The Catholic World, Vol. 04, October, 1866 to March, 1867
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Title: The Catholic World, Vol. 04, October, 1866 to March, 1867
Author: Various
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CATHOLIC WORLD, VOL. 04, OCTOBER, 1866 TO MARCH, 1867 ***
[Transcriber's notes]
Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly
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THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
_A Monthly Magazine_
of
GENERAL LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.
VOL. IV.
OCTOBER, 1866, TO MARCH, 1867.
NEW YORK:
LAWRENCE KEHOE, PUBLISHER.
145 Nassau Street.
1867.
CONTENTS
Aërolites, 536.
Andorra, The Republic of, 561.
Books, Rise and Progress of, 104.
Books and Hymns, Mediaeval, 804.
Cervantes y Saavedra, Miguel de, 14.
Connecticut, Divorce Legislation in, 101.
Cowardice and Courage, 160.
Count Julian and His Family, Legend of, 211.
Celtic Anthology and Poetic Remains, 389.
Charity and Philanthropy, 434.
Christmas with the Baron, 446.
Conversion, The Philosophy of, 459.
Christ is Born, 496.
Christmas Story, Little Sunbeam's, 515.
Christmas Day, The Little Birds on, 584.
Christmas Eve, What Came of a Laugh on, 542.
Christmas, Catholic, 565.
Catholic Church, How my Aunt Pilcher found the, 667.
Christine, 681.
Catholic Ceremonial, The, 721.
De Vere, Aubrey, 73.
Divorce Legislation in Connecticut, 101.
Doubt, Victims of, 550.
European Events, Recent, 217.
French Unity, Founders of, 197.
French Watering-Place, A Month at a, 405.
Flowers, Sea-Side, 621.
Fra Angelico, A Portrait of, 671.
Godfrey Family, The, 30, 174, 320, 473, 598, 750.
Holy Land, The, 500.
Heart of Man, What Most Rejoices the, 559.
Lake Dwellings, 398.
Labor, The Source of, 593.
Limerick, The First Siege of, 708.
Miscellany, 138, 281, 424, 570, 853.
Montpensier, Mademoiselle de, 360.
Monarchy, The Church and, 627.
Mediaeval Books and Hymns, 804.
Nationalities, Development of, 245.
Old Owl, The, 264.
Origen at Caesarea, 772.
Problems of the Age, 1, 145, 289, 519, 652.
Paris, The Musée Retrospectif in, 275.
Painting, Missal, 303.
Proselytism, Protestant, in Eastern Lands, 342.
Pope and the Revolution, The, 577.
Parisian Attic, Genius in, 685.
Robert; or, The Influence of a Good Mother, 641, 824.
Rossetti, Christina G., 889.
Ritualism, What I Heard About, in a City Car, 850.
Saint Catharine at Florence, 129,
Science, Physical and Christian Revelation, 253, 372.
Syracuse and AEtna, 701.
Swetchine, Madame, 736.
The Age, Problems of, 1, 145, 289, 519, 652.
The Church, Independence of, 51,
The Thatched House, The Mystery of, 65.
Traveler's Tales, 111.
Tombstone, The Tale of a, 792.
Unconvicted; or, Old Thorneley's Heirs, 87, 223.
Woman, 417.
------
POETRY
A Summer Sorrow, 103.
Anniversary, 128.
Autumn, 341.
Ave Maria Sine Labe Concepts, 415.
Barabas and I, 535.
Bartimeus, On the Cure of, 771.
Christmas Song, A, 433.
Christmas Bells, 471.
Charity, Christian, 518.
Christmas Tree, My, 533.
Christmas Dream, A, 549.
Delia, 359.
Dying Year, The, 499.
Deliverance, 541.
Deo Opt. Max., 640.
Epigram, 457.
Home at Last, 263.
Herodias, Request of the Daughter of, 626.
I Am the Way, 680.
"Inconsolabile," 838.
Lucifer Matutinus, 110.
Light, 803.
My Soldier, 100.
My Fears, 210.
My Two Mites, 423.
Our Lord, Apparition of, to His Disciples, 514.
One Moment, 651.
Pea-Blossom, 404.
Poem, 597.
Pardon, 620.
"Quare Tristis es Anima Mea et Quare Conturbas Me?" 397.
Resurrection, The, 72.
Silent Grief, 29.
Song, 159.
Saint Lucy, 172.
Summer Days are Gone, 227.
Sonnet, 274.
St. Peter's Denial, On, 499.
The Fairest Fair, 818.
The Virgin's Cradle Hymn, 388.
The Christmas Tree, 458.
The Cry, 748.
The Answer, 749.
The Test, 846.
The Barren Fig-Tree and the Cross, 852.
Work-Box, My Aunt's, 666.
------
NEW PUBLICATIONS
Allie's See of St. Peter, 139.
Alphonso, 144.
Church History, Darras, 575.
Curious Questions, 428.
England, History of, for the Young, 144.
First Principles, 288.
Frederick the Great and His Court, 575.
Holt, Felix, 141.
Harkness' Latin Book, 143.
International Law, Wheaton's Elements of, 282.
King René's Daughter, 859.
Jesus, Sufferings of, 576.
Jesus Crucified. The School of, 858.
Laurentia, a Tale of Japan, 287.
Letters, Beethoven's, 574.
Lydia, 719.
Mormon Prophet and his Harem, The, 144.
Moral Evil, Origin of, 432.
Men, Light and Life of, 576.
Mouthful of Bread, History of a, 720.
McAuley, Catherine, Life of, 854.
Manual, The French, 858.
Philip Earnescliffe, 143.
Pastoral Letter of Second Plenary Council, 425.
Poems, Alice Carey's, 572.
Poems, Buchanan's, 574.
Paulists, Sermons of the, 718.
Pictorial Histories, Goodrich's, 720.
Physiology of Man, The, 859.
Rise and Fall, The, 431.
See of St. Peter, Allie's, 139.
Six Months at White House, Carpenter's, 142,
Sunday-school Class-Book, Improved Catholic, 143.
Saint Cecilia, Life of, 286.
Spanish Papers, Irving's, 286.
Shakespeare, Authorship of the Works of, 429.
Scientific Subjects, Herschel's Lectures on, 430.
Saint Vincent de Paul, Life of, 576.
Severne, Robert, 857.
The Sham Squire, 288.
The Conditioned, Philosophy of, 432.
Town, Out of, 860.
Vignettes, Miss Parke's, 287.
Woman's Work, Essays on, 142.
Women, Higher Education of, 575.
Welte, Alte und Neue, 576.
----
{1}
THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. IV., NO. 19.--OCTOBER, 1866.
ORIGINAL.
PROBLEMS OF THE AGE.
VII.
THE DOGMA OF CREATION--THE PRINCIPLE, ARCHETYPE,
AND END OF THE CREATIVE ACT.
The next article of the creed is, "Creatorem coeli et terrae:" Creator
of heaven and earth.
The mystery of the Trinity exhausts the idea of the activity of God
within his own interior being, or _ad intra_. The dogma of creation
expresses the idea of the activity of God without his own interior
being, or _ad extra_. It is an explication of the primitive idea of
reason which presents simultaneously to intelligence the absolute and
the contingent in their necessary relation of the dependence of the
contingent upon the absolute. Being an explication of the rational
idea, it is rationally demonstrable, and does not, therefore, belong
to the super-intelligible part of the revelation, or that which is
believed simply on the veracity of God. That portion of the dogma of
creation which is super-intelligible, or revealed truth in the highest
sense, relates to the supernatural end to which the creation is
determined by the decree of God. Nevertheless, although the idea of
creation, once proposed, is demonstrable on purely rational
principles, it is fairly and fully proposed to reason under an
adequate and explicit conception adequately expressed, only by divine
revelation. Wherever this adequate formula of revelation has been
lost, the conception has been lost with it, and not even the highest
philosophy has restored it. Plato's conception of the formation of the
universe went no higher than the impression of divine ideas upon
matter eternally self existent. In all philosophy which is not
regulated by the principles of revelation, the ideas of necessary
being and contingent existence and of the relation between them are
more or less confused, and the dogma of creation is corrupted.
The pure, theistic conception gives at once the pure conception of
creation.
Not that the idea of creation can be immediately perceived in the idea
of God, which has been shown to be impossible; but that it can be
perceived in the idea of God by the medium of the knowledge of finite
existences given to the intellect together with the knowledge of
infinite being, in the {2} primitive intuition. When the idea of
infinite being is fully explicated and demonstrated in the perfect
conception of God, the existence of real entities which are not God,
and therefore not included in necessary being, being known, the
relation of these things extrinsic to the being of God, to the being
of God itself, becomes evident in the idea of God. It is evident that
they have no necessary self-existence either out of the divine being
or in the divine being, and therefore have been brought out of
nonentity into entity by the act of God.
This creative act of God is that by which he reduces possibility to
actuality. It is evident that this possibility of creation, or
creability of finite existences extrinsic to the divine essence, is
necessary and eternal. For God could not think of doing that which he
does not think as possible, and his thoughts are eternal. The thought
or idea of creation is therefore eternal in the divine mind. It is a
divine and eternal archetype or ideal, which the externised, concrete
reality copies and represents. The divine essence is the complete and
adequate object of the divine contemplation.
It is, therefore, in his own essence that God must have beheld the
eternal possibility of creation and the ground or reason of
creability. It is the divine essence itself, therefore, which contains
the archetype or ideal of a possible creation. As an archetype, it
must contain that which is equivalent to finite essences, capable of
being brought into concrete, actual existence by the divine power, and
multiplied to an indefinite extent God's eternal knowledge of the
possibility of creation is, therefore, his knowledge of his own
essence, as an archetype of existences which he is capable of enduing
with reality extrinsic to the reality of his own being, by his
omnipotent power. The eternal possibility of creation, therefore,
exists necessarily in the being and omnipotence of God. It is the
imitability of the divine essence as archetype by finite essences,
which are its real and extrinsic similitudes, and which are
extrinsecated by an act of the divine will. The ideal or archetype of
creation is evidently as necessary, as eternal, as unchangeable, as
God himself. God cannot create except according to this archetype, and
in creating must necessarily copy himself, to give extrinsic existence
to something which is a concrete expression of the divine ideal in his
own intelligence. This ideal which creation copies being, therefore,
eternal in the divine intelligence, and the interior activity of the
divine intelligence, or its interior ideal life, being inexplicable
except in the relation of the three persons in God, creation is
likewise inexplicable, except in relation to the distinct persons of
the Trinity.
