 
his elder or younger brother, or of her daughter, and 
often enraged Claud by her praise of him. 

"I won'er to hear you, gudeman," exclaimed the 
leddy one day her father was now dead, and it was 
intolerable to Claud to think that Watty should have 
the Plealands, and that it could not be joined with 
Grippy " I won'er to hear ye aye mislikening Watty 
that gait ; he's a weel-tempered laddie, lilting like a 
linty at the door-cheek frae morning to night." 

" Singing, Girzy ! I'm really distressed to hear you ; 
to ca' yon singing ; it's nothing but lal, lal, lal, lal, wi' a 
bow and a bend backwards and forwards. As if the 
creature hadna the gumshion o' the cuckoo, the whilk 
has a note mair in its sang, although it has but twa." 

"It's an innocent sang for a' that . . . but ye hae 
just a spite at the bairn, gudeman, 'cause my father 
has made him heir o' the Plealands. That's the gospel 
truth o' your being so fain to gar folk trow that my 
Watty's daft." 

" Ye re daft, gudewife . . . there are degrees o' capacity, 
Gir2y, and Watty's, poor callan, we maun alloo between 
oursel's, has been meted by a sma' measure." 

" Weel, if ever I heard the like o' that ! If the Lord 
has dealt the brains o' our family in mutchkins and 
chapins, it's my belief that Watty got his in the biggest 



, THE LEDDY O' GRIPPY 69 

stoup ... he can say his questions without missing 
a word, as far as what is forbidden in the Tenth 
Commandment ? And I ne'er hae been able to get his 
brother beyond ' What is effectual calling ? ' ' 

" That's the vera thing . . . the callan can get ony 
thing by heart, but, after all, he's just like a book, for 
everything he learns is dead within him, and he's ne'er a 
prin's worth the wiser o't. But it's some satisfaction to 
me, that, since your father would be so unreasonably 
obstinate as to make away the Plealands past Charlie, 
he'll be punished in the gouk he's chosen for heir." 

" Gude guide us! isna that gouk yer ain bairn?" 
exclaimed the indignant mother. " Surely the man's 
fey about his entails and his properties, to speak o' the 
ill-less laddie as if it were no better than a stot or a 
stirk! Ye'll no hae the power to wrang my wean 
while the breath o' life's in my body ; so I redde ye, 
tak tent to what ye try." 

" Girzy, t'ou has a head and so has a nail." 
" Gudeman, ye hae a tongue and so has a bell." 
The leddy henceforth had it fixed in her mind that 
Claud meant, if he could, to disinherit Watty of the 
Plealands ; but, as he could not do that, and discovered 
that Watty, through a flaw in the wording of the 
settlement, need not take the name of Hypel, he did 
in fact disinherit Charles, so that Grippy and Plealands 
might keep together. Of this the leddy herself was 
kept in ignorance, for, though Claud did it, he was 
ashamed of it. When old Plealands died the minister 
of that parish betook himself, with his wife, to Grippy 
to condole with the leddy. 

"Nothing," observed Dr. Kilfuddy, "is so uncertain 
as the things of time. This dispensation which has 
been vouchsafed, Mrs. Walkinshaw, to you and yours 



70 THE LEDDY O 1 GRIPPY 

is an earnest of what we have all to look for in this 
world. But we should not be overly cast down by it, 
but lippen to eternity. . . . Your father, I am blithe to 
hear, has died in better circumstances than could be 
expected considering the trouble he has had wi' his 
lawing, leaving, as they say, the estate clear of debt, 
and a heavy soom of lying siller." 

" My father, Mr. Kilfuddy, was, as you well know, a 
most worthy character, and I'll no say hasna left a 
nest-egg, the Lord be thankit, and we maun compose 
oursel's to thole wi' what He has been pleased, in His 
gracious ordinance, to send upon us for the advantage 
of our poor sinful souls. But the burial has cost the 
gudeman a power o' money ; for my father, being the 
head o' a family, we hae been obligated to put a' the 
servants, baith here, at the Grippy, and at the Plea- 
lands, in full deep mourning, and to hing the front o' 
the laft in the kirk, as ye'll see next Sabbath, wi' a 
very handsome black cloth, the whilk cost twenty 
pence the ell, first cost out o' the gudeman's ain shop ; 
but, considering wha my father was, we could do no 
less in a' decency." 

"And I see," interfered the minister's wife, "that ye 
hae gotten a bombazeen o' the first quality. Nae 
doubt ye had it likewise frae Mr. Walkinshaw's own 
shop." 

"Na, mem," replied the mourner, "I was, as ye ken, 
at the Plealands when my father took his departal to a 
better world, and sent for my mournings frae Glasgow 
. . . but it happened to be a day of deluge, so that 
my whole commodity, on Baldy Slowgaun's cart, was 
drookit through and through, and baith the crape and 
bombazeen were rendered as soople as pudding-skins 
... a sight past expression ; and obligated me to send 



. 

THE LEDDY CT GRIPPY 71 

an express to Kilmarnock for the things I hae on, the 
outlay of whilk was a clean total loss. But, Mr. 
Kilfuddy, everything in this howling wilderness is 
ordered for the best; and, if the gudeman has been 
needcessitated to pay for twa sets o' mournings, yet 
when he gets what he'll get frae my father's gear, he 
ought to be very well content that it's nae waur." 

"What ye say, Mrs. Walkinshaw," replied the 
minister, "is very judicious ; for it was spoken at the 
funeral that your father, Plealands, couldna hae left 
muckle less than three thousand pounds of lying 
money." 

"No, Mr. Kilfuddy, it's no just sae muckle; but I'll 
no say it's ony waur than twa thousand." 

"A braw soom, a braw soom," said the spiritual 
comforter. 

At this juncture Watty the heir came rumbling into 
the room crying : 

"Mither, mither! Meg Draiks winna gie me a bit of 
auld Daddy's burial bread." 

" He's a fine spirity bairn," observed Mrs. Kilfuddy ; 
" everybody maun alloo that." 

" He's as he came frae the hand o' his Maker," replied 
the leddy, looking piously towards the minister, " and 
it's a comfort to think he's so weel provided for by my 
father." 

" Then it's true that he gets a' the Plealands 
property ? " 

" Deed is't, sir, and a braw patrimony I trow it will be 
by the time he arrives at the years o' discretion." 

" That's a lang look," rejoined the minister a little 

slyly. 

All this, however, is but a series of hints of what 
the Leddy o' Grippy was in favouring circumstances to 



72 THE LEDDY O 1 GRIPPY 

become. We hope there is no need to repeat what 
has been said in our former paper, wherein we told of 
Claud's secret disinheriting of his eldest son, and of the 
entail he made, whereby both Grippy and Plealands 
were settled on Watty, and with them the other lands 
of the old Kittlestonheugh estate he lived to buy back. 
We read of Claud's own miserable, conscience-stricken 
death, and of the death of his eldest son Charles, dis- 
inherited and broken in spirit. Watty was already a 
widower, and had lost his one child. George, his 
younger brother, had only a daughter, and the entail 
was on his heir male, so that in reality the son of the 
dead Charles was heir, but no one knew it except 
George himself, who was anxious to make up a mar- 
riage between his daughter Robina and his nephew 
James Walkinshaw, the rightful heir of entail. 

James, however, wanted to marry someone else, and 
so did Robina, her choice having fallen on another 
cousin, Walkinshaw Milrookit, son of her aunt Meg, 
third wife of the laird of Dirdumwhamle. We must 
for the present, however, return to the afternoon of 
the day whereon poor Watty had been pronounced 
fatuus by the Court. 

The scene in the parlour of Grippy, after the inquiry, 
was of the most solemn and lugubrious description. 
The leddy sat in the great chair at the fireside, in all 
the pomp of woe, wiping her eyes, ever and anon giving 
vent to the deepest soughs of sorrow. Mrs. Charles, 
with her son leaning on her knee, occupied another 
chair, pensive and anxious. George and Mr. Pitwinnoch 
(his lawyer) sat at the table, taking an inventory of 
the papers in the scrutoire, and Walter was playfully 
tickling his adopted daughter on the green before 
the window, when Mrs. Milrookit (his sister) with 



THE LEDDY O' GRIPPY 73 

her husband, the laird of Dirdumwhamle, came to 
sympathise and condole with their friends, and to 
ascertain what would be the pecuniary consequences 
of the decision to them. 

"Come awa', my dear," said the leddy, "and tak a 
seat beside me. Your poor brother, Watty, has been 
weighed in the balance o' the sheriff and found wanting ; 
and his vessels o' gold and silver, as I may say in the 
words o' Scripture, are carried away into captivity ; 
for I understand that George gets no proper right to 
them, as I expeckit, but is obligated to keep them in 
custody, in case Watty should hereafter come to years 
o' discretion. Hech, Meg ! but this is a sair day for 
us a', and for nane mair than your afflicted gude-sister 
there [Charles Walkinshaw's widow] and her twa bairns 
[whom poor daft Watty had housed since old Claud's 
death]. She'll be under a needcessity to gang back and 
live again wi' my mother, now in her ninety-third year, 
and by course o' nature drawing near her latter end." 

" And what's to become of you ? " replied Mrs. Mil- 
rookit. 

" O, I'll hae to bide here, and tak care o' everything, 
and an aliment will be alloo't to me for keeping poor 
Watty. Hech, sirs ! wha would hae thought it, that 
sic a fine lad as he ance was, and preferred by his honest 
father as the best able to keep the property right, 
would hae been thus, by decreet o' court, proven a born 
idiot ? " 

"But," interrupted Mrs. Milrookit, glancing com- 
passionately towards her sister-in-law, " I think, since 
so little change is to be made, that ye might just as 
weel let Bell and her bairns bide wi' you, for my grand- 
mother's income is little enough for her ain wants, now 
that she's in a manner bedrid." 



74 THE LEDDY O 1 GRIPPY 

" It's easy for you, Meg, to speak," replied her mother, 
" but if ye had an experiment o' the heavy handfu' 
they hae been to me, ye wad hae mair compassion for 
your mother. It's surely a dispensation sair enough to 
hae the grief and heart-breaking sight before my eyes 
of a dementit lad that was so long a comfort to me in 
my widowhood. But it's the Lord's will, and I maun 
bend the knee o' resignation." 

The reader will please remember that if poor Watty 
had been " weighed in the balances of the sheriff and 
found wanting," it was his mother who had helped to 
put him in them. 

" Is't your intent," said the laird o' Dirdumwhamle, 
" to mak any division o' what lying money there may 
hae been saved since your father's death ? " 

"I suspect there will not be enough to defray the 
costs of the process," replied George; "and if any 
balance should remain, the house really stands so much 
in need of repair, that I am persuaded there will not be 
a farthing left." 

" Deed," said the leddy, " what he says, Mr. Milrookit, 
is ouer true ; the house is in a frail condition, for it was 
like pu'ing the teeth out o' Watty's head to get him 
to do what was needful. . . . But now that we are a' 
met here, I think it wad be just as weel an we were 
to settle at once what I'm to hae, as the judicious 
curator o' Watty for, by course o' law and nature, 
the aliment will begin frae this day." 

"Yes," replied George . . . "what is your opinion, 
Mr. Milrookit, as to the amount that she should 
have ? " 

"All things considered," replied the laird of Dir- 
dumwhamle, prospectively contemplating some chance 
of a reversionary interest to his wife in the leddy's 



THE LEDDY <T GRIPPY 75 

savings, " I think you ought not to make it less than 
a hundred pounds a year." 

"A hundred pounds a year," exclaimed the leddy; 
"that'll no buy saut to his kail. I hope and expeck 
no less than the whole half o' the rents." 

The lawyer suggested fifty. 

" Fifty pounds ! fifty placks ! " cried the indignant 
leddy. " I'll let baith you and the sheriff ken I'm no 
to be frauded o' my rights in that gait. I'll no faik a 
farthing o' a hundred and fifty." 

" In that case, I fear," said Pitwinnoch, " Mr. George 
will be obliged to seek another custodier for the 
fatuus, as assuredly, mem, he'll ne'er be sanctioned to 
allow you anything like that." 

" If ye think sae," interposed Mrs. Milrookit, com- 
passionating the forlorn estate of her sister-in-law, "I 
daresay Mrs. Charles will be content to take him at a 
very moderate rate." 

" Megsty me ! " cried the leddy, " hae I been buying 
a pig in a pock like that ? Is't a possibility that 
he can be ta'en out o' my hands, and no reason- 
able allowance made to me at a' ? . . . I'll never agree 
to ony such thing. I'll gang into Embro' mysel', and 
hae justice done me frae the Fifteen." 

" But," said Mrs. Milrookit, " considering now the 
altered state of Watty's circumstances, I dinna discern 
how it is possible for my mother to uphold this house 
and the farm." 

"I am quite of your opinion," said George; "and, 
indeed, it is my intention, after the requisite repairs are 
done to the house, to flit my family, for I am in hopes 
the change of air will be advantageous to my wife's 
health." 

The leddy was thunderstruck, and unable to speak, 



76 THE LEDDY O 1 GRIPPY 

but her eyes were eloquent. Leddy Grippy started up, 
and gave a tremendous stamp with her foot. She 
then resumed her seat, and appeared all at once calm 
and smiling; but it was a calm betoking no tran- 
quillity ; in the course of a few seconds the hurricane 
burst forth, and alternately, with sobs and supplica- 
tions, menaces and knocking of nieves, and drumming 
with her feet, the hapless Leddy Grippy divulged and 
expatiated in the plots and devices of George. But all 
was of no avail her destiny was sealed; and with 
seventy-five pounds a year for aliment, she found 
herself under the painful necessity of taking a flat up 
a turnpike stair in Glasgow for herself and the fatuus. 

There the leddy inveighed against George, who " had 
cheated her and deprived Watty of his lawful senses " ; 
and there, some time after, he called to invite her over 
to the Kittlestonheugh, as he now called Grippy, and 
bring Watty, whither he had, in his new carriage, taken 
Mrs. Charles and her children, to spend a day though 
only one of the new wings was finished. 

" And enough too ! " cried the leddy. " Geordie, tak' 
my word for't, it'll a' flee fast enough away wi' ae 
wing." 

" Is my Betty Bodle to be there ? " asked Watty. 

" Oh yes," replied George, glad to escape from his 
mother's remarks, " and you'll be quite delighted to see 
her. She is uncommonly tall for her age." 

"I dinna like that," said Walter. "She shouldna 
hae grown ony bigger for I dinna like big folk." 

" And why not ? " 

"'Cause ye ken, Geordie, the law's made only for 
them; and, if you and me had aye been twa wee 
brotherly laddies, playing on the gowany brae, as we 
used to do, ye would ne'er hae thought o' bringing 



THE LEDDY CT GRIPPY 77 

yon duty's claw frae Enbro' to prove me guilty of 
daftness." 

The meeting again between the children and their 
poor uncle is told by Gait in what I cannot help 
thinking his rare fashion of comprehension, with a 
sadness most unstrained and most poignant. They 
were several years older now, but they remembered 
Watty's good nature, and looked forward to a long 
summer day with him of frolic and mirth. On alight- 
ing from the carriage they bounded with light steps 
and jocund hearts in quest of their uncle ; but when 
they found him sitting by himself in the garden, they 
paused, and were disappointed. They recognised in 
him the same person whom they formerly knew, but 
they had heard he was daft, and they beheld him 
stooping forward, with his hands sillily hanging 
between his knees; and he appeared melancholy and 
helpless. 

" Uncle Watty," said James compassionately, " what 
for are ye sitting here alone ? " 

Watty looked up, and gazing at him vacantly for a 
few seconds, said, " 'Cause naebody will sit wi' me, for 
I am a daft man." He then drooped his head, and 
sank into the same listless posture in which they had 
found him. 

" Do ye no ken me ? " said Mary. 

He again raised his eyes, and alternately looked at 
them both, eagerly and suspiciously. Mary appeared 
to have outgrown his recollection, for he turned from 
her ; but, after some time he began to discover James ; 
and a smile of curious wonder gradually illuminated 
his countenance, and developed itself into a broad grin 
of delight, as he said : 

"What a heap o' meat, Jamie Walkinshaw, ye maun 



78 THE LEDDY CT GRIPPY 

hae eaten to mak' you sic a muckle laddie ; " and lie 
drew the boy towards him as he had formerly done; 
but the child, escaping from his hands, retired several 
paces backward, and eyed him with pity mingled with 
disgust. Watty, again folding his hands, dropped them 
between his knees, and hung his head, saying to him- 
self: "But I'm daft; naebody cares for me noo; I'm a 
cumber er o' the ground, and a' my Betty Bodies are 
ta'en away." 

The accent in which this was expressed touched the 
natural tenderness of the little girl, and she went up to 
him and said : 

" Uncle, I'm your wee Betty Bodle; what for will ye 
no speak to me ? " 

His attention was again roused, and he took her by 
the hand, and, gently stroking his head, said, " Ye're a 
bonny flower, and lily-like leddy, and leal in the heart, 
and kindly in the e'e ! but ye're no my Betty Bodle." 

Suddenly, however, something in the cast of her 
countenance reminded him so strongly of her more 
childish appearance, that he caught her in his arms, 
and attempted to dandle her; but the action was so 
violent that it frightened the child, and she screamed, 
and struggling out of his hands, ran away. James 
followed her ; and their attention being soon drawn to 
other objects, poor Watty was left neglected by all 
during the remainder of the afternoon. 

At dinner he was brought in and placed at the table, 
with one of the children on each side; but he paid 
them no attention. 

" What's come o'er thee, Watty ? " said his mother. 
"I thought ye would hae been out o' the body wi' 
your Betty Bodle ; but ye ne'er let on ye see her." 

" 'Cause she's like a' the rest," said he sorrowfully. 



THE LEDDY O' GRIPPY 79 

" She canna abide me ; for ye ken I'm daft. It's surely 
an awfu' leprosy this daftness, that it gars everybody 
flee me ; but I canna help it. It's no my faut, but the 
Maker's that made me, and the laws that found me 
guilty. But, Geordie, what's the use o' letting me live 
in this world, doing naething, and gude for naething. 
I'll no eat ony mair it's evendoun wastrie for sic a 
useless, set-by thing as the like o' me to consume the 
fruits o' the earth. The cost o' my keep would be a 
braw thing to Bell, so I hope, Geordie, ye'll mak it 
ouer to her, for when I gae hame I'll lie doun and die." 

" Haud thy tongue, and no fright folk wi' sic 
blethers," exclaimed his mother, "but eat your dinner, 
and gang out to the green and play wi' the weans." 

"An I werena' a daft creature, naebody would bid 
me play wi' weans and the weans ken that I am sae, 
and mak a fool o' me for't. I dinna like to be every- 
body's fool. I'm sure the law when it found me 
guilty, might hae alloo't me a mair merciful punish- 
ment. Meg Wilcat, that stealt Provost Murdoch's 
cocket-hat, and was whippit for't at the Cross, was 
pitied wi' many a watery e'e ; but everybody dauds and 
dings the daft laird o' Grippy." 

They are the last words this great master of human 
nature and pathos puts into the mouth of Watty 
Walkinshaw. But they were not the I&st words spoken 
at Grippy that day, for the leddy's sharp eyes were 
soon open to George's desire, even then, when Jamie 
and Robina were both children, that his nephew and 
his daughter should be drawn together. 

" I'm thinking," said she, " that the seeds of a 
matrimony are sown among us this day, for Geordie's 
a far-before looking soothsayer and a Chaldee excellence 
like his father ; and a body doesna need an e'e in the 



80 

neck to discern that he's just evising and wiling for a 
purpose of marriage hereafter between Jamie and 
Beenie. Gude speed the wark ! for really we hae had 
but little luck among us since the spirit o' disinheri- 
tance got the upper hand ; and it would be a great 
comfort if a' sores could be salved and healed in the 
fulness of time, when the weans can be married accord- 
ing to law." 

Geordie dutifully agreed, and the old leddy went on 
piously: "But marriages are made in heaven; and 
unless there has been a booking among the angels 
above, a' that can be done by man below, even to the 
crying, for the third and last time, in the kirk, will be 
only a thrashing the water and a raising of bells. How- 
ever, the prayers of the righteous availeth much ; and 
we should a' endeavour by our walk and conversation, 
to compass a work so meet for repentance until it's 
brought to a come-to-pass. So I hope, Bell Fatherlans, 
that ye'll be up and doing in this good work, watching 
and praying, like those who stand on the Tower of 
Siloam looking towards Lebanon." 

Mrs. Charles, whom her mother-in-law called always 
by her maiden-name, smiling said: " I think that you 
are looking far forward. The children are still but mere 
weans, and many a day must pass over their green heads 
before such a project ought even to be thought of." 

" It's weel kent, Bell," replied her mother-in-law, " that 
ye were ne'er a queen o' Sheba either for wisdom or fore- 
thought ; but I hae heard my friend that's! awa' your 
worthy father, Geordie often say that as the twig is bent 
the tree's inclined, which is a fine sentiment, and should 
teach us to set about our undertakings with a knowledge 
of better things than of silver and gold, in order that we 
may be enabled to work the work o' Providence." 



THE LEDDY CT GRIPPY;>- 81 

But just as the leddy was thus expatiating away 
in high solemnity, a dreadful cry arose among the 
pre-ordained lovers. The children had quarrelled 
Robina slapped Jamie's face, and Jamie returned the 
slap with instantaneous energy. 

As time went on Robina set her affections on her 
other cousin Walkie Milrookit, and Jamie set his on 
a certain Ellen Frazer, whose charms and excellence 
will not concern us here. Robina was sly, and though 
she was determined not to marry James, she did not 
so much want to refuse him, as to seem to her father 
to be refused by him. To her grandmother she com- 
plained of her father's tyranny in so openly urging a 
union that would make her miserable, especially, as 
she said, when Jamie's devotion to Ellen Frazer was 
so obvious. But Leddy Grippy neither felt nor showed 
sympathy. 

"Never fash your head, Beenie, my dear," said 
she, " about Jamie's calf-love for yon daffodil ; but 
be an obedient child, and walk in the paths of 
pleasantness that ye're ordain't to, both by me and 
your father ; for we hae had ouer lang a divided 
family ; and it's full time we were brought to a cordial 
understanding with one another." 

" But," replied the disconsolate damsel, " even though 
he had no previous attachment, I'll ne'er consent to 
marry him, for really I can never fancy him." 

"And what for can ye no fancy him?" cried the 
leddy; " I would like to ken that ? But, to be plain wi' 
you, Beenie, it's a shame to hear a weel educated Miss 
like you, brought up wi' a Christian principle, speaking 
about fancying young men. Sic a thing was ne'er alloo't 
nor heard tell o' in my day and generation. But that 
comes o' your ganging to see Douglas tragedy at that 

F 



82 THE LEDDY O 1 GRIPPY 

kirk o' Satan in Dunlop Street ; where, as I am most 
creditably informed, the play-actors court ane another 
before all the folk." 

" I am sure you have yourself experienced," replied 
Robina, " what it is to entertain a true affection, and 
to know that our wishes and inclinations are not under 
our own control. How would you have liked had your 
father forced you to marry against your will ? " 

" Lassie, lassie !" exclaimed the leddy, " if ye live to 
be a grandmother like me, ye'll ken the right sense o' 
a lawful and tender affection. But there's no sincerity 
noo like the auld sincerity : when me and your honest 
grandfather, that was in mine, and is now in Abraham's 
bosom, came thegither, we had no foistring and 
parley vooing, like your novelle turtle-doves, but dis- 
coursed in a sober and wise-like manner anent the 
cost and charge o' a family." 

"Ah! but your affection was mutual from the be- 
ginning you were not perhaps devoted to another ? " 

" Gude guide us, Beenie Walkinshaw ! are ye devoted 
to another ? Damon and Phillis, pastorauling at hide 
and seek wi' their sheep, was the height o' discretion 
compared wi' sic curdooing. My lass, I'll no let the 
grass grow beneath my feet till I hae gi'en your father 
notice o' this loup-the-window, and hey cockalorum- 
like love. . . . Wha is it wi' ? But I needna speer ; for 
I'll be nane surprised to hear that it's a play-actor, or a 
soldier-officer, or some other clandestine poetical." 

Miss affected to laugh, saying : 

"What has made you suppose that I have formed 
any improper attachment ? I was only anxious that 
you should speak to my father, and try to persuade 
him that I can never be happy with my cousin." 

"How can I persuade him o' ony sic havers? Na, 



THE LEDDY O' GRIPPY 83 

na, Beenie, ye're an instrument in the hands o' Pro- 
vidence to bring about a great blessing to your family ; 
and I would be as daft as your uncle Watty, when he 
gaed out to shoot the flees so you maim just mak up 
your mind to conform. My word, but ye're weel aff to 
be married in your teens I was past thirty before man 
speert my price." 

Robina urged that James would not, she was sure, 
consent if she would. 

"Weel," cried the leddy, "I declare if ever I heard 
the like of sic upsetting. I won'er what business either 
you or him hae to consenting or non-consenting. Is't 
no the pleasure o' your parentage that ye're to be 
married, and will ye dare to commit the sin of dis- 
obedient children ? Beenie Walkinshaw, had I said sic 
a word to my father, who was a man o' past-ordinar 
sense, weel do I ken what I would hae gotten. I only 
just once, in a' my life, in a mistak' gied him a con- 
tradiction, and he declared that, had I been a son as I 
was but a dochter, he would hae grippit me by the 
cuff o' the neck and the back o' the breeks, and 
shuttled me through the window. But the end o' the 
world is drawing near, and corruption's working daily 
to a head; a' modesty and maidenhood has departed 
frae womankind, and the sons o' men are workers of 
iniquity priests o' Baal, and transgressors every one. 
A', therefore, my leddy, that I hae to say to you is a 
word o' wisdom, and they ca't conform Beenie, con- 
form and obey the fifth commandment." 

The leddy sent for Jamie, and the interview was as 
queer as that just described ; but she liked the hand- 
some, frank lad better than the sly Miss, and though 
she rated him she did not frighten him. Then she 
sent for her son, and tried to find out exactly what he 



84 THE LEDDY CT GRIPPY 

had in his mind. She told him plainly she saw no 
mutual liking between the cousins, but suspected 
much between James and Ellen Frazer. George 
anxiously inquired if she had any real grounds for 
this suspicion. 

"Frae a' that I can hear, learn, and understand," 
replied the leddy, " though it mayna be probable-like, 
yet I fear it's ouer true ; for when he gangs to see his 
mother [who lived in the same village with Miss 
Frazer] and it's aye wi' him as wi' the saints ' O 
Mother, dear Jerusalem, when shall I come to thee ? ' 
I am most creditably informed that the twa do 
nothing but sally forth hand in hand to walk in the 
green valleys, singing, ' Low down in the broom ' and 
' Pu'ing lilies both fresh and gay ' which is as sure 
a symptom o' something very like love, as the hen's 
cackle is o' a new-laid egg." 

"Nevertheless," said the laird, "I should have no 
great apprehensions, especially when he comes to 
understand how much it is his interest to prefer 
Robina." 

"That's a' true, Geordie ; but I hae a misdoot that 
a's no right and sound wi' her mair than wi' him ; and 
when we reflect how the mini maidens nowadays hae 
delivered themselves up to the little-gude in the shape 
and glamour o' novelles and Thomson's Seasons, we 
need be nane surprised to fin' Miss as headstrong in her 
obduracy as the lovely young Lavinia, that your sister 
Meg learned to 'cite at the boarding school." 

George saw his daughter, and James saw her too; 
and of this last interview something came, for the young 
gentleman understood pretty well that, to please her 
at all events, he need urge no suit upon her. Then he 
saw his uncle, and made him know he would not be 



THE LEDDY CT GRIPPY 85 

his son-in-law. On getting into Glasgow he called on 
his grandmother. On entering the parlour he found 
the old lady alone, seated in her elbow-chair by the 
fire. A single slender candle stood at her elbow on a 
claw-foot table, and she was winding the yarn from 
a pirn with a hand -reel, carefully counting the turns. 
Hearing the door open, she looked round, and, seeing 
who it was, said: 

" Is that thee, Jamie Walkinshaw ? Six-and-thirty 
where cam ye frae seven-and-thirty at this time 
o' night ? eight -and-thirty sit ye down nine-and- 
thirty snuff the candle forty." 

He told her he had been with his uncle and that 
they had fallen out. 

"No possible! nine-and-forty what hast been 
about ? fifty but hae ye been condumacious ? Seven- 
and plague tak' the laddie, I'm out in my count, and 
I'll hae to begin the cut again; so I may set by the 
reel." 

He told her his uncle had required him to break 
with Ellen and offer himself to Robina. 

" And sure I am, Jamie," replied the leddy, " that it 
will be lang before you can do better." 

James went on to say that his mind was now made 
up; he would work no longer in his uncle's count- 
ing-house, but in the morning would go out to his 
mother's at Camrachle and would leave Glasgow 
altogether. 

"Got ye ony drink, Jamie," asked the leddy, "in the 
gait hame, that ye're in such a wud humour for 
dancing 'Auld Sir Simon the King' on the road to 
Camrachle? Man, an I had as brisk a bee in the 
bonnet, I would set aff at once, cracking my fingers 
at the moon and seven stars as I gaed louping alang 



86 THE LEDDY CT GRIPPY 

. . . awa' wi' you, awa' wi' you, and show how weel 
ye hae come to years o' discretion, by singing as ye 

gang, 

' Scotsman, ho ! Scotsman lo ! 
Where shall this poor Scotsman go ? 
Send him east, send him west, 
Send him to the craw's nest.' " 

All the same she ended by giving him supper and 
bed. 

"I hope," said she, " nevertheless, that the spirit of 
obedience will soople that stiff neck o' thine in the 
slumber and watches o' the night, or I would ne'er 
be consenting to countenance such outstrapolous 
rebellion." 

Stiff as the leddy had seemed in opposing Jamie and 
Robina in the one thing they had in common a firm 
resolve not to marry each other the moment was 
approaching when she was to exercise a most sudden 
change of front; for we next behold her hurrying 
Beenie into an immediate marriage with someone else. 
The leddy had all along suspected " Miss " of hankering 
after some play-actor or soldier-officer, and, believing her 
to be George's lawful and sole heiress, she thoroughly 
approved of his determination to keep all he had to 
leave in the family; but she had no superstitious 
veneration for the name of Walkinshaw, and, since one 
grandson was determined not to be laird of Kittleston- 
heugh at the price of marrying the laird's daughter, 
she had no objection to helping another grandson to 
lands and lady both as soon as her eyes were opened 
to the fact that it was Walkinshaw Milrookit on whom 
Robina had set her affections. 

" Eh ! megsty me ! I'm sparrow-blasted," exclaimed 
the leddy, throwing herself back in her chair, and lift- 



THE LEDDY CT GRIPPY 87 

ing both her hands in wonderment. " But thou, 
Beenie, is a soople fairy ; and so a' the time that thy 
father as blin' as the silly blind bodie that his wife 
gart believe her gallant's horse was a milch cow sent 
frae her minny was wising and wyling to bring about 
a matrimony, or, as I should ca't, a matter-o' -money 
conjugality wi' your cousin Jamie, hae ye been linking 
by the dyke-sides, out o' sight, wi' Walky Milrookit ? 
Weel, that beats print ! Whatna novelle gied you that 
lesson, lassie ? Hech, sirs ! auld as I am, but I wad 
like to read it. Howsever, Beenie, as the ae oe is as 
sib to me as the ither, I'll be as gude as my word . . . 
and let your father play the Scotch measure, or shan- 
truse, wi' the bellows and the shank o' the besom, to 
some warlock wallop o' his auld papistical and pater- 
nostering ancestors that hae been gude preserve us ! 
for ought I ken to the contrary, suppin' brimstone 
broth wi' the deil lang afore the time o' Adam and 
Eve." 

When presently her daughter and Dirdumwhamle 
arrived, the leddy opened on them at once her pro- 
ject of an instant wedding : the laird jumped to the 
notion, his wife was for more caution. 

"Meg," said the leddy, "ye speak as one of the 
foolish women ; ye ken nothing about it. ... Na, na, 
Dirdumwhamle, heed her not : she lacketh understand- 
ing it's you an' me, laird, that maun work the wherry 
in this breeze ye' re a man o' experience in the ways o' 
matrimony, having been, as we all know, thrice married 
and I am an aged woman, that hasna travelled the 
world for sax-and-seventy years without hearing the 
toast o' ' Love and Opportunity ' . . . and there can be 
no sin in it, Meg, for is't no commanded in Scripture 
to increase and multiply ? " 



88 THE LEDDY O' GRIPPY 

Dirdumwhamle was very willing to be persuaded, 
but Meg still proposed objections. 

" My word, Meg," cried the leddy, " but t'ou has a 
stock o' impudence, to haud up thy snout in that gait 
to the she that bore thee ! Am I ane of these that hae, 
by reason of more strength, a'maist attaint to the age 
of fourscore, without learning the right frae the wrang 
o' moral conduct, as that delightful man, Dr. Pringle o' 
Garnoch, said in his sermon on the Fast Day, that t'ou 
has the spirit o' sedition . . . when I'm labouring in the 
vineyard o' thy family ? Dirdumwhamle, your wife 
there, she's my dochter, and sorry am I to say it; 
but, it's well known, and I dinna misdoot ye hae found 
it to your cost, that she is a most unreasonable, narrow, 
contracted woman, and, wi' a' her through-gality her 
direction-books to mak grozart wine for deil-be-licket, 
and her Katy Fisher's cookery, whereby she would gar 
us trow she can mak fat kail o' chucky-stanes and an 
auld horse-shoe we a' ken, and ye ken, laird, warst o' 
a', that she flings away the pease, and maks her hotch- 
potch wi' the shauwps, or, as the auld by-word says, 
tynes botles gathering straes. So what need the like o' 
you and me sit in council, and the Shanedrims o' the 
people, wi' ane o' the stupidest bawkie-birds that e'er 
the Maker o't took the trouble to put the breath o' life 
in? Fey, did ye say? that's a word o' discretion to 
fling at the head o' your aged parent I Howsever, it's no 
worth my condescendence to lose my temper wi' the 
like o' her. But, Meg Walkinshaw, or Mrs. Milrookit, 
though ye be there afore your gudeman, the next time 
ye diminish my understanding I'll may be let ye ken 
what it is to blaspheme your mother ; so tak' heed lest 
ye fall." 

After this Meg durst urge no more objections against 



THE LEDDY O' GRIPPY 89 

a match she desired, and there and then the minister 
was called and the marriage carried out before the 
bride's father came back from Camrachle. When he 
came he confessed the ill-success of his mission. Jamie 
was obdurate ; he would go into the army, and he would 
not marry Robina. 

" Since he will to Cupar, let him gang," said the leddy, 
" and just compose your mind to approve o' Beenie's 
marriage wi' Walky, who is a lad of a methodical nature, 
and no a hurly-burly ramstam, like yon flea-luggit 
thing, Jamie." 

George declared that he would almost as soon carry 
his daughter's head to the churchyard as see that 
match. 

"Weel, weel," said the leddy, winking at those in 
the secret, " frae something I hae heard the lad himsel' 
say this vera day, it's no a marriage that ever noo is 
likely to happen in this world . . . but it's o' the nature o' 
a possibility that she will draw up wi' some young lad 
o' very creditable connexions and conduct, but wha', 
for some thraw o' your ain, ye wouldna let her marry. 
What would ye do then, Geordie ? Ye would hae to 
settle or ye would be a most horridable parent." 

" My father for so doing disinherited Charles," said 
George gravely. 

" That's vera true, Geordie a bitter business it was to 
us a', and was the because o' your worthy father's _sore 
latter end. But ye ken the property's entail't; and, 
when it pleases the Maker to take you to Himsel', by 
consequence Beenie will get the estate." 

" That's not so certain," replied George jocularly. 
" My wife has of late been more infirm than usual, and 
were I to marry again, and had male heirs " 

" Hoot, wi' your male heirs and your snuffies; I hate 



90 THE LEDDY O 1 GRIPPY 

the vera name o' sic things they hae been the pests 
o' my life. It would hae been a better world without 
them but we needna cast out about sic unborn babes 
o' Chevy Chase, so a' I hae to say for the present is 
that I expeck ye'll tak' your dinner wi' us." 

They went to dinner bride and bridegroom fright- 
ened, bridegroom's parents hardly less so, and bride's 
father absent-minded and worried the leddy alone 
indomitable. 

Presently she proposed a toast that of the newly- 
wedded pair, but by circumstance and craftily. 

" It's extraordinar to me, Beenie," said she, " to 
lo and behold you sitting as mim as a May puddock, 
when you see us a' met here for a blithesome occasion 
and, Walky, what's come ouer thee, that thou's no a bit 
mair brisk than the statue o' marble-stane that I ance 
saw in that sink o' deceitfulness, the Parliament House 
o' Edinburgh? As for our Meg thy mother, she was 
aye one of your Moll-on-the-coals, a signer o' sadness, 
and I'm none surprised to see her in the hypo- 
condoricals; but for Dirdumwhamle, your respeckit 
father, a man o' prospects, family, and connexions the 
three cardinal points o' genteelity to be as one in 
doleful dumps, is sic a doolie doomster, that Uncle 
Geordie there, where he sits, like a sow playing on a 
trump, is a perfect beautiful Absalom in a sense o' 
comparison. However, I'll gie ye a toast. . . . Geordie, 
my son and bairn, ye ken as weel as I ken, what a 
happy matrimonial your sister had wi' Dirdumwhamle, 
and, Dirdumwhamle, I needna say to you, ye hae 
found her a winsome helpmate. Noo, what I would 
propose for a propine, Geordie, is Health and Happi- 
ness to Mr. and Mrs. Milrookit, and may they long 
enjoy many happy returns o' this day." 



THE LEDDY O 1 GRIPPY 91 

The toast was drunk with great glee, amid the nods 
and winks of the leddy, and the immoderate laughter 
of her son at her eccentricity. 

"Noo, Geordie my man," she went on, "seeing ye're 
in sic a state o' mirth and jocundity, and knowing, 
as we a' know, that life is but a weaver's shuttle, and 
Time a wabster, that works for Death, Eternity and 
Co., great wholesale merchants; but for a' that, I am 
creditably informed they'll be obligated, some day, to 
mak a sequester. Howsever, that's nane o' our concerns 
just now ; but, Geordie, as I was saying, I would fain 
tell you o' an exploit ... do you know that ever since 
Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, the life o' man 
has been growing shorter and shorter ? To me, noo sax 
and seventy years auld, the monthly moon's but as a 
glaik on the wall, the spring but as a butter-flee that 
tak's the wings o' the morning, and a' the summer only 
as the tinkling o' a cymbal as for hairst and winter, 
they are the shadows o' death; the whilk is an ad- 
monishment that I shouldna be overly gair anent the 
world, but mak mysel' and others happy, by taking 
the sanctified use o' what I hae so, Geordie and sirs, 
ye'll fill another glass. Noo, Geordie, as life is but a 
vapour, a puff out o' the stroop o' the tea-kettle o' Time, 
let's a' consent to mak' one another happy ; and there 
being no likelihood that ever Jamie Walkinshaw will 
colleague wi' Beenie, your dochter, I would fain hope 
ye'll gie her and Walky there baith your benison and 
aliment. Noo, Beenie, and noo, Walky, down on your 
knees baith o' you, and mak a novelle confession that 
ye were married the day ; and beg your father's pardon 
that has been so jocose at your wedding-feast, that for 
shame he canna refuse to conciliate and mak a hand- 
some aliment doun on the nail." 



92 THE LEDDY CT GRIPPY 

But George would not pardon them, and the leddy 
herself had to find them bed and board till George's 
tragic death left Beenie mistress of herself and of the 
Kittlestonheugh, where the pair at once immediately 
entered into possession. This Beenie, to do her justice, 
did innocently; but Walky Milrookit had learned the 
truth from the rascally lawyer Pitwinnoch. Jamie, 
however, had gone soldiering and knew nothing of his 
rights; neither Milrookit nor Pitwinnoch intended to 
enlighten him. 

When Jamie parted from the leddy, she was not like 
herself the self he had always known. Instead of her 
wonted strain of jocular garrulity, she began to sigh 
deeply and weep bitterly. 

" Thou's gaun awa' to face thy faes as the sang 
sings ' Far, far frae me and Logan braes ' and I am an 
aged person, and may ne'er see thee again ; and I'm wae 
to let thee gang, for, though thou was aye o' a nature 
that had nae right reverence for me, a deevil's buckie, 
my heart has aye warm't to thee mair than to a' the 
lave o' my grandchildren ; it's well known to every one 
that kens me, that I hae a most generous heart 
and I wadna part wi' thee without handselling thy 
knapsack. So tak the key and gang into the scrutoire, 
and bring out the pocket-book." 

He was petrified, but did as he was desired ; and 
having given her the pocket-book, sewed by his aunt 
Mrs. Milrookit when she was at the boarding-school, 
the leddy took out several of Robin Carrick's notes, 
and looking them over, presented him with one for fifty 
pounds. 

"Noo, Jamie Walkinshaw," said she, "if ye spend ae 
plack o' that like a Prodigal Son, it's no to seek what 
I'll say when ye come back ; but I doot, I doot, lang 



THE LEDDY CT GRIPPY 93 

before that day I'll be deep and dumb aneath the 
yird, and naither to see nor to hear o' thy weel or 
woe." 

Jamie stood holding the bill, unable to speak. In the 
meantime she was putting up her other bills; and, in 
turning them over, seeing one for forty-nine pounds, she 
said, "Jamie, forty-nine pounds is a' the same as fifty 
to ane that pays his debts by the roll o' a drum. So 
tak this, and gie me that back." 

When Jamie was gone the leddy was determined to 
do something for his mother and sister, but not out of 
her own pocket. Walky, now laird of Kittleston- 
heugh, brought Robina to pay duty to their grand- 
mother, and the old woman at once told him that he 
ought to continue to Mrs. Charles the annuity even 
George had felt himself bound to allow her. For six 
weeks the leddy had given house-room and board to 
Walky and his wife, and she was not the woman to let 
them forget it now they were rich. 

" Compliment," said she, " is like the chariot-wheels 
o' Pharaoh, sae dreigh o' drawing, that I canna afford 
to be blate wi' you ony langer. Howsever, Walky 
and Beenie, I hae a projection in my head, and it's o' 
the nature o' a solemn league and covenant : if ye'll 
consent to allow Bell Fatherlans her 'nuity of fifty 
pounds per annus, as it is called according to law, 
I'll score you out o' my books for the bed, board and 
washing due to me, and a heavy soom it is." 

" Fifty pounds a-year ! " exclaimed Milrookit. "Where 
do you think we are to get fifty pounds a year ? " 

"Just in the same neuk, Walky, where ye found 
the Kittlestonheugh estate, and the three-and-twenty 
thousand pounds o' lying siller, Beenie's braw tocher, 
and I think ye're a very crunkly character, though 



94 THE LEDDY CT GRIPPY 

your name's no Habakkuk, to gie me sic a constipa- 
tion o' an answer." 

Walky flatly refused to give the annuity to his aunt, 
and mumbled something about paying any lawful 
claim the leddy might have against him. 

" Lawful claim ? ye Goliath o' cheatin' ! if I hae ony 
lawful claim ? But I'll say naething. I'll mak' out an 
account and there's nae law in Christendom to stop 
me for charging what I like. Ye unicorn of oppression, 
to speak to me o' law, that was so kind to you ; but 
law ye shall get, and law ye shall hae. Hech, Beenie, 
poor lassie ! but thou hast ta'en thy sheep to a silly 
market. A skelp-the-dub creature to upbraid me wi' 
his justly dues ! But crocodile, or croakin-deil, as I 
should ca' him, he'll get his ain justly dues ; Mr. 
Milrookit o' Kittlestonheugh, as it's no the fashion when 
folk has recourse to the civil war o' a law-plea to stand 
on a ceremony, maybe ye'll find some mair pleasant 
place than this room, an ye were to tak the pains to 
gang to the outside o' my door." 

On this gentle hint, as the leddy afterwards called 
it, Walky and Beenie took hasty departure, and their 
indignant grandmother forthwith sought Pitwinnoch 
" in the bottomless pit o' his consulting room." 

" Ye'll be surprised to see me," said she, " for I hae 
been sic a lamiter with the rheumatees, that, for a' the 
last week, I was little better than a nymph o' anguish, 
. . . but ye maun know and understand, that I hae 
a notion to try my luck and fortune in the rowly-powly 
o' a law-plea . . . my twa ungrateful grandchildren, that 
I did sae muckle for at their marriage, hae used me 
waur than I were a Papistical Jew o' Jericho. I just, 
in my civil and discreet manner, was gie'n them a 
delicate memento-mori concerning their unsettled 



THE LEDDY O 1 GRIPPY 95 

'count for bed, board and washing, when up got 
Milrookit, as if he would hae flown out at the broadside 
o' the house, and threatened to tak me afore the lords 
for a Canaanitish woman, and an extortioner. But, 
first and foremost, before we come to the condescend- 
ence, I should state the case; and, Mr. Pitwinnoch, 
ye maun understand that I hae some knowledge o' 
what pertains to law, for my father was most extra- 
ordinar at it. Milrookit, as I was saying, having 
refused, point blank, Mr. Pitwinnoch, to implement the 
'nuity o' fifty pounds per annus, that your client (that's 
a legal word, Mr. Pitwinnoch) that your client settled 
on my gude-dochter, I told him he would then and 
there refusing be bound over to pay me for the bed, 
board and washing ... he responded with a justly 
due but I'll due him ; and though, had he been calm 
and well-bred, I might have put up with ten pounds ; 
yet, seeing what a ramping lion he made himsel', I'll 
no faik a farthing o' a thousand, which, at merchant's 
interest, will enable me to pay the 'nuity. So, when 
we get it, ye'll hae to find me somebody willing to 
borrow on an heritable bond." 

Pitwinnoch reminded her that the entertainment had 
lasted but six weeks. 

" Time, ye ken," replied the leddy, " as I hae often 
heard my father say, is no item in law; and unless 
there's a statute of vagrancy in the Decisions, or the 
Raging Magistratom, there can be nae doot that I hae 
it in my power to put what value I please on my house, 
servitude and expense, which is the strong ground of 
the case." 

When the leddy was gone Milrookit arrived, and, to 
his surprise, Pitwinnoch urged him to compound and 
give the old lady two hundred pounds. "Settle this 



96 THE LEDDY O" GRIPPY 

quietly," said the lawyer; "there's no saying what a 
lawsuit may lead to; considering the circumstances 
under which you hold the estate, don't stir, lest the 
sleeping dog awake." 

With Walky's cheque Pitwinnoch sought the leddy. 
" Twa hundred pounds !" cried she " but the fifth part 
o' my thousand ! I'll ne'er tak' ony sic payment. Ye'll 
carry it back to Mr. Milrookit, and tell him I'll no faik 
a plack o' my just debt ; and, what's mair, if he doesna 
pay me the whole tot down at once, he shall be put to 
the horn without a moment's delay." 

" You must be quite aware," urged the lawyer, " that 
he owes you no such sum as this. You said yourself 
that ten pounds would have satisfied you." 

"And so it would but that was before I gaed to 
law wi' him ; but seeing now I hae the rights o' my plea, 
I'll hae my thousand pounds if the hide be on his 
snout. Whatna better proof could ye hae o' the 
justice o' my demand, than that he should hae come 
down in terror at once wi' twa hundred pounds ? I hae 
known my father law for seven years, and even when 
he won, he had money to pay out of his own pocket." 

The leddy got her thousand pounds and invested it 
for Mrs. Charles: to the young lawyer who came for 
her signature to the deed of mortgage she boasted of 
her victory. 

" For ye maun ken, Willy Keckle," said she, " that 
I hae overcome principalities and powers in this con- 
troversy. Wha ever heard o' thousands o' pounds 
gotten for sax weeks' bed, board and washing like mine ? 
But it was a righteous judgment on the Nabal, 
Milrookit whom I'll never speak to again in this 
world, and no in the next either. I doot, unless he 
mends his manners." 



THE LEDDY O' GRIPPY 97 

Willy Keckle thought it as wonderful as she did, and 
told his master, an honest lawyer, called Whitteret, 
who happened to be on the point of starting for Edin- 
burgh. There, at a legal symposium, he repeated 
the queer story of Leddy Grippy's law plea. The 
result was an examination at the Register Office of 
old Claud Walkinshaw's original deed of entail, so 
reluctantly drawn by good Keelevin, long ago, him- 
self long dead. Whitteret was one of the examiners, 
and he at once began to act for Jamie ; but another 
was a certain Pilledge, who resolved to make what he 
could by offering his services to Milrookit. His first 
call at Glasgow was on the leddy. 

" You are the lady," said he, "I presume, of the 
late much respected Claud Walkinshaw, commonly 
styled of Grippy." 

" So they say, for want o' a better," replied the leddy, 
stopping her wheel and looking upon him, " but wha 
are ye ? and what's your will ? " 

" My name is Pilledge. I am a writer to the signet, 
and I have come to see Mr. Milrookit of Kittlestonheugh 
respecting an important piece of business. . . ." The 
leddy pricked up her ears, for, exulting in her own know- 
ledge of the law, by which she had so recently triumphed, 
as she thought, she became eager to know what the 
important piece of business could be and she replied : 

"Nae doot it's anent the law-plea he has been 
brought into an account of his property." 

Milrookit had been engaged in no suit whatever, but 
this was the way she took to trot the Edinburgh writer, 
and she added : 

" How do ye think I'll gang wi' him ? Is there ony 
prospect o' the Lord Ordinary coming to a decision on 
the pursuer's petition ? " 

G 



98 THE LEDDY O' GRIPPY 

This really looked so like the language of the Parlia- 
ment House, considering it came from an old lady, that 
Pilledge was taken in, and, his thoughts running on 
the entail, he immediately fancied that she alluded 
to something connected with it, and said : 

" I should think, Madam, that your evidence would 
be of the utmost importance to the case, and it was to 
advise with him chiefly as to the line of defence he 
ought to take that I came from Edinburgh." 

" Nae doot, sir, I could gie an evidence, and instruct 
on the merits of the interdict," said she, learnedly ; 
" but I ne'er hae yet been able to come to a right 
understanding anent and concerning the different afore- 
saids set forth hi the respondent's reclaiming petition. 
Noo, I would be greatly obligated if ye would expone 
to me the nice point, that I may be able to decern 
accordingly." 

The writer to the signet had never heard a clearer 
argument, either at the bar or on the bench, and he 
replied : 

" Indeed, mem, it lies in a very small compass. It 
appears that the heir-male of your eldest son is the 
rightful heir of entail; but there are so many diffi- 
culties in the terms of the settlement, that I should not 
be surprised were the court to set the deed aside, in 
which case Mrs. Milrookit would still retain the estate 
as heir-at-law of her father." 

We must allow the reader to conceive with what 
feelings the leddy heard this . . . but she still pre- 
served her juridical gravity and said : 

" It's very true what you say, sir, that the heir-male of 
my eldest son is a son I can easily understand that 
point o' law ; but can you tell me how the heir-at-law 
of her father, Mrs. Milrookit that is, came to be a 



THE LEDDY CT GRIPPY 99 

dochter, when it was aye the intent and purpose o' my 
friend that's awa', the testator, to make no provision 
but for heirs-male, which his heart, poor man, was very 
set on ? Howsever, I suppose that's to be considered 
in the precognition." 

" Certainly, mem," replied the writer ; " nothing is 
more clear than that your husband intended the estate 
to go, in the first instance, to the heirs-male of his sons ; 
first to those of Walter, the second son; and failing 
them, to those of George, the third son ; and, failing 
them, then to go back to the heirs-male of Charles, the 
eldest son ; and failing them to the heirs-general of 
your daughter Margaret." 

"I understand that weel," said the leddy, "it's as 
plain as a pike-staff that my oe Jamie, the soldier- 
officer, is by right the heir." 

" But the case has other points, and especially as 
the heir of entail is in the army, I certainly would 
not advise Mr. Milrookit to surrender." 

" But he'll maybe be counselled better," rejoined the 
leddy ; " and if yell tak' my advice, ye'll no scaud your 
lips in other folk's kail. Mr. Pitwinnoch is as gude a 
Belzebub's baby for a law-plea as ony writer to the 
signet in that bottomless pit, the House o' Parliament 
in Edinburgh ; and since ye hae told me what ye hae 
done, it's but right to let ye ken what I'll do. As yet 
I hae had but ae lawsuit . . . but it winna be lang till 
I hae another ; for if Milrookit doesna consent, the 
morn's morning, to gie up the Kittlestonheugh, he'll fin' 
again what it is to plea wi' a woman o' my experience." 

To Pitwinnoch the lady hied hot-foot, and opened 
her case. He began to fence, expressing surprise and 
inability to understand her meaning: but she took 
him up. 



100 THE LEDDY CT GRIPPY 

"Your surprise, and having no understanding, Mr. 
Pitwinnoch, is a symptom to me that ye're no qualified 
to conduct my case ! " and she held Whitteret over 
his head: after nearly blinding him with heirs-male, 
heirs-female, and heirs-general, she ended by declaring 
that Milrookit should renounce the property "the 
morn's morning, if there's a town-officer in Glasgow." 

" But, Madam, you have no possible right to it ! " 
exclaimed the lawyer, puzzled. 

" Me ! Am I ' a heir-male ' ? " cried the leddy, " an 
aged woman and* a grandmother ! Surely, Mr. Pit- 
winnoch, your education maun hae been greatly 
negleckit, to ken so little o' the laws o' nature and 
nations. No ; the heir-male's a young man, the eldest 
son's only son. . . . Ye'll just, Mr. Pitwinnoch, write a 
mandamus to Milrookit, in a civil manner mind that ; 
and tell him in the same that I'll be greatly obligated if 
he'll gie up the house and property of Kittlestonheugh 
to the heir-male, James Walkinshaw, his cousin ; or, 
failing therein, yell say that I hae implemented you to 
pronounce an interlocutor against him ; and ye may gie 
him a bit hint frae yoursel' in a noty beny at the 
bottom that you advise him to conform, because you 
are creditably informed that I mean to pursue him wi' 
a' the law o' my displeasure." 

Pitwinnoch hurried out to Kittlestonheugh and there 
found Pilledge closeted with Milrookit : an angry scene 
of mutual recriminations had come to blows between 
the false laird and the false lawyer when in sailed the 
leddy who had saved coach-hire by the happy chance 
of meeting Beenie, to whom she had divulged nothing, 
but had said, " If ye'll gie me a hurl in the carriage, I'll 
no object to gang wi' you and speer for your gude- 
man, for whom I hae a manner o' respeck, even though 



THE LEDDY <T GRIPPY 101 

he was a thought unreasonable anent my charge o' 
moderation for the bed and board." 

" Shake him weel, Mr. Pitwinnoch," cried the leddy, 
looking in, "and if he'll no conform 'I'll redde ye gar 
him conform." 

" Mr. Milrookit," said Pitwinnoch, " though we have 
had a few words, is quite sensible that he has not a 
shadow of reason to withhold the estate from the heir 
of entail. He will give it up the moment it is de- 
manded." 

"Then I demand it this moment !" exclaimed the 
leddy, " and out of this house, that was my ain, I'll no 
depart till Jamie Walkinshaw, the righteous heir-male, 
comes to tak' possession. . . . Beenie," said the leddy, 
with the most ineffable self-satisfied equanimity, " I 
hope yell prepare yoursel' to hear wi' composity the 
sore affliction that I'm ordain't to gie you. Eh, 
Beenie ! honesty's a braw thing ; and I'll no say that 
your gudeman, my ain oe, hasna been a deevil that 
should get his dues what they are, the law and 
lawyers as weel as me ken are little short o' the halter. 
But, for a' that, our ain kith and kin, Beenie we 
maun jook and let the jawp gae by. So I counsel you 
to pack up your ends and your awls, wi' a' the speed ye 
dow ; for there's no saying what a rampageous soldier- 
officer, whose trade it is to shoot folks, may say or do. 
You and Milrookit must take up your bed and walk to 
some other dwelling-place ; (for here, at Kittlestonheugh, 
ye hae no continued city, Beenie, my dear, and I'm 
very sorry for you. It's wi' a very heavy heart, and 
an e'e o' pity, that I'm obligated not to be beautiful on 
the mountains." 

Alas! we must tear ourselves from this inimitable 
woman ; though much remains to be told of her before 



102 THE LEDDY O' GRIPPY 

the last scene, in which she bids Mrs. Charles fetch her 
the old pocket-book, and speaks as follows : 

" Bring me a pen that can spell, and 111 indoss this 
bit hundred pounds to thee, Bell, as an over and 
aboon ; and when ye hae gotten it, gang and bid 
Jamie and Mary come to see me, and I'll gie him the 
auld gold watch, and her the silver teapot, just as a 
reward to the sympathising, simpering, and wheedling 
Milrookits. For, between oursels', Bell, my time is no 
to be lang noo among you. I feel the clay-cold fingers 
o' Death handling my feet ; so when I hae settled my 
concernments, ye'll send for Dr. Deilfear, for I wouldna 
like to mount into the chariots o' glory without the help 
o' an orthodox." 

And if any reader can tell me where to find the 
leddy's equal in all the range of fiction, I can only say, 
as she would say, that " I'll make a noty beny of it." 
Till then I am content to agree with Lord Byron that 
for truth, nature, and individuality the Leddy o' Grippy 
is surpassed by no female character since the days of 
Shakespeare. 



FICKLE FAME 

" WHERE do good reputations go when they die ? " was 
a question once asked by the present writer. From 
the public he received no more answer than a preacher 
expects who varies the monotony of blank assertion by 
a brief fusillade of blank interrogation. 

Where do good reputations go when they die ? Into 
biographical dictionaries. Turn out an old one, itself 
departed this life, and you will find them there a 
hundred famous people of whom you never heard, a 
thousand of whom you have no more than heard. 

No doubt the best reputations do not die, and these 
exist without much reference to their monuments, 
which may be little frequented. There comes a point 
when the fame, for instance, of a great writer ceases to 
depend on the number of his readers. Dr. Johnson's 
literary reputation is as huge as himself, and would be 
very inadequately measured by the extent to which 
anything he wrote is now read. He is known not now 
largely by his writings, but by his sayings, and millions 
of living human beings have a fair sense of intimacy 
with the great man who only read the obiter dicta of 
this burly pope preserved for us by Boswell. 

Nevertheless, enormous as Johnson's debt, in the 
matter of living reputation, is to Boswell : it would be 
false to assert that without Boswell the doctor's reputa- 
tion would be now obsolete. Few people to-day read 



103 



104 FICKLE FAME 

even Rasselas ; with Miss Jenkyns probably died the last 
critic who preferred that delightful book to Pickwick. 
Still fewer read London or the Vanity of Human 
Wishes : all the same, their author's reputation exists 
independent of his talk. 