The Son, or Word, proceeds from the contemplation of his own divine
essence by the Father, who thus reproduces the perfect and coequal
image of himself. In this act of contemplation, the knowledge of the
archetype of creation, or of the creability of essences resembling the
divine essence, is necessarily included. The expressed ideal or
archetype of all possible existences is therefore in the Word, as the
personal image of the Father, and he contains in himself, in an
eminent and equivalent manner, infinite similitudes or images capable
of being reduced to act, and made to reflect himself in a countless
variety of ways. The Son thus communicates with the Father in creative
omnipotence. The spiration of the Holy Spirit, from the Father and the
Son, consummating the act of contemplation by which the Son is
generated in love, and thus completing the interior, intelligent, or
spiritual life of God within himself, is perfectly correlated to the
eternal generation of the Son. The complete essence of God is
communicated by the Father and the Son to the Holy Spirit, and with it
creative omnipotence as necessarily included in it. The object of
volition in God is identical with the object of intelligence. The
essence of God as being the archetype of a possible creation, {3} that
is, the ideal of creation, or the idea which creation copies, being
included in the term of the divine intelligence, or in the Word, is
also included in the term of the divine love, or the Holy Spirit. The
ideal of creation is therefore included in the object of the eternal,
intelligent, living contemplation in which the three persons of the
blessed Trinity are united. The power of illimitable creation
according to the divine archetype is a necessary and eternal predicate
of his divine being, which he contemplates with complacency. The idea
of creation is therefore as eternal as God; it is coeval with him, and
the object of the ineffable communications of the divine persons with
each other from eternity. God has always been pleased with this idea,
as the artist delights himself in the ideal of beauty, to which he
feels himself capable of giving outward form and expression in
sculpture, painting, or architecture.
The decree of God to reduce this possibility of creation to act, or
the creative purpose, is likewise eternal; since all divine acts are
in eternity, and there is no process of deliberation or progress from
equilibrium to determination possible in the unchangeable God. God is
_actus purissimus_, most pure act, and there is in him nothing
potential or reducible to act which is not in act from eternity; since
in him there is no past or future, and no succession, but _tota, simul
ac perfecta possessio vitae interminabilss_, a complete, simultaneous,
and perfect possession of interminable life.
The necessity of his own self-existent being does not determine him to
the creative act, but merely to the exercise of supreme omnipotence in
choosing freely between the contemplation of creation in its ideal
archetype alone, and of creation in its ideal archetype determined to
outward actual expression. The inward life of God is necessary, and
the interior act of beatific contemplation is of the essence of the
divine being. Nothing beyond this, or outside of the interior essence
of God, can be necessary, and the creation cannot therefore be
necessary, or it would be included in the idea of God, and be
identical with the essence of God. God does not create, therefore, by
necessity of nature, but by voluntary choice. It is the only exercise
of voluntary choice possible to him. It is a choice, however, which
though free is determined from eternity. He might have eternally
chosen the contrary, that is, to leave the possible creation
unactualized in its ideal archetype. He did eternally choose, however,
to create.
The learned expositor of St. Thomas, F. Billuart, says that the
purpose to create is communicated by the Father to the Word,
concomitantly with the intelligence of the divine essence by which he
is generated. [Footnote 1] Creation is no afterthought, no capricious
or sportive play of omnipotence, like the _jeu d'esprit_ which a poet
throws off from a sudden impulse of fancy. The creative purpose has
been the theme of the mysterious communications of the three persons
of the blessed Trinity, from all eternity. In God, purpose and act,
consultation and decree, are one. The decree of creation and the
creative act are identical. The creative act, therefore, _a parte
Dei_, is eternal. It is an illusion of the imagination to conceive of
time as having existed before creation. "In the beginning, God created
the heavens and the earth." That beginning was the first moment of
time, which St. Thomas says God created when he created the universe.
Time is a mere relation of finite entities to each other and to
infinite being, arising from their limitation. The procession of
created existences is necessarily in time, and could not have begun
_ab aeterno_ without a series actually infinite, which is impossible.
Nevertheless, the first instant of created time had no created time
behind it, and no series of instants behind it, intervening between it
and eternity, but touched immediately on eternity.
[Footnote 1: Tract. De Trin. Diss. V. Art III. ]
{4}
The procession of created existences from God is a finite similitude
of the procession of the Son and Holy Spirit from the Father. Creation
is an expression of that archetype in finite form which is expressed
in the infinite image of the Word. He is "the splendor of the glory,
and the express image of the substance" [Footnote 2] of the Father;
and creation is a reflection of this splendor, a reduplication in
miniature of this image. It is an act of the same infinite
intelligence by which the infinite Word is generated. For although
finite itself, it is the similitude of an infinite archetype which
only infinite intelligence can possess within itself. It is also an
act of the same infinite love whose spiration is the Holy Spirit. The
sanctity of the divine nature consists in the perfect conformity of
intelligence and volition. Volition is love, a complacency in good.
Love must therefore concur with intelligence in every divine act, that
it may be holy. The Holy Spirit, or impersonated love, must concur
with the Father and the Son, as principle and medium, to consummate or
bring to its final end the creative act. Creation is therefore
essentially an act of love; proceeding from intelligence and ordained
for beatitude; proceeding from God as first cause, and returning to
him as final cause. [Footnote 3]
[Footnote 2: Heb. i. 3.]
[Footnote 3: Final cause is the same as ultimate end. It is the
cause or reason of the determination of God to create.]
The final cause of creation must be God, just as necessarily as its
first cause must be God. The creative decree being eternal, all that
constitutes its perfection, including its end and consummation, must
be eternal, and must therefore be in God. He is the principle and
consummation of his own act _ad intra_, and of his act _ad extra_,
which imitates it perfectly. God creates, because he freely chooses to
please himself by conferring the good of existence through the
creative act on subjects distinct from himself. The adequate object of
this volition of God is himself as the author of created good, or the
term of the relation which created existences have to him as their
creator. The possession of good by the creature is inseparable in the
volition of God from the complacency which he has in the exercise of
the power of bestowing good by creation. Although he is necessarily
his own final end in creating, yet this does not prevent creation from
being an act of pure and free love, but on the contrary makes it to be
so; because it is as infinite love that God is the end of his creative
act. A charitable man, who confers good upon another, is moved by a
principle of love in himself, which causes him to take delight in the
happiness of his fellow-creatures. This movement originates in
himself, and returns back to himself, being consummated in the pure
happiness which the exercise of love produces. Yet the possession of
good by another is the real object which elicits the act of love, and
it is therefore pure, disinterested charity. Love makes the good as
given, and the good as received, one identical object, and unites the
giver and receiver in one good. Selfishness is inordinate self-love,
or a love of others merely so far as they serve as instruments of our
own pleasure and advantage, and not as themselves subjects of
happiness. But the just love of self and of others is identical in
principle, proceeding from the _amor entis_, or love of being. The
benignant father, prelate, or sovereign, the generous benefactor of
his fellow-men, is not less disinterested in his acts on account of
the pure happiness which comes back to himself, filling his heart with
the purest happiness of which it is capable. Thus in God; his
complacency in his creative act, or sovereign pleasure in creating, is
the purest and most perfect love to the creature. That which he
delights in as creator is the bestowal of existence, which
participates in the infinite good of his own being.
{5}
The mode and degree in which existences participate in this infinite
good which God distributes from the plenitude of his own being,
specificates and determines their relation to him as final cause, and
constitutes the ultimate term to which their creation is directed.
This ultimate term or final end of creation as a whole, includes the
ends for which each part taken singly is intended, and the common end
to which these minor and less principal ends are all subordinated in
the universal creative design. The end of a particular portion of the
creation, taken singly, is attained, when it makes the final and
complete explication of that similitude to the divine perfections
which constitutes it in its own particular grade of existence. The end
of the universe of existences is attained, when they collectively
reach the maximum of excellence which God proposed to himself in
creating. That is, when the similitude of the perfections of God is
expressed in the universe in that variety of distinct grades, and
raised to that altitude in the series of possible states of existence,
which God prefixed in the beginning as the ultimate term of the
creative act. Whatever the maximum of created good may be, whatever
may be the predetermined limits of the universe of existence, whatever
may be the highest point of elevation to which it is destined, it is
evident that the accomplishment of the creative act brings the
creation back to God as final cause. It has its final end in God,
wherever that finality may have been fixed by the eternal will of God.
This is very plain and obvious. But it leads into one of the most
abstruse and, at the same time, one of the most unavoidable questions
of philosophy, that which relates to the end of creation
metaphysically final. What is the end of creation, or the relation of
the universe of created existences to the final cause, which is
metaphysically final? How far ought the actual end of created
existences to coincide, or does it really coincide with the end
metaphysically final?
VIII.
THE END OF CREATION METAPHYSICALLY FINAL--THE ASCENDING SERIES OF
GRADES IN EXISTENCE--THE SUMMIT OF THIS SERIES IS A NATURE
HYPOSTATICALLY UNITED TO THE DIVINE NATURE OF THE WORD--THE
INCARNATION, THE CREATIVE ACT CARRIED TO THE APEX OF POSSIBILITY--THE
SUPERNATURAL END TO WHICH THE UNIVERSE IS DESTINED COMPLETED IN THE
INCARNATION.
By the end of creation metaphysically final, is meant a relation of
the universe to God as final cause which is final in the divine idea,
or the one which God beholds in his own infinite intelligence as the
ultimatum to which his omnipotence can carry the creative act. It is a
relation which brings the creature to the closest union and similitude
to the creator in the good of being which the nature of the infinite
and of the finite will admit.
We have already established the doctrine that God is by nature free to
create or not to create, and eternally determines himself to creation
by his own sovereign will to confer the pure boon of existence. We
have also established, that since God determines himself from eternity
to create, he necessarily creates in accordance with his own nature or
essence, in accordance with the eternal archetype and idea reflected
in the person of the Word; and for his own glory, or for an end in
himself to which the creature is related, and which he must attain if
he accomplishes his destiny. But we must inquire further, whether in
determining himself to create according to the archetype contained in
his own essence, he necessarily carries out this idea to the most
perfect and complete actualization in the real universe? That is, does
he necessarily create for an end metaphysically final, and carry the
creative act to its apex, or the summit of possibility? Or is there
any degree of existence or {6} grade of resemblance and relation to
God as archetype which must be supposed in order to conceive of an end
accomplished by creation which is worthy of the divine wisdom and
goodness? Or, on the contrary, is it just as free to God to determine
any limit, however low, as the term of creation, as it is to abstain
from creating? For instance, can we suppose it consistent with the
divine wisdom to create only a grain of sand? On the one hand, it may
be said that creation being a free act, the creation of a grain of
sand does not take away the liberty of the divine will to abstain from
creating anything else. On the other hand, God, as being in his very
essence the infinite wisdom, must have an adequate end in view, even
in creating a grain of sand. It may be said that the creation of a
grain of sand is truly an infinite act, and that a grain of sand
represents the omnipotence of God as truly as the universe itself.
Yet, it is difficult to see any reason why Almighty God should make
such a representation merely for his own contemplation. For the same
reason, it is equally difficult to suppose any adequate motive for the
creation of a merely material universe, however extensive. The wisdom
and power of God are manifested, but manifested to himself alone. The
very end of such a manifestation appears to be to manifest the
attributes of God to intelligent minds capable of apprehending it.
Suppose the material universe filled with sentient creatures, and,
although its end is thus partially fulfilled, by the enjoyment which
they are capable of receiving from it, its adaptation to the
manifestation of the divine attributes to intelligence is still
apparently without an object. The sentient creation itself manifests
the wisdom and goodness of God in such a way that it seems to require
an intelligent nature to apprehend it, in order that God may be
glorified in his works, and that the love which is the essential
consummating principle of the creative act may be reflected back from
the creation to the creator, and thus furnish an adequate term of the
divine complacency. This complacency of God in himself as creator, as
we have seen, is complacency in the communication of good, or pure,
disinterested love delighting in the distribution of its own infinite
plenitude. The material creation can only be the recipient of this
love _in transitu_ or as the instrument and means of conveying it to a
subject capable of apprehending it. The sentient creation can only be
the recipient of it as its most imperfect term, and as an end most
inadequate to the means employed. The wisdom and goodness of God in
the creative act cannot therefore be made intelligible to us, except
as we consider it as including the creation of intelligent natures,
capable of sharing in the intelligent life of God. As soon as the mind
makes this point, it is able to perceive an adequate motive for the
creation, for it apprehends a good in the finite order resembling the
infinite good which is necessary and uncreated. It is approaching to a
finality, for it apprehends that the rational nature is that nature in
which the finality must be situated, or in which the ultimate relation
of the universe to the final cause must exist. In other words, it
apprehends that God has created a _universe_, including all generic
grades of existence explicated into a vast extent and variety of
subordinate genera and species multiplied in a countless number of
individuals, all subordinate to a common order, and culminating in
intelligent life. It apprehends the correspondence of the actual
creation to its ideal archetype, or the realization in act of the
highest possible nature which omnipotence can create after the
resemblance of his own essence impersonated in the Word, and of every
inferior nature necessary to the constitution of a _universe_, or a
world of composite order and harmony comprising all the essential
forms of existence whose infinite equivalent is in the divine idea.
{7}
It is evidently befitting the wisdom and grandeur of Almighty God,
that the created universe should represent to created intelligence an
adequate and universal similitude of his being and perfections; that
its vast extent and variety, the multiplicity of distinct existences
which it contains, its complicated relations and harmonies, the
sublimity and beauty of its forms, the superabundance of its sentient
life and enjoyment, the excellence and perfection of its intelligent
creatures, should be adapted to overwhelm the mind with admiration of
the might and majesty, the wisdom and glory, the goodness and love of
the Creator; that, as far as possible, the procession of the divine
persons within the essence of God should be copied in the procession
of created existences; that the ineffable object of the divine
contemplation, or the Word going forth from the infinite intelligence
of the Father and returning to him in the Holy Spirit, should be
represented in created similitudes by the communication of being,
life, and intelligence, in every possible grade, and the completion of
these in the most sublime manner of union to God of which finite
nature is capable. This consummation of the creative act is worthy of
the wisdom of God; for it is the most perfect act of the divine
intelligence _ad extra_, or extrinsic to the _actus purissimus_ by
which the Word is generated in the unity of his eternal being, which
is possible. It is worthy of the goodness of God; for it is the most
perfect act of love _ad extra_, or extrinsic to the _actus purissimus_
of the spiration of the Holy Spirit, consummating the interior life of
God in eternal, self-sufficing beatitude, which omnipotence can
produce.
Let us now analyse the composite order of the universe, and examine
its component parts singly, in reference to the final end to which
this order is determined. We will then proceed to examine more closely
the mode by which the end of the universe is attained in the rational
nature, and the relation of this rational nature to the end
metaphysically final.
Theologians distinguish in the divine nature _esse, vivere_, and
_intelligere_, or being, life, and intelligence, as constituting the
archetype of the inanimate, animated, and rational orders of creation
respectively.
The inanimate order, composed of the aggregate of material substances,
imitates the divine _esse_, considered as concrete and real imply;
prescinding the idea of vital movement. It imitates the divine being
in the lowest and most imperfect manner. The good that is in it can
only be apprehended and made to contribute to the happiness of
conscious existence when a higher order of existence is created. God
loves it only as an artist loves an aqueduct, a building, or a statue,
as the medium of contributing to the well-being or pleasure of his
creatures. Its hidden essence is impervious to our intelligence. The
utmost that we can distinctly conceive of its nature is that it is a
_vis activa_, an active force, producing sensible effects or
phenomena. This appears to be the opinion which is more common and
gaining ground both among physical and metaphysical philosophers.
[Footnote 4] By active force is meant a simple, indivisible substance,
which exists in perpetual activity. It is material substance, because
its activity is blind, unconscious, and wholly mechanical, producing
by physical necessity sensible effects, such as extension, resistance,
etc. Though not manifest to intelligence in its hidden nature and
operation, it is apprehensible by the intelligence through the effects
which it operates, as something intelligible. Its sensible {8}
phenomena are not illusions, or mere subjective forms of the
sensibility, but are objectively real. Nevertheless, our conception of
them must be corrected and sublimated by pure reason, in order to
correspond to the reality or substance which stands under them. Our
imaginary conceptions [Footnote 5] represent only the complex of
phenomena presented to the senses. They represent matter as composite,
because it is only through composition, or the interaction of distinct
material substances upon each other, that the effects and phenomena
are produced which the senses present to the imagination. The
substance, or active force which stands under them, is concluded by a
judgment of the reason. Reason cannot arrest itself at the composite
as something ultimate. The common, crude conception of extended bulk
as the ultimate material reality, is like the child's conception of
the surface of the earth as the floor of the universe having nothing
below it, and of the sky as its roof; or like the Indian conception of
an elephant supporting the world, who stands himself on the back of a
tortoise, who is on the absolute mud lying at the bottom of all
things. It is the essential operation of reason to penetrate to the
_altissima causa_, or deepest cause of things, and not to stop at
anything as its term which implies something else as the reason or
principle of its existence. It cannot therefore stop at anything short
of the _altissima causa_, in the order of material second causes, any
more than it can stop short of the cause of all causes, or the
absolute first cause. That which is ultimate in the composite must be
simple and indivisible in itself, and divided from everything else, or
it cannot be an original and primary component. For, however far the
analysis of a composite may be carried, it may be carried further,
unless it has been analysed to its simple constituent parts which are
not themselves composite, and therefore simple. It is of no avail to
take refuge in the notion of the infinite divisibility of matter. For,
apart from the absurdity of the infinite series contained in this
notion, one of these infinitesimal entities could certainly be divided
from all others by the power of God and made intelligible to the human
understanding. And the very question under discussion is, What is the
intelligible essence of this ultimate entity?
[Footnote 4: The philosophical works of Leibnitz may be consulted
for a thorough exposition of this doctrine. Also the Philosophical
Manuals of F. Rothenflue, S.J., and the Abbé Branchereau of the
Society of St. Sulpice. The philosophical articles of Dr. Brownson
in his Review contain some incidental arguments of great value on
the same topic. P. Dalgairns of the London Oratory, also treats,
with the ability and clearness which characterize all his writings,
of this subject, at considerable length, in his work on the Holy
Communion.]
[Footnote 5: By "imaginary conceptions" is not meant fanciful,
unreal conceptions, but conceptions of the imaginative as and
intellectual facility which reflects the real.]
Another proof that material substance is something intelligible and
not something sensible, is, that it has a relation to spiritual
substance, and therefore something cognate to spirit in its essence.
The Abbé Branchereau defines relation: "Proprietatem qua duo aut plura
entia ita se habeat ad invicem, ut unius conceptus conceptum alterius
includat aut supponat." "A property by which two or more entities are
so constituted in reference to one another, that the conception of one
includes or suppose the conception of the other." [Footnote 6]
[Footnote 6: Praelect. Philos. De Relat. Entis. Num. 108, 8.]
The conception of spirit must contain the equivalent of the conception
of matter, and the conception of matter must contain something the
equivalent of which is contained in spirit. Else, they must be related
as total opposites, which leads to the absurd conclusion that in the
essence of God, which is the equivalent of all finite essences, total
opposites and contradictions are contained. The same is affirmed by F.
Billuart after the scholastic principles of the Thomists. "Supremum
autem naturae inferioris attingitur a natura superiori." "The summit
of the inferior nature is touched by the superior nature." [Footnote
7] Everything copies the essence of God and exists by its
participation in his being. There is no reason therefore for any other
distinction in creatures except the distinction of gradation in a
series, or the distinction of a more or less intense grade of
participation in being. God cannot create anything totally {9}
dissimilar to himself, because the sole archetype imitable in the
creative act, whose similitude is externised in creation, is himself.
All things therefore being similar to his essence are similar to the
essence of one another, each to each, each grade in the ascending
series containing the equivalent of all below it.
[Footnote 7: De Augelis. Diss. II. Art. I.]