And there are greater names than Johnson's whose 
present fame is unaffected by the narrowed circle of 
their readers. Mr. Hall Caine and Miss Corelli may be 
more widely read than Shakespeare or Milton, but they 
are not more famous, even for the moment. Mr. Riley, 
while recommending a classical education for Tom 
Tulliver to his father, had a sense of himself under- 
standing Latin generally, though his comprehension 
of any particular Latin was not ready : and English 
people have a similar sense of familiarity with Shake- 
speare and Milton which exists without any particular 
knowledge of their works. So Burke's oratorical 
supremacy is proudly felt by millions of his fellow- 
countrymen to-day who never read a line of any speech 
of his. 

Absolute fame is of course not to be confounded with 
reputation or mere famousness. The former is achieved 
for ever, the latter may be enjoyed, like copyright in 
books, for life and a few years after, and may lapse 
much more quickly than copyright. 

Fame is probably personal, due to the man, who 
only partially expressed himself in his outward achieve- 
ment in whatever sphere it was; so that the mere 
bulk of the latter was really accidental, and has not 
affected the substance of his greatness. It does not 
matter what kingdoms Alexander in fact conquered, 
nor would Napoleon be a greater man forever if he had 
won at Waterloo. Solomon's wisdom did not depend 
on the number of his proverbs, nor is the sanctity of a 



FICKLE FAME 105 

saint invariably demonstrated by all the records of the 
hagiologist. 

" I have read (says Emerson) that those who listened 
to Lord Chatham felt that there was something finer in 
the man than anything which he said. It has been 
complained of our brilliant English historian of the 
French Revolution that when he has told us all his 
facts about Mirabeau, they do not justify his estimate 
of his genius." 

Carlyle, it may plausibly be argued, happened to 
over-estimate the genius of Mirabeau ; and, indeed, the 
capacity of saying greater things than he did say may 
have been over-estimated by Chatham's hearers. But 
Emerson continues : 

" The Gracchi, Agis, Cleomenes, and others of Plu- 
tarch's heroes, do not in the record of facts equal their 
own fame. Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex, Sir 
Walter Raleigh, are men of great figure and of few 
deeds. We cannot find the smallest part of the 
personal weight of Washington in the narrative of his 
exploits." 

The greatness of these great men was, in fact, in 
themselves, and their outward achievements were no 
more than hints of what they were. A man cannot be 
lower than his highest thought, but his biggest act 
may be much smaller than himself. 

" The authority of Schiller," added Emerson, " is too 
great for his books," and, perhaps, when the essayist 
wrote, it was still too great for Schiller himself. If he 
did not carry all the weight of it to heaven, it is lighter 
at present on earth than the poet of Wilhelm Tell and 
the Piccolomini would probably approve. 

" This inequality of the reputation to the works and 



106 FICKLE FAME 

the anecdotes," Emerson declares, with an insight and 
judgment none the less fine because his own reputation 
is attenuated, and his authority a good deal decreased, 
" is not accounted for by saying that the reverberation 
is longer than the thunder-clap : but somewhat resided 
in these men which begot an expectation that outran 
all their performance. The largest part of their power 
was latent." 

Their greatness was in fact in themselves: words, 
deeds, and books were only specimens, haphazard, as 
called forth by time and occasion. 

The more inward a man's greatness, in proportion 
to the external show of it, the more substantial, and 
therefore lasting, his fame ; the more he exhausts his 
actual stock of himself in visible production, the more 
his immediate notoriety will be perceived ; but, as most 
of his acts and words are put out to meet a temporary 
occasion, so, when the occasion has gone by, his reputa- 
tion is liable to fall obsolete. In the matter of fame 
also you cannot have your cake and eat it too. 

But it seems to me that in the neighbourhood of this 
subject of fame and reputation one or two interesting 
questions present themselves for consideration. Some 
once very healthy reputations have certainly expired 
and are now no longer even mourned : the late Mr. 
Tupper not only made a good deal of money out of 
his Proverbial Philosophy, but secured a wide reputa- 
tion, of the third or fourth class, which has long gone 
to its account. 

Other reputations, however, have not only died, or 
died down, but have risen again or sprouted afresh. 
For quite a generation this was, I believe, the case with 
Jane Austen, though it may be scarcely credited now. 
For the last twenty years her delicate and peculiar 



FICKLE FAME 107 

genius has been more and more widely and explicitly 
appreciated ; for the thirty years before, it was almost 
forgotten, and very frankly ignored. No doubt she 
always had readers, and they were all sincere if silent 
admirers. But I suspect they were largely of one class, 
and were in the main elderly people. In country^ 
houses, where good books are more read and better 
tasted than the London public and some literary circles 
are apt to realise, she was read by the serious ; not 
much elsewhere except by the genuine book-lovers 
who go on reading everything, which really is a book, 
for ever. Nowadays, not only are her books sold in 
great numbers, but they are read by all sorts of 
people. There are some books of which scores of 
copies are bought for one which is read, and others 
which have dozens of readers for every copy sold. At 
present Jane Austen's works belong to the latter class ; 
people not only buy them, but they borrow them to 
read. 

The same fate, as I believe, was Blake's. He was 
once very nearly famous, if not quite : he is now very 
famous indeed: but there was a long interval during 
which he was neither much read nor much remembered. 
Perhaps he is just now more praised than read ; not to 
praise him is, at present, not to care for poetry : yet it 
may be imagined that some who do not care for much 
of him may be able to like other fine poetry all the 
same. Once you know it is your duty there is no 
difficulty in admiring Little lamb, who made you ? and 
Tiger, tiger, burning bright, and plenty besides: but 
there may be readers, who would just as lief The Pro- 
phetic Books had never been written, who would feel a 
very deep sense of personal loss if anything happened 
to Shakespeare's Songs, or Keats' Grecian Urn either. 



108 FICKLE FAME 

The re-animation of deceased reputations may be 
largely due to literary critics, especially of that now 
numerous class whose own reputation is almost entirely 
due to their gropings among the bones of their betters. 
It is a thriving trade, and the writing of introductions 
must be a lucrative branch of it. No doubt it is use- 
ful if one has to be introduced to a great man an 
introduction seems appropriate enough. It is only 
when the acquaintance is already of some standing and 
intimacy that the introduction is felt to be officious. 

We have heard Emerson pointing out that some 
great reputations in literature, and elsewhere, were 
larger than the productions or deeds of their owners. 
Anthony Trollope appears to me an instance of the 
contrary phenomenon. His literary reputation seems 
much inferior to his literary achievement. The 
literary critics of the sort just alluded to are, indeed, 
already making at him : he has been " introduced " by 
more than one or two such : articles are written about 
him and his work, and have been, for ten years or a 
dozen : but they are mostly apologies, and the boldest 
are craven enough to damn with faint praise. To hear 
some of these gentry deal out their timid eulogies of 
such masterpieces as Barchester Towers and The Last 
Chronicle of Bar set, makes one sympathise more than 
ever with Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility when 
he said, " Who would submit to the indignity of being 
approved by such women as Lady Middleton and Mrs. 
Jennings, that could command the indifference of 
anybody else ? " 

Unless a masterpiece can be successfully compared 
with some other, this kind of critic is commonly unable 
to realise that it is a masterpiece at all. They wait to 
acclaim it till some bolder spirit has made the discovery. 



FICKLE FAME 109 

It took a long time for Wuthering Heights to obtain 
common recognition as an achievement of the first 
class : it was a Bronte"-book, and had to be ranged along- 
side the other Bronte-books : Jane Eyre was unassail- 
able, and it was not really particularly like Jane Eyre : 
it must be inferior. As a matter of fact it belongs to 
no class, but stands alone and cannot be weighed by 
comparison with any other book. Dr. Johnson said 
Tristram Shandy would perish because it was odd; 
and it certainly was odd though it has not perished. 
Wuthering Heights is much more than odd, and no 
doubt its singularity stood, and will always stand, 
between it and mere popularity. There is, however, 
something higher than popularity, and that recognition 
of eminence has slowly been accorded to this astounding 
work of an isolated, melancholy genius. Even now 
too much stress is laid on the accident of authorship 
as if the most remarkable fact in relation to Wuthering 
Heights is that it was written by a girl : whereas the 
book itself is the most remarkable thing about it : 
and the truth is, it would be astounding no matter by 
whom it had been written. 

Emily Bronte is not cited as an instance of a reputa- 
tion which died and was brought to life again: her 
fame is only coming to posthumous birth long after her 
own death of the flesh. If there be literary justice in 
posterity, the same recognition awaits The Entail, 
whose author so far has never attained any but a 
secondary place, and that for his much inferior Annals 
of the Parish and The Ayrshire Legatees. 

Miss Burney and Miss Edge worth are, however, both 
instances. The authoress of Evelina could support, 
with resignation, a tolerable weight of fame in her life- 
time, and she had to do it. She had her Dr. Johnson, 



110 FICKLE FAME 

just as the authoress of Robert Elsmere had her Mr. 
Gladstone : but perhaps the public was more indebted 
to the latter sponsor than the former. Without any 
imprimatur Miss Burney's irresistible gallery of pic- 
tures must have been soon crowded with delighted 
spectators. 

All the same Evelina went out of vogue, and there 
came a day when, by the general public, it was neglected 
as old-fashioned. That day is past : and the pertest 
critic would not now dare to write himself Dogberry 
by any depreciation of the great Fanny. 

So of the much less great, but much more lovable, 
Maria. She had her Sir Walter, just as the older 
writer had her Johnson : and " the Wizard " was notori- 
ously more lavish of praise than the doctor. No doubt 
she owed him much in her day : but no one would now 
read anyone because the author of Waverley said they 
had better : authority in criticism is less esteemed just 
at present than loquacity. And Miss Edgeworth is 
read again : not as Miss Austen is read, for Miss Austen 
wrote of England, and the English reader never cared 
much about Ireland : but still a good deal. The 
Absentee and Castle Rackrent need not be sought for 
in second-hand book-shops: they are to be seen on 
every railway book-stall, and publishers, like the conies, 
are a timid folk, and would certainly not provide the 
public with books because it ought to read them. 
Their concern is not at all with what should be read, 
but with what is freely bought. 

Yet, in spite of her former and her present vogue, 
Maria Edgeworth also had her eclipse, during which 
she was as old-fashioned as an early Victorian 
wardrobe. 

How about Sir Walter ? Does every American who 



FICKLE FAME 111 

dashes into Abbotsford when the family is at breakfast, 
as if nobody lived there, read Guy Mannering ? 

George Eliot, we are told, has already sunk into the 
tomb of Mrs. John Cross ; which might serve her right 
if JRomola and Daniel Deronda had not been preceded 
by Silas Marner, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, 
and Scenes of Clerical Life. As they were, we may be 
pretty easy as to her sure and certain resurrection. 
Why should her fame be stifled by Theophrastus Such ? 
Did not Tennyson write the May Queen as well as 
Ulysses, Tithonus, and the Lotus Eaters ? 

Among poets, two, very different in quality, may be 
cited as instances of revived reputation Herrick and 
Wordsworth. The occultation of the former lasted at 
all events for a century, though his reputation is now 
probably wider and greater than it was originally. It 
was not possible that generations esteeming Pope the 
prince of poets should esteem Herrick as a poet at all. 

Wordsworth in his lifetime took such care of his 
renown as a poet that his death was an inevitable blow 
to it. He left it, indeed, in trust to a body of admirers 
sincere and numerous, but even the trustees had not 
quite the conviction of the testator. And presently it 
was rather remembered how much of his work was 
inferior to his best than how immensely high his best 
ranks. The zenith of Tennyson's renown was the nadir 
of his predecessor's in the Laureateship. As for the 
public, it probably can only put up with one great 
poet at a time, and it had its living Laureate; there 
was no room for the dead one; nor, for a long time, 
for Browning or Swinburne either, though they had 
the advantage of not having yet joined the immortals. 

The occultation of Wordsworth, however, lasted 
barely through a generation. During the last twenty 



112 FICKLE FAME 

years of the late lamented century his reputation was 
steadily reviving and being preached up. If he was 
not always profound when he seemed silly it does not 
now matter ; no one is anxious to throw We are Seven 
in his teeth ; and for the sake of some of his sonnets 
scores of the others are reverently forgotten. 

The highest fame must be impregnable, but even the 
highest is not subject to the complaint of monotony. 
Shakespeare himself was once in need of apologists, 
and Johnson was one of them. It might surprise the 
public of to-day to learn how poor was his estimation, 
how obsolete seemed his vogue, during a great part 
of the eighteenth century, and before Germany existed 
or the Holy Roman Empire had ceased. To praise 
him is now an impertinence which we are content to 
leave to a people without humour like the Germans, 
who think they invented him. 

To speak of him as the one supreme human genius, 
would be to use a threadbare and stale phrase. We 
cannot realise that there was a long period during 
which he was not only unread, but unadmired ; when 
he was supposed to belong to the crude, coarse, vulgar 
times, ere " taste " was discovered : when he was " un- 
polished," " clumsy " ; careless or even ignorant of the 
" unities " : when even those who went to see his 
plays acted could not be expected to bear the infliction 
of his actual words, but were treated to someone's 
" Version." 

Fortune has always been called fickle because men 
have always been inconsequent. Fame is much more 
unreasonably fickle. 



KING'S SERVANTS 

BEFORE God came down to earth to make His Church 
Catholic, the Truth, but half reyealed and half known, 
was the family secret of one little Nation, lonely in the 
farthest corner of the Midland Sea : and she carried it, 
veiled in her heart and hidden from the great pagan 
world. In those far-off days the Gentile peoples, not 
knowing the One True and Living God, groped wist- 
fully for gods, and made them of anything, lovely 
or potent, that they could perceive beside them on 
the earth, or above them in the heavens. For in 
them also was the great worship-hunger, still assert- 
ing itself against alien and unfriendly appetites; an 
indestructible witness to the fact, older than the world, 
that there is a God somewhere, and to the other fact, 
as old as man himself, that man must fain turn above 
himself, to something higher than himself, more 
potent than he and lovelier, that he may worship it. 

Among those things that pagan man presently dis- 
cerned as better than himself were the Arts, so that 
them also he deified, or half-deified. He made them 
daughters of Jove, with tender Memory for their 
Mother. 

When the Church came, and the sum of truth 
revealed became the birthright of all Mankind who 
should choose to share her Divine inheritance, the 
Muses ceased to be false goddesses and were allotted 
a hisrher function because a true one. She bade 

H 



114 KING'S SERVANTS 

them leave a throne that was not theirs, and yield it 
to Him whose alone it was, but they were not banished 
nor degraded. She did not mislike loveliness, nor 
misery it, but she gave it the place and office of 
witness, that it might preach of Him from whom it had 
caught some hint and reflection of His own eternal and 
uncreated Beauty. 

For she gently told them "All men are vain . . . 
who by these good things that are seen understand 
not Him who is, neither, by attending to the works, 
have acknowleged who was the Workman . . . with 
whose Beauty if they being delighted took them to 
be gods, let them know how much the Lord of them 
is more beautiful than they: for the First Author of 
beauty made all those things. Or, if they admired 
their power and effects, let them understand by them 
that He that made them is mightier than they. For 
by the greatness of the beauty . . . the Creator of 
them may be seen, so as to be known thereby." 

So that the Arts, driven from the dead temples, 
were not exiled from the Living Church, but given 
their home and duty hi it. They were not thrust 
down and shamed, but raised from a false function 
of helpless and idle goddesshood to a true function 
of helpful and real service. 

This, then, was the new and true office of all Arts in 
the Church : they were to be her mouthpiece and her 
witness, bearing, under her inspiration, a lovely testi- 
mony to Divine beauty. In all the ugly and mean 
jostle of common life they were to remind man of 
the eternal and ineffable serenity of God's perfection. 
Man's worship they should no longer seize halfway to 
heaven: but, with fingers ever pointed upward, they 
were to bid him look above the world for the supreme 



KING'S SERVANTS 115 

and sole object of adoration. This noble function we 
see exercised by the Arts in all the story of the Church 
in her freedom and supremacy. She was never their 
foe, but their grave and guiding Mother and Mistress ; 
and it is from the Church that the modern world has 
received the Arts. But as she held them to their high 
vocation, so they, hi the good days, when the world 
was Christendom learning at the Church's knee, 
accepted with proud loyalty their honoured place in 
her economy. But, alas, there came the ugly and 
ruinous revolt that willed to dethrone the Church, and 
changed the noble ideal of united Christendom into 
the poor makeshift of a split-up Europe. And to the 
new notions the idea of service was repugnant, and 
seemed servile, for the inner spirit of the revolt was 
not monarchic but anarchic. And to anarchy the 
noble function of ordered service, the highest man 
and his works can hold towards God, appears mere 
serfdom. 

In the new scheme of things they who had been 
proud to be servants set themselves to be rivals and 
adversaries. The Arts too fell into infection, and slipped 
away ; instead of being honourable servants of the 
Church, and proud helpers in her Divine work, they 
would be tale-bearers against her, and traitors, libel- 
lous. From her they would take no more guidance, 
nor inspiration ; her reproofs they would not bear, her 
canons they would forget and disallow. 

The ripe fruit of the old ways was, in literature, such 
poets as Dante, in sculpture and painting such Masters 
as Michelangelo and Rafael ; the latest, but forever 
unripe and unwholesome fruit of the new revolt is, in 
Art, God save the mark, the Post-Impressionists and 
Futurists, in literature the Massa Damnata of current 



116 KING'S SERVANTS 

fiction if that can be called current which loves to 
crawl and snuff its inspiration from the dung and 
slime of a civilisation turned rotten. 

In the good days when Arts were content to be 
learners of the Church, they taught with a clear 
coherent message, for they shared in presenting her 
noble and unearthly lesson : no longer willing to learn 
of her, they have nothing to teach, having lost cog- 
nizance of their own meaning. In a futile and trivial 
ambition to rank above her they have fallen beneath 
themselves. Despising the old serene simplicity, they 
are tangled in a webbed confusion of dust and dirt and 
throttled contradiction. Pointing no longer upward 
beyond man, they seek to reflect man only, and him 
they reflect littled and more mean, more bestial and 
more base. If, in spite of themselves, they are Balaam- 
prophets, unwilling witnesses on God's side, it is no 
more by the infinite, sublime, if ever unsatisfied and 
unavailing effort to depict Divine loveliness, but by 
proving to the sad angels how ugly man without God 
is bound to be. 

But, though the aim of the Great Revolt was to 
dethrone the Church and destroy her, she is, in fact, 
neither destroyed nor dethroned. Her kingdom on 
earth may have, for a moment, no territorial frontier, 
but it smiles at all boundary-limits and governs the 
hearts of loyal subjects in every realm and every clime, 
and her vigour is not enfeebled in her august and 
venerable age. In all the world she has her lieges, 
who in every tongue proclaim their loyalty and their 
love : so that, wherever her rule is felt, the function 
of literature is to-day what it was of old, to learn and 
so to teach, not a rival message, nor a different, from 
that of the Mother and Mistress herself, but the same 



KING'S SERVANTS 117 

message pitched in a minor key: nor with an inde- 
pendent, rebel or rival, authority, but, as it were, by 
grace of faculties derived from her, and so with a 
sanction incomparably higher than any that could be 
that of literature herself, were she to set herself apart 
in a windy autonomy of her own. 

It is true that in this viceroyalty of literature there 
are many provinces, not alike in function nor equal in 
dignity and importance. There are, for instance, high 
alpine regions such as that of theology, which lift 
white summits up towards heaven itself: there are 
foot-hills of philosophy that he must first conquer 
who would mount those loftier heights. 

There is history, time's memory, upon whose chaplet 
she links together her beads of experience lest they 
scatter and be lost. There is biography, which is a 
sort of gallery of portraits in the wider palace of history 
itself. 

When all these are laid by literature in the lap of 
her great Mother the Church, they hold a consistency 
and coherency, a significance and a purpose, that else 
they would have lost, and must lose. 

But literature has regions less grave and perhaps 
less august, but grateful to tired and busy feet : her 
pleasaunces, fragrant and welcome. For the Church 
herself knows that all work and no play will make of 
her sons but dull children : so she has her gardens, and 
her playing-fields, many flowered, with mimic rocks 
that only seem to frown, and mimic heights that fancy 
may climb and break no bones. There is the lovely land 
of poesy, and all the intricate sweet forest of romance. 
These are set lower, certainly, than those mountain- 
realms of theology, and philosophy, and history. But 
though they seem in comparison to be of the plains, 



118 KING'S SERVANTS 

yet are they upland too, and they also, if their inspira- 
tion be true, point upward to horizons where earth's lips 
are lifted to kiss the hem of heaven's clean garment. 
In an age over practical, as the empty and false- 
flattering phrase goes, an age of common and mean 
purposes, poetry is the more essential, the more in- 
dispensable. To the dull it may seem the mere 
science of fine and fair words, but in reality it is a 
golden bridge that carries us, by high speech, arched 
far above the low swamps of petty ideals, into an 
enchanted, half-unearthly, land of nobler and so truer 
thoughts, whose fruit must be nobler desires and less 
sordid deeds. For noble speech can be born only of 
noble thought, and be in turn its mother, and from 
nobler thinking nobler doing is fain to spring. 

Mere thoughts are not so barren, nor so insignificant 
as the prim and smug would pretend, to whom all 
thinking, except calculation, is uneasy and wasteful : 
the Church has never held it so ; that is why, in her 
wide embrace, contemplative Religion has ever held so 
secure and so warm a welcome. And to contempla- 
tion no leaf on any tree in all God's garden is mean- 
ingless: the Pantheist saw in everything a God, the 
Contemplative sees God through everything, and reads 
His Name ineffable in all the alphabet whose letters 
are this earth and the universe of stars. 

The poet preaches of God though his song may seem, 
to the deaf, whose ears are wool-stopped with avarice, 
no sermon. No decent human being can read any 
true poem without a lifting of his soul, and that at its 
best is prayer : at its worst it is better than lying 
among the pots. The poet's clear song lights |a clearer 
fire among the thorns of our commonplace, we catch 
from him alpine glimpses that touch close upon the 



KING'S SERVANTS 119 

heavens, his high thought begets a higher thought in 
us than our own, and each higher thought, by the 
Divine compassion, tends upward to the highest. 

Confronted with such ideas as are generated by 
great poetry, in every reader capable of conceiving ideas 
at all, mean things are forced to show their meanness ; 
low and pedestrian purposes are stripped and made to 
show their beggarly nakedness. Poetry is not utili- 
tarian, and to them who need it most it seems useless, but 
its use is to remind us of matters too willingly forgotten 
by an age that is disposed to reckon nothing golden 
except money. Life, it compels us to bear in mind, is 
more than meat. 

Poetry is the irreconcilable foe of smug and fustian 
self-complacency, and self-content : and of all re- 
pentance and true betterment the subtlest enemy 
is sen-satisfaction among mean ideas and abject 
purposes. 

In all true and great poetry there is something 
eternal, and some protest against our over-estimate 
of what is temporary and of passing consequence : its 
appeal is never to fashion or whim, but to what is 
as old as man himself, and is therefore new in every 
age. All temporary verse dies with the period that 
occasioned it, or survives it only by a narrow space as 
a mere monument, with a merely quaint and archaic 
interest. 

So it is that we find the best poetry the world 
possesses among its oldest. And this eternal spirit in 
real and great poetry gives to it a function and use 
whose importance cannot easily be exaggerated. It 
serves by its very nature as a protest against the 
irritable spirit of novelty, shallow fashion-worship, and 
mean absorption in matters of trivial and temporary 



120 KING'S SERVANTS 

significance : and against them it is, in its measure, a 
medicine and antidote. 

To my thinking no age ever needed poetry more than 
this : and it is wanting precisely because it is needed. 
Our Miltons are mostly mute, or else inglorious. 

The scope of prose romance is not so high, nor does 
it stretch down so deep into the roots of humanity. 
But the scope is, perhaps, wider. It may reach some 
to whom, as yet, poetry is impossible : and to poetry 
it may serve as the porch and preparation. For many 
incapable at first of savouring great poets may be intro- 
duced to it by the easier appreciation of prose romance. 

The themes of romance seem more varied, and 
perhaps more intimate and more homely, though it 
is not to be forgotten that a supreme poetic genius, 
like Homer's, can appeal with eternal force to the heart 
of mankind when dealing with things most homely 
and most simple. 

Prose romance can never be the rival of poetry, it 
is her younger sister, conscious of a less exalted sphere, 
and venerating without emulation her elder's more 
august dignity. The arc of each circle is often touch- 
ing, but never intersects. A true poem, even an epic, 
can never be merely a metrical tale, and a prose 
romance is never to aim at being a long unversed 
poem with chapters for cantos. 

Nevertheless in genuine romance there is ever dis- 
cernible its kinship with poetry : it will not deal with 
common and trivial things or themes. It moves on 
a higher plane than common experience ; and its aim 
is ideal truth not sordid or servile realism. For ideal 
truth is not imprisoned behind the bars of mere actual 
occurrence, else would not the Master Himself have 
taught in parables. 



KING'S SERVANTS 121 

Its realm is not bounded by the frontiers of dull fact : 
it does not confine itself to the literal reproduction of 
figures that have been seen, and of events that have 
happened precisely thus, in these identical circum- 
stances : but aims at a certain ideal presentation. 

The supreme sculptor draws out of shapeless and 
inert marble forms of men more perfect than any 
experience has installed in his memory ; the supreme 
romanticist fills his stage with men and women that 
are nobly human yet surpass any he may have met, 
or his reader might have imagined. He is not to 
pretend that all good men are angels, but he is not to 
seek his type among men by whom the type has been 
most littled, and most degraded. In this selection and 
presentation of higher types he does not pander to 
human vanity, but the reverse : for reading of men 
that are men but nobler than ourselves does not flatter 
our self-love, but rather breeds in us a wholesome 
shame of ourselves. Nor is he insincere, but only 
loyal. For none treats man with more brutal violence 
than he who draws the portrait of a beast and writes 
under it This is Man. It is odd that they who are 
most disposed to pretend there is no God, and that 
man needs none but himself, are the most inveterate 
in stripping man of all divine resemblance or reminis- 
cence. You would suppose they would depict man a 
demi-God, whereas it is precisely they who insist on 
writing him down a pig. 

Nor is this ideal presentation of man, in romance, 
a forgetfulness of his fall, and an ignoring of original 
sin; it is not a taint of heresy; the Manicheans were 
the heretics, who made man Satan's creature. It is 
but a reminder that man is God's man still and after 
all ; that the fall itself was not the end of the story of 



122 KING'S SERVANTS 

God and man, nor God's last word in creation. It is 
the pornographist, who, while disbelieving in it, witnesses 
to man's fall in the first Adam, and refuses to witness 
to his resurrection in the second ; so, in one foul word, 
he libels man and God. 

Yet, for all this, in high romance there is no affecta- 
tion; it does not make mealy-mouthed pretence that 
men are all good, or that all good men are angelic. 
Cardinal Newman has bidden us realise that all the 
actions even of all the saints were not always saintly ; 
and romance is not hagiology ; the story of some saint's 
life may lend itself to the most perfect romance, but 
all romance cannot and does not deal with lives of 
saints. For mankind, as a whole, has never been 
precisely saintly, and with mankind as a whole romance 
has concern. It is sufficient that it sets its stage on a 
plane elevated above that of common life ; upon that 
stage all the figures cannot be all white. It must have 
shadow, or its light will be as flat as it is false. And it 
is a stupidity, as well as a mistake, to assume that 
good moral can only be afforded by good men. The 
business of high romance is not to stock literature with 
a sort of Sunday-school story-book that is, in fact, not 
literature at all. If it were, then would it be as power- 
less as it would be useless to do that service to religion 
which I think it is capable of doing namely of catch- 
ing the attention and enlisting the interest of readers 
who will only read that which they perceive to be 
literature. Such readers may be good Catholics, but 
they may also be Catholics who are not so good as they 
might be, and they may not be Catholics at all. In 
these two latter classes some are little likely to be 
benefited by a sermon or by a tract ; for they neither 
love to hear the one nor to read the other. Yet they 



KING'S SERVANTS 123 

will read a book that strikes them as worth reading, 
and which does not strike them as a thinly-veiled 
sermon. Is it not worth while to try and engage their 
attention, to make some effort to draw their notice 
back to higher thoughts than those of contemporary 
fad and fancy and fashion, to those more ideal themes 
which romance has for its scope ? If no more were 
done than to help them to a higher taste in recreative 
reading, to give them some better substitute for the 
current fiction of our day, which is neither literature 
nor romance, I think much would be done. But more 
may be done; by such romance as I am trying to 
indicate their attention may be brought back to the 
noble picture of Catholic faith in practice, to stirring 
events, and great personages of the past: to times 
when men, however wrong and passionate, lawless 
even, were marked by a simpler spirit ; when, with all 
their faults and frequent disobedience, they were 
children of the Church, and were still apt to turn to 
her for comfort in sorrow, and refuge in adversity, keen 
to realise that she was indispensable and they could not 
do without her. Perhaps it may seem that I harp too 
much on the past as the theme of romance ; but is it 
not the case that the present day is too much pre- 
occupied with itself, and that, therefore, the diversion 
of its attention to the great and romantic stories of 
other days is wholesome ? We must, I know, live in 
the present and act in it, but by realising that other 
ages were as much alive once as we are now, we are 
made to realise that matters which absorb us to-day 
may not after all be of such final significance as we 
suppose ; that our fuss and fume, our rancours and our 
jealousies, are not of eternal importance ? It seems to 
me that from the pages of high romance we may draw 



KING'S SERVANTS 

a more serene patience, and a more practical remem- 
brance that it is by God, and not by us, that the world 
is ruled ; that somehow, after all our boggling and our 
crossness, His Providence unties our knots, and may 
correct our blunders. We see our own follies and our 
own violence reflected in the calm mirror of the past, 
and yet see that the world was there then, as it is now, 
and that God was over the world all the time ; as the 
world is here now, and God is over us all still. 

If it be said that history should do this, I would be 
tempted to reply that in history there may be as much 
fiction as there is history in romance : and further that 
many who will not read history will read romance. 
And, further still, that history, like art, is long : that 
a mouthful of histoiy is not much good, but often the 
reverse : that in a single work of fine romance there is 
apt to be a completeness hardly to be found in a single 
volume, or a single epoch of scientific history. The 
lesson of one chapter, or even of one epoch in history, 
however patent it may seem, is often untrue if taken 
alone, and needs the correction and adjustment of many 
later chapters and epochs. The romanticist may borrow 
from an earlier page, and forestall a later, in a manner 
that could not be tolerated in a historian. 

The story of the Church, of her Popes, and of her 
saints, of her heroes, and of her humbler servants offers 
a wide field, still almost untouched by the romanticist. 

But it is not suggested that all romance must be 
ecclesiological, nor that her theme must be exclusively, 
or always even definitely, I mean obviously, what is 
called religious. To insist on that would be to clip 
her wings, and limit her audience, and that in such a 
manner as to shut against her voice exactly those 
ears which, in my thinking, we most need to catch. 



KING'S SERVANTS 125 

It seems, indeed, to be assumed by some that a Catholic 
romanticist has no business to write otherwise than as if 
he were addressing a Catholic congregation and from a 
Catholic pulpit : in that case it is pretty sure that only 
Catholics will listen, and that any hope of drawing 
towards the Church those who are outside must form 
none of his ambition. 

The Catholic pulpit exists for Catholics, and there 
is no reason for using it as though it were assumed 
that half the congregation at least were non-Catholics : 
the Church is what she is, and those who do not like 
her as she is cannot be cajoled into liking her by half- 
stripping her, and dressing her up in Reformation 
garments. Such a method might make our people 
half-Protestant, but could never make Protestants, not 
in church at all most likely, become Catholic. 

But the function of romance is not identical with 
that of the pulpit : it may attract the indifferent 
towards the consideration of subjects which will lead 
the reader on to friendlier interest in the Church, her 
children and her august story : it may remind a world 
much oblivious of the past how the present was made, 
and compel it to call to mind that religion is not the 
negligible factor in humanity that many are now eager 
to make it. What painting has done for religion in 
one field, what architecture has done in another, that 
also romance may do in her own. 

Though it be true that romance, and even high 
romance, is not limited to themes explicitly religious, 
yet is it also true that all true romance will hold some 
sort of parable : for every genuine reflection of life 
must be a parable, as life itself is one. For some 
readers, indeed, a parable must be terribly obvious, or 
they will see none in it : but must every writer write 



126 KING'S SERVANTS 

always only for the dullest, least apprehensive and least 
sympathetic, reader ? All readers are not dull, nor 
stupid, nor captious ; priggishness is never literary : 
must every writer be always currying favour with 
stupidity and dullness ? Must his teaching be always 
labelled and placarded, his moral marked in plain 
figures like the price on a ready-made cheap garment, 
that is supposed to fit the public, but fits no one in 
particular ? I cannot help thinking that some readers 
might learn more morality from a course of the 
Waverley novels than from a course of mealy-mouthed 
tract-like tales on the seven capital offences and their 
opposed virtues. I am sure they would learn more 
from King Lear than from the excellent Martin 
Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy. 

One who knew books well said that he knew no 
spiritual reading better than Thackeray's Vanity Fair. 
That I honour as a great saying, and a man who was 
not spiritual could not have made it. Yet Vanity 
Fair is by no means all white light ; it would never 
satisfy those critics who demand of the romanticist that 
he should paint only white figures in clear relief against 
a white background. 

All fine writers of English fiction have not, of course, 
been so cleanly as Sir Walter Scott or Thackeray: 
to cite two, and two who are no favourites of my own, 
Smollett was not and Fielding was not. And neither, 
though they wrote with genius, wrote genuine romance. 
Even from them, though we cannot admit them as 
teachers what to do, we may learn, to borrow Sir 
Francis Burnand's delightful phrase, what to don't. 

And they who care to scan pictures of past life, in 
phases that no one can regret should be past, will con- 
sider that they have an interest and a value. Smollett 



KING'S SERVANTS 127 

and Hume together wrote a history of England, and no 
one could gather from the whole of it what England, 
in any period they deal with, was like, half so well 
as he could gather what some sorts of English life 
were like in the period sketched by Smollett alone in 
his brutal novels. 

This portraiture, or even caricature-portraiture, of 
certain periods and their phases, is one of the func- 
tions, if a minor one, of fiction. And it may be that 
by its aid we gather a more accurate and living picture 
than any history, by herself, can give us. Perhaps the 
ages now called Dark would not seem to us now so 
obscure if they too had had their novelists. Shadowy 
and vague figures, that move like phantoms because only 
their names, and certain of their deeds, are passed down 
to us by history, would have more reality and more sig- 
nificance had they also, in their day or near it, been 
pressed into the service of romance. We said above 
that one great use of poetry is its appeal from what 
is temporary and contemporary to interests that are 
eternal and unchanging : and romance, in its measure, 
has the same effect. It widens our view by the mere 
force of altering it ; that is, by compelling some exercise 
of the faculty called imagination, which does not mean 
pretending, but the realisation of images. To some 
extent this lifts us out of ourselves, and suspends our 
selfishness and self-absorption ; for it knocks, as it were, 
the centre of gravity outside ourselves ; and that is no 
mean function, nor trivial result. Romance tends to 
extend our humanity and deepen its sympathies by 
showing us ourselves as parts of the great river of all 
life, flowing down from the past and flowing on to the 
future ; is this bad for our charity or our humility ? 
That which is called, and is not, realism is a special 



128 KING'S SERVANTS 

idiosyncrasy of our present day : it is twin-sister of a 
shallow and blind materialism : and true romance is its 
sworn foe. For the stage of romance is the lofty and 
the ideal ; its standards are not weights and measures, 
and nothing is more alien from it than the apotheosis of 
material success or of money. Of all dumb beasts the 
last to be idolised in romance is the golden calf. 

Romance is not the business of life, and life is very 
busy : but the busiest seek recreation, and a recreation 
that forces us to remember that all life is not the 
making of money is not the meanest. And romance is 
opposed to worldliness, which is an excess of individu- 
alism, and an absorption in the pursuit of material, 
temporary things, for romance is impersonal and heroic. 
Its values are not those of the Stock Exchange, nor of 
Mayfair. Again in all true romance we are brought in 
presence of pathos and of beauty ; and selfishness can 
have no natural antidote more poignant than pathos, 
which is its solvent ; for selfishness arrives by a thicken- 
ing and a hardening of the heart God gave us. The 
ugliness of our own meanness is brought inevitably to 
our notice by ideal pictures of beauty. Sordid aims 
and satisfactions cannot but be made uneasy in their 
seat by such contrasts as Romance propounds. 

It will be seen that I think nobly of romance, as 
Malvolio did of the soul. Its function seems to me 
neither trivial nor slight. That the soul is noble 
makes them more indefensible who have dealt ignobly 
with it : and the same is true of such as deal ignobly 
with romance. But of them I have neither time to 
treat here, nor inclination. 

It is enough to repeat that romance should be a 
worthy relaxation of tired and jaded minds, to whom 
a brief escape into her golden realm is] like a little 



KING'S SERVANTS 129 

uncostly holiday from the stress of toil, and the pre- 
occupation of dull mechanical affairs. In this use of 
it many, I think, might indulge more, with gain to 
themselves. There are some, perhaps, who are too 
busy, though the busy need it most : but there are 
many others who might save for it, with no loss 
to their souls, some of the time they spend in talk. 
And we must say, too, that those fiction-mongers, to 
whom we need not allude more precisely, by whom 
fiction has been dragged down, have so treated what 
should be a relief to minds fatigued, that in their 
hands it has become a thing intolerable to anyone 
with any mind at all. 

In all that I have tried to say it may seem that, 
while on the whole I have said too much, not enough 
has been said of Catholic literature in particular : my 
reason is this. In one sense I would submit that there 
is no such a thing, apart from such specialised subjects 
as theology, as Catholic literature: in another that 
all literature, that is true literature at all, is Catholic : 
that is, that all true literature is a part of the common 
inheritance which belongs to us and all men. In this 
fashion, it would seem, the Church herself has dealt 
with literature, never disinheriting herself of what 
even heathen wisdom and beauty have left to us, and 
never sparing her condemnation of what was vile or 
untrue, because it was written by a Catholic. 

If we come specially to the function of Catholic 
makers of literature, I have already tried, though 
hastily and inadequately, and chiefly by inference, to 
imply what it seems to me to be : viz. that, as of 
old, so should it be now and always : literature, like all 
arts, is no false goddess, but a true servant. She must 
boast no autonomy. Her jurisdiction is not inherent, 

I 



130 KING'S SERVANTS 

but delegated : there is really no republic of letters : but 
a province of letters within the universal Viceroyalty 
of the Church : to which it owes obedience, from whence, 
if it is to be living and coherent, it must draw guidance 
and inspiration too. Sitting at her feet, encouraged 
by her urbane glance of approval or smile of conde- 
scension, our writers will not be scribes teaching they 
know not what, but, by ever learning, they will know 
what they teach, and they will teach by a higher 
authority than their own. Its function can never be 
that of the Church, its office is not hers, but it will be 
not her rebel but her child. And even when at play, 
it may remind us of those other children, playing about 
the feet of the Master Himself, who would not have 
them driven away, nor see in their presence there any 
interruption of His own august lesson. 



AN ESSAY ON ESSAYISTS 

" DON'T tell me," said an elderly lady in my hearing. 
" I know it isn't round." 

" It is," suggested her nephew, " an oblate spheroid." 

" Oblong or no, nothing will make me believe that the 
churches in New Zealand hang down like chandeliers." 

Microbes she also scouted M'Crawbies, as the 
Scotch chemist called them. Doctors, she averred, 
invented them, for their own purposes; just as they 
invented appendicitis, about the time each of them 
took to having a private nursing home of his own. 
Who, she asked, ever heard of a doctor's wife with 
appendicitis ? 

Her nephew feebly urged that all mankind was 
against her. But she didn't care sixpence for man- 
kind, and had he counted mankind ? On a universal 
census, not one per cent., she said, of the human race 
would be found to believe in the rotundity of this earth 
or in microbes. 

"And one per cent.," she observed with finality, "is 
what I never would put up with." 

I do believe in microbes : for is it not obvious that 
an illiterate brute of a microbe fell in with Mr. Birrell, 
bit him, and turned him from letters to politics ? 
Why on earth else should a man, who might still be 
giving us Obiter Dicta, be frittering away time that 
really belongs to the public in the dismal trivialities 
of party politics? It would serve him right if some 

131 



132 AN ESSAY ON ESSAYISTS 

Chancellor of the Exchequer were to throw up his 
excursions and alarms in the undiscovered country of 
finance, and try his hand on Essays on Mr. Birrell's 
favourite topic Cardinal Newman, say, or George 
Borrow. If asked whether he knew how, such a 
Chancellor might reply, like the man who was asked 
if he could play the German flute, "I don't know. I 
haven't tried." 

We have some very good essayists still, and Mr. 
Birrell is the most perfect essayist living, nor would he 
take any but a very high place if ranked with those 
who are living no longer. 

Macaulay was not precisely an essayist, though the 
pieces to which he assigned the name will always be 
delightful reading, and are assumed by young persons 
to be the models of what essays should be. 

An essay, according to the Great Lexicographer, is (1) 
an attempt, an endeavour ; (2) a loose sally of the mind, 
irregular, indigested piece ; (3) a trial, an experiment ; 
(4) a first taste of anything. Macaulay never at- 
tempted, nor endeavoured, he achieved : his mind had 
no loose sallies ; and there were no indigested pieces in 
him, for he was careful to swallow nothing that was 
hard : his essays were not trials, nor experiments, but 
603 catJiedra pronouncements; nor were they exactly 
first tastes, but rather solid meals. Those essays of 
Macaulay's that deal with books are not really essays, 
but a sort of long reviews, though not so much reviews 
of the books that gave him pretext as of the subjects 
dealt with in the books. At all events they are not 
suggestions, but measured and weighty statements ; last 
words rather than first tastes, 

Hazlitt was no more, or scarcely more, an essayist 
than Macaulay, in the strict sense not that your true 



AN ESSAY ON ESSAYISTS 133 

essayist ever is strict. Macaulay and Hazlitt were as 
strict as Dr. Keate, and " loose sallies" and " indigested 
pieces" were the last thing they would have put in 
print. When they had anything to write they seized 
the poker but they could not have written an essay 
on it : Lamb could have written a delightful series on 
it, or on the lid of the tea-kettle: but he could not 
have been strict for he was a prince, nay, an Emperor 
of Essayists. Hazlitt was only an Antipope, who could 
issue nothing more trivial than definitions. He had, 
for an essayist, too much to say. So had Macaulay. An 
essay should not contain too much Mr. G. S. Street is 
a charming essayist. 

Of course style is half the battle with an essayist, 
and style was what Hazlitt and Macaulay both had 
more than either of them knew what to do with. But 
both were what is called exact thinkers, that is, they 
thought exactly what they thought, and could not 
perceive that anybody had any business to think 
differently. Elia did not invariably state precisely what 
he thought, but smilingly suggested what other people 
might think if they had wit enough. Flat statement is 
seldom urbane, and dear Charles was always urbane, 
and never flat : of chill statement he is as niggard as 
Hazlitt and Macaulay are open-handed. He did not 
want to corner you: if he found you put hi the 
corner, he merely came behind and whispered in your 
ear what funny things you might see in the paper on 
the wall. 

That is your true essayist. It is not his business to 
make you yell, or beat your breast : nor even to force 
you to 6clater de rire burst out at the back, as the 
schoolboy translated it : a smile is all he aims at calling 
up, or a sigh with a half smile hi it. 



134 AN ESSAY ON ESSAYISTS 

Like Lamb, whom I am sure he reveres and loves, 
Mr. G. S. Street is nothing if he is not urbane. He 
calls for terrible retribution on his foes, but it is as clear 
as daylight he has none. It is his unmealy-mouthed 
way of praying for their conversion and ultimate reward. 
He never laughs, but a very gentle smile is never far off. 
He never falls flat, and never kicks you high off your 
feet into regions where the air is rarefied : the first floor 
of Piccadilly is the worst you have to fear from any 
impetus he may impart. And he never has too much 
to say : an eyebrow, even a cocked one, would be too 
heavy a theme for him and some essayists' eyebrows 
are like some statesmen's moustaches. He is diffident 
of statement : even his hints are not broad hints. A 
whole essay of his is mostly a parenthesis en route to a 
conclusion never arrived at for so few things are con- 
cluded till the end of the world: and hurry is even 
more repugnant to Mr. Street than being kept waiting 
for dinner. What would really best illustrate his 
genius would be an essay that might go on forever, 
and find us all still in suspense when the Archangel's 
trump should sound. No, not suspense : that suggests 
hanging : and all Mr. Street wants is to lift a deliberate 
leg of yours and never set it down again precisely 
anywhere. 

When we say your true essay should not contain too 
much, else it can be no first taste, nor loose sally of the 
mind, nor irregular indigested piece ; and add that 
Mr. Street is an essayist to the backbone, it is not a 
spiteful way of implying that he has nothing to say, 
and says it. He says a great deal, and he has so much 
to say besides that he never gets it all out. If he starts 
an essay on Flat Candlesticks, the age in which he lives 
is brought so overwhelmingly to his mind by the idea 



AN ESSAY ON ESSAYISTS 135 

of flatness in general that he cannot, that day, get 
nearer to his title-subject than the conversation of men 
at his club. He never goes back to Candlesticks, but 
tries to, in a later essay on Extinguishers: vain 
attempt ! Far from being led thence, by an easy short 
cut, to the little hole in the handle of the candlestick 
where the extinguisher should be, and so to the candle- 
stick itself he can but realise that, in an age of electric 
light, there is no need of extinguishers at all ; and all 
his perfect phrasing is wanted for a protest against 
extinguishing as currently practised. If you really 
want to read about Flat Candlesticks you had better 
study the Army and Navy Stores Catalogue. 

If you don't care much for Mr. Street you will not 
like him at all. If you really love real essays you will 
be delighted with him. Many of his qualities are 
Lamb-like, though he is less cheerful and less pathetic 
than Lamb, because he reflects the spirit not of Elia's 
age, but of his own: and Mr. Street's age is neither 
cheerful nor pathetic. 

Speaking of age in another sense, I do not think the 
true essayist is ever quite young. Youth is not the 
period of " attempts " and " endeavours " : it counts on 
full achievement and takes it for granted. Macaulay 
might have written his essays at one-and-twenty, and 
had all the equipment for doing so : there is no wistful 
afternoon light on them, as there is on Lamb's as 
there is, too, on Mr. Street's : but those long level rays in 
Elia are at once homely and ethereal : I find Mr. Street 
less intimate, for all his familiarity, and more worldly. 
Comparisons are odious, but I do not believe Mr. 
Street will think this one impudent ; to be compared 
with Lamb at all, he would accept as a flattery if only 
he could believe the comparer knew anything about it. 



136 AN ESSAY ON ESSAYISTS 

Style has been mentioned as half the battle with an 
essayist : Lamb's is unapproachable and indefinable, 
as all really perfect style is. Mr. Street's is so good 
that there is nothing good to be said about it, which I 
take to be a proof of excellence. Of Macaulay's style, 
and of Carlyle's, almost anybody might write pages : 
and the more was said the less would be proved. Of 
Cardinal Newman's very little could be written, at all 
events in the way of description. George Borrow has 
a style of his own, perfect in its kind, and no one could 
say what it is. What can be said of Jane Austen's ? 
The best that can be said, which no one could say of 
Macaulay's, is that you may know her by heart and 
never suspect its existence. For by her style is not 
meant her wit, nor her unique perfection of phrasing, 
nor her capacity of making words her servants to run 
errands and bring you exact and inimitable likenesses. 

Mr. Street has all sorts of essays : those on anything 
except anything in particular : those on people on 
himself, for instance, under various aliases : and those 
on certain personages. In these last his manner is 
altogether different. To say they are first-rate is trite 
for expression, but it is high praise, and it is, like all 
praise worth having, far within the mark. 

His essays on Sarah Jennings, on Byron, on Charles 
James Fox, on Horace Walpole, and on George Selwyn 
deal with themes that have been treated continually, 
and nothing better has been said by any one upon 
them. That on the Great Duchess is the best but 
the others need not be jealous. That they should be 
original, when so much has been said already, is as 
miraculous as that Macaulay should not have been a 
prig, and as true. To the last-named great man we 
must always owe an incalculable debt, and chiefly for 



AN ESSAY ON ESSAYISTS 137 

his letters and journals, himself, in fact: and for the 
fact, above all, that, in spite of his father, he never 
became a prig. 

To Mr. Street the present writer owes not an apology 
but an explanation. Among his quite excellent essays on 
people is one on Anthony Trollope, that I only read for 
the first time the other day. It says many things that 
I myself have tried to say in an Essay on a Novelist's 
Novel-Reading in the hands, for many months, of the 
Editor of the Fortnightly Review, but still unpublished. 
Had I known they had been said better already, I 
should not have been so silly as to say them again. 
They come to this, that the apologetic tone affected by 
Trollope's critics is an impudence and an absurdity: 
Mr. Street mentions one of those critics, though not by 
name, and I alluded to him perhaps not even in the 
singular number, but the criticism we both meant 
appeared some years ago in the Nineteenth Century, 
I think. 

Mr. Street is the last man to accuse me of pilfering 
his opinions. Holding Trollope as high as he does, 
he will only be glad that even an inexpert judge should 
share his wrath at the systematic belittling of one of 
our greatest writers of fiction. We must both hope that 
there are seven thousand in Israel besides ourselves 
who have not bowed the knee to this Baal of stupidity. 

Mr. Street, like Ecclesiastes, is very bold, and in one 
particular he places, and rightly places, Trollope above 
even Jane Austen. He might have placed him above 
her in another : in tenderness and pathos. All that 
Jane Austen did she did perfectly ; all that she gives 
is exquisite of its sort. But there was much she had 
no mind to do, and much that she never tried to give. 
Emotion she almost wholly ignores: when Lydia dis- 



138 AN ESSAY ON ESSAYISTS 

graces herself and her family, even Elizabeth is only 
shocked : there is nothing deeper : and in no other 
instance is there anything so deep. Of either pathos 
or tenderness there is no instance at all : the instances 
of both in Trollope's books are far too many for profit- 
able citation. 

But neither Trollope nor Miss Austen belongs to an 
essay on essayists, and we must leave them reluctantly, 
as we always do leave them. 

Fielding, who was, I take it, the first of the modern 
novelists, was an essayist even in his novels: for his 
introductions are obviously essays, and extremely good 
ones. Here, however, we are concerned with living 
essayists, though they must, naturally, remind us by 
comparison, or contrast, with their ancestors. 

Another essayist whom to read must always be a 
pleasure is Mr. Herbert Paul. He has much know- 
ledge, and much sympathy ; the best taste, and a fine 
faculty of appreciation. He is also a very witty 
quoter : and this happy gift is of priceless service to 
readers. A writer with a knack of remembering the 
best things that have been said about everything of 
which he treats lays us all under an obligation that 
we can only repay by gratitude. 

His themes are more definite than is commonly the 
case with Mr. Street : he is more wont to give a head- 
big that tells you what you are to expect : but he gives 
more than you have any right to expect, and it is 
given in a delightful manner. He is also more apt 
than Mr. Street to finish up: more liable to bring 
you somewhere and leave you there. And he is more 
impersonal: it is not his business to confide in you 
about yourself: he deals with persons of recognised 
importance. 



AN ESSAY ON ESSAYISTS 139 

Nor is he whimsical. Since Elia was the prince and 
pattern of all essayists of all time to come, I think an 
essayist should have whimsies. This is not saying that 
you should read Mr. Street, and not read Mr. Paul ; it 
behoves you to read both. It is not even a personal 
profession of faith that I enjoy Mr. Street more than 
I enjoy Mr. Herbert Paul ; but the enjoyment yielded 
by each is of a different quality. Any intelligent reader 
must find amusement and high pleasure in reading 
Mr. Paul's essays; but unless you like literature for 
its own sake, Mr. Street may be one too many for you ; 
some of his pieces are bits of literature and nothing else 
at all. 

In one respect I like Mr. Paul best; he does not 
reflect the depression, or the dogged resolve not to be 
depressed, of our elderly young century. In another I 
like Mr. Street best ; he has a good word for Charles II 
and another for James II at all events he calls by 
their right names William Ill's traitors, whom he 
dismissed that he might get drunk in peace with his 
Dutch minions. Mr. Paul does not like to hear the 
Prince of Orange mentioned as a second-rate Dutch- 
man. And Mr. Street admires as she deserves William's 
pious and filially dutiful consort. 

That a critic so full of letters as Mr. Street should be 
eager to do justice to Sterne is altogether to his credit. 
Tristram Shandy is unique in literature, and Mr. Street 
could not care for literature and belittle it ; he can 
quote it, as only those who love it would know how ; 
but to hesitate in confessing that it is often simply im- 
pure is a mere derangement of epitaphs. " Laughter," 
urges Mr. Paul, "is quite incompatible with prurience." 
Is it ? If you are prepared to admit the theory Mr. 
Paul's contention is half carried, for, with two excep- 



140 AN ESSAY ON ESSAYISTS 

tions, "there is," he maintains, "hardly a dull page in 
Tristram Shandy." 

But is indecency always dull ? Was Congreve dull 
or decent ? Mr. Paul is not content to prove that as 
a book Tristram Shandy is not immoral. To do so 
might involve a good deal of refining and denning as 
to what an immoral book is; but I am not prepared 
to say it could not be done. I am forced to say that 
he has failed in proving that it is not in many places 
wilfully and designedly impure, suggesting, and meant 
to suggest, impure images and fancies. 

Mr. Birrell, we set out by saying, is the most delight- 
ful of living essayists. We said of Mr. Paul that even 
readers who know but little of books must read him 
with extraordinary pleasure provided, of course, they 
do not really dislike reading altogether. The same is 
true of Mr. Birrell, though he is "all over" books, as 
Mr. Carnegie is "all over" libraries. I should think 
he is the best-read man in the kingdom democracy 
I mean ; what he has not read would be much quicker 
to tell than what he has. And books are his play- 
mates; so that, when he bids you come and join his 
play, you may be sure of good sport and good company. 
His essays are never too long ; and they have so 
compact a completeness that they scarcely seem too 
short. He is impishly witty, and full of exhilarating 
spirits, his sympathy can reach anywhere; and, if he 
skips with a flippant posture now and then, he has 
more reverence than hundreds of writers who have 
not light-heartedness enough to be ever flippant. His 
essays on books and their writers are really essays, and 
not reviews or epitomes. He is urbane, like Elia ; and 
often queer, though with a queerness unlike his. His 
admiration for everything good is ^an education in 



AN ESSAY ON ESSAYISTS 141 

taste for those who have none, and an encouragement 
to those who have a little. He is never gushing nor 
ecstatic ; and he could not learn to be a prig if he 
devoted all his great powers during the continuance of 
the present Ministry to the attempt. 

I read the other day that he hates Nonconformists ; 
his discriminating reverence for John Wesley does not 
prove the contrary ; for Wesley was not a Nonconfor- 
mist ; nor is the statement supported by the fun he 
sometimes pokes at Nonconformists. But if he hates 
anybody, he hates no body of men ; and would certainly 
never parade dislike of the body to which his father 
belonged. It was a fond thing vainly invented to breed 
lovers' quarrels between the Minister and a wide section 
of the dismal party to which he, by Fate's inscrutable 
decree, belongs. 

Hatred is not Mr. Birrell's strong point ; in that 
matter he would hardly have passed muster with Dr. 
Johnson's theory if the doctor himself would have 
passed it ; for it is hard to perceive whom he really 
hated; those he gored and tossed he liked all the 
better, that duty done. He never precisely gored 
Wilkes, but he evidently liked him in spite of that and 
everything. Perhaps, after all, there may be other 
ways of being a good liker than that of being a good 
hater. 

If Southey had been " worthy to know " Mr. Birrell 
it would be interesting to read a colloquy by him be- 
tween the latter and the Great Lexicographer. Would 
the modern Minister's admiration have disarmed the 
doctor's wit ? It might be safer to trust to the 
quondam Laureate, who had a gift that way ; especially 
as he would not leave much of Mr. Birrell's, and wit 
was as disarming to Johnson as flattery not that he 



142 AN ESSAY ON ESSAYISTS 

disliked flattery in proper doses, from such as knew how 
to hold the spoon. And better than flattery he liked 
affection. That was why he had a sincere kindness 
for Boswell, whose flattery was served in buckets, and 
Mrs. Thrale, whom he must have known was as vain 
as James I and no wiser than the Queen of Sheba. 

Mr. Birrell refuses to believe that Johnson was a vile 
Tory; not that it makes a pennyworth of difference. 
Mr. Birrell's affections are not political; they are 
rooted in letters and humanity, where Johnson stands 
impregnable. There too stands Cowper, and nowhere 
is tenderer sympathy and more generous admiration 
yielded to that great, forlorn, and sweet genius than in 
Mr. Birrell's brief essay upon him. 

Of Borrow and of Gibbon he writes, as the theme 
needs, in different vein. Borrow cannot be advocated, 
and no pleading will make him appreciated by such 
as do not appreciate him ; he can but be introduced, 
"Lavengro your tuppeny-ha'penny self." It is an 
extraordinary tribute to Borrow that Catholics never 
mind him. He writes vicious nonsense about the 
Church, and those to whom the Church is sacred, and 
one cannot help wishing he hadn't ; but they skip it, 
once they know the place, and it never prevents them 
if they care for books, from loving Lavengro and the 
Bible in Spain. The present writer likes the latter best 
of the two ; for it is interesting all through, and some 
parts of Lavengro are not ; nor is it unpleasant to note 
that Borrow in Spain, in spite of all his abhorrence of 
priests, was not badly treated by them; for my part 
I believe they liked him. Invincible ignorance is very 
endearing, so is colossal indiscretion. 

Some writers are very economical ; they scarcely like 
to put too much in one essay, foreseeing they may 



AN ESSAY ON ESSAYISTS 143 

need it in another; Mr. Birrell is frightfully extra- 
vagant. He never looks ahead, nor keeps anything 
back; you are welcome to every penny in his pocket, 
and it is not only with the small change he is lavish ; 
it all comes out, gold and silver as well. He can afford 
it ; while you are staring at his affluence he pats you 
on the nose with his wand, and brings a sovereign out 
of the bridge of it, and another out of your chin, and 
three or four from your forehead, where no one could 
have dreamt of it. He will squeeze half a dozen igood 
things into half as many lines; and, while you are 
laughing, he draws whole batches of fresh eggs out of 
the crown of your hat absent-mindedly as it were ; and, 
without sitting on them, hatches you lively broods of 
chirpy, funny chickens, that run about with delightful 
twitterings. He is a master of asides ; in that alluring 
fashion he quotes and alludes; as if there really was 
not time to tell you all he wants except in parentheses. 
One such aside is often an essay in itself ; half a dozen 
would sum up more than half the intellectual stock-in- 
trade of the average man. 

He is a noble admirer; he has an instinct for the 
best things everywhere. Johnson and Gibbon, Cowper 
and Wesley, Carlyle and Newman, Borrow and Brown- 
ing, to each he yields, with the same sincerity, the same 
generous tribute of appreciation and understanding. 
Macaulay could not have appreciated Newman nor 
any cardinal, if he had tried; and he never did try. 
To appreciate anything obsolete he felt to be a waste 
of time ; and, what Newman stood for Macaulay 
thought obsolete; the Catholic faith appeared to him 
merely a feature of the Middle Ages. 

The only writer of a great book to whom it seems to 
me Mr. Birrell falls short of being just is Benvenuto 



144 AN ESSAY ON ESSAYISTS 

Cellini ; to the Rogue's Memoirs themselves he yields 
delighted admiration. I would not insist on his 
admiring their author. But he calls him flatly rogue, 
and repeats the judgment at the top of every page. 
He does not call him hypocrite, nor leave you liberty 
to do so. Nevertheless I think he is hard on him. Of 
his great genius, except as a narrator, he scarcely 
speaks; of the singular qualities that enabled him to 
hold the terms he did hold with Popes and Kings he 
says very little indeed. I doubt if Clement VII, 
Paul III, or Francis I, who knew him perfectly, set 
him down as a mere scoundrel. He did some shocking 
things, and avows them ; but they were not rare things 
in his times ; he ought to have been, as all of us ought 
to be, better than the age ; but I doubt if he was a bad 
man as things went then. He committed what we can 
only call crimes, and he had a religiosity of which he 
was no more ashamed than of the crimes; but I am 
sure the religiosity was as real and undeniable as 
the crimes. He could well have been better; without 
the religiosity I believe he would have been worse. At 
all events he was not smug ; had he been so he could 
have written no memoirs Mr. Birrell would have 
admired. Cellini lived in an age that was not smug; 
it had saints and sinners, and Benvenuto was not one 
of the saints ; he believed in God all the same, and 
took liberties with Divine patience else, thought the 
Rogue, what was it all for, since the saints left it 
undrawn on? He broke commandments when it 
suited him, but not on that account would he deny 
the existence of others that he did not wish to break ; 
still less did he perceive that common logic and 
decency called for impertinence to the Lawgiver. The 
modern sinner has a spite against the authority that 



AN ESSAY ON ESSAYISTS 145 

makes sins of things he resolves to do: he therefore 
Hings the Old Man of the Woods off his back alto- 
gether : but not on that account will he condone your 
offences should they lie in directions whither his 
own desires do not tend. Your Agnostic is not hard 
to shock. 



A NOVELIST'S SERMONS 



PARALLELS 

IN rhetoric, parallels are a numerous family ; but they 
are in reality short-lived. The lines soon diverge in 
one direction, and they run back into mere identity 
of cause. So that, however interesting a seeming 
parallel may appear, it is not to be pressed too far. 
With such limitations in mind it would seem that there 
might be some interest, and even some use, in con- 
sidering a parallel between the position of Catholics 
in England now, and that of Christians in the Roman 
Empire during the age following that of Constantino. 

For a period roughly corresponding the Christian 
Church before the official conversion of the Empire, 
and the Catholic Church in England after the Refor- 
mation, were much in the same position. During the 
first three centuries of her history the new religion of 
Christ in Rome was under a more or less rigorous 
discipline of repression ; for about three hundred years 
after the Reformation the old religion of Christ in 
England existed under analogous, though not identical, 
conditions of varying but distinct repression. 

No one supposes that the Christians of those first 
three centuries lived in a chronic state of acute perse- 
cution ; but their position was always illegal, and from 
time to time the laws, for longer or shorter intervals 
tacitly ignored and disregarded, were put in force, and 
then came outbursts of furious storm. The last of 
these persecutions occurred during the lifetime of the 

149 



150 PARALLELS 

Emperor whose official conversion was to secure 
freedom of worship for the professors of a faith which 
had existed for a long time under protest, though be- 
fore he had arrived at his final complete sovereignty 
and independence. 

The Romans were not by disposition a more in- 
tolerant people than the English: like the English 
they were much disposed to regard the religion of 
which the Pope was the visible head with a somewhat 
scornful wonder, as an unaccountable weakness and 
eccentricity in its professors; but they did not all 
refuse, to those who had the misfortune to be addicted 
to it, a measure of half-puzzled respect, grounded 
chiefly on their obvious earnestness and sincerity; nor 
did they forget that among them were many families 
of ancient lineage and illustrious name. This latter 
consideration had perhaps as much weight as the 
other, for the Romans, whether imperialists or re- 
publicans, were at heart a conservative people like the 
English. 

Such unpopularity, on the other hand, as the 
followers of the Pope laboured under was due in the 
Roman Empire to much the same causes as have been 
the ground of it in England. First of all, they were 
twitted as believers in a foreign cult ; and the Romans 
of the Empire, almost as ready as the English to make 
much of the wrong foreigners, thought that Romans 
should be content with the religion of the State. 
Then the head of this faith, alien in its origin, need 
not be, and often had not been, a Roman : there had 
been Hebrew, Greek, Asiatic, and African Popes. The 
patriotic Roman's national amour propre was offended 
at the notion of subjection, even in spiritual matters, 
to a pontiff who might be a foreigner : to tell the truth, 



PARALLELS 151 

he could not grasp the idea of a subjection that con- 
cerned only the spiritual world, for that world was 
beyond the scope of his imagination. His mind was 
positive and "practical"; he could hardly believe in 
an invisible kingdom, and suspected there must be 
more in it than met the ear. When Christ, not dis- 
claiming His kingship, said, "My kingdom is not of 
this world," Pilate was puzzled, and pressed Him again. 

Again, the Roman conception of useful religion was 
altogether national, whereas the religion of the Pope's 
spiritual subjects was the reverse of national : its claim 
to be Catholic, universal, made it international, un- 
patriotic, and objectionable. To the Roman it appeared 
obvious that the logic of such a claim was opposed to 
patriotism, for it suggested an authority higher than 
the State, outside it, and not subject to it, as it also 
suggested a sort of confederation, independent of the 
State, and not even confined to those who were within 
the vast pale of the Empire. All this made it seem 
that the Pope and his Christians, even when Romans, 
must aim at being something else as well. The Roman 
mind, no more than the English, could grasp the idea 
of sincere loyalty to the State among people who had 
to admit that there was a law higher than that of any 
temporal lawgiver. They did not choose to remember 
that there had been occasions when Romans, and 
heathen Romans too, had risen against the lawgiver 
of the moment, and that those men had ever since 
been acclaimed as national heroes. 

Another count hi the indictment was that the faith 
of those whose supreme representative was the Pope 
was itself intolerant. Its claim was exclusive; it did 
not confess that other religions might be as good ; it 
refused to allow its followers to take part in the public 



152 PARALLELS 

offices of the State religion ; regarding such a com- 
pliance as treasonable to itself, it was itself regarded 
as treasonable. It maintained that there could be 
only one God, and consequently only one Truth, which 
was surly and discourteous, as the fact was notorious 
that many gods were publicly recognised, and truth 
was not commonly supposed to be actually discover- 
able anywhere. Those of their fellow-citizens who 
professed this or that cult (many of which cults were 
as foreign in Rome as Christian Science is in England) 
had no vehement, much less exclusive, addiction to 
their own particular form of worship, and were far 
from laying any surly claim to infallibility in their 
teachers. Your Mithraite had no objection on season- 
able occasions to frequenting the Iseum : the cult of 
Isis and the cult of Mithra were both tolerated by 
the State and professed by persons of consideration 
in society. 

What was intolerable in the Pope, and his absurdly 
subservient followers, was their arrogant, unfriendly 
claim to a special exclusive possession of truth, resting 
on a superstitious pretence of a direct, exclusive revela- 
tion. This sour attitude showed itself not only in a 
rigorous abstention from the religious worship of their 
neighbours, but in a marked shyness to admit to the 
celebration of their own sacred mysteries those who 
happened not to revere them, but who would have been 
quite willing to be present as spectators, out of curiosity. 
This was superstitious and probably worse. There 
must be something to conceal, and so the wildest 
theories flew about to account for it. In such a re- 
ligion there must be more than appeared on the 
surface; something discreditable to conceal. 

Finally, the fruits of the religion were disagreeable, 



PARALLELS 153 

and trees are known by their fruit. To start with: 
the Pope's faith encouraged enthusiasm ; it went too 
far. It was notorious that many Christians of high 
rank had sold estates, palaces, jewels, statues, heir- 
looms, and beggared themselves to found churches or 
to feed the poor. Others had flung up positions of 
eminence to become priests or monks. 

Comparisons were already odious; and this sort of 
behaviour has always been offensive to those whose 
own is diametrically opposed to it. " Suppose my 
daughter should turn Christian," says Tullius, "and 
become a nun, instead of marrying the wealthy 
Lucullus!" "Suppose my son," cries Licius, " should 
get this Christian maggot in his head, and become 
a priest, like a slave's son, whereas, with his influence 
and his talents, he might one day be City Prefect ! 
There' d be an end of the glories of a family that was 
famous three centuries ago, and has been pretty wealthy 
ever since." Why, the young Licius might turn out 
a saint, or even a martyr. And in good families saints 
and martyrs must be as intolerable as sheer vulgarity. 
To the well-regulated, prosperous Roman mind sanctity 
and martyrdom must have seemed as tiresome and 
uneasy as to that of the eighteenth-century Englishman. 

The Roman noble of the Empire, whose uncle may 
have been a Proconsul in Egypt, had heard of the 
Fathers of the desert, and knew that those enthusiasts 
never entered a bath, or cut their hair, or ate any 
reasonable human food. He might himself have seen 
the martyrdom of this perverse and obstinate Christian 
or that, and it put him beyond his patience. 

Have you ever sat alone, on a windless night, in the 
Coliseum, and thought of the thoughts of such as sat 
in your place there seventeen or eighteen hundred years 



154 PARALLELS 

before you ? Of some well-dressed, well-read, well-fed 
Roman gentleman, of no particular belief himself easy, 
tolerant, not ill-natured, nor specially savage, with a 
confidence that all which is is for the best, placidly 
patriotic, proud of his country and iond of its customs, 
with a layman's mild satisfaction in a national religion 
that never in his life had interfered with him, that had 
never snatched one pleasure out of his hands, or scolded 
him, or asked him to confess his decorous sins, or sug- 
gested to him that he should be different; a religion 
with centuries of opulent consideration behind it, 
splendid in its monuments, satisfactory in its calm, 
slightly obsolete, ritual; a religion in which he had 
been born and bred, and his fathers before him, which 
he loved for that reason rather than for itself well, 
well ! perhaps he too had believed in it once, as an un- 
thinking child open to large impressions ; in those 
unreturning days he had watched the sacrifice, and 
listened to the half-comprehended words, with a sense 
that they somehow lifted him, that they were a 
mysterious link with a touching, greater past. And 
the huge amphitheatre is filled, the awning is over- 
head ; it is staring afternoon, but the rude sun cannot 
tease emperor nor court, vestal college, nor all the 
dignity of Rome, the world's calm mistress. 

Then the arena fills too. The athletes are down 
below : they bend before the supreme figure of earthly 
rule, "Morituri, Caesar, te salutant." Not all slaves, 
nor barbarian captives : yonder a fine Roman face, a 
graceful Roman form, familiar features of a patrician 
house identified with a name as old as the Republic. 

Why is he here ? What brings him as food for the 
lion's mouth ? A fancy, an exotic superstition yet he 
too dies: no alien, no criminal, no spoil of ruthless 



PARALLELS 155 

war; and in him his glorious race expires, the fabled 
name becomes extinct because he will not drop one 
sweet grain of incense on the throbbing, pitiful heart 
of red charcoal before the little ivory or bronze Jove 
that cares not one whit whether he drop it or no ! 

Can you not picture the anger of such a Roman 
gentleman ? Ah, the pity of it, the waste ! What a 
faith, that leads its luckless children to such insensate 
end ! How he hates martyrdoms and the religion that 
has been the prolific mother of martyrs. The very 
martyrs themselves insult him, and are a sting and a 
reproach. Cannot a plain man live all his allotted 
length of days, and covering his head in his toga when 
the fated hour strikes, bow down aghast, but without 
vulgar outcry, to the Inexorable Messenger when he 
comes, without rushing like a fool, midway, to meet him ? 

Must not such a pleasant gentleman have loathed 
the religion that led its hapless children along so 
thorny a path ? The faith that knocked aside the 
sweet, sweet cup of life, carven about with lovely brede 
of tender flower and laughing faun the faith that 
cried : " Poison in the cup. Dash it down !" when the 
wine within it was so dancing sweet, filling the veins 
with laughter, and the eyes with lovely images. 

Poor kindly gentleman : he saw no one greater than 
the martyr standing behind him ; had never learned 
the austere tongue that speaks of happiness in pain, 
glory in shame, a light invisible beyond these chilling 
mists of falling darkness. With all the sincerity at 
his conventional command he hated this foreign, 
unfriendly, tyrannical, agonising faith that flung its 
loveliest, noblest children to the lion's mouth. 

Half-sick, all angry, when all was over he strolled 
away to his pleasant, opulent home, or was carried 



156 PARALLELS 

thither, perhaps not immediately forgetting the tragedy 
just seen : remembering it, maybe, as he lolled beside 
his lavish table with wife and son and daughter : they 
too might turn Christian, and for them the shame of 
the arena, the agony of that horrible death. Let the 
easy, faulty gods forbid ! the old comfortable gods of 
the old comfortable religion that asked only sacrifices 
not sacrifice. . . . But these times came to their end 
at last : after Diocletian's there was no great persecu- 
tion, only a hurried interlude of it during Julian's 
short gasp of a reign, when in Rome few martyrs were 
added to the list. 

The old laws against the faith of the Pope's followers 
had been repealed ; the Church had emerged from 
the catacombs for good, and the churches needed no 
longer to hide, or half hide, in the basilicas of great 
Christian houses. Public churches were built every- 
where, and they were thronged with worshippers, many 
of whose names were new among Christians. All the 
old disabilities were done away with, highest offices in 
city and army were being filled with Christians : to be 
Christian was no drawback upon the career of patrician 
or wealthy aspiring plebeian. 

Justice had been done. Let it be done always. 
Fiat justitia, rued coelum: only if the heavens are 
falling men need to know where shelter is. Justice 
was done, as it had to be done, as it is apt to get itself 
done at long last. So far, good; but not every result 
of its tardy arrival was particularly good for those on 
whose behalf it had been done. 

For three centuries the faith had existed in all the 
concentrated vigour of repression ; it spread much 
wider now, but it spread shallower. During those 
unjust years it had been held by men who knew 



PARALLELS 157 

that they might have to die for it, who knew 
that they must suffer for it, paying the lifelong 
price of social ostracism or isolation, of disabilities in 
every turn of their worldly fortune; and what cost 
them dear they valued dearly. Now it cost them 
nothing; there was nothing to pay for it; and its 
cheapness cheapened it. Soon indignant doctors of 
the Church were crying out on the! lives of Christians, 
sometimes for heinous faults, but chiefly because the 
ways of these new-fashioned Christians were just as 
the ways of the pagan, or unbelieving, society in 
which they were finding themselves quite at home. 
Fashion was their ruin. To live as nearly as possible 
the same life as that of their non-Christian friends 
in society, that was their new endeavour; to share 
exactly their amusements, their indulgences ; to be 
as extravagant, as showy, as profuse, as self-indulgent, 
as little serious, as little restrained. Pagan faults are 
not hard for Christians to learn, and according to 
St. Jerome and St. Ambrose the Christians of toler- 
ating Rome soon learned them. They were in a hurry 
to repay the toleration they had lately received ; 
for a long time their forefathers' virtues had been 
out of toleration: their contemporaries' vices they 
tolerated in a wonderfully short time and copied. 
Of course there were saints still ; as in every age of the 
Church there have been and shall be ; but sanctity was 
not popular, and the saints, even those of highest rank 
and birth, as many were, were out of fashion, and 
scarcely known in society. 

So runs one line of parallel. Need the other be 
laboured ? In hurriedly describing the state of 
Christians in the Empire during those first three 
centuries has not the state of Catholics in England 



158 PARALLELS 

during the three centuries following on the Reforma- 
tion been described obliquely ? Of course, in England, 
Ireland, and Scotland the persecution was on a less 
imposing scale. Was it less bitter ? Or was the actual 
repression less rigorous, less complete, or less out- 
rageous in injustice? Were not the grounds of the 
national aversion from our faith rooted in the same 
causes, the same ignorance, the same half-blundering, 
all obstinate prejudices? And was not the result 
of. three centuries of oppression and repression on 
Catholics themselves alike, if not identical ? Here, 
too, we were a people half-despised, and yet respected 
by many for qualities which demand and enforce 
respect. Our Catholic forefathers were intensely in 
earnest, as well they might be, seeing what their 
Catholicity cost them. They were not social leaders, 
were not always polished, lacked public training, were 
without the education of home universities, were old- 
fashioned, had sometimes a foreign smack in their 
manners, led rather obscure lives, and kept closely to 
themselves. The patois of current fashion was not 
theirs; there were among them many of the very 
highest rank, with historic names, famous long before 
anyone had ever heard those of the nobility that came 
up when the monasteries went down; but even these 
were rustic, living mostly in their country-houses, not 
seen, or barely seen, at court : when seen regarded with 
a picturesque curiosity. 

Yet how compact a body they were; with every 
difficulty in their way how rigidly they held their 
faith, and how unflinchingly they followed it up in 
every consequence. Scarcely breathing the common 
atmosphere, they had their own, and its influence 
was with them from baptism to death. They were 



PARALLELS 159 

in many ways unlike other people, and they did not 
mind. They had to be. It was part of being what 
they were. 

Then came the slow-footed justice, grudgingly and 
of necessity, not very cheerfully given, not out of 
breath with haste, nor out of countenance for un- 
punctuality. She came not out of love but without it, 
selling herself, elderly courtesan as she was, and, with 
her price in her hand, wondered that her advent was 
not more acclaimed. Still she had arrived ; and her 
coming caused many to look into the skies to watch 
their fall. Of course they did not fall: when clouds 
break it is not because justice is done, but because 
injustice has fetched them clattering about our ears. 
Well, in England we had no catacombs, only slums, 
and we came out of them. Our churches had been in 
ambassadors' houses, or those of country lords and 
squires ; now they leapt up in the streets and squares 
of London and all the towns. And a thousand other 
good results grew of our new toleration, honest results 
hard won, and ours by right long before we had them 
in our hands. No one but a maniac would sigh for 
the old bad days of shameless repression back again. 

Yet those oldj shadowed times had compensations 
that God gave while man's hand was against us. Let 
us be chary of losing them. 

We breathe the common air now: has it no infec- 
tion ? Do we remember, as we used, that after all we 
live in an atmosphere alien from our faith ? That the 
common opinion about us is founded on the assump- 
tions we have always denied ; that every newspaper 
breathes them, almost every public speech of orators and 
politicians ? That the more we grow like our pleasant 
neighbours the less we may be resembling Catholics ? 



160 PARALLELS 

Are we learning, is there no danger of our learning, 
to regard marriage as it is regarded outside the Church ? 
Do we remember that the Sacraments, and not Insti- 
tutes for this or that, are our way of salvation ? 

Are we not too eager that our benevolences should be 
exactly like the philanthropy of those who believe in 
nothing beyond philanthropy ? Half the philanthropy 
of our time is founded on disbelief in God and the 
immortality of the soul of man. When "charity" 
becomes a department of the Modern State, it is mostly 
because the State has no faith in anything higher than 
Man. When governments promise to annihilate 
poverty it is commonly because they have officially 
annihilated God, Who can alone rob poverty of its 
sting: not because they love the poor for Christ's 
sweet sake, the Poor Man of Nazareth, but because 
they fear them, and recognise in them a danger and 
a menace. Is not that also like pagan Rome? The 
poor were fed there too, wholesale : bread and games 
were flung to them, and did anyone pretend it was for 
love? The loaves were to stop their mouths, which 
else might shout too loudly, not to stay their hunger 
out of any brotherly compassion for the hunger itself. 

The conditions of poverty in England after the Re- 
formation were the direct consequence of the Reforma- 
tion itself, as even such Protestants as William Cobbett 
could see plainly enough. Before it the poor were the 
care of the Church, and especially of the religious houses, 
and their lot was never so pitiable as it became when 
the monks' charity was changed for the scurvy ^recogni- 
tion of the Poor Laws. 

To our questions again. Does it strike us that our 
amusements, too, are provided by those who believe 
almost nothing that we believe? Millions of people 



PARALLELS 161 

every year pass hours of their lives in theatres, where 
the plays they see are the work of writers who have no 
faith, either in God or God's commandments, certainly 
none in. His Church or her right to guard our conduct 
as she guards our belief. Millions are reading books, 
novels, essays, biographies, snippings of history, satires, 
the enormous majority of which are written by those 
who have scarcely any conviction so strong as that the 
Church has always been in the wrong, her teaching an 
arrogant medievalism, obsolete and negligible. 

We do not go to novels or to poetry to be taught, it 
may be urged; nevertheless, we are taught by what- 
ever we read, in higher degree or lower. The age just 
concluded was one of immense literary importance : in 
poetry, in fiction, in history, in social ethics, in natural 
science it produced in England a crowd of names so 
illustrious that we are convinced they are to be im- 
mortal. How few of them stood on the side of faith 
our faith, which we must think of as the only one. 
Did Thackeray love the Church, or respect her 
principle ? Did Dickens, Meredith, Hardy or Scott 
before them ? Yet their attitude was respect itself 
compared with that of Mr. Bernard Shaw and his 
crowd of imitators to-day; and perhaps Mr. Shaw's 
plays teach in a week more hearers than his greater 
predecessors' books taught readers in a month of 
weeks. 

Tennyson was the worthiest of men, and knew it ; 
but he was as Protestant as the parish clerk. Browning 
thought so many things at a time that it was not easy 
to decide which thought was actually predominant : 
but there was always the thought that the Vicar of 
Christ was an elderly nuisance, and that the best of his 
nominal children were the rebellious and disobedient. 

L 



162 PARALLELS 

His Lyric Love, half-governess, half-bore, was never in 
two minds about it : to her the Old Man of the Moun- 
tains was the Old Man who sat among the Seven Hills 
beside the yellow river, whence she was inspired to 
dislodge him with every odd rhyme at her command. 

Swinburne was as much irritated by one sort of 
Christianity as another, and, like Lothaw in Bret 
Harte's parody, said, "Please, I'd like to be a pagan." 
We know how Macaulay loved the Church and all 
her ways, how Froude loved them, and Carlyle, and 
Motley. 

Matthew Arnold disliked Catholicity as much as a 
brilliant man could ; and Ruskin's attitude to it was 
that of a travelled old maid who had taken Protestant- 
ism with him to Italy in his trunk, and brought it 
back a good deal creased, distinctly old-fashioned, 
smelling of camphor, and odd to wear, but by no means 
discarded. John Stuart Mill had a number of hardish 
ideas in his capacious intellectual stomach, and a good 
many of them his successors have spat up again as 
undigested as ever, but one of them was not that 
Christendom was a better idea than Europe, and that 
with the Pope at the head of it a good many things 
had been better managed. 

Of those who taught natural science how many 
started with any assumption that, whatever might be 
wrong, God must be right ? Was not the real theory 
this? If, when we ihave done, God can continue to 
exist, so much the better for Him, but all that's as may 
be; the point is quite different. Our business is to 
erect a universe without Him; if He can creep in 
afterwards, well, it will be a satisfaction to our aunts 
and the rector. 

Of course the current point of view, which meets 



PARALLELS 163 

those who are growing up now, is not precisely identical. 
The Church's God does not exist, but there may be 
a different person of the same name : the great thing 
is to remember that he is different. He has no rights ; 
he does not know anything, or care about anything. 
The things he is supposed to have done were done 
by other people, or more probably were never done 
at all; his existence, such as it is or ever was, is 
morbid and subjective. He is only real at all because 
man made him ; and very soon indeed he will cease 
to be real because man does not want him any longer. 
His existence then will resemble that of Homer, who 
never did exist, and whose epics were composed by a 
number of other people. 

Is it not now worth while to remind ourselves that 
this is the atmosphere we are breathing all day long ; 
that, as George Herbert sang with more force than 
grace, " the fly that feeds on dung is coloured 
thereby " ? 



LOYALISTS AND PATRIOTS 

A CATHOLIC may be a good Conservative or Tory, and 
a Catholic may be a good Liberal or Kadical: and we 
do, in fact, see excellent Catholics in all these political 
camps. And, undoubtedly, a Catholic may be a most 
loyal patriot : a good deal of ink has been used to 
prove, what really needs no proof, the loyalty of 
Catholics and their patriotism. But it is not to be 
forgotten that whether Radical or Tory, Republican 
or Monarchist, a Catholic must be something greater 
than all or any of these things: and that, however 
"loyal" he maybe, and however " patriotic," there is 
in him a principle deeper than either what is called 
loyalty or what is commonly meant by patriotism. 

Some false accusations brought against Catholics 
have their root in a suspected truth, that is, in a fact 
whose existence is instinctively divined by those who 
do accuse, but whose significance is misunderstood by 
them and falsely stated. Patriotism is assumed, by 
those who arrogate to themselves a monopoly hi it, to 
be a civic virtue so important that he who lacks it 
must, as a citizen, be worthless and indeed dangerous. 
But in so far as it is a real virtue at all, it is more than 
civic, and only one phase or expression of a much 
wider and more far-reaching virtue, that of Christian 
charity. It does not consist solely in the love of 
country: it begins, like charity in the proverb, at 
home. The forgetfulness of this leads to an inflated 

164 



LOYALISTS AND PATRIOTS 165 

pseudo-patriotism, which is so far unreal that it has no 
real basis, but hangs in the air, neither linked to 
heaven or logically supported by earth. 

The first step in genuine patriotism must consist in 
love of family and home, and its first efforts must tend 
to the true Igood of home and family : in this each 
individual of the family must start with himself, not 
as seeking for himself the best goods, but as aiming at 
his own best good : for this does not imply selfishness, 
but the reverse: the best goods are temporary in im- 
portance and unnecessary, but the best good is of eternal 
necessity and indispensable : in the attainment of it by 
each human being consisting the Divine Plan hi his 
regard. Thus each member of the family must aim at 
his own eternal good, not jostlingly, so as to interfere 
with the attainment of the same good by every other 
member of the family, but so as to help every other 
member to attain it. And, so far is this from imply- 
ing jostling or rivalry that it implies the opposite : as 
there are only so many temporal "goods" on earth it 
is true, in theory, that the more one gets the less 
another can get : but, as the best good is not thus 
limited, it is not true that the harder I strive for it the 
less likely is it that you can attain it : on the contrary, 
every sincere effort of mine must help you. 

To the pseudo-patriot this appears nonsense, and 
your pseudo-patriots are commonly but indifferent 
members of families, and very unsatisfactory heads of 
them, as they are commonly far from being exemplary 
as individuals. 

The State, however, consists only of so many families, 
just as the family itself consists only of so many 
individuals : and it is because of the frequent neglect 
of this principle of ours by the State itself that the 



166 LOYALISTS AND PATRIOTS 

State suffers. Euclid tells us that the whole is greater 
than its part, but no whole can be greater than the sum 
total of its parts, and no whole can be better than the 
parts of which it consists. 

If the members of a family are severally rotten, the 
family will be rotten ; if the families in a State are 
rotten, the State can be no better. The priest who 
tries to make each individual in his charge better is 
a finer patriot than the doctrinaire politician who 
vapours about the good of the State, neglecting his 
own, and that of his family. There is no such thing as 
the good of the State apart from the good of all the 
individuals in it. 

After the family come groups of families ; hamlets, 
villages, towns, cities, counties, provinces ; and people 
can be, and have been, furiously " patriotic " about 
these; the patriotism of the Greeks mostly confined 
itself to what would seem to us very narrow limits. 
In much later times patriotism in Italy was much 
more of this sort than of that which concerns a whole 
"country" in the English sense of the word. In Italy 
a man speaks of his village as his paese, his country, 
and he means it ; not merely that paese is Italian for 
village, which it is not. A Florentine or a Pisan was, 
and largely is, " patriotic " for Florence or Pisa, and 
only in a much cooler degree for Italy : a Roman had, 
and has, the same feeling ; only in him it had not the 
same twang of localism, because he felt that Rome was 
the Metropolis of the world; to think of it as the 
capital of Italy was not an enlargement of his concep- 
tion but a stunting of it and a narrowing. Until 
recently, however, Italy was not, even politically, one 
country ; and at present it is only so politically and in 
theory. Whereas Spain, France, England, Ireland, 



LOYALISTS AND PATRIOTS 167 

Scotland, Wales, have for many centuries been each 
a country single in itself, though some of them are 
joined together politically. In these countries, there- 
fore, the notion of patriotism has been less local, and 
wider, and also less compact and intense. 

In this broader sense true patriotism is still only a 
part, and an expression, of the Christian rule of charity, 
viz. the obligation of loving; less easy, perhaps, 
because less intimate and more theoretical. The 
members of our family we see, even the members of our 
native town or village we know, or may know, by 
sight; but we cannot have personal knowledge of all 
our compatriots, or personal relations with them ; the 
charities of daily life are not called into play in their 
regard, so that to some extent we are endeavouring to 
love an idea. 

To love is, none the less, the real duty of patriotism, 
whereas, in the mouths of many of its noisiest pro- 
fessors, the point would rather seem to be to hate. 
It is not, with them, so much a question of loving 
their country as of disliking, envying, or despising other 
countries. Such others as appear to claim the dignity 
of rivals they vilify and slander ; the rest they ignore 
as beneath notice. This patriotism would seem to 
be composed largely of vanity and largely of spite. 
The vanity is not hard to understand, for your patriot 
of this kidney has often little in himself on which to 
ground that pleasant sensation, and brags of the great- 
ness (i.e. bigness) of his country to blind the public 
to his own littleness. 

Beyond the idea of country this sort of patriotism 
can, obviously, not reach. It could not occur to these 
patriots that the virtue of which patriotism is a part 
has a further scope still ; that, just as every in- 



168 LOYALISTS AND PATRIOTS 

dividual is a unit in the family, and every family a 
unit in the State, so the State itself is only a larger, 
less interesting, though more important, unit in the 
final unit of the human family of which God is the 
Head. 

As things now stand, probably the Catholic Church 
alone maintains this wide view. In the despised 
Middle Ages it was of general acceptance, because 
when the huge, but artificial and material, unity of the 
Roman Empire disappeared, it was succeeded by the 
vaster and unmaterial unity of the Church. The 
split-up of this union, whereby a single Christendom 
was changed into a divided Europe, did not take 
effect till the Reformation, which substituted for the 
splendid and noble idea of a universal Christian family, 
united under one father, the petty and selfish idea of 
rival nationalities under a group of mutually suspicious 
stepbrothers, and the makeshift compromise of a 
balance of power, which none of those in the balances 
would agree to in his own case. 

The Catholic Church must have the broader idea of 
patriotism, and always have it, because she is Catholic. 
The Hebrew Church treasured the truth of One only 
God as the family secret of one nation : the Catholic 
Church proclaims all truth as the equal birthright of 
all mankind, and refuses to house herself in any one 
nation, or call herself by the name of any one country. 
Countries arise upon the world's great stage, and play 
their parts, and go : empires fatten, fall apoplectic, and 
expire, like the empires whose heirs they are: the 
Church cannot bind herself to what is mortal and has 
its allotted death as surely as it had its appointed birth. 
So she sits, not coldly outside the nations, but serenely 
above them, gathering them into her arms, if they will 






LOYALISTS AND PATRIOTS 169 

come, yet never isolated by the bounds, or by the 
" interests " of any one of them. 

This the world divines, by an instinct so unwelcome 
that it harbours it as a suspicion and an accusation, 
and broods over it as a grudge. The instinct is a true, 
involuntary, intuition : the statement of the suspicion 
a slander, and the grudge envious and malicious. The 
Church has always been higher than the world: and 
a sense of inferiority will ever make the mean spiteful. 

" A Catholic cannot be a genuine patriot." The 
accusation means that every genuine Catholic must 
be something more than a mere "patriot" because 
the boundaries of the largest empire cannot bind his 
patriotism, or forbid its range "as far as God has any 
land." 

Was there ever a finer patriot than St. Gregory the 
Great, or a more papal Pope ? He did more, not only 
for the part of it he actually governed, but for all 
Italy, than any man of his age ; but he was never a 
mere Italian. The nations were his inheritance and 
the uttermost parts of the earth his possession. Thus 
his eye could range, far beyond the bounds of his own 
loved and lovely land, to the fog-girt island lonely in 
the cold seas of the north, that had been Christian 
Britain once and was heathen England then, and be- 
come its apostle, though his own place must be still 
by Peter's tomb. 

There may have been instances, enough and to spare, 
of Catholics whose patriotism has been of the narrower 
sort, and who have vaunted themselves of it because 
there have always been Catholics whose Catholicity has 
been skin-deep, and because it is the perverse tendency 
of man to value himself on the wrong things. Our 
own trivial achievements and personal, private dis- 



170 LOYALISTS AND PATRIOTS 

tinctions are apt to strike us more than what is greatest 
in us, because what is greatest is common and not 
confined to ourselves. The greatest thing about every 
Catholic is that he is one; but, the smaller he is in 
himself, the likelier is it that he will pride himself on 
some small thing he has to himself or shares with but 
few besides. The greater he is in himself the more 
will he think of that which he has in common with 
everyone of his faith. 

" After all," said St. Theresa, dying, " I am a child 
of the Church." It was not that she chafed at 

" The petty done, the undone vast." 

God has plenty of time to do all His work: His 
greatest helpers have not vexed themselves with the 
little they have had time to carry out in their own day 
and their own way. Nor do I believe it was because 
she despised her own work: she was too reverent; it 
was all His, and she could no more belittle it than St. 
Paul would slur over what God had wrought, with him 
for tool and labourer of a day. But in the hour of 
death it is comfort we need, and she found it, as we 
all must at last, saints and sinners, not in what she 
had done for Him, but in what He had done for her : 
in what He is, not in what she was. " After all, O 
Lord, I am a child of the Church." 

Then, loyalty. Oh, frequent word ! Oh, rare virtue ! 
Must not that also begin at home, and the loyal man 
be first of all loyal to himself? 

"Ah, Liberty!" cried Madame Roland, lifting her 
eyes to its image before laying her head upon the 
block " Ah, Liberty ! the things that are done in thy 
name." 

And how queer excursions loyalty has taken : what 



LOYALISTS AND PATRIOTS 171 

cheap proofs of itself it offers. Out of loyalty King 
Charles's subjects levied war against him and removed 
his head, lest a royal tongue should go on telling lies. 
Your rebel of to-day is your loyalist of to-morrow. 
Who was the loyalist when that Charles's namesake 
and great-grandson, and the butcher Cumberland, 
fought at Culloden ? which commanded rebels ? Did 
it not all depend on the issue of a battle? If the 
Prince of Wales had won then, as well as at Preston- 
pans, and the Elector had gone off to Hanover, as he 
was ready to go, I suppose the victorious troops would 
have been the loyalists, and those who had been trying 
to keep King James III out of his throne and dominions 
would have been allowed by history to be the rebels. 
In our own days loyalty often consists, like gratitude, 
in a lively apprehension of favours to come: in an 
eager resolve to be about a court, if possible, to be a 
guest of royalty, and to bask in princely smiles. How 
anaemic such loyalty grows when courtly doors remain 
shut, and royal invitations are not forthcoming. It by 
no means thrives when it has to be its own reward. 

But there is a Catholic notion of loyalty, too : which 
is a virtue, as is patriotism, and, like it, is part of 
another virtue : for, just as true patriotism is not 
national vanity, but a phase of Christian love : so 
loyalty is not a lick-spittle servility, or a self-seeking 
sycophancy, but a part of the great law of sincere 
obedience. 

And this we owe to many, " to the king as excel- 
ling," but to many beneath him, and to some above him. 
The holy spirit of discipline flees from the ungodly, 
and it is not so easy for the ungodly to be loyal as 
they think. 

Here, again, the Catholic is unjustly suspect because 



172 LOYALISTS AND PATRIOTS 

of a true intuition falsely stated. It is perceived that 
in the Catholic idea there is something higher than 
any temporal sovereignty, and thence it is concluded 
that the Catholic cannot be a thoroughly loyal subject 
of any earthly prince or ruler. So far as this means 
anything it means that there is, for the Catholic, a 
court of higher appeal. Has not non-Catholic loyalty 
always presupposed one ? Else why were your Hamp- 
dens patriots, and not mere rebels? How can those 
who sent James II packing be absolved? 

However men may prate when "loyal" prattle 
serves a turn, has it not always been recognised outside 
the Church that loyalty has its breaking-point ? And 
have not they who, when that point has been supposed 
to be reached, flung loyalty aside, been most loudly 
acclaimed in loyal England ? When the subjects of 
every Italian State but one threw off their loyalty 
to their sovereigns, whither did they turn for surest 
praise and blindest applause, but to loyal England ? 
not to Radical English, nay, nor Liberal English, but 
to Tory England, good, solid, constitutional England. 
If anywhere in Europe Portugal found flatterers and 
sympathisers when she drove her King away, it was 
in loyal England. 

And why? Because to the non-Catholic English 
mind loyalty is rather a personal sentiment than a 
logical principle bound up in religion. As a whole 
the British nation has a strong, personal attachment 
not so much to the Crown as to the monarch who 
wears it. But, lacking imagination, and being per- 
sonally indifferent to monarchs of other countries, it 
is not personally interested in their vicissitudes, nor 
deeply moved by their misfortunes. 

This sort of personal loyalty is very well : but it is 



LOYALISTS AND PATRIOTS 173 

not the highest, or safest conceivable. The loyalty 
taught by St. Paul had Nero for its object. That 
Emperor's personal claim could hardly have been less ; 
but it did not affect the Apostle's principle. Loyalty 
based on religion and the duty of obedience is apt to 
be really more weather-proof than that which in fact 
depends chiefly on the popular or excellent qualities 
of the sovereign: since the best sovereign cannot 
guarantee the perpetual excellence of his successors. 

That genuine loyalty is bound up with the principle 
of authority those in authority have persistently 
ignored ; and so they themselves have often assailed 
the principle, while promising themselves that the 
loyalty they desired in their own case would be still 
forthcoming after its foundation had been destroyed 
by themselves. 

There have been no more wanton assailants than 
kings and heads of States of the authority of the 
Sovereign Pontiffs. Now it was one, now it was 
another; kings of France, kings of Naples, Venetian 
oligarchs or doges, Florentine magnificos and grand 
dukes, Spanish monarchs and Austrian, all have taken 
their turn of sowing the windy seed of opposition to 
authority in its supreme seat on earth, and all have 
reaped, or are reaping, their own predestined whirlwind. 
The real root of modern revolutions lies farther back 
than the pretexts advanced in explanation of them : 
the principles which produced the Reformation pro- 
duced also the excesses of the French Revolution. 
Peoples who had been taught the nobility of dethron- 
ing God's Vicegerent were not likely to leave earthly 
rulers enthroned. 

The Church's theory is that all authority, her own 
included, is from above: the Reformation theory is 



174 LOYALISTS AND PATRIOTS 

that all authority, including that of all Churches, is 
from below, i.e., from the people who comprise them. 
In England the King was declared supreme head of 
the Church as well as of the State : and, whatever he 
may have chosen to think himself, that declaration 
was the first step in the destruction of his own position. 
The monarch in question happened to be a tyrant, and 
the concession to him of his new claim to supremacy 
in spiritual affairs gave him the appearance of more 
complete absolutism : but the appearance was delusive 
for the concession implied powers in Parliament that 
no Parliament had ever before dreamed of. It was 
Parliament that made Henry VIII head of the Church, 
and because it so acted, out of timidity and subservi- 
ence, the King's autocracy seemed more assured. But 
the mere acceptance of such a grant from Parliament 
recognised in Parliament powers that would inevitably 
be used again for widely different purposes. Parlia- 
ments that had been taught to set aside the primitive 
authority of the Pope would presently realise their 
power to set aside the authority of the King an 
authority by no means primitive, and resting on a 
much more recent prescription. 

Henry, clever as he thought himself, did a stupid 
thing for the continued solidity of his own throne 
when he made his Parliament pretend to believe it 
had the right to overturn the throne of the Fisher- 
man. 

Time and again the kings of France set up the 
Gallican liberties against the authority of Peter, and 
the Eldest Son of the Church was as blindly stupid 
in doing so as was the Defender of the Faith. For 
the Catholic Church is the citadel of authority, and 
every success, or seeming success, gained against her 



LOYALISTS AND PATRIOTS 175 

outworks sapped the foundations of an authority that 
could never have so much to say for itself. 

Wise monarchs have all perceived that " religion is 
good for the people," by which they mostly mean that 
religion among their people is good for themselves : 
but they have not been equally clear-sighted in re- 
cognising that the basis of religion is a ticklish matter 
to play with : that if the people are taught that the 
only authority for the Church rests in their own will, 
they will not be constrained by any church to what 
is not agreeable to themselves. No man will obey 
orders coming from a quarter subservient to himself, 
except so far as those orders embody his own wishes. 

No Church whose authority is derived from the 
State can expect to rule the members of the State 
even in spiritual matters. It can only offer sugges- 
tions : and its suggestions will only be taken in good 
part by those who happen to approve them, that is, in 
general, by those to whom they are superfluous. 

A preacher or a prelate may, in such a church, 
possess an accidental weight or influence, but it can 
be only that of his own eloquence or of his own per- 
sonality : he will only speak for himself. The moment 
he attempts more, the instant he tries to teach with 
authority of mission, he will be asked: "Who told 
you so ? By whom are you commissioned ? " 



TIME'S REPRISALS 

IN a very interesting paper, that appeared some ten 
or a dozen years ago in the Cornhill Magazine, it was 
remarked that Christian Science is so-called for reasons 
that remind us of the name of the guinea-pig, which 
is not a pig and neither comes from Guinea nor costs 
twenty-one shillings : so the religion invented by Mrs. 
Eddy is not a science, and has nothing to do with 
Christianity. 

If it were scientific it would have fewer followers, 
and its remoteness from Christianity may account for 
its having so many. The " religionists " of the present 
time seem intuitively aware that novelty is their only 
chance, and, so far from standing on the old ways, their 
most feverish aim is to strike out paths that may at 
least appear original. Even those who hoped to work 
inside the Catholic Church, and would have worked 
but for their detection, had the same object ; an object, 
one may observe, totally different from that professed 
by heresiarchs of a less irritable age. The pretence 
of most, if not all, Protestant reformers whose re- 
formation (unlike proverbial charity) never troubled 
itself to begin at home, was that of an appeal to primi- 
tive Christianity. The pretence was false, and only 
passed for true among the ignorant, who knew as 
little about primitive Christianity as they cared for the 
real reformation of the Christianity of their own day : 
but the appeal was respectable in form, however it may 

176 



TIME'S REPRISALS 177 

have been insincere in fact. Even Dollinger, much 
nearer the present day, was willing to condone the 
rebellion of the " Old Catholics " by admitting the 
name as if in the fond hope that the Universal Church 
and its Head might thus be made to appear as con- 
sisting of New Catholics, who had in some way 
wandered into novelty, and by such wandering lost 
just claim to be Catholics at all. 

Whether Dollinger's erudition saved him from, in 
his secret heart, lapsing into heresy may be doubted, 
and it certainly did not save 1 him from falling into 
schism ; but he was not at any rate shallow enough to 
sink into the bathos of Modernism. 

A learned priest who suffers himself to succumb to 
a determination of self to the brain, and refuses to 
submit to the Voice of Christ speaking through His 
earthly Vicegerent, can no longer care as much for 
Christ as he cares for his own vanity ; but it may be 
surmised that Dollinger would have cared enough for 
Christianity to have been sincerely disgusted by the 
Modernists, had their voice been audible in his day. 
Obstinate as he was, and self-satisfied as he was, he 
was too clear-sighted not to have known that Modern- 
ism is merely an attempt to explain away Christianity 
in such a fashion as to make it palatable to those who 
dislike Christianity. With all his fatal faults he was 
not puzzle-headed : and he knew well enough that 
black and white can never be interchanged : the 
whitening of black can only result in a dirty or obscure 



The pretext of Modernism and its congeners is that 
the gate of truth should be made wide, so as to admit 
those whose mental conformation renders entrance by 
a narrow door difficult. But it does not seem to strike 

M 



178 TIME'S REPRISALS 

them that there is a breadth which can only find 
admission by a total razing of walls. After all, the 
building is of more moment than any gate of it : and 
when all the sides shall have vanished, and the roof have 
been taken off (to admit the tallest figures), and the 
foundations tampered with as unnecessary when the 
weight of the superstructure has been correspondingly 
reduced there is not much building left. 

Modernism affects to be an intra-mural affair, and as 
such it concerns us. But there are, in fact, Modernists 
who are proud to be outside. 

The vitality of truth is so innate and so robust, that 
even the retention of some vestiges of it acts as a pickle 
or preservative, though vestiges alone can no more 
keep permanently alive a body that retains only such 
extracts of truth than salt can make the liveliest pig, 
once deceased, anything but bacon. Thus, certain of 
the Reformed Churches at the time of their suicide, 
which was that of their nominal birth, retained, or 
tried to retain, so much at least of Christianity as served 
to stave off their predestined end. The first step of 
their life was a step towards their inevitable grave : 
the first muling and puking of their infancy had 
already the choke of a death-rattle in it, but the agony 
was to be long as I think, for the reason at which I 
have hinted. 

English Protestantism professed to hold fast much 
of the integral faith of that Church from which it shook 
itself free : it flung away five out of seven sacraments, 
but loudly affirmed that it kept the two best ; it turned 
from God's mother, but did not openly assail the 
Divinity of her Son ; it fell into infinite revolt against 
Christ's Vicar, but it did not dare to explain away 
either Himself, His virginal birth, or His Resurrection. 



TIME'S REPRISALS 179 

On such isolated scraps of truth as it clutched at it 
lived on, though marked with the fatal blain of plague 
and inexorable death. 

But who that says to the black waters of untruth 
"thus far and no further" is ever heeded? I never 
heard that Canute was a theologian, but he knew better 
than that. The rising tide respects no throne that sets 
itself upon the fickle sandy shore. Henry VIII was a 
theologian, his title of Defender of the Faith is a livid 
mark upon his wretched forehead now : he was no 
Protestant : he knew all about that, as the devil does : 
his son was knock-kneed Protestant enough : and his 
virginal daughter was a bad woman, but not a bad 
Catholic like her wicked father ; none of the precious 
triad aimed at flinging the Scriptures to the swine, 
though they snatched them out of the hands of the 
Church that had kept them for the world through all 
the "darkness of the dark ages"; Henry would not 
have them jangled by clowns in every ale-shop : his 
reformers, whose aims were widely different from his 
own, had no objection to such jangling, but they at 
least made much of the Scriptures. It was their 
pretence that the Church was at issue with the Bible, 
and they preferred the Bible, setting it upon a pillar 
hi the midst of their tabernacles, as about the only 
sacred thing worth retaining. Their pretence was 
singularly foolish, as it was necessarily insincere: for, 
if the Bible was the one thing of which the Church 
was afraid, the arch-enemy of her claims, and the 
obvious antidote to her doctrine, how unaccountable 
that she, with all the guile wherewith they credited 
her, and she alone, should have treasured it down the 
ages and kept it intact for posterity. 

Where would the Scriptures be but for her and her 



180 TIME'S REPRISALS 

monks ? How easy a thing it would have been, during 
those ages, that the last three or four centuries love to 
call dark, for the Church to have smothered the Bible 
altogether, when there was no learning anywhere but 
hers, and all letters were her monopoly. In the slow 
irony of fate it is odd to note that it is at the hands of 
Protestant sectaries that the Scriptures have met with 
assault, and that now the Church that guarded them 
for the modern world is the sole and unflinching 
champion of their integrity. The descendants of 
Luther have striven to boil them down to a gelatinous 
pudding, innutritions as it is flabby. 

When England started on her eccentric orbit of 
independence, in defiance of the central sun of Christi- 
anity, she seemed resolved to hold sacred two things 
in memory of her former religion ; the Bible and the 
observance of Sunday. Her attitude to both may have 
been marked by the exaggeration of superstition ; the 
Bible she seemed to imagine had dropped down from 
heaven, in English, with gilt edges, straight into the 
lap of James I; and her Sunday might seem more 
connected with Moses than with Christ. Still she did 
revere both, and held them as sacred things which 
man's petulance or self-indulgence was not to tamper 
with. All that has changed, and with a change so 
rapid that one need not be old to be able to note its 
strides. Forty years ago almost every English man or 
woman who could read, and hundreds of thousands 
who could not, would instantly recognise any quotation, 
though it were only that of a phrase, from the Bible ; 
and for the simple reason that those who could read 
did read the Bible, and those who could not went 
habitually to church. It is quite different now. Both 
habits have fallen into disuse, and both are falling 



- 
TIME'S REPRISALS 181 

yearly into a disuse more complete. You may borrow 
a phrase, or an illustration, from the Scriptures and 
they will admire your originality, and wonder at the 
vigorous force of your ideas, without a suspicion that 
you are borrowing from the wisdom whence Solomon's 
was borrowed. 

Again; even dignitaries of the Anglican Church are 
heard smoothly explaining away such central doctrines 
of Christianity as their forbears would have been 
furious at the idea of abandoning as monopolies to 
the Catholic Church, e.g. the Virginal Birth of Christ, 
and the fact of His Resurrection. Old Protestants had 
an odd leaning to St. Paul because, I suppose, he was 
not St. Peter what would they have thought had 
they foreseen that a day would come when their 
descendants would forget how their beloved Apostle 
of the Gentiles cried aloud: "If Christ be not risen 
again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is 
also vain ... if Christ be not risen again, your faith 
is vain, for you are yet in your sins. Then they also 
that are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If hi this 
life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men 
most miserable." 

The various Christian sects which are spoken of 
collectively in England as Nonconformists, descend 
from founders even more exclusively devoted to the 
Scriptures than were the founders of the Anglican 
Establishment. The latter made almost everything 
of the Bible, the former made quite everything ; they, 
for the most part, cared as little for two sacraments 
as for seven ; they wanted no sacraments, and they 
wanted no dogma, no "articles," no liturgy, no holy 
orders; the Bible was to be the one and sole ark of 
their salvation, and it required no interpretation, for 

* 



182 TIME'S REPRISALS 

it interprets itself; the plainest and most literal sense 
of every line of it was to be accepted, and to do 
their business, without priest or paraphrase. This atti- 
tude is now being hurriedly abandoned, and a new 
fashion has sprung up. It is among the younger and, 
of course, the wiser members of the Nonconformist 
ministry that the New Criticism has received its most 
effusive welcome in England. Having bolted it them- 
selves they make haste to illustrate their acceptance of 
it in the pulpit, for the farther they recede from the 
venerable delusion that every word of Scripture was a 
word of God, the more complacently assured are they 
of possessing the brightest illumination in the most 
brilliant of all ages. But it is the simple fact that the 
Nonconformist laity is for the most part scandalised 
and astounded at the rationalistic treatment of the 
Bible to which they are being forced to listen in their 
meeting-houses. This, then, is how the Protestant 
boast of the Bible is ending. 

The system, and group of systems, that professed to 
need it and nothing else but it, only uses it now to 
turn all its substance into shadow, or neglects it alto- 
gether more and more completely. The religions 
which cared for nothing but "faith" are hurriedly 
stripping themselves of all that is the objective of 
faith, by flinging from themselves all that is super- 
natural. It is they, not the Catholic Church (here- 
ditary foe of the Scriptures, as they would make her 
out), that Avould melt the Old Testament and the 
New down into graceful allegories, and would thus 
leave of God nothing but a Name, and of Christ 
nothing but an Idea. 

Thus has boasted faith subsided to a loose surmise ; 
thus has a tough revolt rotted down into a vague 



TIME'S REPRISALS 183 

anarchy : thus has such windlestraw of truth as the 
ruinous blast of the Reformation left to the reformed 
come to be trodden and trampled into sodden slush of 
silly conjecture and sheer untruth. 

Again, the English Sunday is, year by year, losing 
more and more of its character of sacredness : for the 
English are rapidly ceasing to go to church, and an 
Englishman is the last man on earth to do nothing 
at all he amuses his Sunday. On Good Friday he 
used only to plant his potatoes; now he cycles off 
somewhere to pass a jocund day watching somebody 
else play football, or listen to the negro-minstrels on 
the shore, till the merry afternoon lapses into the 
noisy night. 

On Sunday also he goes somewhere anywhere you 
like, so it be not to church. Nor is this a merely vulgar 
habit confined to the hard-worked, who has such ex- 
cuse for stealing an idle day as six days of bustling 
toil may suggest to him. His "betters" set him the 
example. It is their day to scour the country in their 
motor-cars ; their day for distant visits ; and more and 
more their special day for hospitality ; though for such 
purpose the day may begin, like a Jewish sabbath, 
which it resembles in naught else, about the sunset of 
the day before. There are thousands of fashionable 
houses that open no hospitable doors except on Sun- 
day, or from Saturday to Monday ; and, though hospi- 
tality is not servile work, it involves it, and usually 
involves the impossibility for a servant of attending 
any place of worship. In England, nowadays, many a 
Catholic servant will tell you : " On Sunday I cannot 
go to Mass. It is our busy day. On Saturday com- 
pany comes down : on Sunday morning there is a big 
breakfast to send up, or twenty breakfasts to different 



184 TIME'S REPRISALS 

rooms. Then luncheons to get ready, then ever so 
many to tea; then a dinner party. There's not a 
chance of Mass or Benediction." And the heads of 
such households may be Catholics themselves, who 
save their conscience by eschewing Catholic servants 
when they can, or choosing foreigners who, if Catholic, 
they assure themselves, are less fidgety about Mass 
every Sunday. 

For there are all sorts of Liberal Catholics : not only 
such as are "liberal" in belief, but such as confine 
their liberality to easiness in observance of ecclesias- 
tical laws. 

A Liberal Catholic is also like a guinea-pig : for liber- 
ality consists in an open-handed readiness to part with 
what is our own ; and neither the Church's faith nor 
the Church's rule is his to give away : so that he is not, 
after all, particularly liberal, nor is he apt to remain in 
any true sense Catholic. Catholicity is so delicately 
compact together that he who light-heartedly surren- 
ders a bit of what he thinks mere fringe presently 
finds that the whole garment is gone, and he is left in 
the mere nakedness of non-belief. Ask any priest 
who has laboured long in England, and he will tell 
you that he himself knows of whole families once 
Catholic, who have slipped out of the Church by 
nothing else than the sheer neglect of Sunday Mass. 

That way out into the night calls for no delibera- 
tion; still less does it imply what are called intellec- 
tual difficulties. It is open to the idlest and least 
thoughtful. Not that I would for a moment seem to 
suggest that the intellectual difficulties themselves 
usually assail the most intelligent. Such difficulties 
are mostly of the shallowest quality, ot the flimsiest 
texture. 



TIME'S REPRISALS 185 

Even Catholics themselves are far too much apt to 
yield, to such as affect them, a fantastic respect to 
which they have no claim whatever. 

" Poor father ! No, he isn't a Catholic," the devout 
Catholic child of a mixed marriage will tell you. " He 
doesn't believe in anything. He is very clever, you 
see, and he doesn't believe in any religion. Perhaps 
you will pray for him." And such a dull ignoramus as 
he is ! His reasons for unbelief, God save the mark ! 
Why, the simplest and most unquestioning believer 
could suggest to him a dozen difficulties more re- 
spectable than his. 

Show me an " atheist " or an "agnostic," and in nine 
hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand I will 
show you a green goose, if you want such vulgar, 
greasy, unfledged, indigestible bird. 

God is a judge strong and patient, and He is pro- 
voked every day ; we, who are neither patient nor 
strong, are provoked daily by the meek concession of 
believers that the unbelievers are too deep for what 
St. Thomas Aquinas not only believed but knew that 
reason insisted on his believing. The great majority of 
those who profess to be unable to believe are taken too 
seriously. They are encouraged to regard themselves 
as terrible creatures, gloomy, tragic familiars of Satan, 
when they are only his jack-in-the-boxes and tin 
whistles. Such figures of fun as they are intellectu- 
ally are best reformed by the laughter their oddity 
suggests. 

However, as we said already, Liberal Catholicism 
consists more commonly in " liberal " practice than in 
"liberal" theory; and it is not the less fatal on that 
account, for its example is the more contagious, and its 
result equally effectual ; the chimney-sweep next door 



186 TIME'S REPRISALS 

who can see for himself that you never go to Mass, 
and that the butcher calls punctually every Friday 
morning, is as likely to be injured by your example as 
if he heard it mentioned that your views concerning 
the hypostases were grievously unsound ; and perhaps 
those views of yours might themselves fade into a just 
significance if you would leave them alone, and betake 
yourself to Mass eschewing chops on Friday. Besides, 
the Liberal Catholicism which follows on careless 
practice is more fatally easy to fall into. It requires 
uncommon little thought to become a doubter it 
requires none at all to become a defaulter in the 
matter of religious obligations ; a man may have very 
hazy notions on which to ground liberal beliefs (or 
hesitation to believe), but the clearest possible percep- 
tion that it is more trouble to go to Mass than to stay 
away. 

Self-indulgence is the real root of what we may call 
Easy Catholicism, and it leads to the final loss of faith 
much more commonly and much more simply than 
the intellectual alertness and spirit of inquiry which 
are supposed to suggest " difficulties." 



CAUSE AND CURE 

IN the second of these papers I took occasion to 
speak of the fact that Catholics, whether calling them- 
selves, or called by their neighbours, by this or that 
political or party name, must always have in them- 
selves something deeper and more permanent than 
their adhesion to any political party. For the interests 
of parties are shifting and evanescent, while the 
principles of the Church are stable and unchanging. 
It may and does happen that some matter of im- 
portance ranges almost the whole Catholic vote in a 
country for the moment on the side of a Liberal 
Government ; and some other question presently arises, 
even in the same country, which ranges all the 
Catholics in it on the opposite side the Conservative 
Government, or Opposition, happening to favour what 
the Catholics desire, or the Liberal Cabinet, or Opposi- 
tion, chancing to be bent on some measure repugnant 
to what Catholic principles demand. It can hardly ever 
be said with safety, at any given moment, that the whole 
Catholic world is Liberal in politics, or Conservative. 