The material creation represents the real being of God, as
distinguishable in thought from his life and intelligence, in an
express and distinct manner. The being of God is the archetype of the
material creation, and contains a reason why the material order was
necessary to perfect the universe. All geometrical principles are
intuitively seen by the reason to be eternal truths. As eternal and
necessary they are included in the object of the divine contemplation.
The complete and adequate object of the divine contemplation is the
divine essence. It is therefore in his own essence that God sees these
necessary geometrical truths, not as we see them, but as identical
with the truth of his own being in some way above our human
understanding. These eternal geometrical principles are the principles
which lie at the basis of the structure of the material universe,
which therefore represents something in the divine essence not
immediately and distinctly represented by the spiritual world.
Without pretending to define precisely what the material universe
represents as equivalently and eminently contained in the divine
essence, we are only uttering a truism when we affirm that what man in
his present state principally apprehends through it, is the idea of
the immensity of the divine being. The material universe, which has a
_quasi_ infinitude to our feeble and limited imagination, is an image
of God as possessing boundless infinitude, and including an
immeasurable ocean of perfections. It is only when the mind becomes so
overwhelmed with the magnitude of the creation as to forget its
relation to the creator, that its judgment is erroneous. And the error
of judgment does not consist in appreciating the material universe too
highly, but in appreciating it too little, that is, in not
appreciating its highest relation to the spiritual order, with which
it is cognate in its essence. The physical, visible world is not to be
despised. It is no illusion, no temporary phase of reality, no
perishable substance, but real, indestructible, and of endless
duration. Its essence and its relation to the final cause are
incomprehensible. Its essence is, however, so far intelligible that we
can understand it to be a real entity, bearing a similitude to the
divine nature, endued with active force as a physical second cause,
through which wonderful phenomena are produced in which the divine
perfections are manifested. Its end is also intelligible as
subordinated to the higher grades of existence and to the grand
composite order of the universe.
The next grade of existence is that which represents the _vivere_ of
the divine essence, or presents an animated and living similitude of
the life of God. The distinct type of this grade is in the animal
world, but it is connected with the inanimate creation by an
intermediate link, namely, that which is constituted by the world of
vegetative life. This world of vegetative life represents the
principle of life in an inchoate form, and ministers to the higher
life of sentient existences, by furnishing them with the sustenance
and food of their physical life, and contributing to their enjoyment
by the beauty of its forms.
Thus far, the creation is merely good as means to an end, or as the
substratum of that order of existence which is capable of apprehending
and enjoying good. In the sentient creation, existence becomes a good
in itself, or a good capable of terminating the divine will. The
countless multitudes of sentient creatures are created that they may
enjoy life, and attain their particular end in this enjoyment.
Nevertheless this {10} particular end is a minor and less principal
end in reference to the general end of the created universe. To this
more general end the sentient order contributes, by increasing the
beauty and perfection of the whole, and ministering to the happiness
of the higher, intelligent order.
This third and highest grade of existence represents the divine
_intelligere_. It includes all rational natures, or intelligent
spirits, created after the similitude of that in the divine essence
which is the highest archetype imitable in finite existences.
According to the regular series of gradation, man comes next in order
above the animal world, and should be first considered. There is a
particular reason, however, which will appear hereafter, for
considering the angels first.
The angels represent most perfectly the order of pure intelligence as
distinct from the irrational creation. By their nature they are at the
summit of existence, and participate in the most immediate and
elevated mode which can be connatural to any created essence, in the
divine perfections. The perfection of the universe requires that it
should contain a grade of existence imitating that which is highest in
the essence of God so far as it is an archetype of a possible
creation. There is nothing conceivable in the divine essence higher
than its intelligence or pure spirituality. The divine life is
consummated in the most pure act of intelligent spirit, which is the
procession of the Word and Holy Spirit from the Father. This divine
procession within the divine essence being the archetype of the
procession of created existences without it, the latter ought to
imitate the former by producing that which represents the intelligent
act of God as closely as possible. This intelligent act of God being
consummated in love, or complacency in that infinite good which is the
object of intelligence, creation, which imitates and represents it,
ought to contain existences which are the recipients of love and are
capable of its exercise in the highest possible manner which can be
essential to a created nature. The creative act would therefore be
most imperfect and incomplete if it stopped short with the material or
even the sentient creation. Supposing that God determines to carry out
his creative act by creating a universe or a world in which the
potential is actualized in a universal manner by representing the
_esse, vivere_, and _intelligere_ of the divine essence in every
generic mode, this universe must evidently contain intelligent
spirits. Intelligent spirit alone can apprehend the image of God in
creation, apprehend itself as made in the image of God, apprehend the
infinite attributes of God by the intuition of reason, and become
fully conscious of the good of existence, capable of enjoying it, and
of returning to the creator an act of love, worship, and
glorification, for his great boon of goodness conferred in creation.
Creation is an overflow of the plenitude of good in the divine being
proceeding from the complacency of God in the communication of this
good. This communication can be made in a manner which appears to our
reason in any way adequate to terminate the divine complacency, only
by the communication of intelligence.
The type of intelligent nature is most perfectly actualized in the
angels, whose essence and operation are purely spiritual, so far as
created, finite nature and operation can be purely spiritual. Whatever
is intelligible or conceivable of finite, intellectual activity as
connatural, or intrinsically included in the essence of created
spirit, is to be attributed to them.
The notion of any composition of nature in the angels, or hypostatic
union of their pure, spiritual substance with another material
substance distinct from it, is wholly gratuitous. It destroys the
distinctive type of the angelic nature and the specific difference
between it and human nature. It has no foundation in reason except the
baseless supposition that a distinct {11} corporeal organization is
necessary to the exercise of created intelligence. Nor has it any
solid support from tradition or extrinsic authority.
Some of the fathers are cited as maintaining it. Their language is,
however, for the most part explained by the best theologians as
indicating not the union of the angelic spirit to a distinct subtle
corporeity, but the existence of something analogous to matter in the
angelic spirit itself. The angels are called corporeal existences,
because their essence is extrinsic to the divine essence, and
extrinsecation attains its extreme limit in matter; also because their
potentiality is not completely reduced to act, and their operation is
limited by time and space. This appears to be also the notion
advocated by Leibnitz, and the exposition of the nature of material
substance given above, in accordance with his philosophy, removes all
difficulty from the subject.
The conception of the angelic essence as completely free from all
composition with a distinct material substance, is also at least more
evidently in harmony with the decree _Firmiter_ of the Fourth Council
of Lateran, than any other. "Firmiter credimus et simpliciter
confitemur, quod unus est solus verus Deus aeternus. . . . . qui sua
omnipotenti virtute simul ab initio temporis, utramque de nihilo
condidit creaturam, spiritualem et corporalem, angelicam videlicet et
mundanam; ac deinde humanam quasi communem ex spiritu et corpore
constitutam."
"We firmly believe and confess with simplicity, that there is one only
true eternal God . . . . who by his own almighty power simultaneously
from the beginning of time made out of nothing both parts of the
creation, the spiritual and the corporeal, that is, the angelical and
the mundane: and afterwards the human creature, as it were of a nature
in common with both, constituted from spirit and body."
Nevertheless, by the principle of the Thomist philosophy above cited,
that the lowest point of any nature touches the highest of the nature
beneath it, there may be something even in the spiritual operation of
the angels cognate to material operation, and coming within the sphere
of the sensible. We will venture to give a little sample of scholastic
theology on this head from Billuart.
"It may be said with reason that the angels operate two things in the
celestial empyrean. The first is the illumination by which the
intrinsic splendor of the empyrean is perfected, according to St.
Thomas and various testimonies of Holy Scripture in which certain
places are said to have been sensibly illuminated by the angels. For
although an angel cannot immediately produce alterative qualities, as
heat or cold, he can produce light, because light is a celestial
quality and the highest of corporeal qualities, and the summit of the
inferior nature is touched by the superior nature.
"In the second place, the angels operate on the empyrean heaven, so
that it may more perfectly and efficaciously communicate a suitable
perpetuity and stability to all inferior things. For as the supreme
angels who are permanently stationed there have an influence over the
intermediate and lowest angels who are sent forth, although they
themselves are not sent forth, so the empyrean heaven, although it is
itself motionless, communicates to those things which are in motion
the requisite stability and permanence in their being. And that this
may be done more efficaciously and permanently the angels aid by their
operation in it. For, the whole universe is one in unity of order; and
this unity of order consists in that by a certain arrangement
corporeal things are regulated by those which are spiritual, and
inferior bodies by the superior; therefore, as this order demands that
the empyrean spheres influence the inferior ones, it demands also that
the angels influence the empyrean sphere." [Footnote 8]
[Footnote 8: De Angelis. Diss. IL Art. I.]
{12}
Whatever may be thought of this as philosophy, it is certainly
brilliantly poetical, as is the whole treatise of the learned
Dominican from which it is extracted. The physical theory of the
universe maintained by the scholastics was a magnificent conception,
although it has been supplanted by a sounder scientific hypothesis.
There appears to be no reason, however, for rejecting the notion of
angelic influence over the movement of the universe. The modern
hypothesis of a central point of revolution for the universe being
substituted for the ancient one of the empyrean, the entire scholastic
theory of the influence of the angels upon the exterior order of the
universe may remain untouched in its intrinsic probability.
The consideration of man has been reserved, because, although he is
inferior to the angels in intelligence, he sums up in himself the
three grades of existence, and therefore the consideration of the
three as distinct ought to precede the consideration of their
composition in the complex human nature. The human nature includes in
itself the material, vegetative, animal, and intelligent natures,
which represent respectively the divine _esse, vivere_, and
_intelligere_. For this reason man is called a microcosm or universe
in miniature. In certain special perfections of the material,
sentient, and intelligent natures, he is inferior to each; but the
combination of all gives him a peculiar excellence and completeness,
and qualifies him to stand in the most immediate relation to the final
cause of the universe, or to the consummation of its end.