This sort of apparent uncertainty is not an element 
of weakness, but the reverse, even politically speaking ; 
for it is not a secret that more deference is paid by 
party rulers to bodies of voters whose vote has to 
be conciliated than to groups whose adhesion can be 
securely counted upon without any conciliation at all. 
Catholics therefore act wisely when they teach party 



187 



188 CAUSE AND CURE 

rulers to understand that their support can only be 
gained by conduct in consonance with the unchanging 
principles and permanent interests of their unchanging 
Church. Politicians may resent the rigidity of this 
Catholic attitude resent it because it may be hamper- 
ing for the moment to themselves but even politicians 
are apt to recognise conscience in others, though not 
invariably exclusively dominated by it themselves; 
and the more consistent Catholics are the more they 
are respected. Strict Catholics may hear themselves 
accused of bigotry, intolerance, or stiff-neckedness, but 
lax Catholics are not deeply venerated even by Pro- 
testants or unbelievers. The Holy See itself is often 
reviled for its stiffness and unyielding immovability; 
but in its stiffness lies its strength. As a temporal 
sovereignty it does not for the moment exist, whatever 
may happen next ; yet it is as much as ever a World- 
Power ; and its significance as such comes from the 
well-appreciated fact of its solidity and moral force. 
Were it to study chiefly pliancy and adaptability to the 
times, hurriedly grabbing at new methods and novel 
catchwords, hastily admitting every freshly-discovered 
social, political, or ethical nostrum, its moral force 
would no longer impress the times, of which it would 
become the pupil instead of the teacher. " Apres moi 
le deluge," said Louis XIV, and the modern world is 
given to call the Holy See antediluvian, as in a sense 
it is. It was there before all the deluges out of which 
modern society is blankly trying to pick itself together, 
and it will be there to the end, after all the further 
deluges to which modern society may be helplessly 
drifting. Meanwhile politics and parties are here ; and 
what I would like to say is this too much cannot be 
hoped from them, or any of them. 



CAUSE AND CURE 189 

It seems to be admitted almost everywhere that 
society, that is, the present artificial fabric of society, 
is sick and sorry. One party ascribes the mischief to 
the stupidity, greed, selfishness, and obstinacy of its 
opponents ; and those opponents blame the rashness, 
imprudence, and ignorance of the experimentalists, 
whose haste and itching ambition for present applause 
lead them into devious and thorny paths whose final 
exit no one can foresee without misgiving. Whether 
either side really believes that if it could remain always 
in power the wounds of society would be healed, we 
cannot tell. But, whatever they may believe, we can- 
not believe it. The wounds of society lie deeper than 
that : and they never will be healed by any merely 
political physicians. We have heard of Symptomatic 
Treatment, and we are informed that it is not only 
superficial, but false in principle, beginning, as it 
were, at the wrong end : beginning, that is, from the 
outside. Whereas true healing can be wrought, not by 
chasing local symptoms about the sick body, but only 
by finding out the cause of disease and removing it. 

To say that all merely political attempts to heal the 
sickness of society will in the long run prove superficial, 
a radically vicious course of cure, because amounting 
to no more than symptomatic treatment, may sound 
gloomy and pessimistic : nevertheless I believe it to 
be the sad, if dismal, truth. " Are we, then, to do 
nothing ? to let everything drift, and make no attempt 
at relief ? " the political physician may, quite plausibly, 
demand. The answer is trite and dull : " Medice cura 
teipsum." A sick doctor may, as the phrase goes, 
save your life. But if the doctor's own disease lies 
not in his body but in his mind : if all his principle 
of healing be at fault then what good will all his 



190 CAUSE AND CURE 

diplomas do you ? All the letters after his name will 
not spell health for you. That is what's the matter. 
The political physician is making a partial, incomplete, 
superficial diagnosis all the time. 

Certain crude symptoms he may attack and in 
attacking them he does bring temporary relief, if his 
method of attack be not clumsy and ignorant ; but his 
method may be both, and even the irritating local 
trouble may be driven to another part, and reappear 
there with greater suffering to the whole body, or forced 
inward to some vital spot where it works unseen to 
its fatal climax. Meanwhile he earns applause and 
gratitude : good doctors know well how popular a 
quack may be for a time. " Wait," they, like Mr. 
Asquith, say, " and see." All this onslaught upon local 
symptoms will avail nothing to radical cure, till the 
radical disease is frankly confessed, and, if not too late, 
removed. 

God made the world, and all men in it : all they have 
is His, and all their good comes from Him. All their 
ill is of their own making : and yet they cannot mend 
it by themselves. Only He who created can recreate. 
Men can make themselves sick, but perfect health can 
come back only at the word of the one Divine Physician, 
and by obedience to that word. The pool is troubled 
every day, but only when He comes by is the man 
healed eight-and-thirty years sick of his infirmity. 
Then no scrambling haste brings back health, but one 
act of unhalting obedience to one word of omnipotent 
command : " Arise, take up thy bed and walk." 

The evils which afflict society are traced by many 
different observers to many different causes: but the 
underlying cause of all those causes themselves is one 
selfishness, a selfishness deep-rooted and not planted 



CAUSE AND CURE 191 

in one soil alone. There is the selfishness of capital, 
the selfishness of labour, the selfishness of some who 
cling desperately to vested interests being fiercely torn 
from them, and the selfishness of others who can see 
no betterment for themselves except in the dragging 
down and worsening of the position of such as seem 
to have already that which they are in hot haste 
to get. Will any State ever be able to root out 
selfishness? Can any State's legislation ever change 
it into brotherly love and sympathy ? Legislation can 
make anything the State chooses criminal: it can 
punish privilege, and destroy it : it can set a class up, 
and it can tear a class down ; it can drive capital away 
into another State, and it can also drive labour away 
into some other State where employment for labour 
is to be found. It can make inequalities illegal, and 
it can try to make equality obligatory. Can it succeed ? 
Has it ever succeeded anywhere ? 

Any government that is wanton enough to do so can 
pit class against class no government can insist on 
each class loving the others. The business of the Church 
is to try ; not by sledge-hammer legislation, but by teach- 
ing what the Founder gave her charge to teach. God 
alone can do what needs to be done, and the States 
of the world are in a conspiracy to ignore God, and so 
cause Him to be ignored. That is what's the matter. 

Selfishness is inevitable in men who have ceased to 
believe in God, whatever altruism may urge or pre- 
tend. A man will not yield his own profit, or even 
his own pleasure, once he believes that he himself is 
the being of paramount importance. There is no 
radical cure for selfishness except the sincere belief 
and recognition that there is something greater than 
self : and that belief and recognition the States of the 



192 CAUSE AND CURE 

world have for some time been sedulously smothering. 
Man has never admitted any greater than himself 
except God; set God aside, and he sees nothing but 
himself. You may prate of mankind, and the greatest 
good of the greatest number, but his greatest good, 
once he disbelieves in God, is the good of "number 
one" for that intensely significant minority he will 
care more than for all the majorities that ever turned 
any minister's brain. What is the greatest good of the 
greatest number to a man discontented with the little 
share of good he sees himself to have in a world which 
he believes to be the only world ? The mere reduction 
of the general bulk of suffering will not make him 
patient, though the sufferers be made few, so long as 
he suffers anything himself. Can any State by any 
legislation make pain and sorrow, poverty and suffer- 
ing and discontent, illegal ? Can any legislation breed 
patience, or set undaunted hope in the hopeless ? Can 
any State secure ease and comfort to the idle, the 
incapable, the deficient, the improvident, the foolish ? 
It may try, and in trying it may deal great injustice 
to the industrious, the capable, the provident, and 
the prudent : even so it cannot succeed. There 
are obstinacies of ineptitude that will always defeat 
the most grandmotherly legislation. Or States may 
bluntly ignore such helpless, hopeless minorities, and 
leave them to the tender mercies of the law of survival 
of the fittest. Such minorities are helped on suffer- 
ance ; weak and feeble minorities do not count on a 
division. God only has patience for cognizance of 
minorities that are not noisy. 

Radical wounds of society come from radical faults 
in the men of whom society is composed, and the State 
is not concerned to heal those faults. At all events 



CAUSE AND CURE 193 

the State does not concern herself with healing them, 
for they come from a deeper root than social in- 
equalities, huge accumulations of wealth and horrible, 
staring contrasts of squalor and poverty ; they are bred 
in the swamps of unbelief. They are the rank growth 
of the cold, wet, and sour lands of low-lying denial of 
all that is above this present life. Hope is the only 
balm for present pain, and of all men must they be 
most hopeless who have been allowed to grow up 
believing that Christ is not risen from the dead, and 
that death is the bitter end of all. Hopelessness of 
aught beyond this life must lead to greediness while 
this life lasts, and greed unfed must lead to despair 
and fury. Why should the hopeless poor be patient ? 
Why should the hopeless rich loosen his clutch upon 
his wealth ? Life is so short : the most outrageous 
millions can be so guarded as to last a lifetime or two ; 
the most hopeless poverty must make haste to seize 
what it can, no matter whence, no matter how, else it 
will be too late, and death come and find it empty- 
handed still since death ends all. 

God's lessons are the follies of States. His justice 
is their laughing-stock, His adjustment their fables. 
Material good is the only good, and material good they 
promise, break their promises, and invent new ones. 
The promises of States that persist in ignoring God, 
and prove their persistence by eliminating altogether 
when they can as far as possible when total elimina- 
tion does not yet seem feasible the teaching of belief 
in God, the promises of such States, I say, are all based 
on the theory that the State has everything to bestow 
and God nothing, that the only things man can need 
or desire are the things a government can give: in 
other words, that this life and its profits are all there is 

N 



194 CAUSE AND CURE 

to hope for. Under such teaching majorities must be 
progressively formidable, for the majority of men will 
always perceive that there are still desiderabilia in 
other people's possession : the logic of unbelief leads 
to hungry greed and furious discontent, and so to 
anarchy, for human law alone can never abolish un- 
bridled wants, nor muzzle the mouth of majorities 
unsatisfied. Anarchy is only the final consequence of 
negation of God, and to it the public negation, or 
ignoring of God, inevitably tends. Should the weaken- 
ing of government, which seems to exist in many 
States, become general, and pass on to a phase of 
chaos, those who may rejoice in it, the triumphant 
anarchists, may justly boast that the Reformation was 
the first phase ; that the intervening condition of 
things was a mere temporary compromise, a futile 
endeavour to fire a train without any consequent ex- 
plosion an attempt to set in operation certain potent 
causes and prevent the causes producing the result 
involved in them. 

From the teaching of the Reformation arrived, in 
due time, the idea of States without God ; and nothing 
would have seemed more ludicrous to the "positive" 
eighteenth century than the dictum that a State 
without God is an impossible idea. In its old age it 
declared itself in favour of a State without God, and 
the anarchy of the French Revolution was the re- 
sultant enfant terrible. Since then other States have 
proclaimed themselves self-existent without God, and 
the result we have yet to see. Those who believe 
that a State without God will not long continue to 
exist as a State at all will not be sanguine as to that 
result. There is a perverse disposition in mankind to 
believe that identical causes need not produce identical 



CAUSE AND CURE 195 

results, and the fact that causes do not always proceed 
at a uniform pace, owing to special obstacles, or the 
dissimilar gradients of roads, encourages them in this 
perversity. Thus English people, shocked at the con- 
sequences of a Godless State overseas, have always 
refused to believe that any deplorable result would 
accrue from similar behaviour at home. The English 
being, as they complacently averred, a believing people, 
nothing lamentable could happen from merely abstain- 
ing from teaching belief in the schools of the nation. 
It did not seem to occur to those who did believe that 
their belief was the consequence of their having them- 
selves been taught to believe. 

And there really was a mass of habitual, inherited 
belief and conscience. The fruits of the Reformation 
were not hi England so quick to ripen as they might 
have been had not the English substitute for the 
Church clutched wistfully at much of the old Church's 
teaching, and endeavoured, more or less hopelessly, to 
retain it. Men were certainly free to believe what they 
liked, but they ought, in conscience, to go on liking 
to believe something. It was a later result of freedom 
to believe what you liked that you might prefer not to 
believe anything at all. Of course, if you did not, it 
seemed illogical to insist on your being taught belief. 
Still you ought to be good ; a bad man or so, here and 
there, could be no excuse for your being bad too. 
Society must be respectable: whatever you disliked 
believing, you must, as a member of society, be re- 
spectable, or where were we? National respectability 
is a foregone English conclusion, like the National 
Debt an impregnable security at three per cent. A 
disreputable England, without gilt-edged securities, 
would be an idea at which the English mind would 



196 CAUSE AND CURE 

reel and stagger. France without God may very likely 
have lapsed into disreputable courses, but then French 
people and English are widely different. England is 
the land of home and large families ; respectability is 
a national asset like the cotton trade. 

That the basis of respectability is morality, and the 
only permanent security of morality is belief in God, 
and the only security for a continued national belief hi 
God is the continuance of a national teaching of God 
that idea has been lost. Until it is regained, here and 
elsewhere, I, for one, do not place much hope in the 
efforts of any party or of any government, at home 
or abroad, to deal with the radical evils of which society 
complains. 



THE SHOE AND THE FOOT 

OF all the charges brought against Catholics none is 
staler than that of bigotry ; but what is effete is not 
always obsolete, and this old stone is still in vigorous 
use. To throw stones does not call for any acquaint- 
ance with geology, and wanton boys who throw them 
could not often tell you of what they actually consist. 
Thus it is with them who are bitterest against Catholic 
bigotry; they find the missile handy, and do not 
concern themselves greatly with what it means. In 
what, precisely, bigotry consists they have in general 
the vaguest knowledge. 

That a religion, which believes itself to be the only 
true one, cannot possibly admit that any other is 
equally good, does not seem to occur to these subtle 
logicians. Their own attitude is puzzle-headed, and 
perspicacity is offensive to those in their predicament. 
Their position usually amounts to this: that in all 
religionsjthere is some good, and that it cannot matter 
to God Almighty what men believe about Him. It 
certainly would not matter much to a lion if an explorer 
took him for a leveret : but it might affect the future 
of the explorer. In false religions stray reflections of 
truths or half truths may be detected, as in a wrong 
solution of a mathematical problem some figures may 
appear which are to be found in the true solution. 
Their presence does not make the false conclusion true, 
nor gain much respect from correct mathematicians. 

There is, of course, invincible ignorance ; and by its 



197 



198 THE SHOE AND THE FOOT 

lowly gate we hope many will arrive. But the gate is 
lowly, and the fact remains that it is nobler to have 
invincible truth on one's side. A man rooted in the 
conviction that two and two are five need not be a 
blackguard, but it is not mere bigotry or prejudice to 
hold him, so far, a dunce. One who should affirm that 
tigers are harmless little songsters, useful in gardens 
infested with green-fly, might conceivably be a worthy 
poor law guardian, or a successful organiser of charity 
bazaars, but he should beware the criticism of zoolo- 
gists. His amiable willingness to see paupers well fed, 
and his pious zeal in providing funds for a new pulpit, 
will not save him from derision in circles that under- 
stand natural history. 

Catholics do not desire to ignore the respectable 
citizenship of many who disbelieve in the Catholic faith, 
but, when correct belief is in question, they cannot 
admit that civic virtues are to the point or private 
virtues either. A stockbroker might make a fortune 
though he held erratic views concerning algebra; so 
much the better for him, but not so much the worse 
for algebra. What these good folk can never under- 
stand is that, to those who hold the Church's faith, the 
truth is a fact, as actual as light, and that nothing else 
will do as well. To themselves the fact does not appeal 
any more than light appeals to the blind : so they talk 
nonsense about it, as a man born blind would, who 
insisted on laying down the law about colours and per- 
spective. The blind man chooses to have his own 
ideas, and perhaps condemns the superciliousness of 
those who happen to have the gift of sight. If he be 
a moral person why should he be silenced though he 
insist that water is scarlet, and meadow-grass of a royal- 
blue tint ? 



THE SHOE AND THE FOOT 199 

This position of the Catholic Church is the real 
ground of the tedious charge of bigotry against her : 
that she will not consent to treat the sum of Revelation 
as an open question, any more than the arithmetician 
will agree to treat as an open question the sum of any 
given number of figures. She sticks to it that where 
the truth is concerned only absolute truth will do ; she 
will not admit conjectures where Divine Revelation has 
been given, and tolerates no working hypothesis in 
place of certainty when she holds herself possessed of 
certainty. That possession of certitude is the grievance 
for it rests on Divine Revelation : and what is valued 
outside is cocksureness resting on human discovery. 

The real gravamen is the Church's willingness to hear 
God rather than men. The natural man dislikes what 
is supernatural ; and the theory of private judgment is 
implicitly opposed to the recognition of absolute and 
immutable truth. The Reformation, which launched 
the leaky ship of private judgment, had no fear of the 
ocean of unbelief, its rocks and its whirlpools, its iron 
coasts of pitiless atheism, its leeshores of dull, swampy 
indifference and negation ; all it dreaded was the 
presence of a pilot for a pilot with full knowledge 
and complete authority seemed, to mutineers, a mere 
tyrant. 

Free theory was to take the place of assured belief, 
and perhaps the Reformers themselves did not all 
realise what game they were playing. They professed, 
anyway, to have no quarrel with the King, but only to 
be in revolt against His accredited Viceroy. But their 
seed brought its due crop, as seed will, in spite of the 
private fancies of any gardener ; and the dethronement 
of the Viceroy could never satisfy those who had really 
disliked the King's law. King and law must go too. 



200 THE SHOE AND THE FOOT 

The Catholic Church, however, is one thing, Catholics 
are another. If the Church herself be not bigoted, 
unless it be bigotry to affirm truth and deny all that is 
logically inconsistent with truth, are Catholics bigoted ? 
It would be a large assertion to say that all are not, 
that none ever has been. There may be some who 
find it easier to be bigoted than to follow the Church's 
counsels of perfection; simpler to perceive beams in 
other eyes than to pluck mere motes out of their own. 
As long as men are men, charity will be more difficult 
than criticism. 

But are Catholics in the main more bigoted than 
Protestants or unbelievers ? Is a Catholic more apt to 
dislike and distrust, decry and belittle another man 
simply because he is not a Catholic, than a Protestant 
or unbeliever is to mislike, mistrust, misery, and mis- 
prize a man because he is a Catholic ? In that is sheer 
and real bigotry. How do the facts stand ? Of course 
the answer must depend on experience, and everyone's 
experience is not the same. Each man must recall his 
own before he can reply. My own is this : I have met 
with very few bigoted Catholics in the sense in which, I 
take it, real bigotry lies. Indeed, I may truly say that 
I have met none. 

One may meet Catholics who know very little of the 
best sort of non-Catholics, and, out of lack of experi- 
ence, are inclined to lump all Protestants together as 
little better than non-believers. It being perfectly true 
of many Protestants that they believe very little of 
Protestantism itself it is quite true to say that its 
ultimate logic is unbelief; but many decent people are 
better than their logic they conclude that no Pro- 
testant believes much. That is a mistake, and experi- 
ence would disabuse them of it : for many Protestants 



THE SHOE AND THE FOOT 201 

still hold much Catholic doctrine. Such want of 
experience may be quite innocent and honest, but it is 
ignorance all the same. Ignorance, however, is not 
bigotry. And such ignorance is more common among 
Protestants than among Catholics. One finds it, among 
them, not only in people who would naturally be ill- 
informed, but in many whom one would suppose to 
possess reasonable information. 

Not many weeks ago the present writer made the 
acquaintance ,of an elderly lady who would certainly 
consider herself well-educated. It was almost an 
adventure to her to find herself in friendly conversation 
with a priest a servant of the Pope. And I think she 
enjoyed it ; adventures did not occur frequently in her 
somewhat monotonous life. She was so favourably 
impressed that she was good enough, when the priest 
was gone, to express some frank approbation. " But, 
ah ! how sad," she wailed, " to think that he may not 
believe in the Divinity of Jesus Christ." 

She was sure he would, if his terrible Church would 
let him. Not that they had discussed religion at all ; 
but he seemed so respectable. 

For one Catholic rather ignorant as to what the 
better sort of Protestants believe, one would find 
hundreds of non-Catholics wholly ignorant of what it is 
all Catholics believe. I have never met any Catholic 
who would refuse to trust a man, to believe his word, 
or to like him, if he were likeable, merely because he 
happened to be a Protestant. And I have met, and 
often meet, many Protestants who will not trust, or 
believe, or like a Catholic, for no other reason whatever 
than that he is one. These people call themselves 
Christians, but they will not so distrust or dislike 
a Jew, they have no misgivings about Parsees, or 



202 THE SHOE AND THE FOOT 

Buddhists, or Mussulmans. Atheists they revere for an 
intellectual eminence that they take for granted. But 
Catholics are unpardonable, because they are Catholics. 
It does not alarm them if they perceive their sons 
making friends with a Jewish peer's son, still less are 
they perturbed if the Hebrew nobleman's son bestows 
attention on one of their daughters. Nor are they 
nervously apprehensive though their children develop 
intimacies with Atheists, Mohammedans, Parsees, or 
Buddhists. Why not ? Why is there so much fear of 
Catholic influence, so little of any other ? 

Why should it be only an amiable eccentricity if a 
son or daughter turns Buddhist, and forswears meat 
altogether, but so grievous an affront if he or she 
turns Catholic and only eschews it on Fridays ? You 
might suppose that a parent who every Sunday pro- 
fesses to believe in the Holy Catholic Church would be 
less grieved to see a child of his return to the faith once 
held by all his boasted ancestors than to learn that 
that child had abandoned all belief. But it is not 
commonly the case. The agnosticism of a son in his 
teens is treated as of small account : but if another 
son, a year or two older or younger, should become a 
Catholic, then there is weeping and gnashing of teeth, 
and, not seldom, for him, ostracism from intercourse 
with his brothers or sisters. 

Is it really in these people's opinion " safer to believe 
too little than to believe too much " ? Is it really of 
the soul of their child they are thinking at all ? Do 
they care sixpence for his soul ? Are they in honest 
dread of its perdition ? If one believed that, one could 
have a respect for their trouble : but if one believed 
that, one could believe anything. Alas ! it is not 
possible. If there were any such tender solicitude for 



THE SHOE AND THE FOOT 203 

the soul of a son or daughter, then would they not 
be more at ease when one lost faith altogether than 
when the other went back to the faith of illustrious 
forefathers ? It is sheer hatred of the Church, and 
mean suspicion and paltry fear. 

On what is such a fear, and dislike, and suspicion 
grounded ? To a very large extent it is a question of 
money. An ignoble reason, but, I believe, very often 
the true one: these folk imagine that Catholics give 
all their substance to the Church, and it is by no 
means held a virtue in them. " It's no use giving 
anything, or leaving anything, to him," they say, " he 
would hand it all over to the Pope." 

The Pope ought to be better off than he is. Catholics 
are truly good about giving: rich and poor they are 
more than generous in this sort for generosity is not 
always self-denying : but I confess that, after four-and- 
thirty years of Catholic life, I do not perceive any 
violent tendency on the part of the Pope's spiritual 
children to adopt him as their temporal heir. The 
truth is, these people grudge fiercely anything given to 
Catholic objects, and they are right in surmising that 
a Catholic who cares for his Church will even deny 
himself to support it. Once I heard a Protestant lady 
complain piteously that, owing to her husband's elder 
brother having joined the Church and become a priest, 
all his money went to Catholic uses, and so following 
to the unjust detriment of her husband. The facts 
of the case happened to be well known to me. 

The elder brother in question had a family estate, 
and certain moneys that had come to him by inde- 
pendent bequest to him personally. The whole income 
of the paternal property he had, for over thirty years, 
from the time he became a priest, made over to his 



204 THE SHOE AND THE FOOT 

younger brothers who had for thirty years enjoyed 
an income that certainly would never have been theirs 
had he remained a Protestant, married, and had 
children in due course. At his death, the estate, 
instead of passing to any child of his own, would go 
to the husband of my complaining lady. As to the 
income that had been left to him personally, and 
would certainly never have been left to any other 
member of his family, he held himself free to spend 
it as he chose, and he chose to spend none of it upon 
himself, but devoted it to pious uses. There was the 
grievance : had he given it to his second brother, his 
sister-in-law would have had more pin-money. No 
human being would have complained, had he not 
turned Catholic, had he lived to man's allotted spell in 
selfish extravagance ; but in becoming a priest, in 
giving his own means to support works of eternal 
profit, he had behaved ill, and was another flagrant 
instance of the mischief to families of having a 
Catholic in them. 

More recently a friend of mine joined the Church, 
and as his only son was a child, he had him instructed 
in his own faith, and received into the Church, too, 
and presently sent him to a Catholic school. The 
child's mother had not the least objection. But people 
wholly unrelated to either father or mother flew to 
arms, as if it were an unheard-of thing for a father to 
bring his son up in his own faith ; people whose own 
religious zeal found no other expression than in furious 
quarrelling with their parish clergyman. Why should 
they care ? Well, the small boy stands in succession 
to an estate, and the Pope naturally would know that, 
and have an eye to it. 

What makes this sort of fussy bigotry the more 



THE SHOE AND THE FOOT 205 

annoying is that it is commonly betrayed by people 
whom one cannot reasonably believe to have any 
real religious susceptibilities whatever: they are not 
scandalised by defective morality, profanity does not 
shock them, unless it be of the clumsy sort that is 
ill-bred; they often are without even the pretence of 
any religious belief themselves, but that does not 
disarm their hostility to one particular religious belief, 
and only one, that of the Catholic Church. As they 
have no faith in any future life, they cannot possibly 
have any misgiving lest the eternal future of the con- 
vert to Catholicity should be imperilled. They do not, 
in fact, concern themselves with any such matter. 
They think the Catholic religion a bad business for 
this life, because they perceive there is so much of it : 
and the less the better in their opinion. 

They like a Sunday religion, or rather an every- 
other Sunday religion. They dislike the all-the-week- 
ness of Catholicism, and angrily resent its ubiquity, its 
tiresome proneness to assert itself in daily life. The 
religion, they think, of a well-bred person should be as 
well concealed as his ribs, whereas that of a Catholic 
is apt to show itself disconcertingly. 

When a member of some wholly unreligious family 
turns Catholic the other members are affronted ; and 
I cannot help suspecting that one reason for this not 
very logical attitude of theirs is this : they divine, by 
an uneasy instinct, that a standard of life and conduct 
is being set up in their neighbourhood the presence of 
which will be a sting to religious indifference, a disagree- 
able suggestion of contrast, a reminder of things they 
find it convenient to forget. To the fixedly worldly 
person nothing is less welcome than the intimate 
society of some one whose very life and presence com- 



206 THE SHOE AND THE FOOT 

pels them to a constant remembrance that there is 
another world, and that the way to it is not all ease 
and self-indulgence. 

One of the great advantages of Protestantism, these 
people feel, is that you can have as little of it as you 
like. It is not, they surmise, quite so with Catholicism. 
And they shrewdly suspect that the son or daughter, 
brother or sister, of their own, who returns to the old 
faith will not take so much trouble merely to be a bad 
Catholic. It is the introduction of a markedly religious 
element into their household that they resent. 



OF OLD WAYS 

JEREMIAS vi. 16 

WHEN Eliseus bade the Syrian go and wash in the 
Jordan he was angry : not because the thing enjoined 
was difficult, but because there was nothing striking in 
it. And the world is like him. It can never under- 
stand how great effects can follow on causes that seem 
inadequate to them ; for it never wishes to recognise 
the miraculous or the supernatural. St. Dominic's 
answer to a heresy that seemed to threaten Christendom 
was a string of beads ; and yet in those chains the dead 
heresy was presently hanging hi the wind, like the 
bones of a dead malefactor. 

When St. Benedict perceived the rottenness of the 
great Roman world of his day, he fled into the wilder- 
ness out of its sight : an odd way, men would say, to 
heal or help it. Yet he was an apostle, and his apos- 
tolate long outlived himself, and brought to the feet of 
Christ nations far beyond the frontiers of the Roman 
power. That apostolate was of a sort that, to the 
materially-minded, appeared then, and appears now, 
wholly unfitted to the task before it; for it was not 
one of loud speech, nor of bustling interference. Its 
essential feature was silence and thought. 

Neither of those things are more popular now than 
they were fourteen hundred years ago. Even with 
some Catholics they are unpopular, There are, nowa- 



208 OF OLD WAYS 

days, plenty of Catholics who imagine, and even say, 
that contemplative religion is unsuited to our time as 
there were Catholics in St. Benedict's time who mis- 
cried him, and saw no sense or use in his methods ; who 
deemed him egoistic, selfish, almost crazy. The atti- 
tude of those contemporaries of Benedict I take to 
have been this : here, they urged, is a world half-pagan, 
how can you convert it by hiding yourself from it in 
the glens of the hills or on the top of precipitous 
mountains ? Every man with a zeal for religion whom 
you draw to your side is a preacher silenced, a worker 
lulled into idleness. You are God's thief, who are 
stealing from His apostolate the very men whom it 
needs. 

And that is precisely what many who are Catholics, 
and not unzealous in their fashion, say or think now. 
They can realise no fashion but their own. In a 
very noisy, very irritable, very shallow, and intensely 
materialistic age, they cannot perceive that they them- 
selves are infected with its microbe. They do indeed 
desire the conversion of the world; but only by a 
noise as loud as its own, by counter-irritants, and very 
shallow expedients, and by material efforts, can they 
conceive the possibility of anything being done. They 
do not indeed say, and we must not discredit them 
by supposing that they mean, that prayer is of little 
account ; but the only kind of prayer they understand 
is that which many of those they would convert admit 
also the prayer of demand, or intercession. And it 
does not seem unfair to surmise that prayer, in their 
estimation, is of far less consequence than action and 
speech. 

The prayer of oblation, self-dedication, and of con- 
templation, they are often disposed to belittle : even to 



OF OLD WAYS 209 

miscall, as mediaeval and out of date, as they would say. 
They cannot believe that Carthusian and Cistercian 
monks or Carmelite nuns, behind the meek curtain of 
their silence, are working for the conversion of England 
and of the world. It is all too supernatural for them. 
They can see only what is material, and hear only 
voices as loud as their own : it slips their comprehen- 
sion that God sees without eyes and hears without ears ; 
that He hears when there is no crying or uplifting of 
noisy talk in His Holy mountain, and sees oblations to 
themselves invisible and, therefore, to them non-existent. 
They cannot perceive that sacrifice is the highest 
worship, and that the total sacrifice of self, in union 
with the Eternal Sacrifice of the Master, is noblest 
service. They are all Marthas, willing to complain of 
Mary sitting to listen, while they run about. 

This I take to be the effect of environment. There 
is no Catholic boast truer than that of the identity of 
the Church in all lands. The outer world is unable 
to gainsay it, and they who mislike her love her no 
more here than there. Somebody once asked what 
there was in common between Cardinal Newman and 
a Calabrian peasant. The answer is the Catholicity of 
both. One was learned, the other might be ignorant ; 
one was steeped in theology, the other was only born 
heir to its inheritance; one was gifted with insight 
into the grounds of faith, the other merely stood on 
them. Nationality, taste, education, were widely dif- 
ferent ; there was only one thing in common, but that 
one thing was the thing that mattered most to each 
of them that they were each of them Catholics. 

I have knelt before the Blessed Sacrament with 
a Hindu peasant on each side of me; a Hindu is far 
less like a European than a Calabrian is like an English- 

o 



210 OF OLD WAYS 

man; but in one thing we were simply the same, in 
being both of us converts and both Catholics. 

I have stood in St. Peter's when, in a late autumn 
afternoon, fifty thousand pilgrims showed like a dark 
shadow on its floor, and only high up, hundreds of 
feet above our heads, long yellow shafts of light 
seemed caught hi a mesh of gold ; the crowd was 
of many nations and many tongues, of conflicting 
political aims and interests ; the wise, maybe, and the 
unwise, lettered and unlearned, the tender and the 
rough, the refined and the coarse. Then, from the 
great chapel, where Sixtus and Julius lie before the 
Blessed Sacrament for ever, came forth a procession, 
not striking by force of numbers, but striking in all 
besides. A soldier-group, that seemed ending a march 
started in the Renaissance, tall, stalwart, manly, erect, 
strong in all the gracious strength of youth ; a group 
of prelates, in princely purple; courtiers in grave 
Spanish dress, sedately black; more soldiers, and, in 
their midst, a carrying-chair closely shut, whose occu- 
pant the people could not yet see. Slowly, to the 
bottom of the shadowy great church, the procession 
moved down, and there the chair gave up its burden, 
and the old, old man that had sat hidden within it 
crept forth and took his seat in another, like a throne, 
resting on a broad, flat stage that now was raised on to 
men's shoulders, so that in the dim light the bent white 
figure could at last be seen. 

Then, in all the packed crowd, for a moment was a 
hush, like a gasp ; and then a rustle, as when a gust 
shakes the forest, and all the black mass was whitened 
with a flutter like snow, but that it was flung upward ; 
and one great cry, in a hundred tongues, broke, like a 
moan or a sigh at first, and burst into such acclaim as 



OF OLD WAYS 211 

gripped the heart and made the ears swim and tingle 
that heard only a single word : " The Pope ! " 

But that one word, like one seal upon an inviolable 
treaty of union, made all these strangers brothers; 
each other's speech they could not understand, but 
one thing they understood, the name that means 
Father. They were all his children; gathered from 
the four winds of God, for one supreme moment they 
were all at home. For they were there, and he was 
there, and it was his house, and theirs, too. Diverse as 
they were, in colour and speech and race, in a hundred 
human warring interests, his blessing falling on them 
made them all one ; for the only thing that mattered, 
then and there, was the one thing shared equally by 
all : that they were all Catholics. 

Ah ! yes, the Church of God is one. " My perfect 
one is but one," sings the divine spouse to her. But, 
for all that, her feet are set in many lands, and her 
children are scattered up and down the earth. She is 
divine, they are human ; and human things press upon 
them and affect them. 

The Church is not less one that these children of 
hers are so different, each from other; her oneness is 
the more amazing. Let us say again that the world 
itself is sullenly aware of it, and hisses against that 
wall of unity, never daring to hope that, like the walls 
of Jericho, it will fall at its voice. 

I never forget that essential unity for a moment : 
but neither should we forget the natural influences 
that, unheeded, might end in tearing us, ourselves, 
down out of our citadel of unity. Against the Church 
hell's gates shall not prevail, but against you and me 
they may prevail, unless we take good heed. She shall 
be always one: let us mind ourselves, that in every- 



OF OLD WAYS 

thing we are one with her. There is, then, the influence 
of environment to beware of. 

For centuries English Catholics have been a tiny 
islet in a sea, first Protestant and Puritan, and now 
more and more pagan. Has it had no influence ? To 
me it seems that the effect is double ; on the one hand 
there is the effect of repulsion : we have suffered more 
from outside than they have in Latin countries, and 
naturally we feel a deeper repugnance and antagonism, 
a sterner resentment, even. We are more self-conscious 
of the presence of alien forces. Latin Catholics have 
not needed to be constantly thinking of non-Catholic 
scrutiny ; they have not suffered from persecution and 
libel at the hands of men professing the name of Christ. 
The sword has not entered into their flesh, as it has 
into ours ; to them Protestantism is not much more 
than a name for a thing to them merely silly and 
incomprehensible. We think too much of it: we are 
over-sensitive of its opinion, its criticism, its judgment, 
and its odious comparisons. And so this first effect 
merges to the other. 

A certain puritan tinge results. We know that 
puritan standards have nothing to do with us : never- 
theless we would like to disarm them. We are not 
amenable to alien criticism, but we would fain silence 
it. It is not in affairs of faith that this affects us, but 
in matters of method ; though in matters even of faith 
some are timidly anxious to make such presentations 
as may render points of doctrine less obnoxious to 
those who have none. Such timidity, like all timidity, 
is ten times more dangerous than plain courage. 

But it is in matters not of faith but of method that, 
as it seems to me, this nervous wistfulness to forestall 
a criticism that need not at all concern us most 



OF OLD WAYS 213 

manifests itself. That we should earnestly desire the 
salvation of all souls is a part of the alphabet of 
religion. But the first letter in it is the salvation of 
our own. That, as it would seem, is not the Protestant 
counsel of perfection: everybody else's soul should 
come before it ; and something before that the phil- 
anthropy that is specially concerned with material 
betterment. So that non-Catholic piety is, before all 
things, utilitarian. 

Now, Catholic piety is wholly different, for it rests 
not on the theory of the rights of man, but on faith in 
the indefeasible rights of God. I cannot help thinking 
that in some there is an uneasy feeling that unless we 
copy every species of non-Catholic activity, we are idle, 
and falling behind in the race. With Protestantism we 
have no race ; we start from a different point, and do 
not follow the same course. 

That we should be active, industrious, energetic, not 
sparing ourselves for others, is not merely well, it is pre- 
understood. But I cannot perceive why every branch 
of non-Catholic activity need have a counterpart of 
ours. If non-Catholics twitted us with not having such 
a society, or such an institute, our answer might be, 
"We have seven Sacraments. Where are yours?" 
Our object is not merely the promotion of comfortable- 
ness here, but the attainment of bliss ineffable here- 
after. Till our object is the same our methods may 
well be different. 

I am making no plea for Catholic laziness, or indif- 
ference, but only asking that natural activities should 
not make us belittle or forget supernatural means to 
supernatural ends. It is not true that the Church 
must fit herself to a new age : her fitness for every age 
is part of her inherent Divine being. God knows 



214 OF OLD WAYS 

everything, but He knows nothing of accommodation ; 
He is the self-same, and His Church reflects Him. A 
Church which fussily attitudinised to suit the twentieth 
century could never be the Church of any other. 

Does the twentieth century need a St. Benedict less 
than the fifth ? The cave at Subiaco was an odd- 
seeming cure for the huge Eoman world ; but it 
cured it, not by a new gospel, but by the old. Its 
silence was a reminder of the silence of Christ during 
thirty out of three and thirty years. To do God's 
work on earth it taught the primary necessity of 
thought of Him in heaven. This is no quietism. Was 
St. Ignatius a quietist f ? Are the Jesuits quietists ? 
Yet, is there any Order that, in its practice as in its 
theory, makes more of meditation ? 

The shallow and irritable vulgarity of criticism 
would discern in Benedict one spirit, in Ignatius another. 
A thousand years divided them, nothing else. And 
across all those years of change an indestructible bridge 
stretches to unite them the theory of the highest 
prayer : contemplation of God. 



SCIENTLE INIMICI 

IN the last of these essays incidental and brief allusion 
was made to that identity of Catholicism with itself all 
over the world which causes it to be equally disliked 
and suspected by the same sort of people everywhere. 
That identity with itself not only in all places, but in 
all ages also, is illustrated by their treatment of its 
history. Those unmistakable features which are re- 
cognisable everywhere to-day they do not fail to 
perceive as distinctive of it from the beginning, and 
when they compose history, or survey it, they are 
always confronted by the same qualities, principles, 
methods, and obstinacies in the Church which arouse 
their opposition and animosity now. It is obvious that 
when they are assailing contemporary Catholicity, and 
when they are sitting in judgment on the Church in 
other ages, they are assailing and judging the same 
thing. Their enemy of the present day is identical 
with the historical enemy whose presence on the stage 
of past times they so fiercely resent. 

There are now, as there have been almost from the 
beginning of Christianity, those who claim the name of 
Catholic, but are not in communion with the visible 
Head of the Church on earth. It is certain that they 
have never been regarded as Catholics by those who, 
as outsiders altogether, are themselves unconcerned by 
the claim : a Jew has nothing to do with the Church 
but he is perfectly able to recognise its existence, and 



215 



216 SCIENTI.E INIMICI 

to know where it is : no Jew ever yet spoke of Catholics 
and meant any but those who are under the Pope's 
obedience : but a Jew believes in God, and there are 
historians, sociologists, and what not, who believe in no 
God, yet they are bitterly aware of the Catholic Church 
as a pregnant historical fact, and none of them in 
alluding to the Catholic Church has ever meant any 
Church but that of which the Pope is the Head. 

This identity of Catholicism with itself, in every 
place and every period, makes it easy for those who 
have a statement about it to formulate to do so with- 
out reservation, whether the statement be eulogistic or 
intended in accusation. 

A Catholic writer who would say anything about 
Protestantism is not in the same easy position. He 
may, indeed, perceive one logical principle underlying 
all Protestantism, as the principle of anarchy, which 
was its mother and will be its daughter; but nothing 
is less agreeable to Protestantism, or more alien from it, 
than logic : and, so far as it continues to hold on to 
Christianity at all, it does so chiefly by refusing to hold 
hands with logic. But though this one principle of 
anarchy may be discernible in all Protestantism, it can 
never be a principle of union, but must, of its nature, 
be one of disintegration and division. To say that all 
Protestantism is united by an innate principle of 
anarchy would be the same as saying that a house is 
united by being divided against itself. And Protes- 
tantism has no other common feature recognisable in 
different countries and different periods : for to say that 
it has always the common feature of antagonism and 
rebellion against the Pope is only to say the same thing 
over again. In the Pope Protestantism always and 
everywhere perceived, and perceives, the embodiment 



SCIENTI.E INIMICI 217 

of the principle of authority, with which that of 
anarchy is incompatible. 

Even at their birth English and Continental Protes- 
tantism had little in common beyond this instinctive 
recognition of the Pope as the arch-enemy. For in 
England it was the great preoccupation of the new re- 
ligion to seem as like the old as circumstances per- 
mitted, and Continental Protestantism was eager to 
get as far from Catholicity as might be consistent with 
retaining the name of Christianity at all. Those who 
engineered the Reformation-process in England were 
willing that the people should go on thinking them- 
selves Catholics ; for they wanted a national change, and 
the people, as they well knew, wanted no change at all. 
Foreign reformers, less sanguine of national results, 
aimed more at individual conversions, and could be more 
outspoken. Not that even foreign reformers followed 
the same lines everywhere, either in doctrine or hi 
externals. Some were still willing to mount on a spar 
of wreckage and call it a visible Church, others wanted 
no visible Church; some clung to one or two sacra- 
ments, others would not hear of any; some had no 
objection to bishops and priests, so long as they had no 
essential use, and others were determined that every 
man should be his own priest and his own pope. The 
ineffable Knox brought his Protestantism from over- 
seas, and Scottish national Protestantism hated English 
Prelacy as venomously as it hated Romish papistry 
itself. 

But English Protestantism was never one and in- 
divisible; that was a title reserved in petto for the 
Republic that set up the goddess of Reason; or said 
so, only Reason, knowing herself the daughter and 
servant of God, would not act, and Folly clambered up 



218 SCIENTLE INIMICI 

to masquerade upon the new and bloody altar in her 
name. As soon as England found itself Protestant 
it began chopping Protestantism for itself. Acts of 
Parliament might have been necessary to make one 
new religion, but without any Act of Parliament the 
English felt themselves capable of inventing newer 
religions for themselves. If the Pope had been in 
the King's way, they found archbishops and bishops in 
theirs. The Pope had claimed obedience as speaking 
in God's name ; to yield religious obedience where no 
particular claim was made was even more intolerable. 
So the dragon's teeth sent up their rotten harvest. 
All this is stale enough, and the restatement of it 
is only made as being essential to what I want to 
say next. 

Protestantism being so diverse, the Catholic writer 
who aims at being just and candid finds himself in 
a difficulty. There is hardly anything he can say of 
Protestantism which would be true of all sorts of 
Protestants, and he desires to libel no one. All non- 
Catholics who remain, or think they remain, Christians, 
are in fact protestant ; this is true even of schismatics 
who hold nearly all Catholic truth, and have sacra- 
ments and a priesthood. It is taken as granted by the 
world at large, that never would speak of " Orthodox" 
Greeks or Russians as Catholics. 

But many things a Catholic writer might say of 
Protestantism he would not mean of schismatics, like 
the Greeks, nor even of sections in the Anglican 
Church. Among these latter he knows well there are 
many who hold much of the Catholic faith, as there 
are many more who hold to very little of revealed 
Christianity of any colour. This being premised, it 
will be understood with what limitations we say that, 



SCIENTI.E INIMICI 219 

just as Protestantism has loved to accuse Catholicism 
of bigotry, so has it loved to fling other stones and 
heavier. 

There are certain favourites, of which we may men- 
tion three. The Church is accused (1) of being obscur- 
antist, hating knowledge, and desperately eager to hide 
herself in a sort of giant's coat of darkness ; (2) of being 
immoral; (3) of being untruthful. Of these three 
accusations we have only space in this paper to speak 
of one. 

And first, then, that she is obscurantist, an enemy to 
knowledge, and desirous of fleeing to ignorance as a 
last refuge and forlorn hope where her saints are 
hidden by fifties in a cave. It is held proved that she 
is obscurantist when she cannot prove that she has 
flung herself into the arms of a new theory in science 
or sociology; this she is very backward in trying to 
prove. She prefers waiting, in case the new theory 
should itself be disproved by a newer yet ; and she has 
a tiresome habit of refusing to receive the ambassadors 
of a brilliant conjecture as though they represented an 
impregnable fact. She did not begin last week; and 
in the course of nearly two thousand years she has 
witnessed the arrival of a good many new theories. 
They mostly announced themselves pretty loudly, 
without any painful diffidence, and she has had time 
to note their departure, though they withdrew more 
silently, with no definiteness of leave-taking. "We 
have come ; you had better look to yourself, madam," 
they said, with some asperity. But they seldom have 
declared, "We are retiring, madam, and leaving you 
where we found you." 

Obscurantism is darkening up the light, and a lot of 
new rags can shut it out wonderfully for a time : when 



220 SCIENTI.E INIMICI 

wind and weather have torn and worn them to shreds, 
the light is found to have been behind all the time. 

She is accused of hating knowledge because she fears 
it. One thing she admits : that she is sure God is 
the source of all knowledge, and that that cannot be 
knowledge which begins by saying, "I am here to 
knock God to pieces." Fear is the apprehension of 
evil, and she is very ready to fear that which comes 
threatening the greatest of all evils to her conceivable. 
She has no fears for God; He does not stand or fall 
by man's belief in Him; He is not more omnipotent 
when His creatures confess His power, nor less Almighty 
when they are blind to His might. He is not like 
earthly kings, whose sovereignty is lost when their 
subjects are lost. But though she has no fear of God's 
losing anything, she fears lest men should lose every- 
thing ; and all is lost to them when their belief in Him 
is lost. The Eternal Monarch can be deprived of 
nothing ; but if His subjects renounce their allegiance 
it is they who are exiled, homeless, beggared, hopeless. 

This attitude of the Church is always misunderstood 
or misrepresented. It is glibly assumed that she fears 
knowledge as her own natural enemy, and on her own 
account ; that she is aware of her hold on men being 
rooted in men's ignorance, and therefore obstinately 
and malignantly opposed to the spread of knowledge, 
because it would narrow her boundaries and emancipate 
the minds of her subjects from their slavish deference ; 
because, in other words, she is guiltily conscious that 
the spread of knowledge is the antidote to priestcraft. 

Those who bring this accusation choose to regard the 
Church as a human invention, or an inhuman. They 
never have enough of the critical faculty to bear in 
mind that she regards herself as a Divine institution, 



SCIENTLE INIMICI 

with no independent aims at all, and no hand of her 
own to play; existing not for herself but for Him 
whose earthly vicegerent she is. When anything 
novel or unproved is presented to her cognisance, for 
examination and judgment, she tries it not by the 
subtle, intricate considerations by which they suppose 
her to be influenced, but by one so simple that they 
refuse to believe in it. How, she asks, will this stand 
one plain test ? Is it from God ? If so it must be 
for God. That which is not for Him is against Him ; 
and that which is against Him is against man, who 
is not independent of Him, but dependent on Him. 
Man's interest, in her simple view, cannot be served by 
anything directed against Him. This is all her craft. 
There is nothing subtle in it, and nothing secret. It 
is not a late refinement of policy, but has been her 
single principle from first to last. 

If she has seemed antagonistic to some things called 
knowledge, the antagonism has not been originated by 
her, but provoked by those who spoke in its name, for 
they have been at pains to assert that the new know- 
ledge and the old God were incompatible. If that be 
so, she says, the new knowledge must be ignorance; 
and, in opposing it, she takes arms not for darkness, 
but for light. And this she does not as in trepidation 
for her God, who has nothing to lose, for He can lose 
nothing, but because she is the Divinely appointed 
custodian of the eternal interests of men, who may 
lose everything, should she suffer them to be robbed 
in silence. In such a robbery she can be no accom- 
plice. 

This singleness and simplicity of view gives her a 
different judgment as to ignorance from that held by 
her critics. In ignorance, as in knowledge, i there are 



222 SCIENTI^: INIMICI 

many degrees ; but to her the deepest ignorance is that 
of essentials, and the most essential thing of all is God. 
She is not, therefore, ashamed to own that, in her view, 
a scientific discoverer who has undiscovered God, is 
more ignorant than a peasant who, if he knows little 
else, is as sure of God's existence as he is of his own. 
Nor does she shrink from confessing that she would 
liever have men believe in the Creator with but a partial 
understanding of all the marvels of creation, rather 
than that they should accumulate whole encyclopaedias 
of theoretic explanations of created nature and lose 
sight of the Creator behind the mass accumulated. 
Her refusal to rush out and evacuate her position at 
every summons does not spring from a jealous dread 
of selfish loss, but from an impregnable certainty that 
God is indestructible, and that they who would destroy 
Him are dooming themselves to destruction. It is her 
business to keep her children from ruin. Of selfish 
loss she takes wonderfully small account. Material 
loss she constantly suffers rather than suffer one 
principle to be relinquished. That is why Popes have 
died in exile, and the Pope at this moment stands with 
only enough of earth for his feet, but his head in 
heaven. That is why the Church in England is not the 
Church of England, and the Church of France exists 
not by the State's help, but in spite of the State's bitter 
endeavour to strangle her. 

Material loss she faces, and has always faced, with a 
magnificent courage, founded not on human valour but 
on Divine faith : it is spiritual loss she will not agree 
to. For herself she is quite fearless ; in time she knows 
herself indestructible. The gates of hell cannot prevail 
against her ; she has the promise, and she never forgets 
Who made it, though men forget. But there is no 



SCIENTI^E INIMICI 223 

promise that those gates shall not prevail against men, 
and men are her charge, as they are God's creatures 
and subjects. It is her business to save them from 
ruin. If there comes something calling itself know- 
ledge, and announcing its errand to be the emancipa- 
tion of men from belief in God, it is her function to 
warn them, and to make no treaty with their confessed 
foe, till the only terms of agreement are offered that in 
her Master's name she can accept. 

It is not she, but the soi-disant knowledge that 
declares the war. All real knowledge is from Him, 
she knows; Lignum crucis arbor scientice. But she 
cannot forget that former tree whose bitter fruit the 
red juice of the cross healed, and the false promise 
made by the enemy: Eat of it, and Man shall be as 
God and know all things ; and man ate, and his first 
fruit of knowing all things was to think that behind a 
bush he could hide himself from God. 

The last tree with the old name is worse than the 
first. Adam's eating made him silly enough to hide 
from omniscience behind a few green leaves, it did 
not make him silly enough to deny God's presence 
altogether. They who feed on the gaudy fruit of the 
new tree, in the world-old lust of knowing all things, 
run about and cry that there is no God, and, naked, 
they are not ashamed. They prate of law ; the whole 
universe, they say, is the growth of inexorable law; 
and they say, in the same breath, there is no lawgiver ; 
as if any law could make itself and force itself to be 
obeyed. The first Adam lost the garden and had to 
wring reluctant fruits out of the slow soil with sweat 
and secular toil; these new Adams run out into the 
desert of themselves, to fill their hands with its hot 
sand, and cry out to those in the garden to come 



224 SCIENTI.E INIMICI 

thence and eat with them; and all the while the 
sands themselves are running out of their clutching 
grasp, Time watching with dry smile how Eternity 
draws on. Shall we leave the garden for Fools' 
Paradise ? We know what we believe, ye believe ye 
know not what. 

Is it ignorance to hold fast the Church's serene 
unearthly certitude, where one clear voice says always 
one sure thing, rather than run out, like wanton babes, 
to play at bursting bubbles of conjecture ? The most 
brilliant conjecture may be false : if it turn out right, 
it has but caught a little truth upon the wing. Where 
it arrives we started. Can we not bear to be called 
fools for the sake of being on the side of Omniscience ? 

Do let us understand this : the Church's call to 
obedience is no invitation to take our stand in the 
ranks of ignorance, but to resist the most destructive 
of all ignorance. God knows all things, and it is 
on His side she asks us to be. He has brought us 
into His citadel of light and peace, and we can say, 
" One thing I know, whereas I was blind, now I see." 
Are we to jump overboard from Peter's ship of safety 
because a man comes drifting by on a bobbing plank 
he has found for himself in the waste of waters ? 

For my part I do not believe in the sincerity of this 
accusation brought against the Church that she is 
obscurantist, hating and fearing knowledge, and find- 
ing her Adullam in the cave of ignorance whither those 
of mean parts may resort to her. Her history too 
flagrantly gives the lie to it : her fostering of learning 
and letters, when there was none else to keep learning 
and letters alive, her encouragement of scholars, her 
rewards to them, her motherly pride in them. The 
whole foundation of letters was laid in Catholic times 



SCIENTIJE INIMICI 225 

by Catholic hands, the Church guiding and blessing 
their work. When such a word as University is used, 
the very idea brought to the mind is not of a modern 
degree-shop, but of one of those seats of immemorial 
learning that sprang up in ages of Catholic faith and 
acquired prestige from the intellects trained in them by 
the Church, sent to them by the Church, and taught 
in them by masters that the Church herself had taught. 

This is so true that it has acquired the flatness of a 
truism. But no one honestly forgets it. When it is 
ignored, it is ignored on purpose. 

Just as the Church is accused of bigotry by those who 
are most bigoted themselves, so is she accused of hating 
knowledge and wishing to keep knowledge from the 
people, by those whose own aim it is to deprive the people 
of the one essential knowledge the absence of which is 
impregnable ignorance. The accusation is too passion- 
ate : it protests too much. It betrays a shrill note of 
envy and jealousy. The unbelievers have no Aquinas, 
agnosticism can have no pope, for definitions of un- 
certainty cannot be infallible, or even claim infalli- 
bility; though unnumbered antipopes of agnosticism 
bid the people take ship with them, on a stormy 
voyage, for the dull and bleak haven of indecision. 

It is their instinctive sense that they have so little to 
promise that makes them bitter in their envy. Life is 
not over-jocund. " See how dark the present is," they 
say, " and your Church has only Hope to offer." And, 
in place of it, they have only despair to propose as sub- 
stitute. It is not the Church's ignorance that really angers 
them, but her serene knowledge : conjecture based on a 
mosaic of ever-shifting human discovery cannot forgive 
certainty founded on divine revelation. It is not really 
the Church that disconcerts them but the Holy Ghost. 

p 



226 SCIENTI^E INIMICI 

Are they convertible ? All things are possible with 
God ; and many of them have been converted. Many 
more will be, but not by any homo30pathic cure, not by 
conceding small doses of the very poisons that infect 
them. It is not true that the best way of fighting the 
devil is by borrowing his own weapons. God has his 
own armoury and needs no borrowing. Read St. Paul's 
description of the whole armour of God, and see how 
little condescendence is in it, and how sublime faith. 
If we should fail in this new struggle it would not be 
because we had neglected to arm ourselves with new 
weapons, but because we had neglected the old. Un- 
faith is never cured by timid advances to meet it half- 
way on its own ground. With what a little pebble 
David felled Goliath : our danger would lie in despising 
the little pebbles ourselves, and consenting to cumber 
ourselves with an armour like the Philistine's. The 
saints conquered heresies by being saints; but we 
think it easier to learn the wisdom of the unbeliever 
than to spell out the slow alphabet of sanctity. It will 
be by what we are, not by what we know, that we shall 
convert the Church's modern foes, if we ever do con- 
vert them. 

Can we not be patient, like our Mother the Church ? 
We can never force God's hand, nor teach Him to do 
things our way. May we not, we who are so clever, be 
content to be thought fools this little while ? 

Is the folly of the Cross a new idea ? And must 
we be greater than the Master : is it not enough on his 
own warning that the servant should be as his Lord ? 
And yet He will no more call us servants but friends. 
The friendship of God should console us for the little 
stone of folly flung from outside, though it be aimed at 
the heads we make so much of. 



LAXITY OR SANCTITY 

IN the last of these papers we spoke of three, among 
many, of the stones flung at the Church by the more 
wanton and unscrupulous, or the more ignorant and 
stupid of her ill-wishers. There are many entirely 
without faith themselves, or without that degree of 
faith that leads to recognition of the Church's super- 
natural character and divine mission, who throw no 
such stones. Their attitude is not always lacking in 
respect: and, if there must be a supernatural religion 
at all, they would as lief have the Catholic faith as any, 
though it be obviously the most supernatural of all ; 
and they are ready to admit the existence of much that 
is noble in her history, great wisdom and instinct in 
her dealings with men, and a splendid philanthropy 
in her most typical children, as, for instance, in her 
religious of the active kind, and even in some of her 
saints. 

Those who do malign the Church are not particularly 
consistent in the charges they bring, nor are the charges 
commonly formulated with any great precision. They 
are apt to take the shape of vague generalisations, or of 
ill-natured innuendo. 

So, when the Church is miscalled as immoral, all 
sorts of different charges are meant, ranging from flat 
and coarse accusations of immorality in her priesthood, 
to the insinuation that high morality is not consistent 
with the submission of the individual conscience to a 

227 



228 LAXITY OR SANCTITY 

human and absolute authority interposed between it 
and God. 

As to the first of these sorts of charges, it is very 
wholesale in character, and is apt to assume that 
Catholic priests are of defective morality chiefly because 
of the Church's discipline as to clerical celibacy. The 
Church perversely insists on an unmarried priesthood, 
and the priesthood revenges itself, so to speak, by a 
shocking laxity in morals. Such an accusation pro- 
ceeds from a very ugly pessimism, which really assumes 
the impossibility of continence, and throws a somewhat 
lurid light on the mental purity of those who bring it. 
So far from proving them to be the superior persons 
they figure as, it destroys the value of their opinion by 
the intimation it gives of their inability to conceive a 
very high standard of morality. A perfectly honest 
man is the last to accuse others of dishonesty : the man 
who shows us that he believes everybody is sure to 
pilfer or peculate who is short of money, and has the 
means of helping himself out of other people's pockets, 
we infallibly perceive to be himself of a low standard 
of rectitude. His uncharitableness is not only stupid 
and narrow, but mean, and we are warned not to trust 
him. The readiness to bring certain charges labels the 
person who has it. It amounts in the case we are 
dealing with to the unconscious confession : " I, if I were 
unmarried, would be loose all unmarried persons are. 
The Catholic clergy are unmarried, therefore we may be 
pretty sure they are of lax morality." 

These gentry have very short memories for what is 
good, and obstinately tenacious memories for what is 
bad. The history of the Church is nearly two thousand 
years old, and no one denies that there have been 
scandals. That they would come we were warned by 



LAXITY OR SANCTITY 229 

the Founder of the Church; they are not forgotten 
and never will be, so long as there are people in the 
world whose idea of a nose is of a thing to be kept 
fixed at the leaks in a sewer. But it is odd to re- 
member that such scandals occurred oftenest when the 
Church's discipline of celibacy was most disregarded: the 
Popes who strove hardest to enforce it did most to 
maintain and revive the highest standard of sacerdotal 
perfection. 

At the Reformation the new sects finally cast off the 
discipline of clerical celibacy : we are not here pointing 
to any connection between the apostasy of the heretical 
priests with their violation of celibacy, we merely 
mention a boasted fact. At the same time the retention 
of the discipline of celibacy became a special note of 
the Church that held to its obedience, and remained 
Catholic. Since that time, then, the Catholic priest- 
hood has been notoriously celibate : the reformed clergy 
notoriously married. Has the advantage, on the side 
of purity since, been clearly with the latter ? 

We do not wish to throw stone for stone. We have 
no desire to brand the reformed clergy as immoral; 
but have scandals been more common and notorious 
among us than among them ? It must be remembered 
that, owing to our much more stringent ecclesiastical 
supervision, and to the watchfulness of our people 
themselves, a scandalous priest is singularly unlikely 
to escape detection and disgrace. And in England such 
detection is followed by a gloating publicity. Yet, for 
one such miserable shame to us, do we not see in 
newspapers very many cases of outrageous scandals 
among clergy who do not belong to the Church ? It is 
a hateful subject, and we have no intention of labouring 
the point. 



230 LAXITY OR SANCTITY 

As to the old and very stale accusation of monks and 
nuns, that also proceeds generally from mouths that 
plainly prove their own extreme uncleanness ; when, in 
place of an obscene rhetoric, judicial investigation is 
attempted, the result is most disappointing to those 
who would hope to see the blackest case made out. 
Candid witnesses confess that no evidence is forthcoming 
to justify those who were eagerly alert to detect general 
corruption in the body of religious, men or women, as a 
pretext for the dissolution of the abbeys and monasteries 
whose property Henry VIII had determined to steal. 
Great Catholic historians, like Abbot Gasquet, have 
done incalculable service to truth in this matter, but 
they do not stand alone; and judicially-minded his- 
torians on the non-Catholic side have only supported 
their testimony. 

The accusation of the religious, like that of the celibate 
priesthood, is, we must say again, not an evidence of 
Catholic corruption, but a most patent and most shame- 
ful proof of the prurience of them who have revelled 
in it. "Escaped" nuns and "escaped" monks grow 
rich on filth, or remain poor. An itching prurience 
fills the halls where they fabulate charges ; and the 
halls will not fill again for the same speakers unless the 
foul appetite is fed. It is a crusade of dirt. 

Those who take arms in this crusade are evidences of 
the untruth of what they pretend that the Church 
is less moral than themselves. They label themselves 
unclean, and the sound of their bell is a warning that 
lepers are about. They cannot believe in a lofty ideal, 
and by their inability to conceive of the highest standard 
they show us how great is the fall from Catholic 
practice to Protestant theory, from Catholic purity to 
Protestant respectability; for it is quite respectable 



LAXITY OR SANCTITY 231 

to take your wife and your daughters to listen in a 
crowded hall to a man or woman talking the most 
unbridled beastliness. 

Against all this accusation of low morality in practice, 
stands the huge bulk of the sanctity of the saints. To 
leave alone altogether " primitive " saints who were as 
like modern Protestants as Primitive Methodists are 
like the Archbishop of Canterbury let us concern 
ourselves only with modern saints, i.e. with those whom 
the Church has canonised since Dr. Martin Luther went 
to claim his crown from the Lamb, followed whitherso- 
ever He goeth by the hundred and forty and four 
thousand which were undefiled with women, redeemed 
from among men, the first-fruits to God and the Lamb. 

We take those post-Reformation saints not because 
they differed in any way from pre-Reformation saints, 
but simply because they belonged to the Church against 
which the reformed sects were in arms after the de- 
fection of the latter : they were " only Roman Catholic 
saints." At what precise period saints began to be 
only Roman Catholic saints we are not in a position 
to say, for we never have been told ; it must have been 
a long while before the Reformation, as St. Dominic 
was obviously a Roman Catholic saint, or he would not 
have founded the Inquisition ; so must St. Francis, or he 
would not have had the stigmata ; so must St. Gregory 
the Great, as he certainly was not Pope without know- 
ing it. But by the time the Reformation arrived the 
whole business of sanctity had become exclusively 
Roman Catholic : the reformers would have no more 
saints and they never have had. The Roman Catholic 
saints were peculiarly offensive for two reasons : because 
they were so typically Roman Catholic, and because 
Roman Catholics worship them. St. Ignatius of Loyola, 



232 LAXITY OR SANCTITY 

St. Francis Xavier, St. Francis Borgia were not only 
Roman Catholic, they were much worse: they were 
Jesuits. So were many other post-Reformation saints. 
St. Charles Borromeo was a cardinal. St. Theresa was 
a nun, and not even a nun of an " active and useful 
order " ; and so with hundreds of the post-Reformation 
saints: they were Popes, or Cardinals, or Jesuits, or 
monks, or nuns, or traffickers with such. In a word, 
they were deadly Catholic. They were more than 
typically Catholic, they were the quintessence and 
sublimation of Catholicity. The Protestants disapprove 
of them on that very account. Were they immoral ? 
Was their standard low and their practice lax ? Was 
it by reason of their defective virtue that they received 
the honours of canonisation ? 

These post-Reformation Roman Catholic saints, if 
they represent anything, represent the Catholic ideal of 
morality carried into perfect practice. And by their 
practice anyone who read their lives, and knew nothing 
else of Catholic standards of morality, might understand 
what the Catholic standard is. These people realised 
it. These canonised Popes, like St. Pius V., cardinals 
like St. Charles, Jesuits like Francis Xavier, nuns like 
Theresa of Jesus, monks like St. John of God, illustrate 
in real life what the Roman Catholic Church inculcates 
as the rule of Christian life to be aimed at. I can 
understand an Exeter Hall devotee disliking St. Pius V. 
uncommonly, but I cannot understand any reasonable 
person rating the morality of an " escaped " monk, with 
his mouth full of dirt and his eye full of obscene 
innuendo, higher than that of the austere Dominican. 

The post-Reformation saints do not appeal to the 
reformed taste, because they are too Roman Catholic : 
is it because the morality of those saints was too low ? 



LAXITY OR SANCTITY 

Or can it be because it was too high ? Common sense 
must decide. A standard of ethics that prefers Dr. and 
Mrs. Luther to St. Francis Xavier and St. Theresa, is so 
eccentric that no sane argument can ever appeal to it, 
or ever has appealed to it. Any who are capable of 
venerating the apostate monk and nun must be incap- 
able of appreciating real sanctity. But they are also 
incapable of recognising a high standard of morals, and 
the less they talk about morals the better. 

The saints are objectionable to these persons not only 
because they were so typically Roman Catholic which 
we admit, but also because Roman Catholics " worship " 
them. This we do not admit in the sense in which it 
is meant ; and I cannot help thinking it a mistake when 
we use the word in our sense without insisting on its 
not being used as our accusers mean it. What these 
people mean is that we worship the saints as only God 
can be worshipped. That is nonsense: as much non- 
sense as it would be to say that we consider the moon 
hotter than the sun, and starlight more effectual in 
ripening our crops than sunlight. The moon has no 
light of her own, but only that reflection of his that the 
sun lends her. She is much nearer to ourselves than 
the sun, and we can gaze on her brilliance without 
being blinded; nevertheless she is not the origin and 
source of even that lesser light she casts down upon our 
night ; it is only caught by her in the long immensity of 
space and held there for us. She is the sun's witness, 
and without him she would be as dark as ourselves on 
a moonless night. Without the sun it would be all 
night for us, and there would be no moon. 

What these people can never understand is that our 
veneration of saints is a perpetual witness to our adora- 
tion of God. They are saints because He is God: if 



234 LAXITY OR SANCTITY 

there were no God there would be no saints. Their 
light is perfect in its kind and degree, lovely and of 
ineffable purity and serenity, but it is all reflection ; 
in the wild night of sin and human imperfection it 
compels man to remember that there is God. The 
world's bulk is between us and Him, but the sanc- 
tity of the saints insists on our keeping in mind His 
existence. 

I am disposed to suspect that we are accused of wor- 
shipping saints, as only God may be worshipped, because 
they who bring the accusation have themselves but a 
poor and mean idea how God should be worshipped. 
Sacrifice may not be offered to any saint, and these 
people cannot perceive that the supreme expression of 
worship is sacrifice. In this the ancient religions of 
mankind were nobler than they ; for, though they were 
but groping blindly in the dark, they at least were 
capable of discerning that to give something to their 
gods was a higher expression of worship than merely to 
ask something of them. It is true that what they gave 
was often inadequate and trivial, but it was typically 
meant; and it is true that some of the moderns who 
refuse any sacrificial offering say that the only oblation 
worthy of God is the offering of self. But the Catholic 
Church has something ineffably higher to offer. Holy 
Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son, much dearer to 
him than himself; but he prophesied a greater victim 
than Isaac, when he said God will provide Himself a 
Victim : for the morrow of Mount Moriah was the Holy 
Mass. God Himself provided the Lamb for the sacrifice, 
and in it is an oblation unspeakably greater than that of 
ourselves, though that is included, the Man-Christ being 
sum and representative of all men, for Christ is not only 
man but God. Those who pretend that the Mass is an 



LAXITY OR SANCTITY 235 

offering unworthy of God are ignorant of what it is, or 
must believe God to be unworthy of Himself. 

Of all things the Mass is the most Roman Catholic 
and how little are the saints even mentioned in it. 
And the saints themselves, if these accusers but knew 
their lives, how little in all they say and write are they 
concerned with each other. Was there ever a more 
Roman Catholic saint than Catherine of Siena, with 
her ecstasies and her stigmata, her miraculous fasts and 
her miraculous communions ? And is not all her life 
the breathing of one word, Jesus Christ ? 

Again, we "worship saints." Is it because of their 
lax and low morality ? Is not our " worship " of them 
an irrefragable proof and witness of our veneration of 
high virtue, our wistful yearning towards the perfection 
we miss in ourselves, of the value we have for purity 
and justice and charity and holiness ? Of the Church's 
desire to point with the fingers of saints towards the 
ideal Christ sets for us ? Has the Church ever canon- 
ised anyone of middling piety, of but average goodness ? 
It is a contradiction in terms to pretend at once that 
Catholics worship saints and condone laxity of morals. 

But formless and vague as the accusations all are, 
one form they take we have alluded to. It is urged 
that the Catholic Church debilitates the conscience 
of her children by interposing between it and God 
human influence and human interference, especially in 
the practice of the confessional. So I suppose physi- 
cians debilitate the constitutions of their patients by 
interposing untasty medicines, and ^ unwelcome warn- 
ings, between them and their well-loved indulgences 
and ignoble excesses. There are patients who love 
their over-eating and over-drinking better than health, 
and such persons kick at the doctor. But common- 



236 LAXITY OR SANCTITY 

sense recognises that they need him and his purga- 
tives, and his plain threats of what will follow on 
neglect and disregard. If men were all healthy and 
all wise there would be no such calling as the 
physician's. 

If we were what we should be, cry these wiseacres, 
there need be no confessional. Perhaps it was because 
Jesus Christ perceived that men never had been what 
they ought to have been, and never would be all they 
ought to be, that in His Divine condescendence He 
left to the Church the great sacrament of healing. 

It might be very spirited in a doctor to say, " Your 
sickness is all your own fault, I leave you to yourself. 
You have no business to be ill. Either you are guilty of 
excess, or your ancestors were. The human body should 
be perfectly healthy : your gout, or your debility, is all 
abnormal slightly scandalous, my dear sir, or madam, 
and you should be normal. All illness is more or less 
abnormal. Be normal." 

However spirited such fine talk might sound, it 
would be dismal hearing for the sick creature inclined 
to suspect that sickness itself was normal in him. 

The Catholic Church has to deal with mankind as 
Adam left it ; and her Master knew it, and left her the 
means. Man is sick and He left her a medicine, and 
bade her play the part not of preacher only, but of 
physician too. 

He, it may be urged, is the Physician. Precisely, 
and it is He who cures in the confessional. The 
Catholic Church can invent no sacraments : they are all 
Divine institutions. That which is her claim for them 
should be their justification. Her assertion that they 
were all God's invention, not her own, is not an instance 
of her arrogance, but an illustration of her humility. 



LAXITY OR SANCTITY 237 

The Church could give no man power to bind and loose : 
Jesus Christ gave it, and that is her point, which 
invariably escapes her adversaries. Her physicians 
claim no power of healing by right of their innate or 
acquired personal skill ; it is a matter of delegation. If 
God cannot do what an earthly monarch does, and 
delegate judicial faculties, then there is an end. But it 
is not irreverent or presumptuous to say that He can. 

Does the earthly monarch attenuate morality by 
appointing courts of justice ? Are judges notorious 
for encouraging infractions of the law? There are 
countries where there are no such courts and no judges ; 
it is, of course, well known that in them the highest 
standard of morality prevails. It is equally well known 
that the confessional is largely absent from Scotland, 
and from Norway, and I suppose quite an established 
fact that in those favoured countries the prevalence of 
illegitimate births is due to the chill of the climate. 
It is odd that in Catholic Ireland the humidity and 
softness of the climate should produce a contrary result : 
odd, but certainly fortunate. 

In the confessional the human conscience is supposed, 
by these people, to be separated by a human barrier 
from the Divine Lawgiver : thus a bridge separates the 
opposing banks of a river, and nobody is ever helped 
by it to pass from one to the other. It is, as has been 
remarked by a more illustrious writer, odd to note 
what different results accrue from a mere change of 
metaphor. 

The enemies of the confessional assume that the 
object of the priest in it is to put himself between the 
penitent and God ; but, then, they are not in the habit 
of going to confession. In one breath they thank God 
that they know nothing about it, and assert that they 



238 LAXITY OR SANCTITY 

know all about it. They have never been inside a 
house, but they can tell what it is like inside, because 
they have picked up stones out of the muck outside 
and flung them at the windows. It is all very logical 
and very charitable and very superior. But it is not 
exactly common sense. 

When our Lord said that a tree is known by its 
fruits we presume that these critics of ours believe that 
He meant it. Well, there are, alas, many Catholics in 
the whole world who never or seldom do go to con- 
fession, as there are, thank God, vast numbers who do. 
Which of these classes are the more moral, lead the better 
lives, have the more delicate consciences ? Is a delicate 
conscience a debilitated one ? Or is it because the 
confessional enfeebles the conscience of those Catholics 
in the habit of frequenting it that their lives are purer, 
more religious, more charitable and more just than are 
those of Catholics who never make use of it ? 

Does the priest in the confessional impose his own 
conscience on the penitent, and so deprive him of any 
real conscience of his own ? If those who talk so glibly 
on the subject had as much knowledge and experience 
of it as they have ignorance, they would be aware that 
a confessor lays down no private law, but asserts and 
reasserts the unchanging law of God ; and it is precisely 
because every Catholic knows perfectly that he does so, 
that bad Catholics, who have no desire or intention of 
abiding by the law of God, will not trust themselves in 
the confessional. They know that it is useless to enter 
there merely to give a historic account of their sins : 
absolution cannot be obtained without sorrow, and part 
of that sorrow is a purpose of amendment, and such 
purpose of amendment includes a resolve to avoid the 
occasions of relapse. The maligners of the confessional 



LAXITY OR SANCTITY 239 

pretend to believe it an easy way of obtaining licence 
to sin, or a patent method of getting forgiveness without 
repentance : the most ignorant Catholic in the world 
knows fully that without repentance the confessional 
will do nothing for him. It is not a laxative of con- 
science, but an astringent. 

But the priest absolves, and he is a man ; how dare 
he ? Because he is himself sinless, or pretends to be ? 
No, but because God has given him authority to do 
what only could be done by God's delegation. Jesus 
Christ said that He gave the power, and delegated the 
authority : do those who deny the power not believe 
that He is God ? Or do they deny the authenticity of 
the words ? There are no plainer in Scripture ; Christ 
did not in any Scripture more plainly declare His own 
Godhead than He declared His delegation of the power 
of binding and loosing. To believe Him and His words 
in their plain sense is not to despise Scripture ; to admit 
that He could Himself forgive sins is to admit that He 
was God, to refuse Him the power is to refuse to confess 
Him God : and if He be God and Almighty, He can 
delegate any function that He chooses. He said that 
He did delegate His own authority of binding and 
loosing. He must have meant something : is it arrog- 
ance, is it impiety, to believe that He meant what He 
said, and that He could do what He said ? 



EVERYDAY PAPERS 



PRESS AND PUBLIC 

"MR. DARCY," said Elizabeth Bennet, in Pride and 
Prejudice, " has no defect. He owns it himself without 
disguise." And the Catholic public, with very little, 
has lately shown signs of expecting a literature and 
press free from defect and all to itself. Its novelists 
must not strain at wit, but must be as funny as 
Dickens, and equally moving without ever wallowing 
in pathos or growing maudlin. They must show a 
complete grasp of life, like Thackeray's, but without 
hinting at anything in the lives of men that has no 
business to be there. They must produce works of 
fiction that may freely be read in convent boarding- 
schools, but of a quality that will force men of a world 
not Catholic to read them, that so the Catholic present- 
ment of things may reach outside. They are therefore 
not to be goody-goody, but the whiteness of holiness 
must by no means be thrown into relief by any con- 
trast with anything darker than pale grey a lofty 
standard, not, perhaps, to be obtained, as you may 
obtain a new fish-kettle, by ordering it at the stores or 
from the nearest ironmonger. 

As a matter of fact, however, the standard actually 
reached by English writers belonging to the Church 
has been for some time a high one. At the present 
moment they may claim a position not merely pro- 
portionally good, but high even without the proviso of 
relative numbers considered. 

243 



244 PRESS AND PUBLIC 

Dr. Barry, Canon Sheehan, Monsignor Benson. Kathe- 
rine Tynan, Mrs. Hugh Fraser, and Mrs. Wilfrid Ward 
are certainly not inferior to any English novelist now 
writing; and Canon Barry's contributions to literature 
are not confined to fiction. Francis Thomson, dying, 
left no poet greater than himself in England alive and 
still writing poetry ; and at the present moment Lord 
Alfred Douglas and Mrs. Meynell are the best poets 
England has living. Abbot Gasquet, the Rev. H. K. 
Mann, and Monsignor Ward are the best historians 
now writing in English ; and in the neighbour field of 
serious biography Mr. Wilfrid Ward and Mr. Snead- 
Cox are ahead of all competitors. Of living essayists, 
few surpass Mr. Hilaire Belloc in brilliance and 
originality. 

If we come to periodical literature it may fairly 
be said that the Dublin Review is the best of the 
quarterlies, and no shilling monthly maintains a higher 
level of interest, excellence, and literary distinction 
than the Month. 

Then there is the " Press." This also must be a 
branch of literature, or the mission entrusted to it can 
never be seriously carried out. In the non-Catholic 
Press there are papers that by no stretch of courtesy 
could be ranked as falling within any definition of 
literature; all printed words, indeed, are composed of 
letters ; but they have nothing else to do with letters. 
The Tablet is a literary organ of very high standing ; 
not now equalled in consistent excellence, nor in im- 
portance, by weekly reviews that were once names to 
conjure with. The Catholic Times appeals to a large 
public, not, in all its ramifications, so literary ; but, 
besides its popular features, it also is distinguished by 
the generous weekly provision of a mass of very con- 



PRESS AND PUBLIC 245 

siderable and very able literary matter. In this place l 
it does not behove me to speak of the Universe, but 
this may be said : Whatever degree of excellence it may 
have attained so far, it aims at bringing itself higher ; 
concerning which something must presently be enforced. 

The Catholic public, like the general public, is 
formed of various groups or sections in these demo- 
cratic days we must not say, of classes and to these 
diverse groups the different Catholic newspapers 
appeal, so that they have never regarded each other 
as rivals. The divisions are not precisely political. 
Some Catholic reviews, magazines, and newspapers 
may probably circulate chiefly in quarters where Con- 
servatives are not held in derision, others among those 
who are most sanguine as to the benefits promised by 
Liberal Governments; but it has never been the way 
with the Catholic Press in England to attach to itself 
this or that political label. And this is altogether to 
its credit, and much to its advantage even politically 
No Liberal administration can count on the blind 
obedience of any English Catholic newspaper let it 
put forward an Education Bill obnoxious to Catholic 
feeling, and try nor can a Conservative Government 
be sure that any English Catholic review will whisper 
soft nothings in its ear on all occasions. 

This attitude of our Press has been its strong point. 
Let us maintain it. 

In some quarters lately I have noted with regret a 
disposition to assume that every good Catholic must 
be a good Democrat. Against any such assumption, 
little as I like politics of any colour, I take leave to 
protest. In matters that are really only political the 
Church leaves us a free hand. There are, of course, 

1 The present paper appeared in the Universe. 



246 PRESS AND PUBLIC 

questions that claim to be merely political in which 
there is strictly involved some deeper question of faith 
or morals. In those we are not free, for the Church 
has never professed to leave her children free to believe 
what is mischievous and false, nor to behave without 
reference to God's commandments and her own. In 
matters of political significance only, she holds herself 
unbound, and does not bind us, neither must we try to 
bind one another. 

Democracy may be the thing now ; it certainly was 
not the thing always, and the Church was there all the 
time. Christendom was almost wholly feudal once, 
and the Church made the best of it. The world may 
be entirely democratic soon, and the Church will 
make the best of that, too. The old heathen empire 
crumbled and passed, and slowly out of its rums 
arose the feudal Christendom. Feudalism passed, and 
Christendom with it, modern Europe emerging, her 
mouth full of promises of freedom. The world may 
keep them, and all be one democracy, but the world 
itself will pass, and, before it passes, something else 
may grow out of the ruins of democracy, just as 
democracy itself arose out of the ruins of monarchy. 
The Church stands, as she has always stood, watchful, 
not aloof, but uncompromised, a finger on her lip, 
blessing where she can, expostulating when she must. 

The Church has had from the beginning a side that 
democrats love to call democratic. She has never 
existed for any class; she belongs to all alike who 
belong to her. Her sympathy has been always for 
those most in need of it, and there have been times 
when that sympathy has called for the reproof of the 
mighty. All that she has to give isj for poor and rich 
alike. And her highest places are open to the lowest. 



PRESS AND PUBLIC 247 

But her organisation is anything rather than demo- 
cratic ; it is not based on assumptions of equality. 
Her rule is for the people not this section or that, 
highest or even lowest it has never been, and never 
can be, by the people. Her constitution reflects that 
of heaven, and, though one hears God called by many 
odd names nowadays, I have not yet heard Him de- 
scribed as President of the Celestial Republic. What- 
ever happens to the Government of the world, that of 
the Church will always be a Viceroyalty, the reminder 
in time of Eternal Sovereignty. 

The Voice that speaks from the Seven Hills beside 
the yellow river has sent its sound into all lands, insist- 
ing on the Apostolate of the Press, and every Catholic 
ear is listening. But the message cannot, in the nature 
of things, be to the Christian Press alone; it implies 
the correspondence of the Christian public. A duty is 
never, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, all on one side. 

Political nostrums change and fail, but the law of 
demand and supply will work in spite of us. Forced 
feeding is not possible outside prisons, and readers are 
at large. The Apostolate of the Catholic Press depends 
not on the Catholic Press alone, but on the reasonable 
co-operation of the Catholic public. And that is pre- 
cisely what the Catholic public does not seem alert 
to comprehend. A Press, however solidly good, cannot 
maintain itself in vogue by its own weight. Writers 
presuppose readers. That the Catholic writers are 
there we believe is proved. Let the Catholic readers 
keep them going. The Pope's wise and solemn re- 
minder of an imperious duty is to the public on which 
every Press must depend, as it is to those by whom 
the Catholic Press must be provided. 



ON BOOK BUYING 

IN the previous paper I spoke of the correspondence 
necessary on the part of the Catholic public if the 
Apostolate of the Press is to be as effectual as the 
Sovereign Pontiff wishes it to be. Recently Miss 
Lucy Curd, in an interesting article, wrote in the 
Universe of the Apostolate of Fiction. In that matter 
also the Catholic public has its part to play. And, 
though it may not seem pretty in a writer known 
principally as a contributor to fiction, to urge the 
point, it is my intention briefly to do so. 

There is no doubt that Catholic novelists would 
obtain far larger audiences if they were content to 
write what may be called non-Catholic novels; and 
the labourer in the field of fiction is as worthy of his 
hire as any other worker. But they are willing to 
forego larger hire that their work may be in a special 
corner of the great field of letters. In other words, 
they are content with restricted payment of their toil 
in order that they may help in the supply of a Catholic 
literature of fiction. Nor is their self-denial merely 
in the matter of pecuniary rewards ; every writer 
desires to have as many readers as possible, and most 
writers find that the wider their audience is the greater 
is the stimulus to good writing. A novelist labelled in 
the public estimation as Catholic must be content to 
know that ninety-nine out of every hundred novel- 
readers in England will abstain from putting his or her 
books down upon their library-list. 



248 



ON BOOK BUYING 249 

It does seem, therefore, that Catholic novel-writers 
have some right to complain if they find themselves 
also unsupported, or very weakly supported, by 
Catholic novel-readers. 

But, first, as to the buying of books. 

There is nothing, it seems to me, in which people are 
more careful of their money; and I do not mean 
Catholic people particularly. You will find those who 
can afford almost every other kind of expenditure too 
poor, in their own estimation, to spend anything on 
books. 

There are, of course, a few wealthy persons who lay 
out large sums on books, as they lay out large sums on 
pictures, old furniture, miniatures, gold snuff-boxes, 
fans, and china. But the amount spent even by them 
on books is very small indeed in comparison of what 
they lavish on the purchase of other things. And 
they do not buy books to read them. They are merely 
collectors; and it is the desire of possession that 
makes them purchasers, which has nothing at all to 
do with the love of reading or of literature. 

It is not of such people we are speaking. Nor of the 
much larger class who care neither to collect rare 
books nor to read books of any sort. There is another 
class, numerous also, that likes reading pretty well, and 
does read to a certain extent, but will on no account 
buy the books it wants to read. Not all of these 
people are poor ; some of them are wealthy, and deny 
themselves hi very little. In books they practise their 
economies. 

Some new book appears, which they imagine they 
want to read, and to read soon, while other people are 
talking of it. It costs a good deal less than a smart 
hat, less in most instances than a theatre-ticket, perhaps 



250 ON BOOK BUYING 

as little as a cab-fare, nothing like what it would cost 
to fill a bowl with flowers or a dish with asparagus. 
Do they buy it ? They would stare with amazement 
if you suggested such an extravagance. The book may 
be worth reading again and again; it may outlast the 
fashion of twenty hats; it does not wither like the 
lovely flowers, or get eaten up like the asparagus ; but 
to buy it would be the road to ruin. 

Against many books much may be urged, but the 
buying of books has led few to financial embarrass- 
ment. 

A lady, not indeed wealthy, poor thing, but struggling 
along on six thousand a year of her own, independent 
of her husband's separate thousands, remarked lately 
to a writer of novels : 

" I like to have your books, not only to read them." 

She liked, she explained, to read them often. What 
could be more flattering ? 

"And," she went on, " I always do get them. I wait 
till I can get them from Boots' for ninepence." The 
author could not but wish she might have to wait 
long, but he was constrained in justice to commend 
her: 

"You are," he said, "one of the few book-buyers, 
and deserve great praise." 

People like to be given books by their writers. To 
the same author the same lady in straitened circum- 
stances, once wrote, shortly before Christmas : 

" Do not buy me a present " (he had not meant to) ; 
" send me your last book." 

Of course, he did; and it only cost him three 
shillings and fourpence, whereas it would have cost 
her four-and-six. 

"Ah!" I have heard rich folk say really rich folk, 



ON BOOK BUYING 251 

not anxious strivers how to make ends meet on six or 

seven thousand a year "Ah! I see you have 's 

last book, from Mudie. We belong to 's, and can't 

get it. Don't send it back till I've read it. I like his 
books better than any that one reads now." 

If rich people cannot afford to buy books, how can 
you expect poor people to buy them ? I do not. One 
must not count on uncovenanted mercies. All the 
same, it is chiefly poorish people who do buy the few 
that are bought ; unfashionable folk in country-houses, 
whose inhabitants can no longer afford annual visits to 
London, and much poorer people still. 

A man of letters, who was also " literary adviser " to 
a firm of London publishers, once took me on his way 
to worship at the shrine of Mr. Thomas Hardy, and, 
after showing him the neighbouring dens in which 
literary lions had once lived, I hospitably entertained 
him to tea at the expense of a spinster-poetess who 
had about sixty pounds a year. 

" Good gracious," he exclaimed as we came away ; 
" that lady buys books. Her cottage is full of them." 
She did not happen to be a Catholic, but I daresay 
Catholics buy as many books as other people. But, 
leaving the question of downright purchase aside, there 
is the other way of supporting Catholic writers, viz. 
by demanding their books at libraries, and continuing 
to demand them till the books are supplied; and in 
this matter I think Catholic readers are backward. 
They are apt, it seems to me, to ask for the work of a 
Catholic author as if they knew they were asking a 
favour at the hands of their librarian ; and librarians 
never make haste to get books asked for In that way. 
They would never get any book if they could help it. 
They regard all books as mole-catchers regard moles 



ON BOOK BUYING 

tiresome things by the extermination of which they 
live. Nevertheless, the man who pays the mole- 
catcher expects a certain number of moles to be forth- 
coming; and the librarian knows that his besotted 
clients will have certain books, but he will never let 
them have any he can help letting them have. If a 
Catholic subscriber asks meekly for a work by a 
Catholic writer, the librarian will boldly aver it is not 
yet out ; if it be urged that the work has been in 
circulation some time, he will say, "Oh yes! Ah! 
That book. Oh yes; that book's about finished. A 
'Remainder' by now, I expect." This is not odium 
theologicum (though I think almost all librarians are 
Congregationalists) ; it is merely hatred of books. And 
if you show boldly that you know you have a right to 
choose your own reading, and that you simply mean to 
have the book you mention, it will be there in a day 
or two. 



OF DISLIKE OF BOOKS 

WE have all heard of the man who confessed that 
he only knew two tunes when he heard them, of which 
one was God Save the King, and the other wasn't. I 
only once met anyone who went further, and admitted 
that he disliked music; but there must be many 
who do dislike it, such tunes as the happily defunct 
" Ta-ra-ra-Boom-de-ay " could not have been so widely 
beloved, else. 

No one frankly declares that he cannot abide books, 
nevertheless it is obvious that many do. 

They prove it by their reading. 

I am sure one way of disliking books is to like 
newspapers. There are, I know, papers which are a 
sort of books. No one would deny that the Dublin 
Review is a book, a different book appearing under 
the same title four times a year ; so is the Month a 
book, with twelve slim but stalwart volumes a year; 
because the Dublin and the Month are literature. A 
paper that frankly aims at being literary is also a 
book, though its shape be not bookish, and it appears 
every week. But there are papers that are no more 
books than Christian Science is Christianity or Science ; 
for they have nothing to do with literature. They 
are not with it but against it. They gather not with 
it, but scatter. And the more a man, or a boy or 
a girl, reads them, the less capable does he, or she, 
become of reading. They may not be bad morally, 



254 OF DISLIKE OF BOOKS 

though the burden of proof that they are in any way 
good lies on them. They are certainly not good from 
the literary point of view, for the reason just given ; 
they destroy a sound stomach, and ruin anything like 
a literary digestion. A man who fills himself with 
sweet cakes, overlaid with chalky sugar, has no appetite 
for good meat. 

They are made of snips and shreds, and full of in- 
formation that is curious only in the sense of being 
inquisitive. They are equally inquisitive concerning 
criminals and crowned heads. What the Czar has 
for breakfast every day, what the murderer hanged 
to-day had for breakfast this morning, is equally their 
concern ; what costume was worn in the dock by the 
woman arraigned for the poisoning of her husband, 
and what costume the Queen of Bulgaria had on when 
she "sustained an accident in her motor car" is de- 
scribed with the same gusto. The Liberty of the 
Press is understood by them to mean the taking of 
astounding liberties against taste, decency, even 
humanity. 

Some time ago, a very kindly man of letters delivered 
himself of a philippic against capital punishment ; but 
all he wrote was no more than an indictment of the 
indecent morbidity of a press that makes each succes- 
sive murderer its hero, from the moment his crime is 
attributed to him, to the moment in which he pays the 
penalty it has brought upon him. The scandal is not 
that a murderer should know that he will, if convicted, 
have to suffer justly what he has made another suffer, 
unjustly, but that he should be aware, and the public 
should be aware, that every inflection of his voice, 
every feature in his face, the cut of his trousers, the 
spots on his waistcoat, his tie-pin, and his tie, the colour 



OF DISLIKE OF BOOKS 255 

of the pencil with which he writes notes to his counsel, 
the significant twist of his lips, the pregnant droop in 
his left eyebrow, that all this, and a thousand particu- 
lars other than all this, will be noted down, and tele- 
graphed all over the world, and read by hundreds of 
millions of morbid creatures who can see no difference 
between such obscene publicity and fame. Not even 
fact, for even a ring or an albert-chain are facts of a 
sort brazen facts sometimes suffices the spreaders of 
these foul Barmecide feasts; countless inferences are 
drawn or suggested ; nothing in a loathsome murderer, 
no episode in his wretched life, no jest of his, is 
let slip by unnoted. The waxed ends of his moustache 
are as important as the colour of Oliver Cromwell's 
hair. 

The more such ghoulish filth is savoured the less 
does it become possible that those who savour it can 
like books, and they who provide it are the worst 
enemies of reading. 

It may seem an anti-climax to say so, when they 
are also the worst enemies of public morality. For it 
is all glorification of crime, whatever they may think 
of themselves, who deal in the stuff. Criminals are 
not normally healthy-minded persons, and they are 
recruited from the morbid, who gloat on every circum- 
stance of crime. The class of which murderers are 
made is the class that has learned to see in murder 
the one sure road to instant and universal notoriety. 
Decadent lads and girls " educated," God save the 
mark, in ignorance of God, perceive that without 
work, without capacity, without any of the self-denying, 
toilsome climbing that has led the famous to fame, 
they, too, in the last desperate collapse of infamy, may 
secure a notice, a world-wide publicity, that cannot be 



256 OF DISLIKE OF BOOKS 

without its poisonous charm to those who, beyond life, 
see nothing, and in life see only leaden failure. 

Against this prostitution of print every decent paper 
that strives to be a book is a protest, as every good 
man's life is a protest against the mean cry that good- 
ness is beyond our mark, and, as things are, impossible. 
The use of monks is not only in their prayers ; the life 
of perfection, however hidden, forces the reluctant 
world to remember that the Councils of Perfection 
are not Councils of Impossibility. And the goodness 
of a good paper is not merely a refusal to avail itself 
of the profits of prostitution, but an insistence on the 
fact that goodness can and does exist in print, however 
hidden behind the flaunting crowd of vulgar truckling 
to vulgar and mean tastes. Just as the monk in his 
cell proves that there can be Poverty, Chastity, and 
Obedience, so does the paper prove it that prefers 
poverty to a wealth gained by appeal to what is basest 
in those who have learned to read, that will not sell 
legally translated pornography, nor forget that the 
ultimate Censor of a Christian Press is the imprisoned 
Head of the Church of Christ. 

There is many a man who says, honestly and truly, 
that he cannot be, that, at all events, he is not, as are 
holy monks and nuns in their heavenly cloister, but 
he can and will help a work above himself, and so he 
spares them a coin or so out of his superfluities, and 
knows himself blest, for a pipe foregone, or a pleasure 
abdicated, that he may send help to build a convent, 
or a chapel of some monastery. Let him aid by his 
support and subscription an undertaking that depends 
on him. Every man who spares his penny to buy 
a Catholic paper is helping the utterance of clean 
words: doing his share in the work of a great mis- 



OF DISLIKE OF BOOKS 257 

sionary enterprise: helping the Voice that teaches 
from the Seven Hills to come at the ears to which it 
speaks. A penny is not much, nor was the widow's 
mite, nor was the cup of cold water but, alas ! cold 
water is not wont to be given in cupfuls, but rather to 
be poured out of buckets. 



R 



ATMOSPHERE AND ANTIDOTE 

IN a former paper we spoke of the buying, or rather 
the non-buying, of books. Let us return to the pre- 
vious question the buying, or, to be more matter of 
fact, the non-buying, of newspapers : meaning here, of 
Catholic newspapers. 

Though there are many who cannot plead poverty as 
the true reason for their extreme unwillingness to buy 
books, since they habitually buy much more costly and 
less necessary things, it may be truly urged by many 
others that they do not buy books simply because they 
cannot, because they have not the means. And they 
may also plead with truth that they cannot even 
afford the luxury of a library-subscription, though it 
remains the case that numbers, who afford themselves 
indulgences more expensive and more useless, imagine 
themselves too poor to spend a guinea, or half a 
guinea, a year on this. 

But who pretends that he cannot buy a newspaper ? 
Everybody does buy newspapers ; and Catholics buy as 
many as their neighbours ; and this is our grievance 
ihey are given to buy precisely the newspapers bought 
by their non-Catholic neighbours, and to buy them 
only. In England, Catholic papers are only a weekly 
matter, yet those who every day buy at least one non- 
Catholic paper, and often several others as well, do not 
recognise it as a duty to buy a Catholic paper even 
once in a week. 

258 



- 



ATMOSPHERE AND ANTIDOTE 259 

But to do so is, in fact, nothing less than a duty. In 
every Catholic family that can provide itself with a 
daily non-Catholic paper, and usually provides itself 
with at least one weekly non-Catholic paper sporting, 
comic, or what not besides it is a simple duty that a 
Catholic paper should be provided also. It is merely a 
matter of a penny, and the expense is not the real 
obstacle. 

Catholics in a country like England are bound to 
bear in mind that the atmosphere they breathe is not 
Catholic. The ordinary intercourse of business and of 
recreation brings them in lifelong contact with people 
who believe altogether differently from themselves, or 
who believe, only too probably, nothing in particular. 
The tone of conversation at its best is un-Catholic ; the 
principles vital to us are not held by those with whom 
we are in daily intimate communication. The Church, 
to large numbers of them, stands for obsolete, exploded 
ideas ; of the teaching of the Church they are probably 
densely ignorant ; such as they imagine it to be, they 
dislike it; and they impatiently await the day when 
that teaching shall be universally forgotten and 
unheeded. To be subject to it they assume to be a 
fetter, a drawback on freedom, a handicap, as it is 
called, in life. And they are not averse from assuming 
also, that their Catholic friends are conscious of this, 
though unavowedly ; that they would like to be more 
"free" in opinion, less subject to rule and guidance, 
and that either Catholics do not really give all the 
inward submission they seem to give, or that they 
would be glad to emancipate themselves from it. 

They assume, often quite innocently, that their 
Catholic intimates do really regard all the matters of 
daily life from their own standpoint ; and talk accord- 



260 ATMOSPHERE AND ANTIDOTE 

ingly. It may happen, and must often happen, that 
they who thus take their own non-Catholic, non- 
believing point of view for granted, are older, more 
experienced, perhaps cleverer, perhaps better-instructed, 
than the Catholics who listen to them. 

Every Catholic in England outside a monastery is 
subject to this kind of influence ; and in a country 
like England it must be so. It would not be possible, 
were it desirable, for Catholics to forswear non-Catholic 
society in every class of life, from the cradle to the 
grave. Catholics in England are bound to be in constant 
relation of business or pleasure with those who live in 
an atmosphere alien to the Catholic ideal. 

Books are an influential sort of companion, and if 
Catholics read chiefly Catholic books, such reading 
would, as far as it went, provide a certain corrective. 
But Catholics, we believe, are not so disposed. And 
there are immense numbers of Catholics, as there are 
of non-Catholics, who read few books of any sort. 
They are just the sort who read newspapers. 

And non-Catholic newspapers are like non-Catholic 
people; they exercise something of the same kind of 
inevitable influence ; and it is, as it must be, non- 
Catholic. It is not, as a rule, the role of secular news- 
papers to indulge in plain abuse of the Catholic Church ; 
religion is not, in any shape, their preoccupation. But 
they are written by men who do not believe in the 
Church, or greatly like her ; who are apt to suspect 
her, and are willing to despise her ; who regard her as 
an incubus on modern thought, and even on modern 
society, as a quaint and not unpicturesque relic of the 
Middle Ages, useful for occasional purple patches of 
copy, but tiresome too, wrong-headed, perverse, narrow, 
dictatorial, scheming, the enemy of modern man. 



ATMOSPHERE AND ANTIDOTE 261 

On the whole, they ignore her ; and a Catholic who 
should read nothing but secular papers might run 
some risk of ignoring her too, as an element in daily 
life. If he goes to Mass he will be reminded of her, 
no doubt, but only, as it were, in church, not in the 
street, nor at home, nor on his way to his work and 
from it. 

Of the Church in his own land he will hear very 
little indeed from his daily paper ; often, nothing at all 
for weeks together. But the Church is Catholic, and 
her life is not lived in England alone ; of her doings 
and her sufferings abroad he will learn still less, and 
that little is almost always falsely coloured. Odd and 
portentous would be the misconceptions of a Catholic 
as to the events of the last few years in Italy, France, 
Portugal, or Spain, as they concerned the Catholic 
Church, if his knowledge of them were derived from 
the secular press of England. And what other notion 
of them can he have if he will not, even once a week, 
turn to a Catholic paper and learn the truth ? 

It is not merely that non-Catholic papers give but a 
meagre presentment of foreign affairs as concerning 
the Church ; the presentment is not only stunted, it is 
unjust and misleading. Those who send over to the 
non-Catholic press in England their accounts of matters 
concerning the Church in foreign countries, such as 
Portugal, France, Spain, and Italy, neither desire to 
accord to such matters their due importance nor to 
permit English readers to arrive at a just view in 
reference to them. It is their aim to make what 
is really anti-Christian appear merely anti-clerical. 
Their axiom is that the Pope must be wrong, and in 
the cipher of that axiom every despatch concerning 
him and his Church is written. The English being 



262 ATMOSPHERE AND ANTIDOTE 

addicted to liberty, every struggle on the part of the 
Vatican and the Church to secure freedom of Christian 
conscience and worship in Portugal, or France, or Italy, 
or Spain, is represented as an onslaught on liberty; 
every attempt to ward off the fetters of militant 
atheism is made to look like a desperate effort to bind 
fast the shackles of intolerant bigotry. Into this pit of 
misconception Catholics who will not read Catholic 
newspapers fling themselves with deliberate indolence, 
or they sit on the brink, and have only themselves to 
thank if it crumbles and lets them in. 

In home affairs, too, the Catholic who will not read 
a Catholic paper, condemns himself to much inevitable 
ignorance in matters which concern his most vital 
interest. Semi-political affairs often involve such 
questions, and Catholic pulpits are not perpetually 
resounding, like Nonconformist pulpits, with even 
semi-political matters. Concerning the evils of Social- 
ism, concerning the obligation of securing at every 
cost, Catholic education for Catholic children, the 
Catholic who eschews Catholic newspapers must remain 
a good deal in the dark, and will probably acquire, 
what is so easily acquired, a fine equipment of ignor- 
ance ; especially as the Catholic who only hears Mass 
once a week, is often fond of choosing a Mass where 
there is no sermon. 

Again: Catholics in such a country as ours suffer 
from a certain religious isolation, and particularly in 
the case of those who do not live at home, who earn 
their living at a distance from their families, and live, 
perhaps, in lodgings, or board in some non-Catholic 
household. This sort of religious isolation is much 
corrected by the habitual reading of a Catholic news- 
paper, which brings before the memory and mind what 



ATMOSPHERE AND ANTIDOTE 263 

Catholics are caring about, what they are doing, what 
they may be suffering, what their special preoccupa- 
tions, needs, and objects of the moment, are. Such 
reading destroys indifference, and a kind of religious 
selfishness and narrowness. It creates Catholic 
sympathy and warms it, fosters devotion to Catholic 
causes, and deepens loyalty to the Church and her 
August Head. 






ON SITTING STILL 

THE present writer used to know a Cistercian monk 
who was extremely amusing. It is not implied that 
he diverted the monastery with funny gestures, but he 
had occasion to speak sometimes, and when he spoke 
it was his custom to be at once witty and sage almost 
the same thing in the undegenerate sense of these 
words, for a wit need not be precisely a cracker of 
jokes, and a sage was not originally a chartered bore. 

Occasionally this delightful monk was sent by his 
abbot to do duty in the chapel attached to a certain 
large country-house. Even there he kept his rule, so 
far as was possible ; but in such circumstances the rule 
of silence did not apply, and what he said was generally 
worth remembering. 

There was in that house a very devout person of 
whose goodness he had, I am sure, a great opinion ; all 
the same, he thought she dashed about too much 
always in pursuit of good works. 

"You should try and learn," he observed mildly, 
" the ABC of spirituality." 

"What is the ABC of spirituality?" she inquired 
meekly. 

" Sitting still." 

Long afterwards I knew an American lady who had 
never heard this advice of the Cistercian, but acted 
on it. 

" My rule," she explained, " is never to walk when I 

264 



ON SITTING STILL 265 

can ride, and never to ride if I can drive, and never to 
drive if I can sit still." - 

"And what," demanded her brother severely, "do 
you suppose your legs were given you for ? " 

" To balance myself with when I do sit still," she 
replied serenely. 

That, of course, is going very far. But it seems to 
me that the habit of sitting still is almost a lost art, 
and that the loss of it is a misfortune to society I do 
not mean to societies; they mostly imply running 
about. It is my impression that society is also losing 
the art of reading; and the two losses are not un- 
connected with each other. 

To read involves sitting still, and that is what people 
can less and less abide doing. Nobody is ever any- 
where now if he or she can possibly be anywhere else. 
Least of all can anybody abide stopping at home. 
Houses are more dressed up than they used to be, 
more luxurious, and more smart ; but that is to receive 
other people in them ; their owners have not the least 
idea of staying in them themselves. So that they 
become less and less homes. When people are At 
Home, it is in some hotel ; their homes, or flats, are 
not homes, but places whither they return to get clean 
linen, and leave behind the linen that is clean no longer. 
They are a sort of box-rooms, or left-luggage-omce ; 
that is all. 

Hard-worked husbands have to sleep in their own 
houses, on certain nights of the week; but only the 
very abject stay in them from Friday afternoon to 
Monday. This lovely custom has given us the lovely 
new word, " week-end." 

Week-end folk are sure to dislike reading; and 
printed matter suitable to those who do dislike it is 



266 ON SITTING STILL 

piled upon the railway book-stalls, Some of this 
stuff is called magazines, though only two real magazines 
survive for the general, i.e. non-Catholic, public. The 
week-ender in his railway carriage is embedded in 
printed matter, and one glance at it is enough to show 
you he is confirming himself in a rooted habit of dis- 
like of books. 

Of course, week-enders who are better off eschew 
trains, and are wafted somewhere else in motors or on 
motor-cycles ; and those who are worse off fly from the 
bosoms of their families on bicycles. But if they do 
not take with them a cargo of printed (and illustrated) 
matter of the kind that no one can bear to read who 
can bear also to read real books, they are merely in 
the position of those who are saved from eating amiss 
by eating nothing at all. 

A public which simply cannot sit still is precisely 
the public for which the sort of novels now written are 
good enough. The less they resemble literature, the 
more likely are they to find readers. For the novelist 
whose aim is popularity (and profit) has to appeal not 
to the love of literature, but to a wide distaste for it. 

Publishers are quite aware of this, and take their 
measures accordingly. Their business is not literature, 
but to sell things made up as books to the illiterate. 
No doubt they would say, and many of them would 
say quite sincerely, " If a Sir Walter Scott were to 
' come along/ or a Jane Austen, we should be only too 
pleased to publish them." It is not pretended that we 
have among us unpublished Scotts or Austens ; but if 
we had, and if they found their publishers, I, for one, 
do not believe that they would leap into fame and 
popularity. Can anyone believe that Miss Austen, Miss 
Edgeworth, and Miss Burney would achieve now the 



ON SITTING STILL 267 

quick recognition that was theirs when they began to 
give their works to the world ? 

It is not only that the ground is choked up with 
rubbish, but that the public has vitiated its taste. 

About everything classic there is a certain serenity ; 
whether it be in the realms of art painting, or sculp- 
ture, or architecture or in those of music and of 
letters. This serenity is intolerable to a people that can- 
not abide to sit still. Post-Impressionists and Futurists 
have arrived at the only possible moment for them ; 
had they endeavoured to turn up in the ages of the 
great masters we know well what would have happened 
to them. Is serenity much more apparent in the works 
of modern sculptors ? They durst not attempt it, lest 
they should be dull. 

There are some living novelists who would seem to 
have powers that are not slight, and who nevertheless 
" sell." But not because they make the real best of 
those powers ; rather because they secure themselves a 
public by enshrining in each new work some new phase 
of evanescent, contemporary idiosyncrasy. Thus they 
sell largely for the moment ; but it will be seen that 
they will not be read when the fads and follies of their 
moment shall have fallen stale. They can never be 
classical, because they appeal to what is temporary, and 
will soon be old-fashioned. 

My old Cistercian friend thought true spirituality 
incompatible with an incapacity to sit still, because in 
the most active spirituality there must be a contem- 
plative element, else benevolence will always be no 
more than a fussy philanthropy, and will never have 
the inward quality of Christian charity. 

I am quite sure that the love of books and the hatred 
of sitting still cannot exist together, and I suspect that 



268 ON SITTING STILL 

my wise Cistercian would say that, in a people that has 
learned to read at all, the reading of books that are 
real books is a part of spiritual life. And I do not 
believe he would count among good books only those 
that treat expressly of religion. 



DIABOLICAL TREES 

OF Libraries there are several sorts : what we may call 
Great Libraries, as that of the Vatican, the Bodleian at 
Oxford, and that of the British Museum, for instances ; 
Public Libraries, of the municipal sort ; the libraries of 
private houses, some of which might also well be called 
Great Libraries, as Lord Derby's at Knowsley, to mention 
only one ; and Lending Libraries. 

With these last we may concern ourselves first. 

" In my way hither, Mrs. Malaprop," said Sir Anthony 
Absolute, "I observed your niece's maid coming forth 
from a circulating library ! She had a book in each 
hand they were half-bound volumes with marble 
covers ! From that moment I guessed how full of duty 
I should see her mistress." 

" Those are vile places, indeed ! " said the lady. 

" Madam, a circulating library in a town is an ever- 
green tree of diabolical knowledge ! It blossoms through 
the year ! And depend on it, Mrs. Malaprop, that they 
who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the 
fruit at last." 

" Fy, fy, Sir Anthony ! You surely speak laconically." 

A hundred and thirty-seven years have gone by since 
Sir Anthony Absolute delivered this weighty judgment, 
and his "evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge" is 
flourishing still. Some of its leaves deserve all his 
condemnation, not "laconically," but in sober and 



269 



270 DIABOLICAL TREES 

righteous earnest. For, in the region of fiction alone, 
there is every year a large output of what is really bad 
and unwholesome, and much more that is worthless : 
and all of it finds its way to the shelves of the lending 
libraries. Many take out these books because they like 
them ; but many more take them partly out of ignor- 
ance of the nature of their contents, and partly because 
they do not know what else to take. The books are on 
the "new" shelf; they look clean (which in fact they 
often are not) ; and a library subscriber has no idea of 
going off empty-handed. She wants something for her 
money; and she wants something to read: and not 
one library subscriber out of a hundred ever dreams 
of buying books, so there is little, or even nothing, 
at home to read. Thus, utterly worthless books, or 
absolutely bad books, find readers not only among those 
whose taste is perversely bad, but among those who 
have scarcely any taste, good or bad, to start with, but 
who end by acquiring a debauched taste, largely out of 
idleness or hurry. 

Lydia Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice, did Hot think 
her new bonnet very pretty, but thought she might as 
well buy it as not, and vowed there were two or three 
much uglier in the shop. 

So a good many modern Lydias might candidly con- 
fess that the new book they had borrowed was not very 
pretty, but they thought they might as well borrow it 
as not, and assure us with perfect truth that there were 
two or three much uglier in the shop. 

With all their faults, and they are not few, Lending 
Libraries are here; and they have come, like some 
cheap watches across the Atlantic, to stop. Nor, though 
we may be keenly alive to their abuse, can we deplore 
their existence. All who love reading themselves want 



DIABOLICAL TREES 271 

others to read, and they are quite aware that it is out of 
libraries that most people do read. 

Now it seems to me that Catholics might easily do 
a very good and practical work in this matter. They 
also subscribe to libraries, and each of them could 
effectually influence the quality of the books on the 
shelves of his or her local library. One way, which may 
appear the most obvious, would be by exclusion. I 
mean by plainly protesting against certain books : and 
in many cases this might really be done with more 
effect than would be believed by those who have never 
tried. All the same, it is not on that obvious-seeming 
method that special insistence is laid here. The effect 
would largely depend on the librarian's opinion of the 
objector: where he happened to think the objector 
altogether prudish, narrow-minded, or of little authority 
in bookish matters, he would not attach great weight 
to objections, and he might have this opinion of the 
objector quite fairly, as he might have it quite unfairly. 
But librarians are much in the habit of quoting local 
opinions on books ; and, if you return a book, or refuse 
it, with a strong but well-advised condemnation of book 
or author, the chances are you will be quoted if the 
librarian believes you know what you are talking about. 

"Mr. Blank says it's rubblish. Mrs. Dash simply 
couldn't get through it. Miss Asterisks found it a 
sleeping-draught. Lady Smith couldn't stand the 
vulgarity. Sir John won't have any of her books he 
hates middle-class high-life." All these dicta one hears, 
especially the last two, for in these democratic days 
we all have titles, and none of us are middle-class. To 
be thought middle-class is what no courage can face. 

I knew a spiritual director once who was tormented 
by a lady's-maid with scruples. In vain he essayed 



272 DIABOLICAL TREES 

every remedy suggested by a wide and deep acquaint- 
ance with the best mystical writers. At last, in 
desperation, he hinted that scruples were middle-class, 
and the lady's-maid suffered no more. Nor did he. 

If it is not with works of fiction that the objection 
has to do, but with such works of pseudo-science as are 
to be seen on lending-library shelves, the expression of 
adverse opinion should be differently phrased. Such 
books, as the librarians themselves confess, like too 
attractive step-daughters of too youthful step-mothers, 
" are not much taken out." 

But some subscriber with a pretty taste in Agnos- 
ticism orders them; and some other subscribers, not 
averse from being esteemed intellectual, handle them 
dubiously, with a temporarily mortified longing for Miss 
Corelli ; and hesitate. 

" Ah ! " observes the Librarian, " The Origin of Life, 
by Professor Thickness. Yes. A New book? Oh, 
yes ! But quite Mid- Victorian, I understand." Poor 
Professor Thickness ! Upside down, in the Inferno of 
Mid-Victorianism, he goes back to the shelf, the ill-lit 
shelf in the draughty corner away from the stove, where 
the Memoirs of General Sir T. Duffin, K.C.B., and the 
Recollections of a Consul at Five Ports, bide a while till, 
like Lady Clara Vere de Vere, they return to town. 
And the terrified intellectualist turns with relief to 
" Hall Caine's Last " : with the feelings of a chicken 
aware of having providentially been saved from an 
attack of the gapes. 

But they are there, look you : the Memoirs of nothing 
memorable, the Recollections of nobody in particular, 
and the rest of them: not cheap books either. They 
are there because someone ordered them; and you 
yourself might have ordered much better books. Apart 



DIABOLICAL TREES 273 

from fiction altogether there are a great number of 
really excellent Catholic books, history, biography, and 
the like, which would be there if you ordered them, 
and did it as though you meant it. If they were there 
they would be read by many who are not Catholics, and 
who would thus learn a great deal" about the Church. 
In this matter Catholics are somewhat backward: 
perhaps out of a sort of shyness and modesty. But 
it is really false modesty. Catholic library-subscribers 
have as good a right to confront other subscribers with 
Catholic books upon their library shelves, as non- 
Catholic subscribers or anti-Catholic subscribers have 
to confront Catholics there with non-Catholic or anti- 
Catholic books. 



FOOTNOTES 

THE late Bishop Paterson, of Emmaus and Chelsea, 
used to say that there is a sort of pulpit eloquence that 
keeps you with one leg in the air. " When we behold 
the trees in spring dress themselves anew in all their 
green bravery : when we hear the lark pour down her 
song from heaven's gate, or near it ; when we smell 
the fragrance of a million blossoms borne on the 
summer breezes from a thousand fields ; and when, my 
brethren, the harvest gilds the upland. But . . ." 

It seems to me that these papers of mine are in a 
similar predicament. I lift the leg of introduction, 
and, before I can set it down again on my conclusion, 
my allotted space is full, and, without room for more 
than a nod of parting, I must be gone. It is like a 
game of chess with an elaborate opening, and then not 
so much checkmate as a hasty pushing of all my pieces 
back into their box. 

They seem, these papers, a series of parentheses, each 
longer than the statement that embraces it. This is 
hard on a writer who abhors haste, and loves elbow- 
room : but it cannot be helped, and he can but hope 
that whoever reads him will charitably understand that 
he is himself as much disconcerted as anyone could 
be by this sort of interjectional literary gasping, or 
hiccough. Above all things, he trusts that no one 
will take this gulping method as suggesting a model : 
let it serve merely as a warning. 

274 



FOOTNOTES 275 

In their proper place, parentheses are useful creatures, 
and, at their worst, they are less intolerable than foot- 
notes. Footnotes are the curse of history. They are 
pestilent excrescences on erudition, and stumbling- 
blocks in the path of readers who are not erudite, and 
want to get on. 

Everybody does not read history to cram for an 
examination; one of the consolations of declining life 
is that examinations are done with, except the great 
and final one which is not competitive; and we are 
at liberty to read history for pleasure, just as we read 
comic papers lest our ebullient spirits should carry us 
too far in liveliness. 

But the pleasure a good history-book should yield 
us is often spoiled by these footnotes. They catch us 
by the heels and forbid our pushing on. A novelist 
who should so interrupt his readers would never be 
read, and there is no particular reason why history 
should weight itself thus, as if in dread of being too 
readable and too light. Even Thackeray would not 
have dared to plunge his readers to the bottom of his 
page that they might learn his reasons for believing 
Amelia to have been Mr. Sedley's only daughter, or 
Sir Pitt Crawley to have been a baronet. Dickens 
assures us that Mr. Weller's knowledge of London was 
extensive and peculiar; he does not drag us down 
into small-print proof of it, or enumerate, in a note 
that undermines two following pages, all the parts of 
the metropolis familiarly known to that engaging 
young man. 

Are historians afraid of being easier reading than 
Vanity Fair or Pickwick ? Do they do it to teach us 
our place ? " I'll learn you to be a toad ! " said the 
boy. "We'll learn you to think yourselves capable of 



276 FOOTNOTES 

enjoying the ripe fruit of our labours ! " mutter the 
historians, and, flinging their tentacles about our necks, 
they suck us down, like so many octopuses, into chill 
mirk of unfathomable notes of an outrageous specific 
density. 