What this end is, we must now more closely examine. It is plain at
first sight that this end must be attained by creation through its
intelligent portion, or through the angelic and human natures. As God
is final cause as well as first cause; of necessity, these intelligent
natures in themselves, and all inferior natures through them, must, in
some way, terminate on God as their ultimate end. God is final cause
as the supreme good participated in and attained to by the creation,
through the overflow of the plenitude of the divine being. The divine
complacency in this voluntary overflow of the fount of being and good
was the ultimate and determining motive to the creative act. The good
of being thus given is a similitude of the divine _esse, vivere,_ and
_intelligere_. As it is real, or existence in act, it must copy, as
far as its grade of existence permits, the most pure act of God in the
blessed Trinity. That is, the creature must reflect from its own
essence an image of the divine essence, or a created similitude of the
uncreated Word, in which its existence is completed and its act
consummated. In the material world this is a mere dead image, like the
representation of a living form made by a statue or picture. In the
sentient world, so far as we can understand this most inscrutable and
baffling of all parts of the creation, there is an apprehension by the
sensitive soul of a kind of shadow of the intelligible object in
sensible forms, and the imperfect resemblance of the life and felicity
of an intelligent nature which corresponds to this imperfect
apprehension. In the intelligent creature, its spiritual essence, by
virtue of the rationality in which it is created, and is its
constitutive principle, reflects an image of the divine Word in the
contemplation of which its intelligent life is completed. So far as
intelligent nature is merely potential, it is potential to this act of
intelligent life; and when its potentiality is reduced to act, so as
to produce the nearest similitude to the divine intelligence in act,
which God has determined to create, intelligent nature, and in it all
nature, has attained its finality. Intelligent nature has attained the
highest good attainable; and, the different intelligent species and
individuals existing together in due order and harmony in the
participation of the common good, with all inferior grades of
existence subordinated to them, the universe has unity and is
determined to a common final end.
{13}
Thus, creation returns back to the principle from which it proceeded
by the consummation of the creative act. As the Father is united to
the Word in the Holy Spirit, or in love and complacency, so the
creation is united to God by the possession of good and the
complacency of God in this good. It is actualized in the intelligent
nature capable of knowing and loving God, and therefore having a
similitude to the Son or Word. When it is ascertained what the highest
union to the Father, or that approaching nearest to the union of the
Son to him of which created nature is capable, is, it will be
ascertained what is the end metaphysically final to which created
nature can attain, if God wills to bring it to the summit of
possibility. When it is ascertained what this summit of possibility
is, it is ascertained what the end of creation is which is
metaphysically final; and when it is ascertained how far toward this
summit God has actually determined to elevate his creation, it is
ascertained what is the end of creation actually final, and how far it
coincides with the end metaphysically final.
This knowledge cannot be deduced from any first principle given to
reason. It is communicated by revelation, and by this revelation we
learn that God has determined to bring the creation to the end
metaphysically final in the incarnation of the Word.
The revelation of the mystery of the Incarnation is concomitant with
the revelation of the mystery of the Trinity; therefore, in the creed,
the same terms which propose the dogma that the Word is of God and is
God, propose the dogma that the Word is incarnate in human nature. The
name given to the Second Person in the Trinity, in the creed, Jesus
Christ, is the name which he assumed with his human nature. "Et in
unum Dominum nostrum, Jesum Christum Filium Dei unigenitum, Deum de
Deo, Lumen de Lumine, Deum verum de Deo vero, genitum non factum,
consubstantialem Patri, per quern omnia facta sunt. Qui propter nos
homines et propter nostram salutem descendit de coelis, et incarnatus
est etiam pro nobis de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine, et homo factus
est."
"And in one Jesus Christ our Lord, the only begotten Son of God, God
of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten not made,
consubstantial with the Father, by whom all things were made. Who, for
us men, and for our salvation, descended from heaven, and was
incarnate also for us by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was
made man."
The mystery of the incarnation presents to us the idea, that the Word
has assumed human nature, not by assuming all the individuals of the
race, but by assuming humanity individuated in one perfect soul and
body into a union with his divine nature, in which it terminates upon
his divine person as the final complement of its existence, without
any confusion of its distinct essence with the divine essence to which
it is united. By this union, the Word is a theandric person, or one
divine person in two natures, divine and human, really distinct from
each other in essence and existence, but with one common principle of
imputability to which their attributes and operation are to be
ascribed. This is the union, called in theological language
hypostatic, of the creature to the Creator, which is metaphysically
final, or final to the divine intelligence and power; beyond which
there is no idea in God of a possible act _ad extra_, and which is
next in order to the procession of the divine persons _ad intra_.
Through this hypostatic union, created nature participates with the
uncreated nature impersonated in the Son in the relation to the Father
as principle, and the Holy Spirit as consummation, of intelligence and
love; that is, in the divine life and beatitude. The incarnation
having been in the view and purpose of Almighty God from eternity,
{14} as the ultimatum of his wisdom and omnipotence, is the apex of
the creative act, or the terminus at which the creative act reaches
the summit of possibility. In it the creation returns to God as final
cause, from whom it proceeds as first cause, in a mode which is
metaphysically final. It is therefore certain that God, in his
eternal, creative purpose, determined the universe to an end
metaphysically final; and that this end is attained in the
incarnation, or the union of created with uncreated nature in the
person of the Word.
--------
From The Dublin University Magazine.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES Y SAAVEDRA.
Notwithstanding the value of the precious metals extracted from the
American mines, the Spanish exchequer had not been in a satisfactory
condition for a long time. War had scourged the kingdom since the
conquest by the Moors. Ferdinand and Isabella had indeed dislodged
them and their unlucky King Boabdil from their little paradise in
Granada and Andaluçia, about a century before the poor Don made his
first sally; but it was at a dread sacrifice of money and men's lives.
Charles V. was engaged in ruinous wars during the greater part of his
reign, and Philip II., his successor (unwillingly indeed), was put to
trouble and expense while uniting with other Christian powers to
prevent the ferocious sultan from bringing all Europe under the
Mussulman yoke. The victory of Lepanto, gained by his half-brother,
Don John, somewhat crippled the Sublime Porte and the terrible
renegade Uchali, but did not prevent the Algerine and other African
pirates from doing infinite mischief to all the Christian states
bordering the Mediterranean. Ceaselessly they intercepted their
merchant vessels, made booty of the freight and slaves of the crew,
and obliged all in the rank of merchants or gentlemen to find heavy
ransoms. Now what should have prevented Spain and France and the
Italian kingdoms from collecting a large fleet and army at any one
time, and battering down the strongholds of these ruthless plunderers,
and effectually putting it out of their power to annoy their Christian
neighbors? Philip was often urged to co-operate in such a good work,
but he preferred to expend time and money, and his subjects' blood and
property, on other projects.
An extract from the work mentioned below, [Footnote 9] in reference
to the state of Spain toward the latter years of Philip II., is well
worth transcribing. The author is speaking of Cervantes in prison,
some time between 1598 and 1603:
[Footnote 9: Michel de Cervantes, sa Vie, son Temps, son OEuvre
Politique et Littéraire. Par Émile Chasles. Paris: Didier et Cie.]
"He distinctly perceived, through the splendor and apparent unity of
the Spanish monarchy, a muttering and stormy confusion, a thousand
strange and opposed groupings;--politicians who in fact were mere
favorites, austere gentlemen mixed with _galant_ writers,--grave
inquisitors condemning errant Bohemians, applying a barbarous law to
barbarous hordes, and cauterizing but not curing wounds. Through
this assemblage of contrasts he could see a wide separation between
the social classes. Two distinct groups existed united by any common
idea or sympathy, extra-social world of Gitanos (gipsies), rogues,
and mystics, whose lives were independent, and that of the alcaids
and corregidors.
{15}
"Between these two camps hovered a mixed population so frequently
treated of in Spanish letters,--the alguazil, the sacristan, the
deserter, the refugee, a hybrid people attached to the law or the
church, but affiliated to the _hampa_ (illegal bond of union) by
character, by nature, by origin, or by interest.
"In a country where poverty was every day increasing, necessity
threw thousands every day on a career of adventure. It depopulated
Spain in exiling to the Indies her best soldiers. It flung away
innumerable renegades to the coast of Africa. It decimated that
nobility erewhile so valiant, so full of pride and patriotism.
Impoverished gentlemen soon formed a large class of honorable
paupers. They endured, with a stoicism purely Spanish, the
exigencies of honor and poverty, along with the necessity of living
and dying useless to their country."
Let pity be awarded to the poor gentlemen who took his promenade
toothpick in hand, to impress on his world that he had dined.
Cervantes had no need to go beyond his family recollections for
materials for this sketch:
"Behold the hidalgo coming out of his house with unquiet eye. His
suspicious humor inclines him to believe that every one knows his
shoes are pieced, that perspiration has left marks on his hat, that
his cloak is threadbare, and that his stomach is empty. He has taken
a draught of water within closed doors, and just come forth
displaying his hypocritical toothpick,--dolorous and deceptive
exhibition, which has grown into a fashion."
Political principles and social institutions
prevalent during the long wars between
the Christians and the Moors were
still in vigor at the end of the sixteenth
century, when the circumstances
of the country had undergone a thorough
change.
"During the the centuries when Spain was struggling against the
Arabs, the she condition of the nationality was the purity of blood
and the Christian faith. The Old Christian (Christiano Viejo), the
irreproachable Castilian alone, could be intrusted with the defense
of the soil or the government of the country. And now when the enemy
was expelled the usage remained. The alcaid (magistrate) did not
know the law, perhaps he could not read, but 'he had,' as he said,
'four inches of the fat of an Old Christian on his ribs, and that
was sufficient.'"
In the interlude of the Election of the Alcaids of Daganzo, Cervantes
specifies the personal gifts sufficient to qualify for the post. An
elector proposing Juan Verrouil, thus dwells on his good qualities:
"At all events Juan Verrouil possesses the most delicate
discernment. The other day, taking a cup of wine with me, he
observed that it smacked of wood, of leather, and of iron. Well,
when we got to the bottom of the pitcher, what did we discover but a
key fastened by a strap of leather to a piece of wood!
"_Secretary_.--Wonderful ability, rare genius. Such a man might rule
Alanis, Cazalla, ay even Esquivias."
Francis de Humillos is considered fit for the magistracy because of
his nearness in soling a shoe. Michael Jarret is voted worthy, as he
shoots an arrow like any eagle. Peter the Frog knows every word of the
ballad of the "Dog of Alva" without missing one, but Humillos stands
the examination with rather more credit than the rest; he knows the
four prayers, and says them four or five times per week.
The number of wandering gipsies and brigands and thieves of all
description was out of all rational proportion with the honest and
respectable population. These were united under the hampa, and it was
a matter of extreme difficulty to obtain information against any
delinquent from a brother of the order.
Little is said about the mercantile or manufacturing classes in books
connected with the time of Cervantes. Enough is told of the pride, and
luxury, and generally perverted tastes of the great, and hints are
given of the kind and considerate demeanor of the nobility residing on
their estates to their dependents.
{16}
DON QUIXOTE'S PREDECESSORS.
Spain is not the only country which for a time has set an extravagant
estimate on some books or class of books. Even in our own days and in
those of the last generation, have not literary furors prevailed for
picturesque banditti, and feudal castles, and caverns, and awful
noises in vast and dimly lighted bedchambers, for poetry beckoning its
victims to despair and suicide, for novels stamped with the silver
fork of high life, and lastly, for those which enlarge on the
physiology of forbidden fruit? M. Chasles will pleasantly explain the
literary _penchants_ of the peninsula two hundred and sixty odd years
since:
"We have seen the France of the seventeenth century enthusiastic for
the Astrea and the Clelia, [Footnote 10] and the England of the
eighteenth assume shield and spear for Clarissa Harlowe, [Footnote
11] but in 1598 and in Spain, the extraordinary popularity of the
Amadises resembled a brain fever at which no one dared laugh. One
day a certain nobleman coming home found his wife in tears. 'What is
the matter? What bad news have you heard?' 'My dear, Amadis is
dead.' They could not suffer the writers to put their heroes to
death. The infant Don Alonzo personally interceded with the author
of the Portuguese Amadis to rewrite the chapter in which the Signora
Briolana was sacrificed. These creatures of the imagination assumed
a personal reality among the people of that era in the mind of every
one. Every one was convinced that Arthur of Britain would one day
return among men. Julian of Castile, who wrote in 1587, affirmed
(could we believe him) that when Philip II. espoused Mary of
England, he was obliged to reserve the claims of King Arthur, and
engage to yield him the throne when he returned. Chivalric fictions
became an article of faith. A certain gentleman, Simon de Silveyra,
swore one day on the Holy Gospel that he held the history of Amadis
de Gaul [Footnote 12] for true and certain."
[Footnote 10: For information concerning these slow romances and
their contemporaries, and the great Honore d'Urfy. see University
Magazine for February, 1844.]
[Footnote 11: A school of simple and warm-hearted working-class folk
nightly assembled at a forge in Windsor to hear the perilous trials
of Pamela read out to them. They watched with unflagging interest
her progress through her ticklish trials, and showed their joy in
her final triumph by running in a body to the church and ringing the
bells.]
[Footnote 12: This first and best of the chivalric romances was
composed by Vasco de Lobeira of Oporto, who died in 1406. It was
written between 1342 and 1367, and first printed between 1492 and
1500. There is some uncertainty concerning the given dates.]
Such were a few characteristics of Spanish life when Cervantes thought
of writing his Don Quixote. In his numerous works he had it in purpose
to improve the state of things in his native country, and to correct
this or that abuse, but he obtained no striking success till the
publication of this his greatest work. Alas! while it established his
character as master in literature, it excited enmities and troubles in
abundance.
YOUTH OF CERVANTES.
Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra was born in 1547 at Alcala de Hénarès.
His parents, both of gentle birth, were Rodrigo de Cervantes and
Leonor de Cortinas. Their other children born before Michael were
Rodrigo, Andrea, and Luisa. His family belonged to the class of
impoverished gentlefolk, poor but intensely proud of their descent
from one of those hardy mountaineers the Saavedras, who, five
centuries before, so heroically defended the northern portion of Spain
against the Moors. While the hereditary possessions were growing less
and less, the heads of the family would endeavor to compensate for
present privations, by relating to their children the noble deeds and
the great estates of their ancestors.
Cervantes' paternal roof was probably surrounded by some of the
paternal fields, and it is likely that the domestic economy was
similar to that described in the first chapter of Don Quixote, where
translators have still left us at a loss as to the Saturday's fare,
_duelos y quebrantos_ (griefs and groans), some, guessing it to be
eggs and bacon; others, a dish of lentils; others, brains fried in
oil; others, the giblets of fowl.
Alcala de Hénarès [Footnote 13] was worthy to be the birthplace of
Spain's best writer. The archbishops of Toledo owned a palace there,
and there the great Cardinal Ximenes, an ex-student of its {17}
college, returned when somewhat under a cloud, and prepared his
world-famous polyglot Bible in Hebrew, Syriac, Greek, and Latin. From
the date when the great scholar and statesman made the town his
permanent residence it aimed to become, and did eventually become, the
intellectual Metropolis of the native country of Cervantes. It
possessed a University, nineteen colleges, thirty-eight churches, and
works of art in profusion.
[Footnote 13: "From the Arabic At-Cala-d'el-Nahr, the chateau by the
river."]
Whether debarred by poverty or negligence, the last an unlikely
supposition, Cervantes did not graduate in the University of Alcala or
in any other, a circumstance that occasioned him much fortification in
his manhood and advanced age. Émile Chasles thus expresses himself on
this subject:
"The graduated took their revenge. When Cervantes acquired celebrity
they recollected that he had taken no degree. When he thought an
employ they applied to him by way of iron brand the epithet,
_Ingenio Lego_, 'He is not of ours,' said they; 'he is not a
cleric.' The day when he attracted the attention of all Europe their
anger was excessive towards the writer who possessed talent without
permission, and genius without a diploma. Cervantes gaily replied,
that he admired their pedantic learning, their books bristling with
quotations, the complements they paid each other in Greek, their
erudition, their marginal notes, their doctors' degrees, but that he
himself was naturally lazy, and did not care to search in authors
for what he was able to say without them; and finally, that when
there is a dull or foolish thing to be expressed, it will do in
Spanish as well in Latin."
He was smarting under the contempt of the learned asses of his day
when writing the preface to his Don Quixote:
"Alas, the story of Don Quixote is as bare has a rush! Ah, if the
author could do as others,--cite at the head of the book a litany
of authorities in alphabetic order, commencing with Aristotle and
ending with Xenophon or Zoilus! But the poor Cervantes can find
nothing of all this. There he sits, paper before him, the pen behind
his ear, his elbow on the table, his cheek in his hand, and himself
all unable to discover pertinent sentences or ingenious trifles to
adorn his subject. Happily a humorous and intelligent friend enters
and brings relief. 'Quote,' said he, 'and continue to quote; the
first sentence that comes to hand will answer. "Pallida mors aequo
pede" is as good as another. Horace will come in well anywhere, and
you can even make use of the Holy Scriptures. The giant Golias or
Goliath was a Philistine, whom David the shepherd slew with a stone
from a sling in the valley of Terebinthus, as is related in the Book
of Kings in the chapter where it is to be found.'"
THE FIRST PLAYS AT WHICH HE ASSISTED.
The earliest instructors of our brave romancer and poet were the
excellent clergyman Juan Lopez de Hoyos, who took pride and pleasure
in expanding the intellects of clear-headed pupils, and the talented
strolling actor, Lope de Rueda, who at a time (middle of sixteenth
century) when neither Alcala nor even Madrid could boast a suitably
appointed theatre, went from town to town, and amused the inhabitants
from his rudely contrived stage. This consisted of a platform of loose
planks supported by trestles, and a curtain as respectable as could be
afforded, doing duty as permanent scene, and affording a hiding-place
behind it to the actors when not performing, and to the few musicians
who occasionally chanted some romantic ballad.
Rueda had been in his youth a gold-beater at Seville, whence, finding
in himself a strong vocation for the mimetic art, he made his escape,
carrying some of the popular satiric stories in his head, and moulding
them into farces. His troupe consisted of three or four male actors,
one or two occasionally presenting female characters, and these were
found sufficient to present a simple story in action, the manager
himself being an actor of rare ability. These open air performances
took a very strong hold on Cervantes' imagination. An outline is given
of one of these acted fables, the precursors of the voluminous
repertory furnished some years later by Lope de Vega.
Rueda himself, presenting an old laborer, tired and wet, and carrying
a fagot, appears before his door, and calls on his wife, who should
have his supper ready. His daughter (represented by {18} a beardless
youth) acquaints him that she is helping a neighbor at her skeins of
silk. She is called, and a fierce scolding match ensues, he demanding
his supper and vaunting the severity of his labor, she vilifying the
fagot he has brought home. By-and-by the discourse falls on a little
plantation of olive trees which he has just put down, and the Signora
Aguéda de Toruegano forgets her anger in the anticipation of the large
profits to accrue from her seedlings:
"_Wife_.--Do you know, my dear, what I've been just thinking? In six
or seven years our little plantation will produce four or five
fanèques (about fifteen barrels) of olives, and putting down a plant
now and again, we shall have a noble field all in full bearing in
twenty-five or thirty years.
"_Husband_.--Nothing more likely; it will be a wonder in the
neighborhood.
"_Wife_.--I'll gather the fruit, you'll take them to market on the
ass, and Menciguela (the daughter) will sell them; but mind what I
tell you, girl! you must not sell them a maravedi less than two
reals of Castile the celemin (bushel).
"_Husband_.--Two reals of Castile! O conscience! a real and a half
[Footnote 14] will be a fair price.
[Footnote 14: This has been substituted for fifteen deniers,
about three farthings, the amount in M. Chasles' version.]
"_Wife--Ah_, hold your tongue! They are the very best kind--olives
of Cordova.
"_Husband_.--Even so, a real and a half is quite enough.
"_Wife_.--Ah, don't bother my head! Daughter, you have heard me; two
reals of Castile, no less.
"_Husband_.--Come here, child. What will you ask--the bushel?
"_Daughter_.--Whatever you please, father.
"_Husband_.--Just a real and a half.
"_Daughter_.--Yes, father.
"_Mother_.--Yes, father! Come here to me. How will you sell them the
bushel?
"_Daughter_.--Whatever you say, mother.
"_Father_.--I promise you, my lass, two hundred stripes of the
stirrup leathers, if you don't mind my directions. Now what'll be
the price?
"_Daughter_.--Whatever you like, father.