Of course, you may skip the notes altogether ; and it 
will be well for you if you are able. You will learn 
much more quickly; just as you will learn French 
or Italian much more quickly if you lock up your 
dictionary somewhere, and lose the key, and read on 
pleasantly without one. 

But there are people who can no more skip in any 
book they want to read than they can read a problem- 
novel. I am one. I have often tried to ignore the 
fifty lines of austere print at the foot of a page, and 
read only the blander, mellower three lines of big type 
at the top ; it is no good. Ten pages further on those 
unread lines still vex, and no resolution can stand 
against the temptation to turn back. Till the notes 
have been read the text is read in an absent-minded 
haze. But I hate the man who wrote them. 

Were they after-thoughts ? Are they parentheses ? 
In either case they are a plague and nuisance where 
they are. 

If they are second thoughts, the author should not 
have been in such a hurry at first. If they are 
parentheses, he should have English enough to be able 
to manoeuvre a parenthesis without losing his way in 
his sentence. 

Perhaps they are sometimes a sort of false conscience : 
the author is afraid of being believed too implicitly, 
or so determined to be believed that he thrusts you 
down into his authorities, and dances on you. That 
is all very well for him, but rather dull for you. 



FOOTNOTES 277 

As the poet sang in the village epitaph : 

" Poor Martha Anne is gone to rest, 
Her place is now on Abram's breast. 
Glory and grace for Martha Anne ; 
It's hardish tho', on Abraham." 

There should be more give and take between author 
and reader, and more confidence. If I could not believe 
my author without a crack on the head with a footnote, 
six hundred footnotes would not make me more trust- 
ful. It might be edited with sixteen hundred that 
would totally demolish the original six. 

An author is at liberty to give all his authorities in 
an introduction or an appendix. It is not skipping not 
to read them. If he and his authorities make two tales 
of it, that is for the critic to nose out how else are 
they to live, poor things ? It is hardly fair on them to 
snatch the bread out of their mouths as you go on. 
Besides, there is no law that compels the erudite author 
to tell all he knows in his footnotes. Sometimes, like 
the play Queen in Hamlet, they have the air of pro- 
testing too much. And sometimes they do not prove 
quite enough; such a king, says our historian, was a 
glutton : very well, it is a failing not confined to royal 
personages. It does not even, of itself, prove that he 
really was a king he might have been an alderman. 
But in a note our historian brings chapter and verse. 

Such a demagogue, we are told, was the mirror of 
courtesy. The proof lies far below in Note 31 : at table 
the great man would say " Please " when he asked his 
neighbour to pass the salt. 

Historians should skim us along without insisting on 
our seeing how thin their ice is. 



"THIS PUBLIC CONSCIENCE" 

THE three words, as above, inverted commas and all, 
running across the whole front page of Public Opinion, 
gave, with certain following words, text for the leading 
article in that paper on February 9th, 1912. The 
following words were : " The Real English Conquest " 
in the same huge type as the first three ; and then, 
in a bold, black, but smaller type: "The State has 
largely taken the place of the Church as the organ 
of the collective conscience of the community." 

The inverted commas were to indicate quotation 
quotation from Professor A. F. Pollard, Professor of 
English History in the University of London, "one," 
says Public Opinion, " of the most brilliant of our 
historians." Whether the big letters and black type 
were intended to delight the public, or to alarm it, or 
merely as a delicate tribute to Professor A. F. Pollard's 
brilliance as a historian, we are left free to decide for 
ourselves. 

It is not my ambition to controvert the judgment 
quoted, but merely to draw attention to it. In the 
first instance, the dictum is levelled at the Church of 
England ; and perhaps the Church of England has 
already pleaded or denied the soft impeachment. 
That is not our business. But the dictum is not meant 
for the Church of England only. Public Opinion 
quotes as follows : 



278 



279 



State replaces the Church 



" In a final chapter on English Democracy Professor 
Pollard, pointing out the growth in number of the 
departments of State, says that 'they are merely 
machinery provided to give effect to public opinion, 
which determines the use to which it shall be put. 
But its very provision indicates that England expects 
the State to-day to do more and more extensive duty 
for the individual.' 

" For one thing, the State has largely taken the place 
of the Church as the organ of the collective conscience 
of the community. It can hardly be said that the 
Anglican Church has an articulate conscience apart 
from questions of canon law and ecclesiastical property ; 
and other Churches are, as bodies, no better provided 
with creeds of social morality." 

The Eighth Commandment 

" The Eighth Commandment is never applied to such 
genteel delinquencies as making a false return of income, 
or defrauding a railway company or the Customs ; but 
is reserved for the grosser offences which no member 
of the congregation is likely to have committed; and 
it is left to the State to provide by warning and pen- 
alty against neglect of one's duty to one's neighbour 
when one's neighbour is not one individual but the 
sum of all." 

Professor A. F. Pollard, it is seen, does not mince 
matters with the Church of England. It can hardly be 
said, according to him, to have an articulate conscience 
" apart from questions of canon law and ecclesiastical 
property." Canon law, we never knew before to be the 
strong point of the Established Religion. Ecclesiastical 
property is undoubtedly one of its solid assets. 



280 "THIS PUBLIC CONSCIENCE" 

But Professor A. F. Pollard has no prejudice ; and he 
hastens to aver that other Churches are, as bodies, 
no better provided with creeds of social morality. 
Whether it is "as bodies" that some of them are 
provided with the Ten Commandments we are not told. 
Of one of the Ten Commandments he proceeds to 
speak in terms not altogether unflattering to the 
morality of people who still go to church. It appears 
that no member of the congregation is likely to have 
committed grosser offences against honesty than false 
returns of income, defrauding railway companies, or 
the Customs. We hope that it is so; if it be so, 
"members of the congregation" had better, it would 
seem, go on going to church, that they may still 
be restrained from open or secret stealing, helping 
themselves out of their masters' tills, falsifying ac- 
counts, floating bogus companies, and so following. A 
good many species of fraud exist ; and it is comforting 
to learn that those who go to Church do not indulge 
in them. Rigidly honest to "one's individual neigh- 
bour," they may even come in time to apply the 
principles they have learned so well as "members of 
the congregation" in the case of "one's neighbour 
when one's neighbour is not one individual but the 
sum of all." 

It appears certain from the newspapers that "grosser 
offences" than false returns of income, &c., are com- 
mitted ; if Professor A. F. Pollard is right in his 
suggestion that they are not committed by " members 
of the congregation," so much the better for the congre- 
gations. It might even seem plausible to suggest 
that some benefit to general morality might accrue if 
everybody went to church. Whether " other Churches," 
say our own, are " no better provided with creeds of 



"THIS PUBLIC CONSCIENCE" 281 

social morality" is a question the answer to which 
partly depends on terms, creeds, for instance. So far 
as I know, it is dogma which the Church formulates by 
means of creeds ; her formulation of ethics summing 
itself up briefly in Commandments or Precepts, and 
expressed at length and large in her system of Moral 
Theology. That she has two separate systems of 
Moral Theology, one for Personal Morality, one for 
" Social Morality," I am not prepared to maintain. It 
would seem probable that she finds herself unable to 
make the distinction. For society has no existence 
except as consisting of individuals, and it is with each 
individual who will listen to her that she deals in 
reference to his duty towards God, towards his neigh- 
bour, and towards himself. In her mind, as I venture 
to read it, this is the only effectual method of per- 
fecting society, by impelling towards perfection every 
human being. You may make a bucket of water 
wholesome for drinking, but only by the purification of 
every drop in it. There may be a true and wholesome 
Public Conscience, but not unless the men and women 
who make up the public have wholesome and true 
consciences. All conscience implies a recognition of 
obligation, and all obligation implies a sense of law ; no 
sense of law can long survive belief in the existence of 
the law-giver ; while it does survive such belief it is not 
true conscience, but a fortunate, though illogical, force 
of convention. The Church's business, therefore, is 
to preserve belief, in each member of society, of the 
existence of the law-giver a Law-giver, competent and 
supreme, the force of Whose law will appear to every 
sort of man binding on himself, at cost of convenience, 
personal desire, or apparent profit. This is her Creed of 
Social Morality. 



282 "THIS PUBLIC CONSCIENCE" 

It may not appeal to Professor A. F. Pollard, or it 
may ; we cannot tell. It may appear to have nothing 
to do with the State ; it has everything to do with 
those of whom the State consists. If the State should 
insist on being herself the sole law-giver, then the 
State must rely on herself for the enforcement of her 
laws, and not complain of the Church if the human 
beings who compose the State evade inconvenient 
laws when they see their way to it. These human 
beings may be naughty children towards the Church, 
too, but their naughtiness towards the State must be 
brought home to them by such arguments as the State 
is mistress of. The State must not cry out : " Slap me 
these naughty children that don't belong to you." 
Slapping other people's children is indiscreet and 
interfering. It may cause the slapped to make faces at 
the slapper, but rarely generates obedient affection for 
the parent who requisitions the discipline. When the 
Church slaps her own naughty ones, the State is apt 
to call out: "Poor dears! What harshness! A 
scandalous old persecuting mother ! " 

After all this, let us say that there seems to be a 
good deal of force in Professor A. F. Pollard's announce- 
ment that " the State has largely taken the place of the 
Church as the organ of the collective conscience of the 
community." 

" But men may construe things after their fashion." 
" We are in God's hands, brother." 

And, remembering, we may say more of this. 



STATE AND CONSCIENCE 

THE State, according to Professor A. F. Pollard, has 
largely taken the place of the Church as the organ of 
the collective conscience of the community. If this be 
so it is portentous enough : for the State's power is 
chiefly penal. She can make a law, and having made 
it, must punish those who break it ; she cannot make 
them lovers of the law. Of course, she may profess 
her desire to educate the people up to admiration of 
her own particular laws, and even to love of law in 
general. But the manner in which modern states are 
apt to set about this effort is not likely to produce the 
only recognition of the real binding force of law that 
can stand against the strain of self-interest. It would 
be a pious work, but they are not prone to set piously 
about it. They talk at large about education; but 
their first principle in education is the elimination of 
God. In some countries the elimination is positive ; 
and the non-existence of God is taught without dis- 
guise. In others, the elimination is negative; the 
subject must not be treated at all. The result in both 
cases is the same, whether it is intended to be the same 
or no. The origin, source, and sanction of all funda- 
mental, eternal law is ruled out. 

It may be the case that concurrently with such 
process another process is attempted the inculcation 
of morality, and respect for the law, for their own sake. 
No such attempt is made in some instances. Where 



284 STATE AND CONSCIENCE 

it is made, it fails, and will fail more and more com- 
pletely the further back the old teaching of God as the 
Lawgiver recedes into oblivion. 

It is not asserted that all unbelievers are flagrantly 
immoral, any more than it can be asserted that all 
believers have always been faithful to the moral 
standard set them by belief in God. Some men are 
prone to a decorum that immorality must shock. But 
the majority of men will never be long held captive by 
anything so artificial as decorum ; by the time they 
have ceased to care what they think of themselves, 
they cease to care what other people think of them 
and there is nothing higher than self-respect, and the 
respect of Morality is a restraint : a restraint so con- 
trary to self-will and self-indulgence that even the love 
and fear of God has not always been sufficient to enforce 
it throughout life on those who really have believed in 
God. Such a restraint will not long be suffered when 
no belief in God survives. Immorality of any sort can, 
to such as have no faith in God, only be proved to be 
obnoxious as injurious to self or to one's neighbour, 
and the selfish do not care about their neighbour, nor 
will they be forced to pursue their own best good at 
the cost of present loss in profit and pleasure ; second- 
best good is often good enough for them. 

Teach those who are learning that God is not, but 
that Morality must be, and they will ask themselves, 
Why ? For a time they will protest in silence, or 
seem to acquiesce silently ; lest perchance some finger 
of scorn may point their way ; nevertheless, they bide 
their time, and presently they outgrow the pupil's dis- 
like of scorn. Morality, they perceive, is merely a 
convention, or else a sacrifice of self to altruistic 
theories ; and convention is not outraged by decorously 



STATE AND CONSCIENCE 285 

veiled offence ; whereas altruism, like reciprocity, they 
feel, should not be all on one side ; until everybody else 
sacrifices his own profit or pleasure to them, why must 
they be monopolists of self-sacrifice ? As for the pretty 
plea that in obedience to irksome ethical restraints they 
are securing their own superiority, they will mostly 
be content with something short of such invidious 
eminence ; why should they set themselves above their 
neighbours ? Of course the reasonably intelligent 
learner, taught to disbelieve in God, whether by posi- 
tive statement that there is no such Being, or by the 
analogous process of total absence of any statement on 
the subject, may assimilate the teaching that the State 
herself is the guardian of morality. What then ? Why, 
the State's guardianship must be evaded when it leads 
to inconveniences as obvious as those that formerly 
followed on belief in the Existence of an Omniscient 
Law-giver, viz. the sacrifice of personal profit or 
pleasure. Fortunately, they remember, the State is not 
omniscient ; and therefore evasion is easier. Detection, 
no doubt, will lead to punishment; but then, how 
much that is immoral the State makes no pretence of 
punishing, even when detection has supervened ? 

As for rewards, in what State are they accorded to 
eminent morality ? Stupidity, if blatant enough, may 
earn its meed ; shallow, noisy parts are not likely to 
languish in the shade; even real genius and capacity 
may extract a grudging recognition. But where is 
mere goodness though it be but the goodness of stoic 
morality rewarded by power and place ? Your pupil 
of unbelief knows better than that. The rigid equity 
without God that he has heard belauded, he gathers by 
observation, is only a handicap. Does his altruistic 
virtue help the successful agitator? Not unless his 



286 STATE AND CONSCIENCE 

altruism takes the inverted form. " The less there is of 
mine, the more there is of yours," a formula applied 
not to what he has himself, but to what some third 
party may monstrously possess. 

Are Ministers or party-leaders selected anywhere for 
their consistent practice of even such morality as we 
are told may exist when the existence of God has been 
disproved or forgotten? No Council-School teachers 
have the impudence to teach that, and, if they taught 
it, Council-School scholars would not swallow it, though 
hard and indigestible are the things they are made 
to swallow every day, till their intellectual stomachs 
are at breaking-point with flatulent crudities and 
obduracies. 

Where the State has openly avowed itself director 
of the public conscience, and ousted, or tried to oust, 
the Church from her function of teacher and guardian 
of the consciences of men, the results have been pre- 
cisely what might have been expected : morality and 
justice have not lingered long, but have followed 
religion into hiding or exile. 

Believing, therefore, that religion and morality are 
inseparable, and that as a moral educator no State, 
complacently assuming the Church's office and function, 
has achieved or ever will achieve success, we cannot 
hear with equanimity the dictum that the State has 
largely taken the place of the Church as the organ of 
the collective conscience of the community. What- 
ever foundation of fact may lie under the statement 
is ground for serious apprehension and alert watch- 
fulness. 



EMPIRE DAY 

WHEN M. Comte invented the positivist religion he 
enriched it, not only with a Catechism but with a 
Calendar, celebrating on every day of the year the 
name of some great person or of some group of persons, 
who, in his opinion, had been of use to humanity. 
He also invented a set of sacraments for instance, 
that of Retirement, to be administered, forcibly if 
necessary, on attaining the age of sixty. 

When England made her official religion national, 
in place of remaining a part of the Church that is 
Catholic, she provided herself with a new Catechism, 
but abstained from the invention of a Calendar. In 
process of time, however, the shrunken remnant of 
the old one, prefixed to the Book of Common Prayer, 
was enriched by three special Commemorations that 
of King Charles the Martyr on January 30, that of the 
Restoration of King Charles II on May 29 (which was 
also Royal Oak Day), and that of Gunpowder Plot 
on November 5. These three Commemorations, after 
long holding their place in the Calendar, were removed 
from it by Act of Parliament in 1859. But Comte was 
right in believing that people have a liking for days of 
Commemoration, and, when they cease to commemorate 
Saints, they commemorate something else. In Scotland, 
where they will have no Saints' Days, nor even feasts 
like Christmas, they celebrate New Year's Day with 
national ardour. In America there is the great feast 



287 



288 EMPIRE DAY 

of the Declaration of Independence. Even official 
France celebrates July 14. 

And now in England there is a new Feast : Empire 
Day. 

I am a very loyal person, and I love my country. 
Her greatness I earnestly pray may be maintained ; 
that her sons may grow up in unselfish love for her, 
and in unselfish patriotism, I pray also. That Empire 
Day and its celebrations may foster true patriotism we 
must all hope. There is no reason why they should not. 

Nevertheless, there is something quaint about it all ; 
something perhaps a little pathetic. St. George and 
Merry England was the old thing, but St. George is 
not greatly remembered now. Perhaps because he was 
a saint. " Saints," as a picture-dealer once assured me, 
" are at present down." Nor is England exactly merry. 
The loss of faith does not tend to cheerfulness in in- 
dividuals, and never will tend that way in nations. 

In schools, I understand, there is a flag-ceremony : 
how to call it I do not quite know. But it appears to 
be a sort of veneration of the Union Flag a pretty 
ritual, and intended to promote the patriotic idea ; not, 
perhaps, precisely the Imperial idea, or the symbol 
would be that of the Emperor, as it was in Imperial 
Rome. The veneration of the Imperial symbols in the 
Roman world was frankly pagan, and connected with 
the subsequent deification of the Emperors themselves ; 
the tendency of modern Empires is not at all in the 
direction of any such deification. Nevertheless, there 
seems to be something semi-pagan in this cultus of a 
flag, especially when one notes that it is carried out in 
places where no higher cultus is encouraged. 

I wonder if it strikes anyone what these children are 
venerating the Cross of St. George and England, 



EMPIRE DAY 289 

St. Andrew's Cross of Scotland, St. Patrick's Cross of 
Ireland. Perhaps it is because the three together lose 
something of their likeness to the Cross that no one 
objects to the ritual. For three conjoined Crosses make 
rather a Star : the star of Great Britain's ascendancy, 
the star of the seas of which England is the mistress. 
But Catholics wot of another star of the seas, and to 
her also we may turn, that her ancient dowry be not 
forgotten, and that the merry day may come back 
when it shall be her dowry once again. 

Empire Day suggests loyalty, not only to the Flag, 
but to the figure-head of the Ship of State : and that 
figure is the Sovereign's, by whom more than by any- 
thing else the whole great Empire is really bound 
together. For the plain truth is that the only point 
of absolute union in that vast Empire is the possession 
of a single Sovereign at its head. It is not true to say 
that there is the link of common speech, for English 
is not the language of scores of millions of our fellow- 
subjects, and it is the language of scores of millions who 
are not our fellow-subjects. Cabinets and Governments 
may be all-powerful where they hold their sway; but 
none of them hold sway throughout the Empire. The 
link which binds all Canada, all India, all the islands 
of the South and of the West, the Commonwealth of 
Australia and South Africa, to the British Empire is 
not the link of any law, nor that of common blood and 
common speech, but that of the possession of one 
Sovereign. Vivat Rex. 

That God may save and strengthen him, guide and 
protect him, must be the prayer of Empire Day : that 
his subjects may be leal and loving, and those who act 
for him be wise and loyal. 

To a Catholic there must seem something, as we 

T 



290 EMPIRE DAY 

have said, pathetic in any commemoration that reminds 
us how the old commemorations have faded out of 
national veneration, and old bonds of union have 
ceased to bind. For St. George's Merry England was 
part of Christendom, a province in the Church's fair 
realm, and now there is no Christendom, but only 
Europe. St. George's Merry England was united not 
only in one loyalty to one king, but in one faith, and 
one deference to the head of the faith. 

How much is gone ! How much is lost ! That 
England and Ireland, Scotland and Wales may once 
again be one in faith and hope we are strongly 
reminded to pray by to-day's celebration: the crosses 
conjoined into a star our fellow-subjects are willing to 
venerate already as symbol of national unity. May a 
union more eternal yet bind us and them at last. 
May they give again the old allegiance to the cross for 
which Patrick lived, and George died, and on which 
Andrew learned the last chapter in the lesson of like- 
ness to his master. 

Meanwhile, let us cling fast to the link of union with 
our fellow-subjects that is left loyal veneration for the 
august head of the Empire. 



DUTY AND DISCIPLINE 

ONE of the obvious advantages of having your name 
hi some directory is that it enables you the more 
readily to receive appeals for contribution to charities 
and to hopes. It also leads to invitations to join in 
Movements. 

The present writer quite recently received one to join 
the Duty and Discipline Movement. In the simplicity 
of his heart he had taken it for granted that in joining 
the Catholic Church he had already become a member 
of a rather widely-diffused organisation, one of whose 
objects is the inculcation of Duty and Discipline. 
And, even after reading the book of essays which 
accompanied the explanatory pamphlet on Duty and 
Discipline, he still suspects that the Catholic Church is 
the best organisation for that purpose. 

The essays are by all sorts of people : some of whom 
are very distinguished, and all of whom are evidently 
agreed that there is a " lack of adequate moral training 
and discipline, the effects of which are apparent hi 
these days amongst many British children, in rich as 
well as in poor homes, and which constitutes, in the 
opinion of many, a serious danger to society and to the 
permanent security of the Nation and of the Empire." 
In that opinion we entirely concur ; as we concur also 
in the belief that the organisers of the Duty and Dis- 
cipline Movement do not imagine or exaggerate the 
evil of which they complain. 

291 



DUTY AND DISCIPLINE 

The promoters of the Movement decline, we are told, 
to recommend any special methods by which the 
objects they have at heart may be attained. The 
Movement deals with principles, not with methods ; 
they consider that one of its aims is to discover the 
means by which juvenile indiscipline may most 
effectively be combated in the home and in the school, 
and that a right decision can only be arrived at by the 
united practical experience of a large number of men 
and women working earnestly and independently in 
their homes (and elsewhere) with this object in view. 
They feel that the decisions as regards the best methods 
of dealing with juvenile indiscipline must be left to the 
intelligences and consciences of individuals, or groups 
of individuals. 

The establishment of Correspondence Circles is re- 
commended, by which means it is hoped that valu- 
able interchange of ideas, comparison of experiences, 
and observation of methods may help to achieve the 
above object. 

The idea of these Circles is to enable young parents 
who desire, in the training of their children, to carry 
out practically the ideas advocated in the Essays on 
Duty and Discipline, to exchange their views and 
experiences quite frankly, by means of letters ad- 
dressed to the Centre of the Circle, assured that 
their names and addresses, or those of the children 
discussed, can never be known to any but the Centre 
of their own Circle, who undertakes not to disclose 
to anyone the name and address of any member of 
the Circle. The members of a Circle never meet 
in Session. 

Each person who undertakes to form a Circle invites 
a few friends, having practical experience in the 



DUTY AND DISCIPLINE 293 

management and training of children, to write letters 
to him, or her, descriptive of the methods of training 
which they have found most useful and practical, or 
containing accounts of various phases, difficulties, or 
incidents in connection with the training and develop- 
ment of the children with whom they are concerned. 

The originator, or Centre of the Circle thus formed, 
has these letters, or extracts therefrom, copied or 
typed, without any name or address appearing on them, 
and sends these copies to each member of his or her 
Circle. 

Then follows a list of suggestions, as to the circula- 
tion of the essays among friends, societies, clubs, 
schools, libraries, &c. : as to public and drawing-room 
meetings, articles in magazines and reviews, and so on. 

All this is very well. And we can hope that the 
Correspondence Circles, the Essays, the Public and 
Drawing-Koom Meetings, &c., will have all the ex- 
cellent results that the promoters of the Movement 
desire. We can only repeat that we heartily agree with 
them in deploring the evil they wish to combat, that 
we have recognised its existence for some time, and 
that we are as fully convinced as themselves that its 
continuance and growth must be a menace to Society, 
the Nation, and the Empire. 

If English children, in rich as well as in poor homes, 
are increasingly lacking in duty and discipline, it is 
chiefly because their parents and elders are also in- 
creasingly lacking hi the spirit of duty and discipline. 
And that is because, in rich as well as in poor homes, 
the source of discipline and duty is becoming more and 
more weakened and rare. In other and more direct 
words, because there is less and less religion. 



294 DUTY AND DISCIPLINE 

We have not the slightest wish to speak disparagingly 
of excellent people who are trying to achieve an ex- 
cellent object. But we cannot help saying that, in spite 
of their disclaimer, they do propose methods, and that 
those methods must largely fail because they are laid 
on an inadequate base. 

It seems that they aim at producing their desired 
results by natural means, and only by supernatural 
means can they be attained. The effort to produce 
virtues by natural means can result mainly in produc- 
ing only pagan virtues ; and pagan virtues, even when 
produced, will never cure ills that, in fact, proceed from 
a growing paganism. 

We believe that the lack of Duty and Discipline is 
due to the increasing paganism of English society in 
poor as well as in rich homes. 

Of course, it may be urged that, even in pre-Christian 
Paganism, there were pagan virtues; and that what 
some of the promoters of the Duty and Discipline 
Movement lament is that in England to-day even the 
pagan virtues are falling obsolete. But the Paganism 
of Greece and Rome was pre-Christian, and English 
society is not. A society which had never heard of 
Christianity had to defend itself by maxims of natural 
law and reason only ; for without natural virtue it 
perceived that it must rot. But a world that has 
known Christianity, when it ceases to be Christian, 
will not readily submit to wear old shackles under new 
names, albeit the new names are but antique ones 
revived. And every virtue is a shackle to those who 
want to do what they like, no matter whether they be 
children or such as are of riper years. 

When Christianity appeared it brought with it a law 
that was only partly new ; but it propounded the law 



DUTY AND DISCIPLINE 295 

with a new and a higher sanction. In some respects 
the new law was more stringent, even more austere 
than the old ; for it demanded a perfection not previ- 
ously dreamed of, and it aimed not merely at the 
regulation of outer conduct, but at the subjugation of 
the will. It did not content itself with the obedience 
of act, but claimed to rule the thoughts whence acts 
are born. But, though more stringent and austere 
in some respects than the old law, it was more sweet, 
because it gave a sweeter motive for obedience, and a 
more compelling. It gave, first, the presentment of 
Christ, and then asked those who had seen to love. 
Obedience was only the proof and test of love, as it 
was also the inevitable result of love : for love tends not 
merely to please the beloved, but to union with Him. 
It no longer called for virtues because they were useful 
to the State : but because they were the bond of like- 
ness with the Lawgiver Himself and the bridge whereby 
fallen man might come near Him. 

The world cannot quickly forget this. If any portion 
of it loses the old faith which taught thus, it is not 
ready to go on keeping the law whose old sanctions 
have been withdrawn. If it ceases to believe in the 
fair promises of Christ, because it has ceased to be- 
lieve in Him, it will not submit to His law all the 
same. And a world which has once known Christi- 
anity is not like the world to which it was as yet 
unknown: it will persist in regarding virtue as part 
of the law of Christ and it has rebelled against Christ. 
Nobody goes on obeying a monarch dethroned and 
exiled. 

The distinction between Christian and Pagan virtues 
is too subtle for ordinary people, and all virtues are 
lumped together as part of the incubus of Christianity ; 



296 DUTY AND DISCIPLINE 

when Christianity is felt to be an incubus, those who 
so feel will no longer consent to bend their back to any 
part of the weight. For it is precisely to escape that 
weight that they have slipped the cords which have 
bound them to belief. 



ON DECADENCE 

IT would not seem, since Jerusalem stoned them, 
that the prophets were popular in their day ; and Jere- 
mias was probably as little popular as any of them. 
He did not prophesy smooth things. Like the son of 
Jemla, he prophesied evil, and Achab hated Micheas. 

But one needs not to be a prophet in order to read, 
in one's own fashion, such writing as may be seen 
upon the wall. If the reading be not flattering to the 
national amour propre of one's contemporaries, one 
must be content to be called a Jeremias, and to be 
unpopular in one's turn. England has a writing on 
her walls, on the walls which have been for centuries 
her national glory and her especial pride. They were 
wooden walls once ; hearts of oak were her ships, hearts 
of oak were her men ; they are of iron now. And upon 
them it is written that England can no longer afford 
to trust to them alone, under God, for the safety of her 
possessions in the Midland Sea. All the ships she can 
spare money for are wanted elsewhere ; for the defence 
of her Eastern highway, and of the fortresses that 
should guard it, she must trust to the uncovenanted 
benevolence of a friendly State, for with that State we 
have not even a treaty of alliance. 

Long ago Spain was England's rival on the seas, and 
her foe there. The Dutch took their turn. Then 
came France, and the naval victories which set the 
seal of supremacy on British fleets were won over hers. 

297 



298 ON DECADENCE 

The old secular hatred and rivalry has died down, 
and they who love peace thank Heaven that it is so. 
But we are going far beyond friendship, and assuming 
the meek role of protege. That should, at all events, 
mitigate our national vanity. Purse-proud England is 
to be no longer rich enough for a navy adequate to 
protect her sea-roads and gate-houses. Friendly France, 
oblivious of the past, must protect them for her. 

This is not a political paper, and the present writer 
abhors politics. Those who live by them will have 
much to say on this matter, and much to make of it, 
if they can. 

What we have to say has nothing at all to do with 
politics. We have nothing to say for or against those 
whose position in affairs enables them to make this 
plan. But we would like, all the same, to say some- 
thing about the national spirit which causes them to 
feel strong enough to devise so original a method of 
national defence. In the last essay we alluded to a 
movement that calls itself the Duty and Discipline 
Movement ; and we mentioned that they who receive 
its literature receive a collection of essays, on duty and 
discipline, written by certain distinguished people. Now, 
it seemed to us, in reading these essays, that what all 
these writers said, in most various ways, from most 
varied standpoints, amounted to this: a recognition 
of decadence. 

That decadence they read in certain domestic symp- 
toms, and we do not doubt the justness of their 
reading. The same decadence, as it seems to us, 
accounts for the apathy with which certain public 
questions are ignored. They are too public. They 
do not peremptorily appeal to those who are entirely 
preoccupied with private interests. Selfishness is a bad 



ON DECADENCE 299 

soil in which to grow Patriotism : for selfishness is 
myopic, and can see no farther than to the end of its 
own personal profit, and no higher than to the top of 
its own greediness. It is odd to see what close neigh- 
bours extreme animosity and extreme indifference can 
be; but the spectacle does not amount to a pheno- 
menon, for it requires no scientific explanation. The 
animosity is due to the same cause as the indifference 
a parochial-minded selfishness. Those who have some 
private gain to achieve can be full of bitterness till 
they have got it, and they will be full, also, of indiffer- 
ence to any other matter that does not strike them as 
nearly touching their own pockets, or their own case. 

If those who are charged with the public defence make 
a mistake in a grave instance, it must be a public misfor- 
tune ; but it is a much greater misfortune if the public 
itself be indifferent and unmoved. Ministers of every 
shade of political colour have made mistakes ; and it has 
been mostly they who have had, themselves, to pay for 
it. When they are suffered to proceed unchecked, then 
the nation pays ; and what it loses, it has deserved to 
lose. 

It is a human thing to fall into error, and not, of 
itself, a thing to scandalise us. I, for my part, am 
never scandalised, though they who rule my country 
for me (and some others) do many things that seem to 
me ill-calculated to serve her, or gain themselves credit. 
But healthy people are apt to discern really unhealthy 
symptoms in others, and it is not a sign of general 
sanity when a lunatic passes muster in general society 
as a sane man. 

It seems to us that the party opposed to those at 
present in power will make great capital out of the 
Ministerial decision to confide the defence of the 



300 ON DECADENCE 

Mediterranean another navy than our own. But it 
also seems to us that this was foreseen, and discounted ; 
because it was foreseen that there would be an in- 
different majority. 

Of the political sentiments of any majority we have 
nothing to say ; it is a political affair, and none of ours. 
Of national indifferentism we may speak, for it has 
nothing to do with politics, and concerns national 
character. To say the same thing over and over again 
is, no doubt, tedious ; but the thing may be true and 
vital for all that. We attribute the indifference to 
certain great questions of national import, which we 
cannot help believing to exist, to the thing called 
Decadence ; and that Decadence we believe to be 
rooted in a swift-growing cancer of selfishness ; and the 
cause of that selfishness we can explain by the growth 
of disbelief in God. And how is a nation to believe 
in God which, as a nation, is not taught to believe in 
Him? 



MESSRS. HOOLIGAN AND 
TURVEYDROP 

AMONG the lost arts may be counted that professed 
by the late Mr. Turveydrop, if it be not a contradiction 
in terms so to speak of an immortal personage. Of 
course we allude to Mr. Turveydrop senior; young 
Mr. Turveydrop's art of dancing is not by any means 
lost, though it seems to have lost its way. The elder 
Mr. Turveydrop modelled himself on the Prince Regent, 
and professed Deportment. 

It is not likely that anyone now admires the First 
Gentleman in Europe ; if he really were the first, we 
could but hope he would be the last also. Nor is the 
Act of Deportment as practised by Mr. Turveydrop to 
be regretted. It was false and insincere : more vulgar 
than any roughness. But that was specially the fault 
of the copyist, and of his choice of a model. Vain 
and vulgar, silly and selfish, old Turveydrop would 
have been insufferable no matter what he adopted as 
his stock-in-trade. As it was his whole stock-in-trade 
was Deportment, and on it he lived, idle and intoler- 
able. But Deportment was not invented by him, nor 
even by George IV. And it survived both of them. 
It began before George III went mad, and it lived on, 
in boarding-schools and middling society, till quite late 
in the reign of his granddaughter. It is as dead as 
Queen Anne now. 



301 



302 MESSRS. HOOLIGAN AND TURVEYDROP 

Becky Sharp knew how to jeer at it : but funny as 
her scorn of Miss Pinkerton was, it was only scorn, 
bitter and savage, and does not make her undoubted 
genius more admirable. Miss Pinkerton was, like Mr. 
Turveydrop, an old hypocrite, though of a different 
pattern: with her, Deportment was also a stock-in- 
trade; she sold it, as she sold the dates in English 
history, to the young ladies at her Academy on 
Chiswick Mall. And to her, and her sort, it did not 
occur that it stood for something better. 

To her and Mr. Turveydrop alike, it was merely part 
of the art of polite seeming. And, because she and he 
had thousands of fellow-artists, the idea of Deportment 
became identified with the general scheme of humbug 
and pretence, against which a revolution began some 
years ago. Revolutions are much less afraid of destroy- 
ing what is good or harmless than of not destroying 
what they perceive, half-perceive, or imagine, to be bad 
and noxious. 

But all along there had been a practice of Deport- 
ment that was not at all like that of Mr. Turveydrop 
and the elder Miss Pinkerton. The lady, at all events, 
was shrewd enough to be aware that there was a sort 
of demeanour that was apt to distinguish people of 
high station, birth, and breeding. It seemed a part of 
them. She was not herself highly born, nor highly 
bred, nor was her station lofty; many of her young 
ladies were in the same predicament : the only thing 
she could perceive to do was to ignore those little facts, 
and behave herself, and teach her pupils to behave, as 
though the facts were different. And facts hate to be 
ignored : they always revenge themselves. So that all 
the Pinkerton School of Deportment had the same 
unlucky quality of sham, pretence, and unreality. That 



MESSRS. HOOLIGAN AND TURVEYDROP 303 

was what doomed it. I am not in Nature's confidence, 
and I take it entirely on trust that she abhors a 
vacuum : if she does, it is because a vacuum has 
nothing in it. She can't bear things with nothing 
in them. That is why the Pinkerton Deportment 
perished ; it had nothing in it. Where it lived on, it 
had most reality: it expressed something that was 
there : something perhaps not of the first importance, 
but something not altogether unimportant, an idea 
that social intercourse was not exactly the jostling of a 
crowd, where elbowing, or shouldering, one's way was 
the only mode of progression. 

By the less strong it was used as a weapon of defence, 
by the less weak it was admitted as a concession to 
natural defencelessness. When Deportment received 
its Death Warrant, good manners were not mentioned 
in the indictment: but in Revolutions it is custom- 
ary to execute on a large scale. Much that was true 
was chargeable against Deportment, and, though good 
manners were innocent, it was easier to kill both 
together since they were a kind of step-sisters. 

In Revolutions it is criminal to have even cousins 
who are suspect. That was why so many thousands of 
harmless and good creatures were massacred in France 
when Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality took each her 
sword in hand for the purification of society. The 
poor things had done nothing against Freedom, Brother- 
hood, or that equalness of everybody to everybody else 
which Nature herself has made so obvious, but they 
might have kinsfolk who might have liked to : so their 
heads had to fall too. 

And, though good manners do not consist in Deport- 
ment, there may be a family likeness. The best sort 
of Deportment was an expression of good manners, and 



304 MESSRS. HOOLIGAN AND TURVEYDROP 

the worst sort of good manners are not much more 
than decent Deportment. So, in our revolution against 
humbug, pretence, and unreality we decided to let 
good manners perish as well as her passee step-sister. 

Certainly bad manners are real enough : there is no 
nonsense about them, and no one mistakes them for 
anything but what they are. They do not pretend 
respect for anything, except, perhaps, money, and that 
is no pretence: the rudest cringe and grovel to it. 
They have no idea of seeming interested, or even 
patient, when they are bored ; they make no show of 
deferring to anything that cannot insist on their de- 
ference. They intend to do what they like, and it 
does not matter in the least what anyone else may like 
or dislike. They are not afraid of being vulgar, they 
are only afraid of not getting precisely what they want 
at once. They are not distinctive of any social class : 
in the lowest they are expressed in one way, in the 
highest in another, but the same thing is expressed in 
both selfishness that is naked, and not at all ashamed. 

The middle classes are now what they never were 
before, by far the best mannered : but that will only last 
till the middle classes have discovered that it is "smart" 
to be ill-bred. Men are not much worse- mannered than 
women, though the expression is different : the ill- 
mannered modern woman, who chances to fall in with 
a man better-mannered than herself, simply takes ad- 
vantage of it, and gives nothing in return. So that he 
is tempted, unless he be very good, to suspect that he 
has made a fool's bargain, everything for nothing. 

Really good manners are a delicate bloom on the 
ripest fruit of Christianity : a last refinement of the 
civilisation Christianity brought into the world. That 
is why they are grown old-fashioned. 



TWO PESSIMISMS 

THERE was once a promising little friendship on paper 
an epistolary friendship, as the elder Miss Jenkyns 
and Dr. Johnson would have called it nipped in the 
bud owing to the alleged pessimism of one party to it. 
He was the less well known of two authors, and the 
better known gave over complimenting him on his 
books, and gave over writing him charming letters, 
because he was not in love with the present age this 
so-called twentieth century, as the curate witheringly 
described it. 

Of a century not quite in its teens it is rash to say 
much ; not every enfant terrible is disagreeable when 
grown up. But I cannot perceive that it is a sacred 
duty to admire the present moment. Swift loathed 
his own species, and men are to be excused for not 
loving him ; to dislike the age in which you live is not 
inhuman, though it is probably impolitic, and unlikely 
to help you in being of service to it. Whether it be 
also silly must depend on the reasonableness or un- 
reasonableness of your grounds of dislike. If the 
qualities you imagine yourself to perceive in another 
person, or group of persons, are unattractive, you are 
held excused from being attracted; no one is angry 
because you cannot admire selfishness, bumptiousness, 
rudeness, hooligan manners, profanity, shallow conceit, 
irreverence, and what-not. And, if one who lives in a 
certain period, thinks it marked by bad and ominous 

305 



306 TWO PESSIMISMS 

characteristics, it is hardly fair to abuse him for liking 
it less than some other age, distinguished, as he thinks, 
by finer traits. Of course, his judgment may be at 
fault in both instances ; the age that is deceased, and 
has left only its memoirs and its miniature behind, may 
be flattered in both ; the miniature may display only 
the upper portions of the figure, the lower limbs were 
perhaps unsightly or deformed ; and the memoirs may 
observe a wise economy of detail. The qualities sup- 
posed to exist in the living people may mean less than 
is imagined. The rudeness you deprecate may be wit 
whose point you merely failed to see: your fancied 
hooligan may be a light-hearted creature who only 
cracks your head open out of high spirits, and so on. 

All this we must admit ; but, all the same, I cannot 
see that it is criminal to be a laudator temporis acti. 
'Tis an ancient calling, and was freely exercised so long 
ago that our name for it belongs to a language dead for 
centuries. It is not conceited, for he who thus praises 
the past does not flatter what is his own. Nor is it 
servile, or time-serving, for the past is not suborned, 
nor tickled, nor grateful; he who praises it can get 
nothing out of it for his pains, not even a smile or a 
caress. The past is a dead king who makes no peers, 
and rewards his living courtiers with no ribbons or 
stars ; he has not a penny in his pocket. He will not 
flatter back; in his silent mouth are no puffs, no 
advertisements; he can bestow no vogue, nor fashion, 
nor popularity. The praise of him may be half blind, 
but it is not mean, nor cringing, nor self-seeking. It 
cannot be corrupt, nor venal, even though it were 
affected and but half sincere. The excessive laudator 
temporis acti may be a little morbid ; there is apt to 
be something half pathetic, half wistful, about him ; 



TWO PESSIMISMS 307 

we may doubt if his backward glances of admiration 
will ever make the present more admirable; but his 
weakness is not ignoble. He is a sort of martyr, though 
not the best sort. Every Christian makes daily sacri- 
fice of something pleasant ; that is a better sacrifice, 
for it is to make the future better : but the laudator 
temporis acti makes his sacrifice, too, not on the altar 
of faith, but on that of his ideals ; for the present has 
more to give him, and he lets it all go because he will 
not grow rich by time-serving. 

The successful author of whom, higher up, mention 
was made, was scandalised by what seemed to him the 
pessimism of his younger literary brother, in that the 
latter said hard things of the present age by reason of 
its unbelief and religious indifference or shallowness. 
This, he urged, was really wicked, as contravening the 
onward procession of time towards perfect good. To 
him such gloomy estimate of the world's actual condi- 
tion, in this its latest moment, appeared profane. 

The onward procession of time towards perfect good 
is not merely a phrase, but one that involves a 
metaphor. Does every long procession, then, move 
continuously upward, and always straight forward ? Is 
its course really up an inclined plane that has no dips 
and no turnings ? If not, the procession must go down- 
hill at times, and at times proceed in directions not 
directly pointing to its goal. 

If faith in Divine Goodness and Divine Providence 
really insists on our belief that this present age is 
better than all its predecessors, then each of them must 
have been better than any that came before it. So 
that primitive Christianity, of which we hear so much, 
must be a complete delusion, and the tenth century 
stand ten pegs higher on the ladder of perfection than 



308 TWO PESSIMISMS 

the first. The Dark Ages must, of course, have been 
incomparably lighter than the Augustan, or any earlier 
age; all the dismal groans of historians about the 
tenth and eleventh centuries must be sheer affectation, 
for they must have marked a huge advance and im- 
provement on the eighth and ninth, and still more on 
the second, third, or fourth. If it be a covert profanity 
to hint that the present age is marked by a wider 
spread of unbelief, then it must be openly profane to 
assert that the eighteenth century was less believing 
than the sixteenth or the fifteenth, 

That there will be an ultimate goal of perfect good, 
we must indeed believe, and do. But is it promised 
that all shall reach it ? Shall there be no defections on 
the way, no stragglers, and no deserters ? 

Are there not two sorts of pessimism ; one that may 
be nervously inclined to call all the darker colours 
black, and one that perversely calls black white ? To 
my thinking he was a pessimist who thought the reign 
of the Goddess of Reason an advance in human pro- 
gression on the ancient Reign of Faith in Catholic 
Christendom. Yet the latter came first, and the 
Goddess of Reason only set her uncouth throne on 
altars that had stood for over a thousand years, in a 
land that had called herself Eldest Daughter of the 
Church. 

The most fatal of all pessimisms is that which calls 
Evil, Good, and sees no menace in evil growing, but 
sits smiling on it, and declaring that it is all healthy 
progress and upward, onward movement. 



PEACE AND PEOPLES 

PROFESSOR Wilhelm Forster, the well-known astrono- 
mer and worker in the peace movement, has issued 
and circulated a complete and verbal translation of 
Mr. Churchill's speech on the Navy Estimates in 
order to correct wrong impressions caused by erroneous 
translations and summaries. 

So we read in the Times newspaper, and the reading 
reminds us of the existence of a certain society to 
which, some while ago, we ourselves were invited to 
belong. It is called the British Council of the 
Associated Councils of Churches in the British and 
German Empires for fostering friendly relations be- 
tween the two Peoples, but we quote from memory 
and the title is rather long ; perhaps we have not got 
it quite right. At first we seemed to savour something 
odd as well as long-winded in this society's name, and 
hardly expected, on turning to the long list of Vice- 
Presidents, to find among them the names of Catholics. 
In some cases it was not easy to guess whether the 
distinguished personages mentioned were Catholic or 
no : thus between the names of the Right Rev. Lord 
Bishop of Bangor and Right Rev. Lord Bishop of 
Gloucester, came those of the Right Rev. Lord Bishop 
of Liverpool, and Right Rev. Lord Bishop of Birming- 
ham. Were the present Archbishops of Liverpool and 
Birmingham intended ? Lower down the list another 
Right. Rev. Lord Bishop of Birmingham supervened, 

309 



310 PEACE AND PEOPLES 

though no second Bishop of Liverpool. Clearly one of 
the Right Rev. Lord Bishops of Birmingham must 
mean the Catholic prelate, and it did not matter which. 
But the question as to whether or no Catholics could 
belong to this society was set at rest by the appearance 
of his Eminence Cardinal Bourne's name upon the list ; 
and we joined the society accordingly. With the 
object of such a society every one should feel deep 
and earnest sympathy. That every one does not is 
evidenced by the need for the society's existence. Of 
the methods pursued by it we have nothing to say in 
criticism ; but we would like to say something in the 
way of advice. And that advice is very simple, and 
even more brief than the society's own name. Let it 
direct its influences on the right people. Deputations 
from it have waited, we believe, on august personages, 
and have been received with courtesy and respectful 
attention. So far, so good ; and let us hope the benevo- 
lent reception of such emissaries in such quarters may 
produce all the permanent effect desired. 

But our own belief is that much more practical 
results would be produced if the society could bring 
any real influence to bear upon the public press in 
Germany and in England. For it is also our belief 
that if peace should be broken between the two 
Empires it will not be through the action of the 
Sovereign of either country, but by means of the 
irritant forces of a section of the press in both countries. 
What Sovereigns really think or wish can only be 
conjectured by their own people in each case, and 
very incorrectly estimated by the people under the 
allegiance of the other monarch. What newspapers 
are trying to effect can be felt by even the stupidest 
reader in England and in Germany, and that which 



PEACE AND PEOPLES 311 

many of them are willing to bring about is clearly a 
state of morbid irritation, suspicion, and passion that 
could only lead to war in the long run. A habit has 
grown up, even among responsible speakers here, of 
alluding to England as a Democracy which is hardly 
polite to the head of what is still an unconstitutional 
Monarchy. Nor is the term very descriptive, for, if 
anything, our condition is rather that of a temporary 
oligarchy, which reminds us of Venice erected on piles 
rooted in the mud. But, though England be not pre- 
cisely a Democracy, and Germany is an absolute 
Monarchy with a Parliament, we must repeat that it 
is not by addresses or deputations to the British or the 
German Sovereigns that the society with the long 
name can hope to produce its desired effect, but by 
bringing, if it can, persuasion to bear on the militant 
press of the two countries ; for the whole ignorance of 
modern peoples lies in the power of the press. By it 
the passions of the peoples can be, and often are, 
inflamed; vulgar jealousies can be aroused, fostered, 
and made noisy; national prejudices and suspicions 
hatched into bitter hatred ; and every sincere effort 
at mutual understanding made by official diplomacy 
brought to nought. 

In this line of business nothing is more lamentable 
than the indulgence in personalities and insults which 
a certain section of the press, both here and in Germany, 
allows itself. Anything likely to insult or annoy the 
German Emperor, his heir, or his family is seized upon 
and given prominence by such English papers as we 
have in mind; and they are not a bit worse than 
similar papers in Germany, wherein much has ap- 
peared insulting to our present Sovereign and his two 
immediate predecessors. And, though august person- 



PEACE AND PEOPLES 

ages naturally afford the most obvious target for this 
sort of pitiful attack, it is not by assaults on them 
alone that it can keep itself supplied with offensive 
matter. Everything German is liable to such vilifica- 
tion here, everything English held up to scorn or 
derision there. 

If the Associated Council of Churches, &c., has any 
real power which we hope it may have it would do 
far more good by urging, with all its force and the 
whole strength of its organisation, a more gentlemanly 
tone, a more amiable spirit, upon the peccant press, 
than by any number of Imperial or Royal receptions. 

The society has its organ, a very readable monthly 
report, called the Peacemaker ; but granting that every 
member of the Association reads it which is granting 
a good deal it can only convert the converted. Its 
funds and its energies would be better spent in the 
effort to bring to a better mind those who are not yet 
on the side of peace. The Peacemaker is something 
in the position of a preacher who harangues the con- 
gregation he has on the iniquity of those that have not 
come to church. If the preacher could, he would 
fill his benches better by enlisting on his side the 
proprietors of places of rival attraction; for the ab- 
sentees would hear them, and do not hear him. 

In this matter much would be done, if it could be 
done, by carrying the peaceful war into the camps of 
those capitalists in whose hands the newspapers really 
are. They also may have consciences, and it would be 
worth while to carry on extensive excavation works in 
search of them. They need not, either, be impervious 
to the argument that colossal wars are hardly favour- 
able to commerce, and that commerce and capital are 
apt to suffer simultaneously. The present writer is 



PEACE AND PEOPLES 313 

unable to resist the conviction that, if wars should 
ever cease from a world constituted as ours now is, it 
will be, humanly speaking (which means, apart from 
miracles of Divine grace), by the understanding of 
Governments and of those that make them that war 
is too destructive of commerce for the patience of an 
age that cares for nothing else. 



DRESS AND CLOTHING 

CLOTHING was one of the immediate results of original 
sin, but dress was a later and slower development. 

Nevertheless, one may be reminded even now of the 
primary connection between clothes and original sin. 
It was not, indeed, vanity, but shame that led our first 
parents to cover themselves : but it was vanity that 
brought them to their fall they wanted to be as gods 
and know all things. And as time went on vanity 
refused to content herself with coverings that merely 
answered the purposes of modesty, and of protection 
from cold and heat. 

Vanity, having made herself thoroughly at home, 
sought a mate and found one in the irritable spirit of 
Novelty : their union produced Fashion, now very old, 
but condemned to a chronic second-childhood. Her 
dictates are often silly and apish, sometimes mis- 
chievous, and her obedient votaries are apt to make us 
remember the original connection between dress and 
original sin. For vanity leads some to head the pro- 
cession, and shame crowds others into the pitiful tail 
of it. It certainly is not the frank love of beauty that 
makes the most eager followers of fashion ; for fashions 
are very often ugly. But every new fashion is novel 
for a time, and in novelty the easiest satisfaction 
of vanity is to be attained. It calls for no gifts of 
mind or person, neither cleverness or loveliness is 
required: an empty head can display the most out- 

311 



DRESS AND CLOTHING 315 

rageously new sort of hat quite as conspicuously as 
one filled with all the wisdom of Solomon : and the 
hardest-featured and most ungainly creature will look 
no uglier or more ridiculous in a hobble skirt than 
Helen of Troy would or Mary Stuart. 

In this way fashion is a leveller : for it destroys the 
superiority of natural gifts. The foolish and the un- 
beautiful are aware of it, and hide their deficiencies, in 
the world's masquerade, under the cheap domino of 
fashion. Not, of course, that this goddess is an in- 
expensive one to worship, but many silly and ugly 
people have plenty of money, and many others behave 
as though they had. 

The alliance between vanity and shame is of so 
long standing that they appear to be almost naturally 
related. And there is a sort of shame that is merely a 
sort of vanity : such is the shame of not being in the 
fashion. 

If vanity could ever be of any use at all you might 
expect it to be so in hindering people not ill-looking 
from making themselves appear so by dressing mon- 
strously. But it does not seem to serve them much. 

Thousands of women whom Jane Austen would 
describe as " well enough," have, within the last year or 
two, made themselves monstrous by meek and servile 
adoption of fashions that no beauty could carry off. 
And this shame of not being fashionable has blinded 
thousands more to a shame they ought to have felt ; 
for the dress in which it has led them to display them- 
selves to the public has been not only ugly, and " un- 
becoming" in the new sense, but unbecoming in the 
original sense of that innocently debased word, that is 
to say, indecorous and indelicate. 

It is odd to see ladies who would not read a " sugges- 



316 DRESS AND CLOTHING 

tive" novel, parade themselves in costumes that are 
simply not modest, with no better excuse than that 
such dress is the fashion, which means that it was 
recently novel. 

And they must be well aware that their example 
will be followed, and, as such examples always are, in 
descending, exaggerated. 

For fashion is not one of the monopolies of the upper 
classes, as in meeker ages they were called, or of the 
leisured classes, as they are called in an age which is 
never witty except by accident. 

Once every class had its own sort of dress, and all of 
them were dressed more picturesquely. Now all are 
dressed alike, that is to say, one class serves to another 
as a mirror in which it could see, very soon if it chose, 
how silly and how unsightly its fashions are, since they 
become vulgar when they are become common, and 
intolerable when they have grown cheap. 

And fashion changes so rapidly that no cheapness of 
material in the copy can prevent its being expensive. 
The living wage has to take count of this : for husbands 
have wives and even daughters, and daughters and 
wives alike must be fashionable. The dresses of last 
year would be impossible this. 

Any decent person must wish to see poorer people 
well-dressed ; but it is not pleasant to see poor children 
wanting warm clothes in winter, half-shod, and wet 
through, for lack of reasonable wrappings against the 
weather, but clad in tawdry finery, thin, draggled and 
often dirty, with necklaces and bangles, and half the 
useless etceteras of costume, and scarcely any of its 
essentials. 

In a hot summer one may just as often see such 
children, who would be more comfortable and more 



DRESS AND CLOTHING 317 

clean in a washing frock, sweltering in the fusty 
velveteen of last winter, with ponderous velveteen hat 
to match, and smothered in a fur or feather boa by way 
of cape. 

In this matter " the poor " are not much sillier than 
many in the classes ranging up above them. If council- 
school children must have glass pendants, subalterns' 
wives must have diamond tiaras convertible into 
necklets. And middle-class folk take it for granted 
that they must dress like peeresses; where were 
Democracy else ? 

It is not comfort they seek. Comfort, the late 
Laureate assured us, is scorned of devils; and, if that 
be so, they have a devilish scorn of it. Silly creatures 
who will not be content even to look nice, who prefer 
to look nasty so they look fashionable, will not be 
content to be comfortable. 

If Mr. Lloyd George could enrich us with an Act to 
insure the life of any one fashion for twenty years, even 
the people with fixed incomes would be better off. 
But who on earth can say where Mr. Lloyd George, 
or any of us, will be in twenty years' time ? 



OF CATHEDRALS 

A CATHEDRAL is the basilica, church, or chapel in which 
a bishop's chair is. We know that, and so we know 
that there need, essentially, be nothing grandiose about 
the building, and that, in the beginnings of churches, 
there could hardly have been anything grandiose in the 
places where bishops had their seat. The room, in the 
house of Pudens, where the first chair of Peter was, was 
the forerunner of the Lateran, and Omnium Ec- 
clesiarum Urbis et Orbis Mater et Caput, the Cathedral 
of the World. 

But, since, nearly two thousand years have passed of 
Time's procession towards Eternity, and twenty cen- 
turies of experience have taught the people to associate 
with the word cathedral ideas of beauty and dignity ; 
so that, on the one hand, even ecclesiastical authorities 
are wont to recognise this, by giving to a church in 
which a bishop's throne is set, but which is felt to be 
inadequate to the name of cathedral as lacking the 
fitting dignity or importance, some name, as Pro- 
Cathedral, implying a promise of something better to 
come ; and, on the other hand, simple folk, who are not 
ecclesiastically learned, are apt, whenever they see a 
church of distinguished beauty or size, to call it a 
cathedral. We Catholics have no bishop at Norwich, 
or at Arundel, but the visitor to either town will have 
had his attention complacently drawn by some in- 
habitant to the Catholic Cathedral. 

318 



OF CATHEDRALS 319 

It is a mistake of fact, but not a bad sort of mis- 
take, for it is an unconscious witness to long and true 
experience. Men expect something of a cathedral, 
because for many centuries the word has signified 
something lovely, noble, and above common. 

The Catholic Church, when the Arts ceased to be 
false goddesses, adopted them as her children, and 
took them into her service. The service of literature 
has always been acknowledged, for it is a direct form of 
speech, and so a quite obvious means of instruction. 
The service of painting is so like it that it also has been 
acknowledged commonly and freely; for pictures are 
books, not only for the lettered, but for those who 
cannot read. And music, even without words, has a 
voice so clear that it may speak of God to the blind, 
who can see neither letters nor pictures. But the 
service of architecture to religion is not so explicitly 
recognised, though it has almost from the begin- 
ning of the Church been admitted implicitly by its 
use. 

The method of service is not so obvious as that of 
spoken or written language, or that of pictorial art, or 
even that of song and musical sound. No dogma is 
set forth, plainly and without allegory, by architecture, 
as dogmas can be set forth in literature and in painting. 
It, however, is also among the prophets, and there is 
only gracelessness in measuring and comparing the 
service of the prophets ; it is like plaguing one lost in 
admiration of the Matterhorn by reminding him that 
Mont Blanc is higher, 

Perhaps the teaching of noble architecture belongs 
rather to the sphere of moral than of dogmatic 
theology; it influences faith by ethic, and binds the 
soul to faith by cleansing it. And if a cathedral 



320 OF CATHEDRALS 

cannot formulate Catholic doctrine, neither will it lend 
itself to teach any other. For over three centuries and 
a half the pulpits of all the old Catholic cathedrals in 
England have been listening to an alien teaching, but 
the cathedrals have never turned Protestant. They 
express what they were built to express, and ignore the 
Reformation. Their air is as bland as ever, as devout ; 
they make no descent from their serene aloofness into 
the lists of controversy ; but their aloofness is as strong 
a protest as though it were not silent. No Reformer 
in England or elsewhere has ever converted them : the 
ancient cathedrals may be freeholds of new religious 
corporations, but the mark of ownership has never 
obliterated the birth-mark of origin and purpose. 
Perhaps that is why they have borne, and bear now, 
so little share in the actual contemporary life of 
" reformation countries." I suppose many a Catholic 
has dropped in at one or other of them, in England, 
and, as it chanced, heard some portion of a service, 
heard lovely boy-voices singing the old king's im- 
mortal songs, and watched the yellow evening light 
fall on the great, empty, pathetic spaces, tipping with 
gold, perhaps, the niddle-noddling autumnal bonnets of 
the literal two or three gathered together for worship. 
Whatever else may have struck him, one thought 
could not fail : that it all had nothing on earth to do 
with the people. England was outside. Here, within, 
was an archaism : an attempt to pretend that some- 
thing gone was present. Out in the street, beyond the 
green close, was the life, the interest, the business of 
the people; inside, nothing but a monument and a 
decorum. 