"_Mother_.--How! Ah, here's for your 'whatever you like.' (_She
beats her_.) Take that, and maybe it'll teach you to disobey me.
"_Father_.--Let the child alone.
"_Daughter_.--Ah, mother, mother, don't kill me! (_Cries out; a
neighbor enters_.)
"_Neighbor_.--What's this, what's this? Why do you beat the little
girl?
"_Wife_.--Ah, sir, it's this wasteall that wants to give away all we
have for nothing. He'll put us out of house and home. Olives as
large as walnuts!
"_Husband_.--I swear by the bones of my ancestors that they are no
bigger than grains of millet.
"_Wife_.--I say they are.
"_Husband_.--I say they're not.
"_Neighbor_.--Will you please, ma'am, to go inside? I undertake to
make all right (_She enters the house_.) Now, my friend, explain
this matter. Let us see your olives. If you have twenty fanèques, I
will purchase all.
"_Father_.--You don't exactly comprehend. The fact is--do you
see?--and to tell the honest truth, the olives are not just in the
house, though they are ours.
"_Neighbor_.--No matter. Sure it's easy to get them brought here.
I'll buy them at a fair price.
"_Daughter_.--My mother says she must get two reals [Footnote 15]
the bushel.
[Footnote 15: The Spaniards keep their accounts in piastres,
reals, and marvedis, the first-named being worth about 8s. 6d. of
our money. Thirty-four marvedis make a real, eight reals a
piastre. The real mentioned in the text was probably a piece of
eight or piastre.]
"_Neighbor_.--That's rather dear.
"_Father_.--Now isn't it, sir?
"_Daughter_.--My father only asks a real and a half.
"_Neighbor_.--Let us see a sample.
"_Husband_.--Ah, don't ask to talk about it farther. I have to-day
put down a small plot of olives. My wife says that within seven or
eight years we'll be able to gather four or five fanèques of fruit
from them. She is to collect them, I to take them on the ass to
market, and our daughter to sell them, and she must not take less
than two reals. She says yes, I say no, and that's the whole of it.
"_Neighbor_.--A nice a fair, by my faith! The olives are hardly
planted, and yet your daughter has been made to cry and roar about
them.
"_Daughter_.--Very true indeed, sir, what you say.
"_Father_.--Don't cry any more, Menciguela. Neighbor, this little
body is worth her weight in gold. Go, lay the table, child. You must
have an apron out of the very first money I get for the olives.
"_Neighbor_.--Good-by, my friend; go in and be agreeable with your
wife.
"_Father_.--Good-by, sir. (_He and his daughter go in_.)
"_Neighbor, alone_.--It must be owned that some things happen here
below beyond belief. Ouf! quarrel about olives before they're in
existence!"
{19}
The reader will easily recognize the "Maid with the milking pail" at
the bottom of this illustration. Before the production of any of the
regular pieces of De Vega, or Calderon, or Alarcon, or Tirso de
Molina, the easily pleased folk of country or town were thoroughly
satisfied with Rueda's repertory. When the talented stroller died in
1567, he was honored with a costly funeral, and solemnly interred in
the cathedral of Cordova. Strange contrast between his posthumous
fortune and that of Molière!
The impression made on Cervantes by the performances on Rueda's
platform was strong and lasting. He ever retained a high respect for
the talent of observation, the native genius and the good sense of
Lope de Rueda.
In the preface to his own plays, Cervantes left an inventory of the
theatrical properties of the strolling establishments in his youth:
"All the materials of representation were contained in a sack. They
were made up of four jackets of sheepskin, laced with gilt leather,
four beards, as many wigs, four shepherd's crooks. The comedies
consisted of eclogues or colloquies between two or three shepherds
and one shepherdess. They prolonged the entertainments by means of
interludes, such as that of the _Negress_, the _Ruffian_, the
_Fool_, or that of the _Biscayan_,--four personages played by Lope
as well as many others, and all with the greatest perfection and the
happiest natural ability that can be imagined."
One evening in the old age of Cervantes, the company around him were
discussing the living actors and the present condition of the theatre.
Among other things they treated of the infancy of the Spanish stage,
and the artist who first essayed to make it something better than a
platform for tumbling. Cervantes at once brought forward the claims of
his early master:
"I remember having seen play the great comedian Lope de Rueda, a man
distinguished for his intelligence and his style of acting. He
excelled in pastoral poetry. In that department no one then or since
has shown himself his superior. Though then a child, and unable to
appreciate the merit of his verses, nevertheless when I occasionally
repeat some couplets that have remained in my memory, I find that my
impression of his ability is correct."
HIS FIRST STEP IN LIFE.
The young admirer of Lope de Rueda exhibited in his temperament and
appearance more of the soldier than the poet. With his high forehead,
his arched eyebrows, his hair flung behind, his firm-set mouth, he
seemed to present little of the imaginative dreamer. However, there
was that in the delicate contours of the countenance, in the searching
look, in the fire of the large dark eyes, which betrayed the ironical
powers of the observant man of genius. No doubt he had the literary
instincts somewhat developed by the practical lessons of Rueda, but
military aspirations had the ascendant for the time. Though his
brother Rodrigo had departed for the war in Flanders, and it seemed as
if he was destined to remain at home with his family, fate and
inclination were against this arrangement. However, the first step he
took in life was not in the direction of the battle-field. An Italian
cardinal took him to Rome in quality of secretary. The brave Don John,
half-brother of Philip II., was appointed general of the league arming
against the Grand Turk at the same time, and the young and ardent
Miguel eagerly took arms under him, and was present at the memorable
naval engagement of Lepanto. Philip did not enter with much good-will
into this strife, and prevented any advantages that might result from
the glorious victory by shortly withdrawing his brother from the
command of the allied forces of Christendom. The enthusiastic young
soldier received three wounds as well as a broken arm in the fight.
This was in the year 1571, and until 1575 we find Cervantes attending
Don John in his contentions with the Mohammedan powers on the coast of
Africa, in which the chivalric commander was hampered by the ill-will
of his brother, Philip II. He went into the Low Countries much against
his will, and after several victories met a premature death there in
1578, when only thirty-two years old.
{20}
CAPTIVE IN ALGIERS.
Cervantes received from his great-souled commander written
testimonials of his valiant conduct and moral worth, and sailed for
Spain from Naples in the year 1578. On the voyage the vessel was
attacked by three Turkish galliots; those who fell not in the
engagement were made prisoners, and our hero became the slave of a
lame renegade called the "Cripple," in Arabic, Dali Mami.
The Algerians, rigid Mussulmans as they were, killed as few Christians
in these attacks as they could. Slaves and ransoms were the cherished
objects of their quests, and as soon as could be after the landing in
Algiers, the classification was made of "gentles and commons." The
captors were cunning in their generation, and this was the process
adapted for the enhancement of their live property.
The captive's owner proceeded with wonderful skill to raise the value
of his goods. While the slave declared his poverty, and lowered his
station in order to lower the terms of his ransom, the master affected
to treat his victim with the greatest respect. He gave him almost
enough of nourishment, and professed he was ruining himself for the
other's advantage through pure deference and good-will; and slipped in
a word as to his hopes of being repaid for his outlay. The prisoner
might undervalue himself as much as he chose, "he was merely a private
soldier." Ah, his master knew better; the man of the ranks was a
general, the man before the mast a _caballero_, the simple priest an
archbishop.
"As for me,' said the captive Dr. Sosa, 'who am but a poor clerk,
the need me bishop by their own proper authority, and _in
plenitudine potestatis_. Afterward they appointed me the private and
confidential secretary of the Pope. They assured me that I had been
for eight days closeted with His holiness in a chamber, where we
discussed in the most profound secrecy the entire affairs of
Christendom. Then they created me cardinal, afterwards governor of
Castel Nuovo at Naples; and at this present moment I am confessor to
Her Majesty the Queen of Spain.' In vain Dr. Sosa renounced these
honors. They produced witnesses, both Christian and Turks, who swore
to having seen him officiating as cardinal governor."
The letters of of Don John of Austria having been found on Cervantes,
the poor soldier of Lepanto became at once a great lord, from whom a
large ransom might be expected. They began with genuflexions, and
frequently ended with the scourge, not in his case, however. Many poor
wretches, to save themselves from the horrible treatment they endured,
or expected to endure, became Mohammedans, on which they immediately
obtained their liberty, were set on horseback, with fifty Janissaries
on foot, serving as cortège, the king defraying the expense of the
ceremony, bestowing wives on the hopeful converts, and offering them
places among his Janissaries.
Cervantes became the centre, round which the hopes of many poor
captives were grouped. He made several attempts at evasion, and,
strange to say, was not in any instance punished by his otherwise
cruel master.
Several Christians enjoying the benefit of safe conduct were free to
come and go among these Algerines, and the Redemptorist Fathers
enjoyed thorough freedom, as through them the ransoms were chiefly
effected. A Spanish gentleman being set at liberty, carried a letter
from our hero home to his family, and in consequence the brave old
hidalgo, his father, mortgaged his little estate, took the dowries of
his two daughters, and forwarded all to his son for the liberation of
himself and his brother, who was also in captivity. When he presented
himself to Dali Mami with his sum in his hands the renegade cripple
only laughed at him. He and Rodrigo were men of too much importance to
be ransomed for so trifling a sum.
{21}
The cruel viceroy of Algiers having spent his allotted time in charge
of that nest of vultures, was replaced by a governor still more cruel,
under whom Cervantes made a desperate effort to escape, and carry off
forty or fifty fellow-captives with him. He paid his brother's ransom,
and he, when set at liberty, managed to send a vessel near the spot
where Miguel had his companions in safety in a grotto of a certain
garden. Through some mismanagement the descent failed, and the
hiding-place was revealed by the treachery of a trusted individual.
All were brought before the new Viceroy Hassan, and Cervantes avowed
himself the chief and only plotter among them. Hassan used flattery,
promises, and threats to induce the intrepid Spaniard to criminate a
certain brother Redemptorist as privy to the plot, in order that he
might come at a much coveted sum of money which he knew to be in his
possession. All was in vain. Cervantes was not to be turned from the
path of loyalty, and when every one expected sentence of death to be
pronounced on him at the moment, Hassan became suddenly cool, and
merely ordered him to be removed.