High overhead, as the little, withered, meek, un- 
questioning congregation creeps home to cosiness and 



OF CATHEDRALS 321 

tea, old bells, baptized centuries ago with Mary's name, 
or Peter's, proclaim their patience. 

He Al-so Serves 
Who on-ly Stands 

9 

And Waits. 

So they stand, the old Catholic cathedrals, and wait, 
in patience, faith, and hope. 

There is no such a thing as Protestant Church archi- 
tecture. There is post-Reformation architecture for 
theatres, skating rinks, railway stations, and municipal 
baths. And the post-Reformers are welcome to it. 
But if Protestants who rejoice in bishops, as pew- 
openers enjoy poor health, are for building a cathedral, 
they try to build a Catholic one. The architect goes 
a-gleaning, and scrapes together bits from Salisbury, 
bits from Chartres, bits from Cologne, an arch from 
Amiens, a nave from Notre Dame, a lady-chapel (for 
the Ladies chapel, cosier for morning prayers), and so 
on. The new stones are all dug from the old quarries. 
The more like a real cathedral the thing looks, the 
more it will resemble what it is not an old Catholic 
building meant for the old Catholic Mass. 

Cathedrals are for bishops, and some Protestant 
branches of the Reformation-tree kept bishops on their 
bough, partly by accident, partly for the look of the 
thing. But a new non-Catholic cathedral can never 
be induced to express the new non-Catholic idea. It 
refuses to look like a cathedral at all, or insists on 
expressing the old, disallowed idea, of a place for a 
Catholic bishop to pontificate in. 

Other Reformation religions declined to be bothered 
with bishops. They saw no sense in scotching the 
queen-bee and hiving common bees with the queenly 

x 



OF CATHEDRALS 

title. They want no cathedrals: they require preach- 
ing-halls, and they build them, something like dull 
theatres, but more recently with a half-hearted affecta- 
tion of ecclesiasticism. Money is seldom lacking, and 
money is deemed capable of purchasing taste, but it 
cannot buy conviction; and a Gothic meeting-house 
is one of the most unconvinced-looking things I know. 
"Which shall I be?" it seems to ask of itself, and 
(aside) of the public, "A chapel or a church? If a 
chapel, why these mediaeval airs ? Where was I in the 
Middle Ages? If a church, what is going on in my 
inside ? " 

One may even see, nowadays, meeting-houses with 
crosses on them, venerated as religiously as the cross 
on a hot-cross bun. 



OF STONE SERMONS AND 
WHITE ELEPHANTS 

WE read of an American lady to whom an enthusi- 
astic fellow-tourist appealed, to know if the Venus de 
Medici did not overpower her. 

" I guess," she declared, " none of those stone women 
ever sat on me." 

Cathedrals do not sit on us ; their influence is potent 
without being oppressive. No influence, however 
strong, affects all alike, and there may be some who 
are not sensible of the appeal of these stone sermons. 
They are right not to pretend to feel it ; all attempt to 
affect a taste we have not leads to false taste, and 
affected feeling is worse than affected taste. The 
wonderful loveliness of Nature is quite invisible to 
some people, and they are no more to blame than 
if they were colour-blind. So, too, with really great 
Music; it is quite meaningless to certain hearers, and 
the lack of a sense is not a fault in them, but only an 
unfortunate deprivation. Yet it is equally true that 
there are others to whom a forest-glade or a symphony 
are more than sermons; they seem to serve them as 
a sort of sacramentals. No one is to affect such a 
quality; but, to those who have it, it is as real as 
another's capacity for getting all that there is in them 
from the sermons preached in church ; and we are not 
to undervalue it, or laugh it off. 



324 OF STONE SERMONS 

So of stone sermons cathedrals, and all that in this 
place we mean to signify by cathedrals, such as an 
abbey, or a cloister, a noble church, or even the ruin 
of one : for the ruin of a beautiful building has often 
a deeper loveliness than the building ever had when it 
stood intact, the pathos of its ruined state having no 
taint of degradation : it is only the ruin of a man that 
is ghastly and horrible. 

By stone sermons, then, we do not mean stony 
sermons in pulpits, but the preaching of a certain sort 
of noble buildings, as of cathedrals. 

In England, owing to their alienation in actual use 
by the dismal Reformation, they have a special effect 
of pathos, as of beauty widowed, suffering in a patient, 
immortal hope. They carry, too, a message of indomit- 
able fidelity. But England is not all Christendom, and 
there are cathedrals, elsewhere, that still serve their 
original, dedicated purpose. In any country they 
preach, and of themselves, apart from effects produced 
within them, as by great ceremonial, the actual pre- 
sentments of sacred things by image or picture, holy 
music, and the like. The sort of influence whereof we 
speak is independent of those things, and can work in 
us without them, though the complete effect intended 
is made up of the combination of building, sacred 
function, devout representations, and the rest, all 
together : for the sense of sacredness in any place must 
be deepened by the presence of all these things; as, 
for instance, by the knowledge we may have that some 
great relic is preserved there, or That Which is greater 
than any relic is adored there. These things, however, 
are themselves objects of worship or of veneration, and 
this is true of the building itself only by association. 
The actual stones of which it is made might have 



OF STONE SERMONS 325 

lain unhewn in their quarry, or served some meaner 
purpose : they are holy only by dedication, use, and 
benediction. Yet the building, now it is made what 
it is, preaches of itself, and goes on preaching even 
when, as in the old English cathedrals, those other 
things are no longer present. In Gothic church-archi- 
tecture almost every detail is given some definite 
mystical significance, though, perhaps, this minute 
intention has been read into it by the zeal and piety 
of commentators rather than been originally present to 
the mind of the architect. Anyway it is lawful and 
profitable to find any possible good meaning in what 
only means what is good. Nevertheless, the influence 
of this building does not depend upon such readings, 
for few comparatively are aware of them, and the 
influence is felt by many. This is, roughly, paralleled 
by the spiritual effect of some holy and ancient book, 
which the merely devout reader experiences, though 
he may be without familiarity with the critical, and 
beautiful, expositions of this or that passage or phrase. 
The first, most simple, and most important, impression 
produced, for instance, Is that of reverence, and such 
reverence is excited very little by any expert admiration 
of detail. Condescendence upon detail, indeed, many 
find rather a distraction than a help: as a reverent 
worshipper of the Blessed Sacrament would be teased by 
officious explanations from the sacristan of the meaning 
involved in the jewelled designs of the tabernacle. 

Such persons, potently affected by the force and 
message of a great cathedral, are not helped by in- 
struction as to detail of significance. Expert apprecia- 
tion is too scientific for emotion, and the emotion of 
reverence is too spiritual to be aided by admiration of 
completeness or ingenuity. 



326 OF STONE SERMONS 

It is hard to believe in any true emotion not being 
on the side of the angels : and reverence is the last 
emotion fallen angels would suggest. The reverence 
effected, in those who are capable of it, by a great 
or lovely cathedral is so intimately connected with 
worship, that worship has almost a twin-birth with it. 
And this is no "light thing or slight." For genuine 
worship is rarer in us than we like to recognise or admit. 
Worship implies faith, and cannot exist without it, for 
it must have an object higher than ourselves ; but our 
faith is sometimes lethargic, chilly, and habitual, rather 
than actual and vital, and what awakens it, warms it, 
and brings it to that life and movement that act 
necessitates, cannot be of trivial use or import. 

The building of great cathedrals was not, when they 
were built, the mere provision of a need ; it was an Act 
of Faith, and an Act of Worship : to such active faith 
and worship they move us still, even though, as in 
England, the faith they were built to illustrate, and 
the worship they were meant to serve, has been out- 
lawed from them. In our own day we have seen the 
building of our great cathedral at Westminster. Our 
friends the Weaker Brethren might have objected, 
some, we may be pretty sure, did object, that it was 
not a necessity : by which they meant that the Catholic 
population of that part of London did not demand or 
justify so huge a fane, and that Catholics in other parts 
of London had their own churches, or had them not. 
The bdte noire, if such a bull may serve our turn, of 
Weaker Brethren is the White Elephant. A Catholic 
cathedral at Westminster, they would urge, was a 
White Elephant. What it really was requires no 
metaphor to express it an Act of Faith noble enough 
to link modern Catholic England with the ages in 






OF STONE SERMONS 327 

which, faith was not pushed aside as an anachronism : 
an Act of Worship that proclaims to a selfishly utilitarian 
world that, in the Catholic idea, man's gifts to God are 
not to be measured by the inch-rule of man's conscious 
needs for himself. We are not to say to God : " All I 
have is Thine, and this mean sum I will invest in Thee, 
because thus I see my way to getting back for myself a 
higher rate of interest than by spending it elsewhere." 






AN ADMIRATION NOTE 

GREAT cathedrals, we say, inspire in the first place 
reverence, a religious reverence indissoluble from 
worship, and not to be confounded with the different 
veneration aroused by the sense of their immemorial 
age. And such reverence is a stimulus of faith, which 
it awakes, so that out of the dormant habit an act is 
produced. 

But a word may be said of the other veneration to 
which we have just alluded. 

In the case of our alienated English cathedrals, as 
also in that of the still Catholic cathedrals and abbeys 
of the Continent, we are moved to this sense of venera- 
tion by the impression of their historic age. We may 
be unlettered in history, but the effect does not at all 
depend upon expert historical knowledge. The archae- 
ologist may, indeed, be able to read by a mere glance 
at the form of an arch or the style of a pillar the 
precise period to which this or that part of the build- 
ings belongs. He finds a great and legitimate pleasure 
in this. But the sense of which we speak is much 
more than a pleasure : and to those who are not 
archaeologists the age of the great and sacred fane 
appeals quite as strongly, without any effort of theirs 
to decide or surmise as to precise date. It is not a 
mere consciousness of interest they are aware of, but 
an emotion that they feel. And this emotion is also 



328 



i 

AN ADMIRATION NOTE 329 

spiritual and refining, that is, purifying. All spiritual 
emotion is purifying, because it is essentially opposed 
to the appetite of mean and sordid things. This 
veneration, aroused in us by ancient cathedrals and 
the like, enters our soul by more than one avenue. 
First by the historical sense, even though we be not 
ourselves accomplished historians : few lads are, and 
yet a lad is often specially susceptible of this emotion. 
It is enough that we should perceive the gracious and 
venerable antiquity of the place, for the perception 
connects us with a chain whereby we find ourselves 
linked back personally with a history which we can 
only surmise, or may know but in part, and remember 
in part : we are, perhaps, more affected by the whole 
from our very ignorance of parts. What we know 
is not, maybe, much; yet it is enough. We know 
that the place is very old; that it has seen the rise 
and fall of dynasties, and outlived the growth and 
decay of governments: that it antedates the changes 
whereby the new Europe was fashioned out of ruins 
of the old Christendom. Especially in England we 
remember that the cathedral was here before the 
ungainly and uncheerful Reformation: papal bulls 
have been promulgated in it : crusades, no doubt, 
preached hi it : here Crusaders gathered for their last 
Mass before setting out, and here they received the 
Cross. It is not only of them we fall to think, nor of 
the way-worn, battle-bruised remnant that came back 
hither to thank God who had brought them safe home 
again. One Crusader's battered tomb suffices to raise 
in our mind the whole pageant of the Crusades and of 
chivalry, that was like a brave trimming and galon 
upon the old habit of Faith. The certainty that Popes' 
bulls have been proclaimed here calls up the whole 






330 AN ADMIRATION NOTE 

idea of the Papacy, to which the whole Middle Ages 
serve but as background. Again, apart from this more 
historic sense, our emotion of veneration is quickened 
in us by another sense, that of association and sym- 
pathy. Perhaps it is not actually a cathedral in which 
we find ourselves, but something much smaller, as the 
chapel of some ancient college at Oxford, for instance, 
or at Cambridge. Innumerable generations have been 
young here, many lads destined to be great, great 
prelates, great statesmen, or great scholars; the place 
is crowded with their ghosts, not grim spectres of 
cadaverous shape, but eager spirits, bland and hopeful, 
with the sunrise on their faces, and generous light of 
high and noble purpose in their eyes. Nothing touches 
us closer, or grips our heart with a tenderer warmth of 
fellowship, and admiration, and sympathy, and com- 
passion. How immortal their youth seemed to them 
as did ours once : what a sacred capital was all life, 
to be invested by each almost too vast, and so 
precious that each must be in eager and alert haste 
lest there should be loss or waste . . . the chapel seems 
like a great heart with the pulsing of thousands of 
young lives in it. 

This emotion, also, I class as veneration Maxima 
pueris debetur reverentia, and not to the living 
young only, but to those as well who, in the great 
procession, have passed on to the imaging youth of 
Eternity. 

This marvellous sacredness of youth how the 
Beloved of Love Himself felt it. He, who had leant 
near the Heart of the Son of Man, though he lived to 
so great age, could not grow old, nor wither with old 
wintry carpings at youth. "I write unto you," said 
his pen, sixty-six years after the Ascension had drawn 



AN ADMIRATION NOTE 331 

between him and his own heart's Master the holy arras 
of faith, "I write unto you, young men, because you 
are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and 
you have overcome the wicked one." 

And, finally, there is admiration. This is put last 
because, in truth, I hold it least of the motive forces to 
veneration. But it has also place. If I put it last it is 
because it depends in some measure upon taste, which 
is a much less sure guide to a really spiritual emotion : 
if I put it down at all it is because the admiration here 
meant does not depend entirely on taste, and depends 
very little on what is often meant by taste. A 
perfectly tasteless person cannot be Tnoved by the 
beauty of a cathedral: but the necessary taste need 
not be reasoned, nor aware of itself, nor founded on 
expert knowledge of canons of beauty. When a thing 
is beautiful, simple people, if they be clean of heart, 
are apt to see that it is beautiful. The clean of heart 
who see God are not all theologians. 

Just, then, as the beauty of nature does teach many 
simple souls, out of an easy book, what the beauty of 
God must be Who made it, so the loveliness of these 
places, made by man, reminds them of the Divine 
Beauty to which even man is constrained, by fitness, to 
offer such lovely gifts. No palace ever made by man 
for himself has ever had half the beauty of the fanes 
even fallen man has raised to God. Is that an 
accident ? The simple will not believe it one : they 
believe, not in accident, but in Providence and His 
inspiration. 

So the stones preach : it they, being dedicated to a 
Divine service, can be so noble and so exquisite that 
men are fain to confess that they who built such places 
at all events believed in God, what service should not 



332 AN ADMIRATION NOTE 

we render, who know what we are about, who need not 
wait for others to build us up into a Temple of the 
Holy Spirit of God, or let chance decide whether from 
the quarry we go to make a part of His Church or go 
to help build some new Devil-Temple on earth ? 



WHY NORWICH? 

LEEDS and Newcastle were obvious places for a Catholic 
Congress ; so would Liverpool be, so would Birmingham 
or Manchester. But why Norwich ? 

A good many people seem to have asked themselves 
this question as, on August 1, 1912, the train carried 
them far into the East Country. 

That the choice of place was the Cardinal's we were 
told by himself, and from His Eminence, as from the 
Duke of Norfolk, we learned that at first his choice was 
frankly criticised, and that by three critics who seemed 
most concerned hi it : by His Grace, by the Bishop of 
the diocese, and by Canon Fitzgerald, of Norwich. It 
does not appear that any of them were dubious of the 
friendliness of the Norwich citizens: their ground of 
hesitation was merely that the Catholic population of 
the city is quite small, whereas the Congresses of Leeds 
and Newcastle had their success largely secured before- 
hand by the great Catholic population of those cities. 
The Cardinal did not lay open to the Congress what 
his own reasons had been: whatever they were, they 
were justified by the event; and perhaps we may in- 
dulge our surmises as to some of them. 

As the train ran over the flat and not striking 
country of East Anglia, there was not much to be seen 
from the carriage windows: a land of narrow fields, 
with rather mean hedgerows not dignified by fine 
timber: the villages seeming ugly to one who came 

333 



334 WHY NORWICH? 

from the county of lovely villages but a land of 
churches, and all old churches, persistent monuments 
and reminders of the faith that set them there. Then 
came Norwich, itself anything but flat, with twisting 
streets winding eternally up hill and down: and at 
every turn a church, always an old one, always another 
monument and another reminder of the ancient faith 
whose death-warrant King Henry signed as nonchalantly 
as though it were merely that of a wife ; and finally 
another church, crowning the hill and the city, set 
there by another Henry in noble, wordless protest that 
the death-warrant has never been carried out, and 
never can be : a church that is itself an act of sublime 
faith, not uttered with chattering lips, in one easy 
moment, but slowly, with the deliberate silence of 
thirty years, spelling itself out, stone by stone, till now 
the whole great Word stands, and will stand while 
Time has ears to hear it Credo. Was not that church 
the Cardinal's reason ? How better could so princely 
a gift be welcomed and acknowledged by the Church 
than by the gathering into it, as for a second dedication, 
by a Prince of the Church, of the Episcopate of England, 
and the delegates of her faithful ? 

And was the Cardinal willing to set us praying as we 
went thither and came back? In Norwich are over 
forty ancient churches, and could we pass them in our 
way without memory of the Exiled Master of them ? 
Who could see them and not think of their arches, like 
praying fingers, and of the Absent Object of their 
worship ? No White Christ in any of them now, where 
once He hid Himself from sight, but proved Himself to 
faith, by the sheer impossibility of such a thing as such 
a Presence occurring to any imagination but that of 
God. Man could no more have invented the Eucharist 



WHY NORWICH? 335 

than he could have invented the Incarnation : only He 
who thought of entering the world by the lowly gate of 
birth could have devised how to remain in it in the 
time-long silence of that White Disguise. All great 
ideas are simple, and I hope the Cardinal will pardon 
me if, unwarranted, I attribute to him these. No 
wonder he stuck to them. 

The place of our meeting in Norwich may well have 
had some minor influence upon the decision of His 
Eminence, too. Could any see him, on that first 
evening, when the Lord Mayor was giving him 
courteous welcome there, and not think that he himself 
might be truly regarded as host, and the Lord Mayor 
guest, in that old church of the Black Friars ? Is there 
any hall, in any English city, where a Cardinal could 
more fitly gather about him his fellow-bishops and the 
representatives of their flocks to remind England and 
them that England was Catholic once and may be 
again ? 

The conversion of England can we believe in it? 
Faith has not intricate problems, but she has hidden 
treasures; and to her children she lets the shine of 
them peep forth, the golden gleam of substance of things 
to be hoped for, evidence of things that appear not. 

England was Britain once, and heathen : it stretched 
forth praying hands to Rome, and from the father that 
sits among the Seven Hills beside the yellow river, 
came the faith. Then was the British nation driven 
westward to the hills, and the old land took a new 
name from a new people, and they were heathen, too. 
This time Rome did not wait to be called, but the old 
father with a new name, because he could not come 
himself, sent the Black Monks, with Christ upon their 
lips and Heaven hi their hands, to carry the beacon- 



336 WHY NORWICH? 

light to our island lonely in the bitter sea. And for a 
thousand years England was a jewel on the hem of her 
garment who is God's great Mother. 

This time the people were not driven out, nor did 
they send the faith packing : they were rifled of it, and 
cheated : very slowly, with cruel fraud, was the old 
treasure stolen, and something to look like it foisted in 
its place. The inevitable always happens, and the sorry 
substitute, discredited and unloved, is losing, daily, the 
hold that was never due to itself, but externally im- 
posed, so that the cold, borrowed light of Protestant 
England is swiftly guttering down to the stink and flare 
of weary paganism ; not the simple, groping paganism 
that has never known Christ, but the stale and vapid 
paganism that has half-known Him and lost all savour 
of His sweetness. 

Can there be another youth for an old, tired people ? 
Whence can it come ? Whence came the light before ? 

Is this sad worsening a prelude to a new bettering ? 
Perhaps an England weary of its follies, sick of dry 
and savourless Dead Sea fruit, thirsty, hungry, utterly 
weary, may turn her eyes again to the hills whence her 
help came before, those two times, and cry to the 
World-Father to give his children Bread and Wine 
and Water again : the Bread that comes from Heaven, 
the small, round, White Thing, the Red Wine and the 
White that the soldier's lance let loose, upon whose 
double tide of Love and Sorrow we are carried out 
beyond these swamps of time into the deep, deep ocean 
that is God. 



COLD PORRIDGE 

AN unobtrusive, though elderly, gentleman, on a 
Sunday evening in August, less than a century ago, 
took his way to church through the streets of an East 
Anglian city: they were what is called back-streets, 
though they curved more than is considered necessary 
in backs. It was a treat for him to be going thus to 
hear a famous preacher, instead of having to preach 
some sort of sermon himself. For nine years he had 
been listening to himself, and the idea of listening to 
someone else gave him a holiday sense of peace and 
goodwill. He naturally thought of Oliver Wendell 
Holmes's clergyman, who perished through lack of 
religious instruction by reason of having during half a 
lifetime had to preach at every service he had been 
attending. Smiling at the witty American's conceit, 
the elderly priest became aware of a young boy who 
had begun to dance around him, as he walked, in 
a witch-like fashion, as though he took his harmless 
elder for a cauldron. As he skipped he flung up the 
fingers, first of one hand then of the other, and snapped 
them, not as implying a compliment. 

"Oh, Catholic!" squeaked the boy. "Catholic! 
Rotten Catholic ! " He must have been used to dancing 
backwards, for he did not trip, or stumble : and as he 
danced he repeated, almost to monotony, his simple 
chaunt : " Catholic ! Oh, Rotten Catholic." 

"You are not strictly correct," the elderly priest 

337 y 



COLD PORRIDGE 

a stickler, perhaps, for accuracy pointed out. "A 
Catholic, perhaps, but not rotten. Not even dead yet, 
much less rotten." 

The young boy, a little touched in the wind, maybe, 
seemed disposed to consider the argument, and would 
have slowed down to do so; but there supervened a 
mother, not necessarily his own, but all maternity, and 
with motherly provision of a small stool, which she 
seemed able to wield with precision, and inclined to 
employ as a rod. The priest had heard of whipping- 
stools, but never seen one : if this should prove to be 
an example it would be interesting. 

" I'll warm you ! " bawled the lady (not to the elderly 
gentleman). 

" Madam," said he, " it is not necessary. The even- 
ing is close, and he seems active." 

"Til learn him," bawled the lady (though an ex- 
cellent thing in woman her voice was not low). "I'll 
learn him to dance at gentry and call folks Catholics." 

But the boy was averse from learning, and retreated, 
and the whipping-stool was hurled after him, and hit 
him, flat side on, in such fashion that, if he had but 
sat down at once, everything would have been perfectly 
regular. 

The lady was pleased and she liked being called 
madam: though it was what she called her own 
daughter when that daughter was, like Ecclesiastes, 
very bold. 

"That'll learn you," she called out, "to call folks 
names as might be your grandfathers." 

" Madam," said the priest, " I might not even be one 
of his grandfathers. And he only called me what I am, 
and what I shall be. When I am rotten I shall, please 
God, be Catholic still. He's premature, that's all ' 



COLD PORRIDGE 

" Rotten Catholic," yelped the boy, from a safe corner, 
by a church with a convenient alley hard by it. 

A clergyman was approaching the church and also a 
sort of nun, half-deaconess, half old-maid. On such a 
breezeless night it was odd how her garments could 
float so wide, as upon a gale. And how insistent were 
her feet .' Catholic nuns never have any so far as the 
public can depone. Protestant nuns are all feet. The 
elderly priest had been a schoolboy once, and they 
made him think of a schoolfellow, called Hart, who 
had the same peculiarity: when a certain psalm was 
sung all the choir would fix merciless eyes on him, and 
carol forth: "Thou shalt make his feet like Hart's 
feet." 

"Rotten Catholic!" yelled the lively boy, with 
renewed wind, and skipping again. 

The clergyman and the nun (so to speak) frowned : 
half as disapproving rudeness, and half wistfully : the 
rudest boy in Britain had never called " Catholic" after 
them, and never would. 

Which things are an allegory. 

On his homeward way, the elderly priest paused a 
moment in an open market, where a preacher, not 
indigenous, nor racy, of the somewhat lethargic soil, 
was lashing himself to imbecility, with denunciations 
of the Pope and the Pope's Church. He seemed to 
find it easy. It all depends on your starting-point and 
the distance you have to get. He was rather noisy, 
but he was also rather dull. His audience was not 
innumerable : and it hardly seemed on fire. It was not 
uninteresting to cast a glance on them. Some were 
easy creatures, not readily shoved into anger with 
people who came to their city to spend money in it : a 



340 COLD PORRIDGE 

confluence of Catholics they clearly esteemed a sort of 
protracted picnic, where the picnickers could not reason- 
ably be supposed capable of bringing their provisions 
with them in paper-bags : anyway they could not sleep 
in paper-bags, and fifteen hundred or two thousand 
Catholics, however erroneous their theology, must be 
good for local hotels. Many of those who came to scoff, 
and seemed disinclined to remain to pray, had the look 
of that class of youthful theologian that deals chiefly in 
graffiti on blank walls. They were not, apparently, 
elated. They wanted to hear something indecent, and 
wouldn't stop for anything else. 

A church clock or two began to strike. 

"Oh, fie! Oh, my! My eyes! What lies!" they 
called out, by way of preparation, and then struck 
solemnly. "Poof! Poof! Poof!" Another alle- 
gory : and, incontinently, it brought to the elderly 
priest's mind a rhyme he had not heard for years : 

" The man in the Moon 

Came down too soon, 
And lost his way to Norwich. 

The man from the south 

Has burned his mouth 
Eating of cold plum-porridge." 

Yes, the man belonged to the moon, and had lost his 
way completely ; and, eh, how cold the porridge was ! 



ONE never meets them : Weaker Brethren are never 
in company : like Mr. Chevy Slyme, it is their peculi- 
arity to be always round the corner. " He is," said Mr. 
Tigg, "round the corner at this instant. Now," said 
the gentleman, shaking his forefinger before his nose, 
and planting his legs wide apart as he looked attentively 
in Mr. Pecksniff's face, "that is a remarkably curious 
and interesting trait in Mr. Slyme's character, and 
whenever Slyme's life comes to be written, that trait 
must be thoroughly worked out by his biographer, or 
society will not be satisfied. Observe me, society will 
not be satisfied." 

In any treatise on Weaker Brethren that "comes 
to be written" that trait, which they share with Mr. 
Chevy Slyme, must be thoroughly worked out, or 
society will not be satisfied : but this is not a treatise, 
and we can merely allude to the curious and interesting 
feature in their character. Weaker Brethren, we say 
then, are never actually present : but they are always 
assumed as being round the corner. 

They are never seen any more than Mrs. Bennet's 
nerves: but that lady was not justified in supposing 
her husband to be oblivious of them. 

" You mistake me, my dear," he said. " I have a high 
respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I 
have heard you mention them with consideration these 
twenty years at least." 



341 



342 OF WEAKER BRETHREN 

We cannot see the Weaker Brethren, but we have a 
high respect for them: they are our old friends, and 
we have heard them mentioned with consideration for 
much more than twenty years by the time we are on 
the practical side of thirty. 

Except in being always round the corner, they do 
not at all resemble Mr. Tigg's friend. Messrs. Slyme 
and Tigg were not respectable, and they are all respect- 
ability. It is, perhaps, part of their weakness to 
imagine in themselves a monopoly of respectability. 
But then in their weakness lies their strength: they 
would not be Weaker Brethren at all, else, and they 
would not be important. 

No one doubts their importance. They often pre- 
vent things being done which admittedly ought to be 
done, or might be done with a large probability of use- 
fulness. True things are often left unsaid, even in 
pulpits, because Weaker Brethren might not like it. 
The weakness of Weaker Brethren is never in the 
tongue: they are not backward in criticism, though 
their strength is not best displayed in argument. It 
is precisely because they are impervious to argument 
that they are Weaker Brethren, and redoubtable. 

They are very long-sighted for future difficulties 
when anything is to be done which calls for courage 
rather than heavy calculation: cold water is their 
element; not for drinking purposes, or mere ablution, 
still less for floating anything, but for damping. For 
the quenching of smoking flax they are the gentry. 
They are not specially desirous of doing anything: 
what they enjoy is stopping things being done. When 
they cannot prevent something being done they are all 
for doing something else. If you have to build a 
church they will try to stop your building anything : 



OF 'WEAKER BRETHREN 343 

as a last resource they will insist you should build a 
school : if it is a school you want, they will vote for an 
institute instead. 

"There is," said Cardinal Manning long ago to 
the present writer, "a class of persons who have 
never done anything that mattered, or written any- 
thing that mattered, but have something to urge 
against anything anybody does and anything anybody 
writes." His Eminence was describing the Weaker 
Brethren. They are decent people in general, and 
never give scandal: they take it about once a week. 
To do so they esteem a sign of delicacy of conscience. 
The Saints were singularly backward in taking scandal, 
it was their own faults that shocked them; but the 
Saints were never Weaker Brethren. 

Children are never Weaker Brethren either, for 
children are simple, and simplicity is not a charac- 
teristic of the Weaker Brethren. There are countless 
numbers of grown persons who are as simple as 
children, and have much of the innocence of children, 
but innocence of even a higher kind, for it is not 
ignorance. They are never Weaker Brethren. The 
Duke of Wellington observed that he was much ex- 
posed to authors : editors, I suspect, are much exposed 
to Weaker Brethren ; but they do not publish all their 
letters. Priests suffer still more from them, for they 
inhabit everywhere and have not a mean opinion of 
their own judgment. Bishops probably receive many 
letters from them. It would be very wrong to forget 
that they have their rights : but perhaps there is more 
danger of their forgetting that the other brethren have 
rights, too. Much should be conceded to weakness of 
any kind : but not everything. For things have to be 
done, and inexpert criticism is not precisely motive 






OF WEAKER BRETHREN 

power, but only the drag on the wheel of motion : now 
a drag is all very well down a steep hill, but not quite 
so useful if it is desired to mount one. 

There were plenty of Weaker Brethren in Siena in 
St. Catherine's time, and they would have liked to 
extinguish her altogether. If Weaker Brethren had 
got their own way there would have been no restored 
Hierarchy in England. But they can't expect to get 
it always. St. Francis Xavier was terribly exposed to 
them : so was St. Ignatius, his master : they are not a 
modern growth, for in almost all the lives of the Saints 
they occur, though never as the principal character in 
the story. St. Thomas of Aquino would never have 
been a Dominican if they could have stopped him. 
They looked on without misgiving while the Blessed 
Joan of Arc was being burned at Rouen: but with 
much misgiving one of their ancestors looked on while 
the woman that was a sinner washed Our Master's feet 
with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her 
degraded head. Simon was only a Pharisee, we are 
not told he was a bad man : like the other Pharisee, he 
fasted and paid tithes, and behaved himself morally : 
he merely belonged to the Weaker Brethren and never 
suspected it. It is hard for decent people to suspect 
there is anything amiss with themselves. We can only 
guess what the ninety and nine feel when the Shepherd 
goes out into the wilderness to catch one wilful, silly 
sheep. But the strayed sheep must not bleat at the 
pushing welcome he receives in the fold : it is enough 
that the Shepherd thought it worth while to go out and 
bring him home. 






THE ROMAN ROAD 

WHILE this paper is being printed a certain number of 
our fellow-countrymen and countrywomen will be on 
the road to Rome : and it is fitting, as it is natural, that 
our thoughts should go with them. They go not as 
themselves only, but as a sort of Ambassadors to repre- 
sent us all. Many thousands, who must stay at home, 
would go, too, if they could: all should go in spirit. 
For the National Roman Pilgrimage concerns all the 
Catholics of England, and is more than the personal 
journey of them who are able to make it. It must 
carry with it all our hearts, and express for us all the 
fealty and faith of the whole Catholic people of this 
country. 

Time was when the Roman Road was very long, and 
very arduous : when the journey took a great while, and 
was not always free from hardship and danger. Saracens 
were at the very gate of Italy ready to swoop down 
upon the pilgrim from their mountain-eyrie by Fraxi- 
neto. But still the English pilgrims went to the Tomb 
of the Apostles, and to the feet of St. Peter's "Vicar. 
Long after the danger of Saracens had ceased, there 
were difficulties ; and the journey even down to our own 
times was very costly. Now it is easy, and quick, and 
grown very cheap. But such cheapness is comparative. 
Scores of thousands who would long to make the 
Roman Pilgrimage have not the means. Perhaps some 
of them might be able if they would make it a slow, 

345 



346 THE ROMAN ROAD 

deliberate purpose, and save a little from year to year 
that they might put together enough to make the 
Roman pilgrimage at least once in their lives. Poorish 
people save as much for less important things. And 
to have made the Roman Pilgrimage once in life they 
would find to be more than a memory, it would be a 
possession. Many holidays are far more costly, and 
none could be remembered as this : we do not wish to 
speak of the devout journey to St. Peter's Tomb and 
Throne as a mere holiday : but it is true that the pil- 
grimage is not meant to be a dolorous penance. The 
pilgrims of old days had as much faith and piety as 
any, but they were a jocund folk, or Chaucer described 
out of his own head. 

This idea of representation on the Roman Pilgrimage, 
simple as it is, and obvious, hardly seems to be enough 
remembered and acted upon. Of those who cannot go 
themselves not all are hindered by lack of money ; some 
are too old, and some too delicate ; and of these many 
are rich enough to go or to send others in their stead. 
Is that often done ? Many a poor relation might well 
carry to Rome a wealthier kinsman's vota: and such 
vota would be doubled, offered as they would be in his 
person, or hers, who went, and in his name, or hers, 
who gave the means. 

Again, a whole family might join to send one mem- 
ber, and this would involve no great cost for any one 
member of it. Thousands are rich enough to put by 
some slight thank-offering to St. Peter every time they 
go to Confession ; and such alms, clubbed together by 
a family, would easily equip a pilgrim to carry to St. 
Peter's Tomb, and St. Peter's Seat, the whole gratitude 
of the family for what St. Peter does for them, year by 
year, in the gracious sacrament of reconciliation. Do 



THE ROMAN ROAD 347 

we remember, I wonder, when we receive absolution, 
that it is St. Peter's special sacrament ? He is the arch- 
custodian of them all, but in this the sacrament of our 
daily need, the medicine of our quotidian fevers and 
sicknesses, we are brought into a life-long personal rela- 
tion with him. Are we half mindful enough of it, half 
grateful enough to the Christ-appointed Patron Saint 
of the Confessional? To him the keys were given: 
every priest that absolves us does it by his authority, 
and by delegation from him. The Fisherman himself 
sits in every Confessional of the world, with keen and 
eager eyes scanning the waste of waters, turbid waters, 
and muddy, dark and troubled, to catch our souls for 
Christ. Is this duly remembered ? Each may choose 
his patron-saint for himself: there are of every sort, so 
that every sort of man and woman may see in all these 
mirrors of Christ's perfectness that which may most 
surely draw him or her to the love of Christ by cords 
of a man, Adam-strings of the manhood that is Christ's 
and was the Saints' too. 

But as we are all sinners, and all need penance and 
forgiveness, Christ Himself chose St. Peter to be 
Patron Saint of all : the shadow of his gold and silver 
keys lies over all our lives, for without the golden love 
and silver sorrow of his sacrament of healing we are all 
dead men. So that thousands of times in our lives 
St. Peter and we meet in a matter of poignant interest, 
ineffable consequence : to forget it is to forget half of 
St. Peter's perennial office in the Church. The other 
half is his office of perpetual and indefectible teacher. 
That we are Catholics at all implies devotion to him : 
shall we be content if our gratitude is implicit only ? 
The best thing about the best of us is that we are 
Catholics : Papists, as those outside, with a just instinct, 



348 THE ROMAN ROAD 

call us for nick-name. Pope-folk are Peter-folk, and 
Catholics are Peter's folk, holding unspilt and unsullied 
the Peter-faith which Christ promised he should carry 
in his storm-vexed ship unwrecked, till this bitter sea 
of time is crossed at last, and Peter's passengers shall 
have been landed by him on the shores of that other 
sea, unvexed by cloud or storm that smiles beneath the 
great White Throne of God. And those who take the 
Roman Road travel not only to Peter's tomb ; they go, 
not only to venerate his relics unviolated through 
nineteen centuries, but to offer homage at his un- 
shaken throne. Peter lives, not in heaven alone, but 
on earth; for he is perpetual Viceroy till the King 
comes again. His word is not a written memory, a 
manuscript, a monument, but a living voice speaking 
through live lips that human ears can hear. 

That voice is more than an echo among the Seven 
Hills: it is an utterance never stilled, never silent. 
And so it has no staleness and no novelty, but sounds 
in many tones a steadfast, divine unison. The world 
itself knows it, and ever turns, half-astonished, pricking 
averse ears, in spite of itself, to hear what that change- 
less voice shall say : often it hears with bitter protest, 
. for the light, sweet burden is intolerable to many, who 
want no burden at all but such as they pile for them- 
selves; and, that Christ will not change Himself, nor 
wear new suits, and babble new promises, is a hard 
hearing for them. Though He sent them Moses from the 
dead, and the prophets, they would not listen ; for they 
want a Moses with no law in his hands, and prophets 
with no God-Man upon their lips. 

But for us : we lift our eyes to the hills, whence help 
came hither when this was Britain, and whence it came 
again when Christian Britain had become heathen 



THE ROMAN ROAD 349 

Saxon-land : Rome brought our fathers to Christ, and 
Rome keeps us His. The least we can render back is 
our leal homage and gratefulness. If we be too poor, 
or too old, or too weak to carry our bodies down that 
glorious road, we can send our hearts in their hands 
who go ; and bid them, who go for us, with their lips 
pray for us beside the Apostle's tomb, and with their 
lips kiss for us the tired feet of him who holds the keys 
that have so often opened again for us the gates our 
sins had shut against ourselves. 



OF SAINTS AND WORTHIES 

THE Protestant Reformers were great abolitionists ; they 
promised themselves the abolition of all sorts of things 
the Pope, purgatory, indulgences, sacred images, 
sacraments, saints, and much besides. In the case of 
the Pope the procedure was to be by the method of 
division : infallibility was thenceforth to reside in every- 
body everybody, that is to say, who did not remain 
Catholic ; for a judgment that should happen to coincide 
with that of the Pope and of some hundreds of millions 
of Christians still adhering to the Pope, however private, 
could never claim the noble prerogatives of real privacy. 
In the case of the saints there arose another sort of 
substitutes. Instead of saints the reformed churches 
plumed themselves on Worthies. Luther, Calvin, 
Melancthon, Zwingle, and the rest of them, were not set 
up as saints, and no one can be greatly surprised. The 
title of saint had, in the course of fifteen hundred years, 
acquired a meaning so definite that to apply it to any 
of those personages would have suggested comparisons 
proverbially odious. And the meaning of the word 
saint was not one acceptable to the Reformers. In the 
first place, all the saints had from immemorial time 
been singularly Roman Catholic. Differing immensely 
in personal characteristics, in worldly rank, in education, 
in natural tastes, in a thousand other ways, they had 
all been distinguished by a peculiar loyalty to the 
Catholic Faith and to the visible Head of the Church 

350 



OF SAINTS AND WORTHIES 351 

that was both Catholic and Roman, Catholic in univer- 
sality, as opposed to nationality or localism, and Roman 
as having the Bishop of Rome for its supreme earthly 
head, and Rome as its metropolis and central seat of 
government and authority. The saints, too, had been 
pestilently Roman Catholic in other ways, as they had 
shown by their prayers and their pious practices. They 
went to Confession, they heard Mass, they adored the 
Divine Prisoner of Love in His white shackles of the 
Blessed Sacrament, they venerated sacred relics and 
images, they went pilgrimages to holy places, they loved 
and glorified Christ's Mother, and made hymns in 
honour of her and her unique prerogatives ; they sought 
her intercession and that of the martyrs and other great 
servants of God. Many of them were monks or nuns, 
many of them had actually been Popes. They used 
great austerities on their own bodies, they bound them- 
selves by vows to perpetual chastity, to religious 
obedience and religious poverty. They did worse than 
all this, for they wrought miracles hi life and after 
death. English or French, Spanish or Italian, German 
or African, they were all alike in being intolerably and 
incurably Catholic : mere Papists all of them. It was 
inevitable that the Reformers should dislike and miscall 
them. For centuries these canonised Popes and car- 
dinals, bishops, abbots, monks, nuns, and so on, had 
been keeping alive the wicked superstition that the 
Catholic Church is the home and house of sanctity. 
The Reformers did not like either them or their sanctity ; 
in the reformed churches they should have no home, 
and they never have had. So far these abolitionists 
have been as good as their word; the old-fashioned 
sanctity did not, indeed, obey the proclamation that it 
was to die out. Saints of the original type and quality 



352 OF SAINTS AND WORTHIES 

went on appearing; the Reformation period produced 
a singularly notable group of them, as heroic as ever, 
as supernatural, as inexplicable by human standards 
and logic. But the new saints did not swarm in the 
new hives of reformed Christianity. It was not in any 
one of the new religious bodies that they showed them- 
selves; but they went on blossoming on the old tree 
that had always borne them, just as if the dropping 
off of dead and rotten boughs had made no difference. 
No complaint can reasonably be made of the Reforma- 
tion churches' peculiar objection to the post-Reformation 
saints, for the post-Reformation saints proved them- 
selves, one and all, peculiarly opposed to the Reformation 
doctrines and ideals. 

If saints of the old sort have continued to appear in 
the old Church, the Reformers have not been troubled 
by anything of the kind within their own gates. So 
far they have succeeded; without precisely abolishing 
sanctity, the superstitious sanctity so obnoxious in 
Papal religion, they have kept their own ranks quite 
clear of it. 

There have been no Reformation saints, which would 
seem almost a providential circumstance, as it would be 
hard to decide whose business it would have been, had 
any supervened, to canonise them. The Church of 
England produced a Royal martyr, but poor Charles I 
was never much revered by overseas Protestants, and 
his cult even at home was chiefly confined to a vener- 
able political party now equally defunct with himself. 
Those who did not belong to that party seem to have 
thought that even cutting off that head could never 
put much into it, and that the martyr to some extent 
fell a victim to his unlucky predilection for telling fibs. 
He was not, at all events, our Martyr, and it does not 



concern us to be Advocatus Diaboli or Promoter 
Causes ; but I would wish to say, frankly, that I for my 
part do not ascribe the King's execution to his faults, 
but to the ambition and hypocrisy of his enemies. 
That he was a saint I do not believe ; that he was better 
than nine-tenths of the Protestant worthies I do firmly 
believe. Had he been a saint I doubt whether- either 
Laud or Strafford would have been beheaded. That he 
and they died very nobly no enemy of theirs has ever 
tried to deny. Charles I and Laud were not by any 
means Protestant worthies, but they were among the 
best of the Anglican. 

Real Protestant worthies were creatures like the 
unspeakable Knox, and the really disreputable Burnet ; 
but out of Scotland the former has never been admired, 
and even in England the latter has long been recog- 
nised as a conscienceless time-serving courtier and 
sycophant who would have been glad to play Cranmer 
to Charles II's Henry VIII, had that too much decried 
scapegrace been willing to descend to such infamy as 
the royal author of the Reformation in England un- 
blushingly perpetrated. 

Tillotson was a worthy, too, and the Archbishop of 
Canterbury was a far better man than the Bishop of 
Salisbury; but even the Benchers of Lincoln's Inn, 
whose chaplain he was in 1664, complained that "since 
Mr. Tillotson came, Jesus Christ has not been preached 
among us." If he was not Christian enough even for 
a corporation of Restoration lawyers, his Christianity 
must have been vague indeed. Still, it was enough to 
plant him on the throne of St. Augustine, St. Anselm, and 
St. Thomas a Becket, not in the time of Charles II, for 
Charles gave no mitre either to him or Burnet, but in 
that of the Prince of Orange, another Protestant worthy 

z 



354 OF SAINTS AND WORTHIES 

and Patron-Worthy of all Protestants in Ireland to this 
day. If ever Protestantism could have longed to 
canonise anyone, William of Orange would have been 
the man, though whether the process would have been 
carried out by the States-General of Holland, the 
Parliament of England, or the Orange lodges of Ireland 
no one can now determine. Henry VIII and his 
daughter Elizabeth (of virginal memory) have always 
been regarded as Proto-worthies by the full-blooded 
Protestant, by whom the elder monarch's bluff 
adulteries have never been counted to him for un- 
righteousness, who can never perceive that he was 
simply a bad and villainous Catholic, and that Elizabeth 
was merely a sceptical autocrat with no idea of per- 
mitting in her realms any religion she could not carry 
in her own pocket. Father and daughter hanged 
priests and tried to lay the Pope under an interdict; 
so they are Protestant worthies and entitled to the 
smug halo of the same. The royal triad is completed 
by Edward VI, also a worthy, in addition to being 
an anaemic prig, which Protestant worthies usually 
are not. 

But the race is not confined to princely personages 
and Erastian Bishops. (Hoadly deserves a niche to 
himself, and it is a shame to mention him thus in 
parenthesis.) Oliver Cromwell was a worthy, and he 
was no king, though that was really not his fault. Sir 
Walter Raleigh was another, as was Drake, as were 
Hawkins and Frobisher, all very eminent men and fine 
seadogs ; but it was not their valour or sea-science that 
made them worthies, it was their fondness for piratical 
enterprises against Catholic Spain. Titus Oates was a 
worthy, and to this day there are those who love him 
none the less for the infamy of his life. If his vices 



OF SAINTS AND WORTHIES 355 

did not lean to virtue's side they were enlisted against 
the Catholics, and the multitude of his sins was more 
useful than any amount of charity could have been. 

Some of the worthies had none of the high colouring 
distinctive of a few whom we have mentioned; they 
were harmless, half-forgotten men of letters like Fuller, 
himself the historian of the worthies, and to his book 
the reader may refer who wants more detailed instances. 
He will find among them many very respectable people, 
some famous in their day, some still remembered. But 
what will strike the Catholic reader most is the singular 
difference between these Reformation worthies and the 
saints of the old religion. The former at their best 
scaled the giddy heights of respectability; to have 
attempted more would have been to risk their place 
among the worthies. What would Burnet have been 
had he aimed at sanctity ? We can only say that he 
would certainly not have been Burnet. It is to be 
regretted that they were not all respectable. Had 
Henry VIII been so, Queen Elizabeth would never have 
existed. 






OF GREAT AGE 

LORD MELBOURNE is supposed to have said that the 
best of the Order of the Garter was that there was no 
" D d nonsense of merit about it." We must suppose 
he meant that it was given, not for anything you might 
have done, but for what or who you were. Perhaps 
that is why others besides Lord Melbourne so deeply 
venerate them who get it. 

For it is odd how much more people are esteemed 
for things they cannot help than for things they do of 
themselves. Most kings can't help it: they are born 
so, not precisely kings, but with circumstances so 
powerfully in favour of their becoming kings that they 
only have to wait and it happens. Sovereigns who 
do it of their own accord are not so much admired. 
Napoleon could perfectly help becoming an emperor, 
but he didn't try, and an emperor he became, and it 
was the only thing for which anybody could laugh 
at him. And even regular kings, who have to 
be, because their fathers were before them, are not 
commonly thought so much of on account of their 
virtues as for the fact that they are kings. It is the 
inherited sovereignty that dazzles, not the wisdom or 
excellence. When a hundred thousand persons wait for 
many hours in the rain to see a king go by, it is not 
because he is as good a man as any in his realm, but 
because he is the only one in it who can, off the stage 
use a sceptre instead of an umbrella if he pleases. 

356 






OF GREAT AGE 357 

And so of all high birth. Nobody that has it can 
help it. The most industrious ingenuity is unable to 
arrange it. Even Chinese emperors could not ennoble 
folks' ancestors in such a manner as to cause the 
ancestors to have been noble. There is no nonsense of 
merit about high birth : if you have got it you may not 
deserve it, and though you deserve it never so much 
you cannot attain it by your deserving if it happens to 
be wanting. And that is precisely why it is really 
esteemed. Almost anything can happen to you in a 
Republic : your father may have been a crossing- 
sweeper, and you may be a senator. Your father may 
have been a senator, and you may be a perfectly honest 
man. But even in a Republic you cannot rise to be 
well-born : that is why in Republics they are so fear- 
fully in earnest about pedigrees. Again, if you, my 
dear reader, are a miracle of beauty, you can't help it. 
That is why you are so immensely applauded for it. 
If you could prove that you were originally a hideous 
person, and had arrived at your present degree of 
loveliness by industry and no sparing of expense, every- 
one would laugh at you. If you could convince us that 
your wonderful hair was a matter of faultless taste and 
judicious choice, and an ungrudging purse; that your 
left eye was your own idea, and selected from a thousand 
others by an unerring judgment, to fill a hollow left by 
nature or accident; that your teeth replace a row of 
uncouth tusks, extracted anything but painlessly ; that 
your complexion was not a gift but a purchase why, 
how we should all pish and giggle at you. 

If Mary Stuart had made herself the loveliest woman 
of her day, and had meekly explained the process, she 
might have outlived Queen Elizabeth, but not the gibes 
of Elizabeth's courtiers. 



358 OF GREAT AGE 

Beauty is accounted meritorious because no one by 
any degree of merit can achieve it. 

And, next to high birth and beauty, and the Order of 
the Garter, there is nothing folk so much pride them- 
selves upon as great age. The public admits the claim 
and applauds. The newpapers chronicle the meritorious 
circumstance, and the sovereign telegraphs approval. 
He has to; it is his business, in a constitutional 
country, to reflect the feeling of his people. For sixty 
years you may have been doing your duty very labori- 
ously, nay, for seventy-five there is nothing magical 
in those numbers : you are not commemorated in even 
the column that records that a Mrs. Smith has had 
triplets (and she could not help that either), and that 
the sovereign of a Balkan State has "assumed the 
regal title." But twiddle your thumbs till you are a 
centenarian, and you are sure of your paragraph. Let 
your youngest daughter be turned of eighty, and all 
Tallis Street will encourage you to go on doing nothing 
in particular for, if possible, another decade. 

People are apt in middle-life to resent the circum- 
stance and hate you for seeming aware of it. Wait 
a bit. Wait a good bit. No one frankly admits the 
foul offence of being nearer sixty than fifty, but no one 
over ninety can resist boasting of it. Some attribute 
it to having never eaten salt, some to never having 
eaten anything else. Some to being life-long total ab- 
stainers, others to having never abstained from any- 
thing. But it is not the cause that interests us ; for at 
our own age, say, at sixty, we cannot begin to be life- 
long abstainers from salt, or from nothing : it is the 
mere longevity that is admired. 

Those who write reminiscences of eighty or ninety 
years are so alive to the merit that is really theirs that 



Or GREAT AGE 359 

they endeavour to enhance it by linking on their own 
lives to someone else's. "I was not born till 1815," 
says the autobiographer, " and I do not remember the 
Battle of Waterloo; but my grandmother (Georgiana 
Duchess of St. Ives and Chiltern) often described to me 
her godfather, George I, who died when she was seven. 
Hie grandmother was the Winter Queen, and could, of 
course, remember James I, her father. So that I have 
been kissed by one who was kissed by a king who had 
often been slapped by a lady that the first Stuart King 
of England had corrected for childish faults. It seems 
to bring one very near to Queen Elizabeth, whom the 
Modern Solomon succeeded." In this way the remi- 
niscencer can introduce anecdotes of the Tudor court 
as if they belonged to himself. 

Are we laughing at great age ? God forbid we should 
at age, or youth, or venerable childhood. If Jaques 
talks of the mewling and puking babe, the slippered 
pantaloon, the second childishness and mere oblivion, 
there is more sadness than gibe in it : he is the melan- 
choly Jaques. And be sure there was no gibe in the 
great tragic-comedian who put the seven stages in his 
mouth. He would not be Shakespeare without a 
reverence for every phase of our poor human life. 
Winter has beauties more lovely and more poignant 
than any of summer's ; not sadder than autumn's, nor 
less divinely hopeful than any in spring. The year's 
resurrection is nearer in frozen January than in many- 
hued October. The dawn is loveliest on a February 
morning, when the sun, unrisen yet, turns all its frosty 
pearl to opal, than in staring August, when day comes 
hustling back before the earth has had time to rest her 
dazzled eyes. 

To the sight of the aged there comes a change that 



360 OF GREAT AGE 

is not an accident nor a failing: near things and 
little are no longer seen so well ; their detail is merged 
and softened. But the great distant things are drawn 
nearer, and the eyes seek them the more willingly that 
the small, petty things at hand are grown mistier. You 
shall note the gaze of the very old turned oftenest to 
far horizons, especially if these rise to heights behind 
which the clouds sink with day-fall. Another light than 
that on the child's is on their faces, or the same come 
back and falling from the same place at a wider angle. 
It fades often from the child-face, or loses itself in 
a hotter and more common light : from the old white 
face it is the shadows that fall away, while the sun, 
unrisen yet, foretells the full dawn in a glow of un- 
earthly delicacy and radiance. 



MARE'S NESTS AND MUCH 
BOASTING 

SOMETHING in a paper never read by the present writer 
was quoted to him the other day, and, as it was only a 
quotation, it would be worse than temerarious to attempt 
a requotation. But the point urged appears to have 
been that Catholics, if not the Catholic Church, make 
undue parade of accessions to our religion from other 
bodies, as, for instance, from the Church of England. 
That those who join us make some sort of boast of it, 
and so do we on their account ; whereas recessions occur 
from our Church to other bodies, as to the Church of 
England, and the receders make no boast of it, nor is 
any made on their behalf by the religion which satisfies, 
better than ours, their ideals of unity, sanctity, catho- 
licity, and apostolicity. It is not meant that the above 
phrasing represents that of the paragraphs in the news- 
paper ; it is merely what I understood to represent the 
subject matter of the complaint or twit. Probably there 
was no allusion to the unity, sanctity, catholicity, or 
apostolicity of the religion, or religions, whither lapsed 
Catholics may betake themselves. 

Is there any truth in the assertion conveyed ? Are 
we concerned to deny it altogether ? I do not see that 
we are. 

If those who become Catholics boast of what they 
have done, self-righteously, they are in fault, as all self- 



362 MARKS NESTS AND MUCH BOASTING 

righteousness is faulty. If they held themselves as 
though their conversion were so great a thing for the 
Church that the Church ought to feel herself slightly 
overpowered by the honour done to her, they would 
show themselves singularly lacking in a sense of pro- 
portion. But they may glory in finding themselves 
where they are without any personal boast in the 
matter: the woman in the Scripture who found the 
groat she had been seeking called her friends and 
neighbours together to rejoice with her, and He who 
tells us of it does not blame her ; and the true faith is 
a greater find than a groat. The rejoicing is a sign of 
appreciation of the thing found, and need not imply 
vanity or self-consequence. I think it is true that our 
converts do so rejoice, and their joy does not quickly 
evaporate : it does not wear away when the novelty of 
their position, as co-heirs of all the Church's treasures, 
has been worn away, but deepens through life and is 
deepest when life itself is ending. 

It may be true that those who leave the Catholic 
Church for some other make no boast, personal or 
otherwise. It is very likely. They may betray no pride 
and no elation: and one does not wonder. It is a 
humble moment; and, if they are aware of it, it may 
mean some remnant of grace. At all events their silence 
cannot surprise us. If they abstain from calling friends 
and neighbours to rejoice with them, they doubtless 
have their own reasons, and one who is no wizard may 
divine them. To rejoice, even rather loudly, over 
treasure-trove is as natural as it is human and harmless : 
to make much cry over the acquisition of a mare's nest 
only proclaims an imbecility it were better to hide. To 
find your mare's nest, and hold your tongue about it, is 
a natural result of some suspicion as to the importance 



363 

of your discovery. It would not appear that we are 
much concerned to deny that converts to Catholicity 
arrive with a sense of elation and delight they are 
unable to repress ; and that receders from Catholicity 
withdraw with all reasonable meekness, in perfect silence, 
and without the least tendency to betray elation, or 
even relief. 

But does the Catholic Church, or do Catholics, make 
a great to-do over the arrival of converts ? These are 
two separate questions though one in principle. The 
Catholic Church at large is not commonly aware of the 
accession of converts unless they arrive in masses, so to 
speak, or their importance is peculiarly significant in 
some special way. If it could be aware of each in- 
dividual conversion it would rejoice over each, as the 
Good Shepherd in the parable rejoiced over the finding 
of the one sheep that had been wandering hi the 
wilderness. When converts are made in striking 
numbers the Church, and her Head on earth, are aware 
of it, and there is great rejoicing : so there has been in 
Rome over the conversion of whole nations brought to 
the faith by the apostolic men Rome has sent forth to 
carry God's truth to them. 

On ordinary occasions it is different. If the writer of 
the gibe, or complaint, we speak of, were to be con- 
verted to Catholicity, the Pope would perhaps not be 
informed, nor would the Catholics in America, Australia, 
or even Austria : and Rome, New York, Melbourne, and 
Vienna would go on just as if nothing particular had 
happened. If, however, the fact were known in all those 
places it would cause rejoicing : not that the Universal 
Church had escaped a great menace, or plumed her cap 
with a remarkable feather, but because another soul 
had been brought to what is meant for the safety and 



364 MARE'S NESTS AND MUCH BOASTING 

sanctification of all souls. In the meantime those who 
did know would be glad: not all Rome (such is the 
defective supply of information even in these days of 
telegrams and postcards), nor all the Catholic Church 
in England, or Bayswater, but all Catholics who should 
know that another spiritual brother had been born to 
them. 

Converts themselves should know as much about it 
as those who have not the least intention of becoming 
converts. What is their experience ? Did we find, 
when we became Catholics, that the Catholic Church 
had her head turned ? Did the Pope suffer from an 
accession of blood to the head ? It was a great day for 
us : was it made a festival for Christendom ? Was the 
priest who received us promoted, or has he since con- 
fided to us his just disappointment at the delay in his 
promotion ? Was all Catholic Battersea agog, and the 
Archbishop of Canterbury, even anonymously, warned 
that he had better look out Mr. Smith had turned 
Catholic, and the Established Religion was on its last 
legs? 

Nay, but Mr. Smith is given a friendly welcome and 
a friendly warning. He has made a beginning, let him 
see to it that he walks worthily of the great grace God 
has given him. He is a child of the Church now, but 
her babe; let him learn, and let him, above all, learn 
obedience. Of babes not much else is required. Much 
talking is not seemly in babies : they are but stammerers, 
and precocious speech is seldom instructive. He is not 
greatly flattered, but he is sincerely congratulated. He 
has done as good a day's work in becoming a Catholic 
as he could do under the circumstances. Certainly he 
is congratulated on his own account, not because the 
Church stood in special need of him, but because he 



MARE'S NESTS AND MUCH BOASTING 365 

and all men stand in great need of her. Is there no 
such congratulation for the neophyte who flings himself 
into the arms of the Church of England ? Has she no 
such embrace for him ? Why not ? Is there no warm 
congratulation ? Does such congratulation seem out of 
place ? It may be. I, for one, can believe it. Perhaps 
those to whom he goes wonders why he comes. What 
brings him ? What has he to gain spiritually, what 
is he willing, spiritually, to lose ? Dr. Johnson was a 
devout Anglican, a hundred times more devout an 
Anglican than any thousand Anglicans you shall 
commonly meet. " I shall never," said he, " be a Papist, 
unless on the near approach of death, of which I have 
a very great terror." What says he of converts from 
" Protestantism to Popery " and vice versa ? " A man," 
declared the Doctor, "who is converted from Pro- 
testantism to Popery, may be sincere: he parts with 
nothing : he is only superadding to what he already had. 
But a convert from Popery to Protestantism gives up 
so much of what he has held as sacred as anything that 
he retains . . . there is so much laceration of mind in 
such a conversion, that it can hardly be sincere and 
lasting." 

Laceration of mind hardly begets elation in those 
who have to endure it : and if they who welcome them 
do so with a calm that is much like coldness, who can 
wonder ? 

Many receders from Catholicity even abstain from 
making their names public, we are told, and, upon my 
word, I can readily believe it. 









IN our last paper we spoke of the difference alleged to 
exist in the bearing of converts to Catholicity from that 
of such as have left the Church for some other religious 
body. But there are differences other than those of 
bearing and demeanour ; and it may be worth while to 
allude to them briefly. 

To many Catholics it comes with a shock of surprise 
to learn that there are people who leave the Church 
with deliberate intention. In many missions and 
parishes such a thing has never happened within their 
memory. They hear with horror that there is a con- 
siderable annual leakage in England ; but they under- 
stand that for the most part the leakage is due not to 
any wilful decision of adult Catholics to abandon the 
faith of our fathers, but to quite other causes, however 
deplorable. Some of the causes given are the follow- 
ing: Children of Catholic parents are left orphans, 
and without relations willing or able to support them ; 
such children are taken into workhouses or homes, and 
are brought up in non-Catholic religions, either through 
ignorance of what their parents' religion was, or through 
a more or less deliberate unwillingness that they should 
receive Catholic instruction. Or, in the case of a mixed 
marriage, the Catholic parent dies ; the children, being 
still very young, no longer receive Catholic instruction, 
either because the non-Catholic parent is glad to recede 
from his undertaking, or because he or she is too 



366 



OF LAPSE AND LOSSES 307 

indifferent. In many instances the surviving non- 
Catholic parent sends the children to a non -Catholic 
school because it is, or claims to be, of a higher standing 
than any Catholic school in the neighbourhood. In 
many cases the surviving non-Catholic parent marries 
again, and marries a non-Catholic, and the step-parent 
is more indifferent or more antagonistic to the religion 
of the Catholic children than their remaining parent. 
It is not difficult to understand how little chance, under 
such circumstances, there is of the semi-orphan Catholic 
children being brought up in the religion of their dead 
father or mother. 

Again, children who are not drafted into workhouses, 
or homes, or industrial schools, but who have lost one 
or both parents, are often received into the families of 
non-Catholic relations: even where both the deceased 
parents were Catholics, such people are not always 
willing that their adopted children should have a 
religion different from their own. Where only one 
parent was Catholic, and the children are taken home 
by the relations of the non-Catholic parent, they are 
very unlikely to receive a Catholic education. The 
non-Catholic parent may survive, but may be quite 
indifferent, or unwilling to propose vexatious conditions 
to those who are relieving him, or her, of the support of 
children it is convenient to be rid of : that convenience 
is specially obvious in the case of poverty, or in the 
case of the surviving non-Catholic parent wishing to 
marry again. 

All these cases must be of such frequent occurrence 
in an enormous population like that of England, that, 
though we may be startled to hear any estimate of their 
numbers, we can hardly be astonished. It is truly 
lamentable to hear of them, but in none of these cases 






368 OF LAPSE AND LOSSES 

does the lapse of those who ought to be Catholics 
suggest the least choice or deliberation on the part of 
the lapsed. The faith was never relinquished by them, 
but simply withheld from them. 

What shocks as well as distresses is to hear of grown 
people, brought up Catholics, lapsing from the Church. 
Of what sort are they, and how does it happen ? 

In some instances it comes about thus : A Catholic 
makes a mixed marriage, and makes it in the worst 
way possible, without seeking any dispensation and 
without making, or asking the non-Catholic party to 
make, the undertakings necessary in order to secure a 
dispensation. The marriage takes place, therefore, in 
a non-Catholic place of worship, or in a registry-office. 
The Catholic willing to do this either marries a person 
without religion, or with religious prejudices hostile to 
the Catholic Faith; and in either case a Catholic in- 
different enough to behave thus will probably be easily 
open to the irreligious or anti-Catholic influence of the 
other party. In such cases the nominal Catholic, who 
has begun by violating the law of the religion thus 
loosely professed, is very apt to continue an outlaw, and 
to remain in that neglect of the practices of religion 
which is so nearly certain to end in complete, if gradual, 
loss of all faith. Such loss of Catholic faith is grievous 
and lamentable, but it does not count as an accession to 
any other opposed religion. In very much rarer in- 
stances the Catholic who has shown himself or herself 
thus careless of his own, or her own, religion is drawn 
by the non-Catholic to frequent non-Catholic places of 
worship, and to become more or less informally, if 
practically, a member of that other religion. Such 
cases are by no means common, even when there has 
been a mixed marriage in a registry-office or non- 



OF LAPSE AND LOSSES 369 

Catholic place of worship. Where they do occur they 
prove chiefly this, that the Church is wise in her strict 
conditions as to the permission of mixed marriages, and 
that those who violate the condition are but nominally 
Catholics. They illustrate the truth that it is only a 
very bad sort of Catholic who is ready to fling aside 
what can barely be called his faith for some other 
religious profession. 

Again, there are cases where, mixed marriages apart, 
Catholics so progressively neglect the practice of religion 
that they lapse from religion altogether, and finally 
cease even to call themselves Catholic. Such as these 
seldom join any other religious body : when they do, it 
is scarcely because they even profess to find hi it a 
loftier presentation of faith or a higher standard of 
morals ; but rather because there is no absolute rule of 
faith, and morals are left to private taste and judgment. 
Their adhesion to the,' new religious body is chiefly 
outward, and involves no special admiration of it. To 
be free to believe as little as you like, and to be relieved 
from the recurrent obligations of Catholic practice, is a 
great convenience if you have become very nearly an 
agnostic. 

It may be urged that some cases might be produced 
of undeniably earnest Catholics having lapsed. But 
such cases would, if examined individually, be found to 
range themselves into two very small classes. The first 
would consist of persons who had been converts to the 
Catholic faith, but had probably never truly grasped it ; 
who had, in reality, perhaps, never been Catholics at all. 
They joined the Church for sentimental or aesthetic 
reasons, without ever arriving at the idea of an infallible 
authority, out of a sort of preference, not out of any 
conviction of the obligation of belief. If it be contended 



- 



370 OF LAPSE AND LOSSES 

that those who have left the Church for other bodies 
and return to it, return to it for the same reason 
because they never were convinced and real Protestants 
at all, I am not concerned to deny the probability of 
the contention. 

But two small classes were mentioned above ; the other 
consists of a very few individuals, but of individuals of 
more note, for seriousness and earnestness. In each 
instance it will be found that these persons have been led 
astray into some teachings or professions which have led 
to ecclesiastical prohibitions and censures : not until they 
fell under the Church's condemnations have they shown 
any disposition to leave her. Even under condemna- 
tion, and even when refusing to submit to the Church's 
rulings, they have not commonly joined any other 
church : when they have done so, it is not because they 
specially admire that other church, but on the principle 
that any port is better than none in a storm, and 
because of the convenience of belonging to a body that 
exacts no profession of faith. They shelter there faute 
de mieux, not because they profess to think it best of all. 
The Church will not allow them to call themselves her 
members and teach what is not her teaching, so they 
loosely attach themselves where they may teach as they 
choose. 

The significance of conversions to the Church, on the 
other hand, very greatly depends on the fact that con- 
version to it implies and necessitates a definite accept- 
ance and profession of the whole of her faith. The 
Church will not admit those who merely dislike the 
religious teaching of other bodies ; she does not open 
her arms to those who find other religions too strict in 
exacting conformity to some rule of faith, or standard 
of practice : what she demands is conformity, and more 






OF LAPSE AND LOSSES 371 

than conformity, inward acceptance, of her whole rule 
of faith, and of her ordinary practice. No priest would 
receive into the Church a person whose confession of 
faith amounted only to condemnation of the Thirty- 
nine Articles, or who betrayed his intention of not 
hearing Mass every Sunday, or not going to Confession 
and receiving Holy Communion according to ecclesi- 
astical law. 

No one does, or could, become a Catholic because he 
had lapsed into practical agnosticism, or because he 
had fallen under the censures of any other religious 
authority. 

To re-state what is so obvious may seem dry and 
tedious enough, but it happens to make all the differ- 
ence. It suggests very simply a reason why non- 
Catholic bodies should make but small capital out of 
lapses from our Church to theirs. There is not much 
wool, and no great wonder if there be very little cry. 



THE END 




Printed by BALLANTTNE, HAK8ON & CO. 

Edinburgh fr London 






A CLASSIFIED LIST OF WORKS 

MAINLY BY 

ROMAN CATHOLIC 
WRITERS 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAGS 

STONYHURST PHILOSOPHICAL SERIES 2 

THE WESTMINSTER LIBRARY 3 

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 4 

FOR THE CLERGY AND STUDENTS . ... . 5 

BIOGRAPHY 7 

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE CHURCH 8 

LIVES OP THE FRIAR SAINTS 9 

HISTORY ".10 

WORKS BY THE AUTHOR OF "THE LIFE OF A PRIG" . 11 

EDUCATIONAL 12 

POETRY, FICTION, ETC 14 

NOVELS BY M. E. FRANCIS (MRS. FRANCIS BLUNDELL) . 16 

WORKS BY THE VERY REV. CANON SHEEHAN, D.D. . . 16 

WORKS BY CARDINAL NEWMAN 17 

INDEX 22 



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MESSRS. LONGMANS' LIST OF WORKS 



Stonyhurst Philosophical Series. 

Edited by RICHARD F. CLARKE, S.J. 

Extract from a Letter of His Holiness the Pope to the Bishop of Salford, 
on the Philosophical Course at Stonyhurst. 

" You will easily understand, Venerable Brother, the pleasure We felt in what you re- 
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their students text-books of Philosophy, following the Principles of St. Thomas Aquinas. 
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LOGIC. By RICHARD F. CLARKE, S.J. Crown 8vo. 5s. 
FIRST PRINCIPLES OF KNOWLEDGE. By JOHN 

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MORAL PHILOSOPHY (Ethics and Natural Law). By 
JOSEPH RICKABY, S.J., M.A. Crown 8vo. 5s. 

NATURAL THEOLOGY. By BERNARD BOEDDER, 

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PSYCHOLOGY, EMPIRICAL AND RATIONAL. By 

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GENERAL METAPHYSICS. By JOHN RICKABY, S.J. 

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POLITICAL ECONOMY. By CHAS. S. DEVAS, M.A. 

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THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE : Absolutism, Pragma- 
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The Westminster Library. 
A Series of Manuals for Catholic Priests and Students. 

Edited by the Right Rev. Monsignor BERNARD WARD, President of 

St. Edmund's College, and the Rev. HERBERT THURSTON, S.J. 

Crown 8vo. 

THE TRADITION OF SCRIPTURE: its Origin, 

Authority and Interpretation. By the Very Rev. WILLIAM BARRY, 
D.D., Canon of Birmingham. 3s. 6d. net. 

THE HOLY EUCHARIST. By the Right Rev. JOHN 

CUTHBERT HEDLEY, O.S.B., Bishop of Newport. 3s. 6d. net. 

THE LEGENDS OF THE SAINTS: An Introduction 

to Hagiography. From the French of Pere H. DELEHAYE, S.J., Bollan- 
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THE PRIEST'S STUDIES. By the Very Rev. THOMAS 

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NON-CATHOLIC DENOMINATIONS. By the Very 

Rev. Monsignor ROBERT HUGH BENSON. 3s. 6d. net. 

THE MASS : a Study of the Roman Liturgy. By the Rev. 

ADRIAN FORTESCUE. 6s. net. 

THE NEW PSALTER AND ITS USE. By the Rev. 

EDWIN BURTON, D.D , Vice- President of St. Edmund's College, 
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The following Volumes are in Preparation : 

THE CHRISTIAN CALENDAR. By the Rev. HERBERT 

THURSTON, S.J. 

THE STUDY OF THE FATHERS. By the Rev. Dom 

JOHN CHAPMAN, O.S.B. 

THE ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. By the Right Rev. 

Mgr. A. S. BARNES, M.A. 

THE BREVIARY. By the Rev. EDWARD MYERS, M.A. 
THE INSTRUCTION OF CONVERTS. By the Rev. 

SYDNEY F. SMITH, S.J. 



MESSRS. LONGMANS' LIST OF WORKS 



The Catholic Church. 

BACK TO HOLY CHURCH : Experiences and Know- 
ledge acquired by a Convert. By Dr. ALBERT VON RUVILLE, 
Professor of History at the University of Halle, Germany. Translated by 
G. SCHOETENSACK. Edited with a Preface by the Very Rev. 
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SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND SELF-DISCIPLINE. By 

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LAWS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE. By the same 

Author. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 

THE PRICE OF UNITY. By the same Author. Crown 

8vo. 5s. net. 

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH FROM WITHIN. With 

a Preface by His Eminence CARDINAL VAUGHAN, late Archbishop 
of Westminster. Crown 8vo. 6s. 6d. net. 

LENT AND HOLY WEEK: Chapters OH Catholic Ob- 
servance and Ritual. By HERBERT THURSTON, S.J. Crown 8vo. 
6s. net. 

BISHOP GORE AND THE CATHOLIC CLAIMS. 

By Dem JOHN CHAPMAN, O.S.B. 8vo. Paper covers, 6d. net ; 
cloth, Is. net. 

ASPECTS OF ANGLICANISM; or, Some Comments 

on Certain Incidents in the 'Nineties. By Mgr. JAMES MOVES, D.D., 
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THE INNER LIFE OF THE SOUL. Short Spiritual 

Messages for the Ecclesiastical Year. By S. L. EMERY. Crown 8vo. 
4s. 6d. net. 

CHRIST IN THE CHURCH : A Volume of Religious 

Essays. By the Very Rev. Monsignor ROBERT HUGH BENSON. 
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THE FRIENDSHIP OF CHRIST: Sermons. By the 

same Author. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. 



MAINLY BY ROMAN CATHOLIC WRITERS. 



For the Clergy and Students. 
PRIMITIVE CATHOLICISM : By Monsignor PIERRE 

BATIFFOL. Authorised translation by HENRY L. BRIANCEAU, 
St. Mary's Seminary, Baltimore, revised by the Author. 8vo. 12s. 6d. net. 

THE CREDIBILITY OF THE GOSPEL. "Orpheus 

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HISTORY OF THE ROMAN BREVIARY. By the 

same Author. Translated by the Rev. A. M. Y. BAYLAY, M.A., 
from the Third French Edition. 8vo. 

SCHOLASTICISM, Old and New: an Introduction to 

Scholastic Philosophy, Mediaeval and Modern. By MAURICE DE 
WULF, Professor at the University of Louvain. Translated by P. COFFEY, 
Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy, Maynooth College, Ireland. 8vo. 6s. net. 

HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY. By the 

same Author. Translated by P. COFFEY, Ph.D. 8vo. 10s. 6d. net. 

THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC : an Inquiry into the Principles 

of Accurate Thought and Scientific Method. By P. COFFEY, Ph.D. 

(Louvain), Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, Maynooth College, Ireland. 

2 vols. 8vo. 

Vol. I. Conception, Judgment, and Inference. 7s. 6d. net. 
Vol. II. Method, Science, and Certitude. 7s. 6d. net. 

MOTIVE-FORCE AND MOTIVATION-TRACKS: 

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OUTLINES OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. By 

SYLVESTER JOSEPH HUNTER, S.J. Crown 8vo. Three vols , 
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THE SERMON OF THE SEA, and Other Studies. By 

the Rev. ROBERT KANE, S.J. Crown 8vo. 5s. net. 

THE PLAIN GOLD RING. By the same Author. 

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CORDS OF ADAM : a Series of Devotional Essays with 

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" I will draw them with the cords of Adam, with the bonds of love." Osee xi. 4. 

STUDIES ON THE GOSPELS. By VINCENT ROSE, 

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by ROBERT FRASER, D.D., Domestic Prelate to H.H. Pius X. 
Crown 8vo. 6s. net. 

THEODICY : Essays on Divine Providence. By ANTONIO 

ROSMINI SERBATI. Translated with some Omissions from the Italian 
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6 MESSRS. LONGMANS' LIST OF WORKS 

For the Clergy and Students continued. 

AT HOME WITH GOD : Priedieu Papers on Spiritual 
Subjects. By the Rev. MATTHEW RUSSELL, S.J. Crown 8vo. 
3s. 6d. net 

AMONG THE BLESSED : Loving Thoughts about 

Favourite Saints. By the same Author. With 8 full-page Illustrations. 
Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. 

THOUGHTS OF A CATHOLIC ANATOMIST. By 

THOMAS DWIGHT, M.D., LL.D., Parkman Professor of Anatomy 
at Harvard. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net, 

** Synopsis of Introduction. Decline of religious belief ; Science the alleged cause. Rela- 
tions of Religion and Science. 

ESSAYS IN PASTORAL MEDICINE. By AUSTIN 

O'MALLEY, M.D., Ph.D., LL.D., Pathologist and Ophthalmologist to 
Saint Agnes's Hospital, Philadelphia ; and JAMES J. WALSH, Ph.D., 
LL.D., Adjunct Piofessor of Medicine at the New York Polytechnic 
School for Graduates in Medicine. 8vo. 10s. 6d. net. 

** The term " Pastoral Medicine " may be said to represent that part of medicine which 
is of import to a pastor in his cure, and those divisions of ethics and moral theology which 
concern a physician in his practice. This book is primarily intended for Roman Catholic 
confessors. 

THE SCIENCE OF ETHICS. By Rev. MICHAEL 

CRON1N, M.A., D.D., Ex-Fellow, Royal University of Ireland ; 
Professor, Clonliffe College Dublin. 8vo. 
Vol. 1., General Ethics. 12s. 6d. net. 

THE OLD RIDDLE AND THE NEWEST ANSWER, 

An Enquiry how far Modern Science has altered the aspect of the Problem 
of the Universe. By JOHN GERARD, S.J., F.L.S. Crown 8vo. 
2s. 6d. net. Popular Edition. Paper Covers. 6d. 

THE KEY TO THE WORLD'S PROGRESS: an 

Essay on Historical Logic, being some Account of the Historical Significance 
of the Catholic Church. By CHARLES STANTON DEVAS, M.A. 
Crown 8vo. 5s. net. Popular Edition. Paper covers, 6d. 

*** The object ofthis book is to give to the logic and history of Newman an economic or 
sociological setting, and thus to show that "for the explanation of World-history we must 
first have the true theory of the Christian Church and her life through eighteen centuries ". 
Part I. states briefly the problems which the philosophy of history seeks to resolve. Part II. 
presents the solution offered by Christianity and takes the form of an historical analysis of the 
principles by which the Church has been guided in her relations with the world. 

THE MONTH ; A Catholic Magazine. Conducted by 

FATHERS OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUS. Published Monthly. 
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INDEX TO THE MONTH, 1864-1908. Arranged 

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MAINLY BY ROMAN CATHOLIC WRITERS. 



Biography, etc. 
THE LIFE OF JOHN HENRY CARDINAL 

NEWMAN. Based on his Private Journals and Correspondence. By 
WILFRID WARD. With 15 Portraits and Illustrations (2 Photo- 
gravures). 8vo. 36s. net. 

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CARDINAL WISEMAN. 

By the same Author. With 3 Portraits. Two vols. Crown 8vo. 10s. net. 

AUBREY DE VERE : a Memoir based on his unpublished 

Diaries and Correspondence. By the same Author. With Two Photo- 
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THE HISTORY OF ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA 

AND HER COMPANIONS. With a Translation of her Treatise on 
Consummate Perfection. By AUGUSTA THEODOSIA DRANE. 
With 10 Illustrations. Two vols. 8vo. 15s. 

A MEMOIR OF MOTHER FRANCIS RAPHAEL, 

O.S.D. (AUGUSTA THEODOSIA DRANE), some time Prioress 
Provincial of the Congregation of Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of 
Siena, Stone. With portrait. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. 

LIFE OF ST. ELIZABETH OF HUNGARY, 

DUCHESS OF THURINGIA. By the COUNT DE MONTALEM- 
BERT, Peer of France, Member of the French Academy. Translated by 
FRANCIS DEMING HOYT. Large Crown 8vo. 10s. 6d. net. 

THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF THE LADY SAINT 

CLARE : Translated from the French version (1563) of Brother Francis 
du Puis. By Mrs. REGINALD BALFOUR. With an Introduction by 
Father CUTHBERT, O.S.F.C., and 24 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. 
Gilt top. 4s. 6d net. 

HISTORY OF ST. VINCENT DE PAUL, Founder of 

the Congregation of the Mission (Vincentians), and of the Sisters of Chanty. 
By Monseigneur BOUGAUD, Bishop of Laval. Translated from the 
Second French Edition by the Rev. JOSEPH BRADY, C.M. With an 
Introduction by His Eminence CARDINAL VAUGHAN, late Arch- 
bishop of Westminster Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net. 

EXPLORERS IN THE NEW WORLD BEFORE 

AND AFTER COLUMBUS, and THE STORY OF THE 
JESUIT MISSIONS OF PARAGUAY. By MARION McMUR- 
ROUGH MULHALL, Member of The Roman Arcadia. With pre- 
Columban Maps. Crown 8vo, 6s. 6d. net. 

LIFE OF THE MARQUISE DE LA ROCHE- 

JAQUELE1N, THE HEROINE OF LA VENDEE. By the 
Hon. Mrs. MAXWELL SCOTT (of Abbotsford). With 8 Illustrations 
and a Map. 8vo. 7s. 6d. net. 



MESSRS. LONGMANS' LIST OF WORKS 



Biography, etc. continued. 

SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI : a Biography. By 
JOHANNES JORGENSEN. Translated by T. O'CONOR 
SLOANE. With 5 Illustrations. 8vo. 12s. 6d. net. 

-LIFE OF ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI. By Father 

CUTHBERT, O.S.F.C. With 13 Illustrations. 8vo. 12s. 6d. net. 

TEN PERSONAL STUDIES. By WILFRID WARD. 

With 10 Portraits. 8vo. I Os. 6d. net. 

SOME PAPERS OF LORD ARUNDELL OF WAR- 

DOUR, 12th BARON, COUNT OF THE HOLY ROMAN 
EMPIRE, Etc. With a Preface by the Dowager LADY ARUN- 
DELL OF WARDOUR. With Portrait. 8vo. 8s. 6d. net. 

THE THREE SISTERS OF LORD RUSSELL OF 

KILLOWEN. Sketches of Convent Life. By the Rev. MATTHEW 
RUSSELL, S.J. With Portrait and other Illustrations. 8vo. 

ESSAYS. By the Rev. FATHER IGNATIUS DUDLEY 

RYDER. Edited by FRANCIS BACCHUS, of the Oratory, Bir- 
mingham. With Frontispiece. 8vo. 9s. net. 

UNSEEN FRIENDS. By Mrs. WILLIAM O'BRIEN. 

8vo. 



The Beginnings of the Church. 
A Series of Histories of the First Century. 

By the Abb4 CONSTANT FOUARD, Honorary Cathedral Canon, Professor 
of the Faculty of Theology at Rouen, etc., etc. 

THE CHRIST, THE SON OF GOD. A Life of Our 

Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. With an Introduction by CARDINAL 
MANNING. With 3 Maps. Two vols. Crown 8vo. 14s. 
Popular Edition. 8vo. Is. net. Paper Covers. 6d. net. 

ST. PETER AND THE FIRST YEARS OF CHRIS- 
TIANITY. With 3 Maps. Crown 8vo. 9s. 

ST. PAUL AND HIS MISSIONS. With 2 Maps. Crown 

8vo. 9s. 
Popular Edition. 8vo. Is. net. Paper Covers. 6d. net. 

THE LAST YEARS OF ST. PAUL. With 5 Maps 

and Plans. Crown 8vo. 9s. 

ST. JOHN AND THE CLOSE OF THE APOSTOLIC 

AGE. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. 



MAINLY BY ROMAN CATHOLIC WRITERS. 



Lives of the Friar Saints. 

Editors for the Franciscan Lives : 

The Very Rev. Fr. OSMUND, O.F.M., Provincial, and 
C. M. ANTONY. 

Editors for the Dominican Lives : 

The Rev. Fr. BEDE JARRETT, O.P., and C. M. ANTONY. 
Fcap. 8vo. Cloth, 1 s. 6d. per volume ; Leather, 2s. 6d. net per volume. 

THE HOLY FATHER has expressed through the Very Rev. Fr. 
Thomas Esser, O.P., Secretary of the Congregation of the Index, his great 
pleasure and satisfaction that the series has been undertaken, and wishes it 
every success. He bestows " most affectionately " His Apostolic Blessing upon 
the Editors, Writers, and Readers of the whole series. 

F. OSMUND, O.F.M., Provincial, 
F. BEDE JARRETT, O.P., 

C. M. ANTONY, 

Editors. 

FRANCISCAN. 

ST. BONAVENTURE. 

The Seraphic Doctor. Minister 
General of the Franciscan Order, 
Cardinal Bishop of Albano. By Fr. 
LAURENCE COSTELLOE, 
O.F.M. With 6 Illustrations. 

ST. ANTONY OF PA- 

DUA. The Miracle Worker 
(1195-1231). By C. M. AN- 
TONY. With 4 Illustrations. 

ST. JOHN CAPISTRAN. 

By Fr. VINCENT FITZ- 
GERALD, O.F.M. With 4 
Illustrations. 



DOMINICAN. 

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS. 

Of the Order of Preachers (1225- 
1 274). A Biographical Study of 
the Angelic Doctor. By Fr. 
PLACID CONWAY, O.P. 

With 5 Illustrations. 

ST. VINCENT FERRER, 

O.P. By Fr. STANISLAUS 
HOGAN, O.P. With 4 Illus- 
trations. 



ST. PIUS V. 

Holy Rosary. 



Pope of the 

By C. M. 

ANTONY. With Preface 
by the Very Rev. Monsignor 
BENSON. With 4 Illustra- 
tions. 



10 MESSRS. LONGMANS' LIST OF WORKS 

History. 

MEMOIRS OF THE SCOTTISH CATHOLICS DUR- 
ING THE XVIIth AND XVIIIth CENTURIES. Selected from 
hitherto inedited MSS. by WILLIAM FORBES LEITH, S.J. With 
20 Illustrations. 2 vols. Medium 8vo. 7s. 6d. net. 

THE INQUISITION : a Critical and Historical Study of 

the Coercive Power of the Church. By the Abbe E. VACANDARD. 
Translated from the French by the Rev. BERTRAND L. CON WAY, 
C.S.P. Crown 8vo. 6s. net. 

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BISHOP CHALLONER, 

1691-1781. By EDWIN H. BURTON, D.D., F.R.Hist.S., Vice- 
President of St. Edmund's College, Ware. With 34 Portraits and other 
Illustrations. 2 vols, 8vo. 25s. net. 

THE DAWN OF THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL IN 

ENGLAND, 1781-1803. By Right Rev. Monsignor BERNARD 
WARD, F.R.Hist.S., President of St. Edmund's College, Ware. With 
38 Illustrations. 2 vols. 8vo. 25s. net. 

THE EVE OF CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION. 

Being the History of the English Catholics during the first Thirty Years 
of the Nineteenth Century. By the same Author. With Portraits and 
other Illustrations. 3 vols. 8vo. 

Vols. I. and II. 1803 1820. 21s. net. 

Vol. III. In preparation. 

THE DAWN OF MODERN ENGLAND: Being a 

History of the Reformation in England, 1509-1525. By CARLOS 
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PSYCHOLOGY OF POLITICS AND HISTORY. By 

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A SHORT HISTORY OF IRELAND, from the Earliest 

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HISTORY OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUS IN NORTH 

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FALKLANDS. With 6 Portraits and 2 other Illustra- 

tions. 8vo. 10s. 6d. 

THE LIFE OF SIR KENELM DIGBY : By One of his 

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THE ADVENTURES OF KING JAMES II. OF 

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GASQUET, D.D. With 27 Portraits and other Illustrations. 8vo. 
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CHISEL, PEN AND POIGNARD : Or, Benvenuto 

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MARSHAL TURENNE. With an Introduction by 

Brigadier-General FRANCIS LLOYD, C.B., D.S.O. With numer- 
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12 MESSRS. LONGMANS' LIST OF WORKS 



Educational. 
A LIFE OF CHRIST FOR CHILDREN. With 20 

Illustrations, reproduced chiefly from the Old Masters. With Preface by 
His Eminence CARDINAL GIBBONS. Large Crown 8vo. 4s. net. 

BIBLE STORIES TOLD TO "TODDLES". By Mrs. 

HERMANN BOSCH. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net. 

WHEN "TODDLES" WAS SEVEN: A Sequel to 

" Bible Stories told to ' Toddles ' ". By the same Author. Crown 8vo. 
3s. net. 

THE GOOD SHEPHERD AND HIS LITTLE 

LAMBS. By the same Author. With a Frontispiece. Fcap. 8vo. 
2s. 6d. net. 

THE CHILD'S RULE OF LIFE. By the Very Rev. 

Monsignor ROBERT HUGH BENSON. Printed in Red and Black 
and Illustrated by GABRIEL PIPPET. 4to. Paper Covers, Is. net ; 
Cloth, 2s. net. 

THE HOUSE AND TABLE OF GOD : a Book for His 

Children Young and Old. By the Rev. WILLIAM ROCHE, S.J. 
With 24 Drawings by T. BAINES. 8vo. Cloth, 2s. 6d. net ; Vegetable 
Vellum, 3s. 6d. net. 

A HISTORY OF ENGLAND FOR CATHOLIC 

SCHOOLS. By E. WYATT-DAV1ES, M.A. With 14 Maps. 
Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. 

OUTLINES OF BRITISH HISTORY. By the same 

Author. With 85 Illustrations and 13 Maps. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. 

A CHILD'S HISTORY OF IRELAND. From the 

Earliest Times to the Death of O'Connell. By P. W. JOYCE, LL.D., 
M R.I. A. With specially constructed Map and 160 Illustrations, including 
Facsimile in Full Colours of an Illuminated Page of the Gospel Book of 
MacDurnan, A.D. 850. Fcp. 8vo. 3s. 6d. 

OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF IRELAND. 

From the Earliest Times to 1837. By the same Author. Fcp. 8vo. 9d. 

A READING BOOK IN IRISH HISTORY. By the 

same Author. With 45 Illustrations. Crown 8vo. Is. 6d. 

A HISTORY OF IRELAND FOR AUSTRALIAN 

CATHOLIC SCHOOLS. From the Earliest Times to the Death of 
O'Connell. By the same Author. With specially constructed Map and 160 
Illustrations, including Facsimile in Full Colours of an Illuminated Page of 
the Gospel Book of MacDurnan, A.D. 850. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 

The authorised Irish History for Catholic Schools anil Colleges throughout Australasia. 

A HANDBOOK OF SCHOOL MANAGEMENT 

AND METHODS OF TEACHING. By the same Author. Fcp. 3s. 6d. 

A GRAMMAR OF THE IRISH LANGUAGE. 

By the same Author. Fcp. 8vo. Is. 

ENGLISH AS WE SPEAK IT IN IRELAND. 

By the same Author. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net. 



MAINLY BY ROMAN CATHOLIC WRITERS. 13 

Educational continued. 
AN EXPERIMENT IN HISTORY TEACHING. By 

EDWARD ROCKLIFF, S.J. With 3 Coloured Charts. Crown 8vo. 
2s. 6d. net. 

THE EDUCATION OF CATHOLIC GIRLS. By 

JANET ERSKINE STUART. With a Preface by the CARDINAL 
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DELECTA BIBLICA. Compiled from the Vulgate Edition 

of the Old Testament, and arranged for the use of Beginners in Latin. 
By a SISTER OF NOTRE DAME. Crown 8vo. Is. 

HISTORICAL ATLAS OF INDIA, for the Use of High 

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29 Maps in Colours. Post 4to. 2s. 6d. 

PRINCIPLES OF LOGIC. By G. H. JOYCE, S.J., M.A., 

Oxford, Professor of Logic at Stonyhurst. 8vo. 6s. 6d. net. 

INTRODUCTORY PHILOSOPHY: a Textbook for 

Colleges and High Schools. By CHARLES A. DUBRAY, S.M., 
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With a Preface by Professor E. D. PACE, of the Catholic University, 
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STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF CLASSICAL 

TEACHING. By the Rev. T. CORCORAN, S.J. Crown 8vo. 
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HANDBOOK OF HOMERIC STUDY. By HENRY 

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Crown 8vo. 6s. net. 

HANDBOOK OF GREEK COMPOSITION. With 

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HANDBOOK OF LATIN COMPOSITION. With 

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PARLEZ-VOUS FRANCAIS? OU LE FRANAIS 

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GRAMMAR LESSONS. By the PRINCIPAL OF ST. 

MARY'S HALL, Liverpool. Crown 8vo. 2s. 

THE CLASS TEACHING OF ENGLISH COMPOSI- 

TION. By the same Author. Crown 8vo. 2s. 

QUICK AND DEAD? To Teachers. By Two of 

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THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE. To Catholic Teachers. 

By One of the Authors of "Quick and Dead". Crown 8vo. Is. net. 

SCIENCE OF EDUCATION. By T. P. KEATING, 

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14 MESSRS. LONGMANS' LIST OF WORKS 



Poetry, Fiction, etc. 

A MYSTERY PLAY IN HONOUR OF THE NATI- 
VITY OF OUR LORD. By the Very Rev. Monsignor ROBERT 
HUGH BENSON. With Illustrations, Appendices, and Stage Directions. 
Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. net. 
Acting Edition. 6d. net. 

THE COST OF A CROWN : a Story of Douay and 

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THE MAID OF ORLEANS. By the same Author. 

With 14 Illustrations by GABRIEL PIPPET. Crown 8vo. ,3s. net. 
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STORIES ON THE ROSARY. By LOUISE EMILY 

DOBRfiE. Parts I., II., III. Crown 8vo. Is. 6d. each. 
A TORN SCRAP BOOK. Talks and Tales illustrative 

of the "Our Father". By GENEVIEVE IRONS. With a Preface by 
the Very Rev. Monsignor R. HUGH BENSON. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. 

OLD RHYMES WITH NEW TUNES. Composed by 

RICHARD RUNCIMAN TERRY, Mus. Doc., F.R.C.O., Organist 
and Director of the Choir at Westminster Cathedral. With Illustrations by 
GABRIEL PIPPET. 4to. 2s. 6d. net. 

BALLADS OF IRISH CHIVALRY. By ROBERT 

DWYER JOYCE, M-D. Edited, with Annotations, by his brother, 
P. W. JOYCE, LL.D. With Portrait of the Author and 3 Illustrations. 
8vo. Cloth gilt, 2s. net. Paper covers, Is. net. 

OLD CELTIC ROMANCES. Twelve of the most beauti- 

ful of the Ancient Irish Romantic Tales. Translated from the Gaelic. By 
P. W. JOYCE, LL.D., M.R.I.A. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. 

ANCIENT IRISH MUSIC. Containing One Hundred 

Airs never before published, and a number of Popular Songs. Collected and 
Edited by the same Author. 4to. Paper wrappers, Is. 6d. Cloth, 3s. 

OLD IRISH FOLK MUSIC AND SONGS: a collection 

of 842 Irish Airs and Songs hitherto unpublished. Edited by the same 
Author, with Annotations, for the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. 
Medium 8vo. I Os. 6d. net. 

IRISH PEASANT SONGS. In the English Language ; 

the words set to the proper Old Irish Airs. Collected and Edited by the 
same Author. Crown 8vo. Paper Covers, 6d. net. 



MAINLY BY ROMAN CATHOLIC WRITERS. 15 



Poetry, Fiction, etc. continued. 
HISTORICAL BALLAD POETRY OF IRELAND. 

Arranged by M. J. BROWN. With an Introduction by STEPHEN I. 
BROWN, S.J. With 8 Portraits. Crown 8vo 3s. 6d. 

SAID THE ROSE, AND OTHER LYRICS. By 

GEORGE HENRY MILES. With an Introduction by JOHN 
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CHRISTINE: A TROUBADOUR'S SONG THE 

SLEEP OF MARY AMIN. By the same Author. With Photogravure 
Frontispiece. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net. 



A REVIEW OF HAMLET. By the same Author. 

With Portrait of the Author. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. net. 



A READER'S GUIDE TO IRISH FICTION. By 

STEPHEN J. BROWN, S.J. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. 

ONE POOR SCRUPLE. By Mrs. WILFRID WARD. 

Crown 8vo. 6s. 

OUT OF DUE TIME. By the same Author. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
GREAT POSSESSIONS. By the same Author. Cr. 8vo. 6s. 
THE LIGHT BEHIND. By the same Author. Cr. 8vo. 6s. 
THE JOB SECRETARY. An Impression. By the same 

Author. Crown 8vo. 4s. 6d. 

THE FUGITIVES. By MARGARET FLETCHER. Crown 

8vo. 6s. 



16 MESSRS. LONGMANS' LIST OF WORKS 

Novels by M. E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell). 
DORSET DEAR : Idylls of Country Life. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
LYCHGATE HALL : a Romance. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
CHRISTIAN THAL : a Story of Musical Life. Cr. 8vo. 6s. 
THE MANOR FARM. With Frontispiece by Claude C. 

du Pre" Cooper. Crown 8vo. 6s. 

FIANDER'S WIDOW. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
YEOMAN FLEETWOOD. Crown 8vo. 3s. net. 

Works by the Very Rev. Canon Sheehan, D.D. 
THE QUEEN'S FILLET. A Novel of the French 

Revolution. Crown 8vo. 6s. 

LISHEEN; or, The Test of the Spirits. A Novel. Cr. 8vo. 6s. 
LUKE DELMEGE. A Novel. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
GLENANAAR : a Story of Irish Life. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
THE BLINDNESS OF DR. GRAY; or, the Final Law: 

a Novel of Clerical Life. Crown 8vo. 6s. 

"LOST ANGEL OF A RUINED PARADISE": a 

Drama of Modern Life. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. 

THE INTELLECTUALS : An Experiment in Irish Club 
Life. 8vo. 6s. 

PARERGA : being a Companion Volume to " Under the 

Cedars and the Stars ". Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. net. 

EARLY ESSAYS AND LECTURES. Crown 8vo. 

6s. net. 



MAINLY BY ROMAN CATHOLIC WRITERS. 17 

Cardinal Newman's Works. 

i. SERMONS. 
PAROCHIAL AND PLAIN SERMONS. Eight vols. 

Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. each. 

SELECTION, ADAPTED TO THE SEASONS OF 

THE ECCLESIASTICAL YEAR, from the "Parochial and Plain 
Sermons ". Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. 

CONTENTS: Advent: Self-denial the Test of Rel gious Earnestness Divine Calls 
The Ventures of Faith Watching. Christmas Day : Religious Joy. New Year's Sunday : 
The Lapse of Time Epiphany: Remembrance of Past Mercies Equanimity The 
Immortality of the Soul Christian Manhood Sincerity and Hypocrisy Christian 
Sympathy. Septuagesima : Present Blessings. Sexagesima : Endurance, the Christian's 
Portion. Quinquagesima : Love, the One Thing Needful. Lent : The Individuality of 
the Soul Life, the Season of Repentance Bodily Suffering Tears of Christ at the Grave 
of Lazarus Christ's Privations, a Meditation for Christians The Cross of Christ the 
Measure of the World. Good Friday : The Crucifix on. Easter Day : Keeping Fast and 
Festival. Easter Tide : Witnesses of the Resurrection A Particular Providence as 
revealed in the Gospel Christ Manifested in Remembrance The Invisible World 
Waiting for Christ. Ascension: Warfare the Condition of Victory. Sunday after Ascen- 
sion : Rising with Christ. Whitsun Day : The Weapons of Saints. Trinity Sunday : The 
Mysteriousness of Our Present Being. Sundays after Trinity : Holiness Necessary for 
Future Blessedness The Religious Use of Excited Feelirgs The Self- wise Inquirer 
Scripture a Record of Human Sorrow The Danger of Riches Obedience without Love, 
as instanced in the Character of Balaam Moral Consequences of Single Sins The 
Greatness and Littleness of Human Life Moral EfTects of Communion with God The 
Thought of God the Stay of the Soul The Power of the Will The Gospel Palaces- 
Religion a Weariness to the Natural Man The World our Enemy The Praise of Men 
Religion Pleasant to the Religious Mental Pr.yer Curiosity a Temptation to Sin- 
Miracles no Remedy for Unbelief Jeremiah, a Lesson for the Disappointed The Shep- 
herd of our Souls Doing Glory to God in Pursuits of the World. 

FIFTEEN SERMONS PREACHED BEFORE THE 

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, between 1826 and 1843. Cr. 8vo. 3s. 6d. 

CONTENTS. The Philosophical Temper, first enjoined by the Gospel The Influence 
of Natural and Revealed Religion respectively Evangelical Sanctity the Perfection of 
Natural Virtue The Usurpations of Reason Personal Influence, the Means of Pro- 
pagating the Truth On Justice as a Principle of Divine Governance Contest between 
Faith and Sight Human Responsibility, as independent of Circumstances Wilfulness, 
the Sin of Saul Faith and Keason, contrasted as Habits of Mind The Nature of Faith 
in Relation to Reason Love, the Safeguard of Faith against Superstition Implicit and 
Explicit Reason Wisdom, as contrasted with Faith and with Bigotry The Theory of 
Developments in Religious Doctrine. 

SERMONS BEARING UPON SUBJECTS OF THE 

DAY. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. 

CONTENTS. The Work of the Christian Saintliness not Forfeited by the Penitent 
Our Lord's Last Supper and His First Dangers to the Penitent The Three Offices of 
Christ Faith and Experierce Faith unto the World The Church and the World 
Indulgence in Religious Privileges Connection between Personal and Public Improve- 
ment Christian Nobleness Joshua a Type of Christ and His Followers Elisha a Type 
of Christ and His Followers The Christian Church a Continuation of the Jewish The 
Principles of Continuity between the Jewish and Christian Churches The Christian 
Church an Imperial Power Sanctity the Token of the Christian Empire Condition of 
the Members of the Christian Empire The Apostolic Christian Wisdom and Innocence 
Invisible Presence of Christ Outwaid and Inward Notes of the Church Grounds fcr 
Steadfastness in our Religious Profession Elijah the Prophet of the Latter Days 
Feasting in Captivity The Parting of Friends. 



18 MESSRS. LONGMANS' LIST OF WORKS 



Cardinal Newman's Works continued. 
DISCOURSES TO MIXED CONGREGATIONS. 

Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. 

CONTENTS. The Salvation of the Hearer the Motive of the Preacher Neglect of 
Divine Calls and Warnings Men not Angels The Priests of the Gospel Purity and 
Love Saintliness the Standard of Christian Principle God's Will the End of Life 
Perseverance in Grace Nature and Grace Illuminating Grace Faith and Private 
Judgment Faith and Doubt Prospects of the Catholic Missioner Mysteries of Nature 
and of Grace The Mystery of Divine Condescension The Infinitude of Divine Attri- 
butes Mental Sufferings of our Lord in His Passion The Glories of Mary for the Sake 
of Her Son On the Fitness of the Glories of Mary. 

SERMONS PREACHED ON VARIOUS OCCA- 
SIONS. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. 

CONTENTS. Intellect the Instrument of Religious Training The Religion of the 
Pharisee and the Religion of Mankind Waiting for Christ The Secret Power of Divine 
Grace Dispositions tor Faith Omnipotence in Bonds St. Paul's Characteristic Gifc 
St. Paul's Gift of Sympathy Christ upon the Waters The Second Spring Order, the 
Witness and Instrument of Unity The Mission of St. Philip Neri The Tree beside the 
Waters In the World but not of the World The Pope and the Revolution. 



2. TREATISES. 

THE DOCTRINE OF JUSTIFICATION. Cr. 8vo. 3s. 6d. 

CONTENTS. Faith considered as the Instrumental Cause of Justification Love con- 
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Secondary Senses of the term "Justification" Misuse of the term" Just "or " Righteous" 
The Gift of Righteousness The Characteristics of the Gift of Righteousness Right- 
eousness viewed as a Gift and as a Quality Righteousness the Fruit of our Lord's 
Resurrection The Office of Justifying Faith The Nature of Justifying Faith Faith 
viewed relatively to Rites and Works On Preaching the Gospel Appendix. 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 

Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. 

THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY DEFINED AND 

ILLUSTRATED. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. 

I. In Nine Discourses delivered to the Catholics of Dublin; II. In Occasional Lectures 
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2s. net. Leather, 3s. net. 

A GRAMMAR OF ASSENT. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. 



MAINLY BY ROMAN CATHOLIC WRITERS. 19 



Cardinal Newman's Works continued, 

3. HISTORICAL. 
HISTORICAL SKETCHES. Three vok Crown 8vo. 

3s. 6d. each. 

VOL. I. The Turks in their Relation to Europe Marcus Tullius Cicero Apollonius 
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VOL. II. The Church of the Fathers St. Chrysostom Theodoret Mission of St. 
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r V i L- } ll '~ Rise and Pr g ress of Universities (originally published as " Office and 
Work of Universities "(Northmen and Normans in England and Ireland Medizval 
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Church, ii. The Antichrist of Protestants. 12. Milman's View of Christianity. 13. Re- 
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5. THEOLOGICAL. 
THE ARIANS OF THE FOURTH CENTURY. 

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SELECT TREATISES OF ST. ATHANASIUS. 

Two vols. Crown 8vo. 7s. 

TRACTS : THEOLOGICAL and ECCLESIASTICAL. 

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trinal Causes of Arianism. 4. Apollinarianism. 5. St. Cyril's Formula. 6. Ordo de 
Tempore. 7. Douay Version of Scripture. 



20 MESSRS. LONGMANS' LIST OF WORKS 

Cardinal Newman's Works continued. 

6. POLEMICAL. 

THE VIA MEDIA OF THE ANGLICAN CHURCH. 

Two vols. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. each. 

Vol. I. Prophetical Office of the Church. Vol. II. Occasional Letters and 
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DIFFICULTIES OF ANGLICANS. Two vols. Crown 

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PRESENT POSITION OF CATHOLICS IN ENG- 
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APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA, being a History of his 

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The " Pocket " Edition and the " Popular " Edition of this book contain a letter, hitherto 
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7. LITERARY. 

VERSES ON VARIOUS OCCASIONS. Cr. 8vo. 3s. 6d. 

Pocket Edition. Fcp. 8vo. Cloth, 2s. net. Leather, 3s. net. 

THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS. 

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LOSS AND GAIN : The Story of a Convert. Cr. 8vo. 3s. 6d. 
CALLISTA : A Tale of the Third Century. Cr. 8vo. 3s. 6d. 



MAINLY BY ROMAN CATHOLIC WRITERS. 21 



Cardinal Newman's Works continued. 



8. DEVOTIONAL. 

MEDITATIONS AND DEVOTIONS. Part I. Medita- 
tions for the Month of May. Novena of St. Philip. Part II. The 
Stations of the Cross. Meditations and Intercessions for Good Friday. 
Litanies, etc. Part III. Meditations on Christian Doctrine. Conclusion. 
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Part II. STATIONS OF THE CROSS. 

Part III. MEDITATIONS ON CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. 



THE LIFE OF JOHN HENRY CARDINAL 

NEWMAN. Based on his Private Journals and Correspondence. By 
WILFRID WARD. With 15 Portraits and Illustrations (2 Photo- 
gravures). 8vo. 36s. net. 

LETTERS AND CORRESPONDENCE OF JOHN 

HENRY NEWMAN DURING HIS LIFE IN THE ENGLISH 
CHURCH. With a brief Autobiography. Edited, at Cardinal Newman's 
request, by ANNE MOZLEY. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. 7s. 

ADDRESSES TO CARDINAL NEWMAN, WITH 

HIS REPLIES, 1879-81. Edited by the Rev. W. P. NEVILLE (Cong. 
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NEWMAN MEMORIAL SERMONS: Preached at the 

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and Very Rev. Canon McINTYRE, Professor of Scripture at St. Mary's 
College, Oscott. 8vo. Paper covers. Is. net. . 



INDEX. 



Pag* 



Adventures of King James II . of England 
Antony (C. M.) St. Antony of Padua ... 

St. Pius V. ... . ... 

Arundell (Lord) Papers 

Assisi (St. Francis of) A Biography, by 
J.Jorgensen 

Balfour (Mrs. Reginald) The Life and 
Legend of the Lady Saint Clare 

Barnes (A. S.) The Origin of the Gospels 

Barrett (E. Boyd) Motive Force and 
Motivation-Tracks ... 

Barry (W.) The Tradition of Scripture ... 

Batiffol (P.) Credibility of the Gospel ... 

History of the Roman Breviary 5 

Primitive Catholicism 



ii j Clarke (R. F.) Logic 
9 | Class-Teaching (The) of English Corn- 



Page 



Benson (R. H.) Christ in the Church ... 

Cost of a Crown 

Friendship of Christ ... 

Mystery Play 

The Maid of Orleans ... 

Non-Catholic Denomina- 



tions 



The Child's Rule of Life 12 



Boedder (B.) Natural Theology 

Bosch (Mrs. H.) Bible Stories told to 

" Toddles " 

The Good Shepherd 

and His Little Lambs 

When " Toddles " was 



Seven 12 

Bougaud (Mgr.) History of St. Vincent 

de Paul 7 

Brown (H.) Handbook of Greek Composi- 
tion 13 

Homeric Study 13 



tion 



Latin Composi- 



(M. J.) Historical Ballad Poetry 



position 13 



of Ireland 15 

. (S. J.) A Reader's Guide to Irish 

Fiction 15 

Burton (E. H.) Life and Times of Bishop 

Challoner 10 

and Myers (E.) The New 



Psalter and its Use 



Catholic Church from Within 4 

Challoner, Life and Times of Bishop ... 10 
Chapman (J.) Bishop Gore and Catholic 

Claims ... 4 

The Study of the Fathers 3 

Chisel, Pen, and Poignard n 

Christ, A Life of, for Children 12 



Coffey (P.) The Science of Logic 

Conway (P.) St Thomas Aquinas 
Corcoran (T.) Studies in the History of 

Classical Teaching 

Costelloe (L.) St. Bonaventure 

Cronin (M.) The Science of Ethics. Vol. I. 

Curious Case of Lady Purbeck 

Cuthbert (Fr.) Life of St. Francis of 

Assisi 

Delehaye (H.) The Legends of the Saints 

Delecta Biblica 

De Montalembert (Count) Life of St. 

Elisabeth of Hungary 

Devas (C. S.) Political Economy 

The Key to the World's 



Progress 6 

De Vere (Aubrey), Memoir of, by Wilfrid 

Ward 7 

Dewe (J. A.) Psychology of Politics and 
History 10 

De Wulf (M.) History of Medieval Philo- 
sophy 5 

Scholasticism, Old and New 5 



Digby, Life of Sir Kenelm 

Dobr^e (L. E.) Stories on the Rosary ... 
Drane (A. T.) History of St. Catherine of 

Siena 

Memoir (Mother Francis 



Raphael) 7 

Dubray (C. A.) Introductory Philosophy 13 
Dwight (T.) Thoughts of a Catholic 

Anatomist 6 

Emery (S. L.) The Inner Life of the Sou} 4 

Falklands n 

First Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-on- 

Tyne n 

Fitz-Gerald (V.) St. John Capistran ... 9 

Fitzgerald (K.) Parlez-vous Francais ... 13 

Fletcher (M.) The Fugitives 15 

Fortescue (A.) The Mass 3 

Fouard (Abbe") St. John and the Close of 

the Apostolic Age 8 

St. Paul and his Missions 8 

St. Peter 8 

The Christ the Son of God 8 

Last Years of St. Paul 8 

13 



Fountain of Life (The) 



INDEX. 



23 



Francis (M. E.) Christian Thai ... 

Dorset Dear 

Fiander's Widow 

Lychgate Hall ... 

The Manor Farm 

Yeoman Fleetwood 



Page 

... 16 

... 16 

... 16 

... 16 

... 16 

... 16 

Friar Saint Series 9 

Gerard (J.) The Old Riddle and the 

Newest Answer ... ... ... ... 6 

Gerrard (T. J.) Cords of Adam 5 

Grammar Lessons, by the Principal of 

St. Mary's Hall, Liverpool 13 

Hedley (J. C.) The Holy Eucharist ... 3 

Hogan (S.) St. Vincent Ferrer 9 

Hughes (T.) History of the Society of 

Jesus in North America n 

Hunter (S. J.) Outlines of Dogmatic 

Theology 5 

Index to The Month ... 6 



Irons (G.) A Torn Scrap Book 

Joppen (C.) Historical Atlas of India 
Jorgensen (J.) St. Francis of Assisi 
Joyce (G. H.) Principles of Logic 
(P. W.) Ancient Irish Music 



-Child's History of Ireland 12 



English as we Speak it in 

Ireland 12 

Grammar of the Irish 



Language 



-Handbook of School 



Management 12 

-History of Ireland for 



Australian Catholic Schools ... 

Irish Peasant Songs 

Old Celtic Romances 

Old Irish Folk Music 



Origin and History of 

risk Names of Places 

-Outlines of the History of 



Ireland 12 

Reading Book in Irish 



History 12 

Short History of Ireland 10 

-Social History of Ireland 



Story of Irish Civilisation 10 

Wonders of Ireland ... 10 

-(R. D.) Ballads of Irish Chivalry 14 



Kane (R.) The Plain Gold Ring 5 

The Sermon of the Sea ... 5 

Keating (T. P.) Science of Education ... 13 



Page 
Leith (W. F.) Memoirs of the Scottish 

Catholics 10 

Lives of the Friar Saints 9 

Lumsden (C.) The Dawn of Modern 

England... 10 

Maxwell-Scott (Hon. Mrs.) Life of the 

Marquise de la Rochejaquelein ... 7 

Maher (M.) Psychology 2 

Marshal Turenne n 

Maturin (B. W.) Laws of the Spiritual 

Life 4 

Self-Knowledge and 

Self-Discipline 4 

The Price of Unity ... 4 



Miles (G. H.) Christine and other Poems 15 

Review of Hamlet 15 

Said the Rose 15 

Montalembert (Count de) St. Elizabeth 

of Hungary 7 

Month, The 6 

Moyes (J.) Aspects of Anglicanism ... 4 
Mulhall (M. M.) Beginnings, or Glimpses 

of Vanished Civilizations 10 

Explorers in the New 

World before and after Columbus ... 7 

Myers (E.) The Breviary 3 

Newman (Cardinal) Addresses to, 1879-81 21 
Apologia pro Vita 



A rians of the Fourth 



Century 19 

Callista, an Histori- 



cal Tale 20 

Church of the Fathers 19 

Critical and Histori- 
cal Essays 19 

D evelo pment of 



Christian Doctrine 

Difficulties of Angli- 



Congregations 



Discourses to Mixed 



Discussions 



and 



Arguments ............ 19 

-- Dream of Gerontius 20 
. --- Maurice Francis 

Egan, D.D., LL.D., With Notes by 20 
---- Facsimile 



Edition 20 

Presenta- 



tion Edition 



24 



INDEX. 



Page 
Newman (Cardinal) Essays on Miracles 19 

Grammar of A ssent 18 

Historical Sketches 19 

Idea of a University 18 

Justification 18 

Letters and Corre- 
spondence 21 

- Life, by Wilfrid 
Ward 7, 21 

Loss and Gain ... 20 

Meditations and De- 



votions 21 

Memorial Sermons... 21 

Oxford University 



Sermons 17 

Parochial Sermons... 17 

Present Position of 



Catholics 20 

Select Treatises of St. 

Athanasius 19 

Selections from Ser- 
mons 17 

Sermons on Subjects 

of the Day 17 

Sermons Preached on 



Various Occasions 18 

Theological Tracts 19 

University Teaching 18 

Verses on Various 



Occasions 20 

Via Media .. .. 20 



O'Brien (Mrs. William) Unseen Friends 8 
O'Malley (A.) and Walsh (J. J.) Pastoral 

Medicine 6 

Pryings among Private Papers n 

Quick and Dead 13 

Rickaby (John) First Principles of Know- 
ledge 2 

General Metaphysics ... 2 



(Joseph) Moral Philosophy ... 2 

and Mclntyre (Canon) 

Newman Memorial Sermons 21 

Rochester and other Literary Rakes ... u 

Roche (W.) The House and Table of God 12 
Rockliff (E.) An Experiment in History 

Teaching 13 

Rose (V.) Studies on the Gospels 5 

Rosmini (A.) Theodicy 5 



Page 

Russell (M.) Among the Blessed 6 

At Home with God 6 

The Three Sisters of Lord 

Russell of Killowen 8 

Ruville (A. Von) Back to Holy Church 4 

Ryder (I.) Essays 8 

Scannell (T. B.) The Priest's Studies ... 3 
Sheehan (P. A.) Blindness of Dr. Gray 16 
Early Essays and Lec- 
tures 16 

Glenanaar 16 

Lisheen 16 

' Lost A ngel of a Ruined 



Paradise' 16 

Luke Delmege 16 

Parerga 16 

The Queen's Fillet ... 16 

The Intellectuals . 16 



Smith (S. F.) The Instruction of Converts 3 
STONYHURST PHILOSOPHICAL 

SERIES 2 

Stuart (J. E.) The Education of Catholic 

Girls 13 

Terry (R. R.) Old Rhymes with New 

Tunes 14 

Thurston (H.) Lent and Holy Week ... 4 
The Christian Calendar ... 3 



Vacandard (E.) The Inquisition 

Walker (L. J.) Theories of Knowledge ... 
Ward (B.) Dawn of the Catholic Revival 

in England 

Eve of Catholic Emancipation 



-(Wilfrid) Aubrey de Vere, a Memoir 7 



Life of Cardinal New- 
man 7, 

Ten Personal Studies ... 



The Life of Cardinal 

Wiseman 

(Mrs. Wilfrid) Great Possessions... 

One Poor Scruple 

: Out of Due Time... 

The Job Secretary 

The Light Behind 



15 
15 
'5 
15 

WESTMINSTER LIBRARY (THE)... 3 
Wiseman (Cardina \Life.by Wilfrid Ward 7 
Wyatt-Davies (E.) History of England 

for Catholic Schools 

: Outlines of British 



12 



History 12 - 



No. 13. 10,000 viii/ 1 2. A.U.P. 



Illlill llll Hill Hill '"''!JJ!I1 Ji QCO c.