The bagnio of Hassan was a sufficiently wretched place, but while our
hero sojourned there, he made it as cheerful as he could by composing
poetical pieces and reciting them, and getting up a Spanish comedy.
There were forty priests in it at the time, and these performed their
clerical duties as if at liberty. They celebrated mass, administered
holy communion, and preached every Sunday. When Christmas approached,
he arranged a mystery, such as he had seen performed in his native
Alcala under the direction of the ingenious Lope de Rueda. All were
prepared,--the shepherds' dresses, the crib, the stable, etc.; the
guardian admitting outsiders at a small charge, and a shepherd
reciting the opening verses of the entertainment, when a Moor entered
in hot haste, and shouted out to all to look to their safety, as the
Janissaries were rushing through the streets, and killing the
Christians. Some clouds on the northern horizon had been taken for the
Christian fleet under Don John, and the terrible guards determined to
put it out of the Christian captives' power to aid the attack. The
massacre ceased on the clearing away of the vapors.
About that time, Philip II. was collecting a large naval force in the
Mediterranean for the ostensible purpose of storming Algiers, though
in reality his intent was merely to seize on the kingdom of Portugal.
Its romantic sovereign, Don Sebastian, the hero of one of Miss
Porter's romances, had just been slain in Morocco, and his successor
Henry, whose days were numbered, was unable to cross his projects. The
report of Philip's meditated descent inspired Cervantes with a project
of a general rising of the slaves. He even addressed to the sombre
king, through his secretary Mateo Vasquez, a remonstrance and
encouragement, of which we present a few extracts:
"High and powerful lord, let the wrath of thy soul be enkindled.
Here the garrison is numerous, but without strength, without
ramparts, without shelter. Every Christian is on the alert; every
Mussulman is watching for the appearance of the fleet as the signal
for flight. Twenty thousand Christians are in this prison, the key
of which is in your hands. We all, with clasped hands, on bended
knees, and with stifled sobs, and under severe tortures, beseech
thee, puissant lord, to turn your pitying looks towards us, your
born subjects, who lie groaning here. Let the work courageously
begun by your much loved father be achieved by your hand."
Hassan employed the slaves in building fortifications for his
garrison, but he kept Cervantes strictly guarded. "When my disabled
Spaniard," said he, "is under guard, I am sure of the city, the
prisoners, and the port." But though well watched, the restless
captive made three other attempts at escape, for each of which he was
to receive, but did not, two thousand bastinadoes. In the fourth
attempt, two merchants who were compromised, and feared he might
betray them under the torture, offered to pay his ransom, and thus
secure his departure, but he did not accept the terms. He braved the
examination, and would {22} not reveal the names of any accomplices
except four who were already out of danger. Strange to say, even this
time he escaped without punishment. A renegade, Maltrapillo, high in
Hassan's confidence, and who seems to have entertained great esteem
for the fearless and generous character of Cervantes, probably saved
his back sundry stripes on these different occasions. On this subject
we quote some lines from M. Chasles:
"Either through the interference of Maltrapillo or the influence
exercised by the noble character of Cervantes on all around him,
this time again he was spared by Hassan. How was he enabled to many
times to escape his master's rage? In following his fortunes
through these years of trial, I am struck by the mysterious
influence of his noble character on the events and the persons by
whom he was surrounded. In the mixed of a diverse population
incessantly changing, among a crowd of soldiers and captive
doctors, he occupied an exceptional station. Brothers of Mercy,
Christian merchants, renegades, all recognize in him a moral
superiority. 'Every one,' says the eye-witness Pedrosa, 'admired
his courage and his disposition.'"
The acts of kindness done by the renegades to the captives were not
small nor few. Nearly all of them had conformed through the immediate
prospect of promotion, or fear of punishment, and there was scarcely a
conscientious Mussulman among every hundred of them. In general they
were anxious to obtain from the captives about to be ransomed
certificates of their own good offices towards them. These were
intended to be available for some possible future contingencies.
The poor sorrowful father continued to make unavailing efforts for his
ransom. He even disturbed the court officials with representations of
his son's services and sufferings; but "circumlocution" was a word
understood even in Madrid and in the days of Philip II. The afflicted
and impoverished gentleman died in dragging his suit through the lazy
and unpatriotic officials, and if ever a death resulted from
heartbreak his was one. Still his mother, his brother Rodrigo and his
sister Andrea exerted themselves, and dispatched to Algiers 300
crowns. A strong representations at the court insured in addition the
amount of a cargo then consigned to Algiers, which produced only 60
ducats, say £30. These sums were not sufficient, and the heart sick
captive would have been carried by Hassan to Constantinople, his
viceroyalty having expired, only for the deficiency being made up by
the Brothers of Mercy, Christian merchants, etc., who were "tightly
targed" for that purpose by the good-hearted and zealous brother
superior, Gil. This providential redemption occurred in 1580.
Before he quitted his abode of little ease he had the forethought to
demand a public scrutiny of his conduct by the Christian authorities.
Witnesses in great number came forward to testify to his worth. The
following facts were irrevocably established. He had rescued one man
from slavery only for the treachery of Blanco. The pure morality of
his life was attested by a gentleman of high standing. Others proved
his many acts of charity to the unfortunate and to children, all done
as secretly as possible. He had contrived the escape of five captives.
A gentleman, Don Diego (James) de Benavides, furnished this testimony:
"On coming here from Constantinople, I asked if there were in the
city any gentlemen by birth, I was told there was one in
particular--a man of honor, noble, virtuous, well-born, the friend
of caballeroes, to wit, Michael de Cervantes. I paid him a visit. He
shared with me his chamber, his clothes, his money. In him I have
found a father and a mother."
The declarations of Brother Gil and of Rev. Dr. Sosa solemnly
confirmed the facts brought forward by numerous captives. Sosa wrote
his declaration while still in irons, and avowed with a mixture of
dignity and feeling that his principles would have prevented him from
allowing himself such {23} intimacy with Cervantes, had he not
considered him in the light of an earnest Christian, liable to
martyrdom at any moment.
A scrutiny was also made in Spain at the request of the elder
Cervantes, in 1578, and both the justifying documents, signed by
notaries, are still in existence.
"Ah!" says Haedo (himself an eye-witness of the sufferings of the
Christians in that vulture's nest), "it had been a fortunate thing
for the Christians if Michael Cervantes had not been betrayed by his
own companions. He kept up the courage and hopes of the captives at
the risk of his own life, which he imperilled four times. He was
threatened with death by impaling, by hanging, and by burning alive;
and dared all to restore his fellow-sufferers to liberty. If his
courage, his ability, his plans, had been seconded by fortune,
Algiers at this day would belong to us, for he aimed at nothing
less."
Cervantes did not put his own adventures in writing. The captive in
Don Quixote said with reference to them, "I might indeed tell you some
strange things done by a soldier named Saavedra. They would interest
and surprise you, but to return to my own story." The disinterested
hero had more at heart the downfall of Islamism than his own
glorification.
HIS RESTITUTION TO HIS NATIVE LAND.
Cervantes touched his native land again with no very brilliant
prospect before him. His father was dead; his mother could barely
support herself, his brother was with the army, and his friends
dispersed. Still the first step on his beloved Spain gave him great
joy, afterwards expressed through the mouth of the captive in Don
Quixote:
"We went down on our knees and kissed our native soil, and then with
eyes bathed in tears of sweet emotion we gave thanks to God. The
sight of our Spanish land made us forget all our troubles and
sufferings. It seemed as if they had been endured by others than
ourselves, so sweet it is to recover lost liberty."
At the time of his arrival king and court were at Badajos, watching
the progress of the annexation of Portugal. He joined the army, and
during the years 1581, '2, '3, shared in the battles between Philip
and the Prior Antonio de Ocrato, the latter being assisted by the
French and English. In one of these fights the Spanish admiral ordered
the brave Strozzi, wounded and a prisoner, to be flung into the sea.
At the engagement of the Azores, Rodrigo Cervantes and another captain
flung themselves into the sea, and were the first to scale the
fortifications, thus giving their soldiers a noble example.
MARRIAGE AND SUBSEQUENT TROUBLES.
He lived in Lisbon a short time and composed his Galatea there. Next
year he returned to Madrid, and married the lady Dona Catalina de
Palacios y Salazar y Vomediano. She was of a noble family, but her
dowry consisted of a few acres of land. In the marriage contract,
signed in presence of Master Alonzo de Aguilera, and still in
existence, mention is made of half a dozen fowl forming part of the
fortune brought by her to the soldier and poet. The marriage was
celebrated 12th December, 1584, at the bride's residence, Esquivias, a
little town in the neighborhood of the capital.
He now betook himself seriously to literature, published the Galatea,
and began to write for the theater. At first he was very successful,
but on a sudden Lope de Vega came on the scene, and exhibited such
dramatic aptitude and genius and mental fertility, that managers and
actors and audience had no ears for any other aspirant to dramatic
reputation, and poor Cervantes found his prospect of fame and
independence all at once clouded. The pride of the Spanish hidalgo and
"Old Christian" [Footnote 16] had been much {24} modified by his life
in the army and bagnio, and his good common sense told him that it was
his duty to seek to support his family by some civil occupation rather
than indulge his family pride, and suffer them and himself to starve.
[Footnote 16: One unsuspected of having Moorish or Jewish blood in
his veins.]
But oh, Apollo and his nine blue stockings! what was the occupation
dropped over our soldier-poet's head, and doing all in its power to
extinguish his imaginative and poetic faculties? Nothing more nor less
than the anti-romantic duties of a commissary. Well, well, Spain was
no more prosaic than other countries, and Cervantes had brothers in
his mechanical occupations. Charles Lamb's days were spent in adding
up columns of "long tots." Burns gauged whiskey casks and kept an eye
on private stills; Shakespeare adjusted the contentions of actors, and
saw that their exits and entrances did not occur at the wrong sides;
perhaps the life of the mill-slave Plautus furnished as much happiness
as any of the others. The mill-stones got an occasional rest, and he
was in enjoyment for the time, when reading comic scenes from his
tablets or scrolls, and listening to the outbursts of laughter that
came from the open throats of his sister and brother drudges.
The Invincible Armada, while preparing to make a hearty meal on
England, had need meantime of provender while crossing the rough
Biscayan sea, and four commissaries were appointed to collect
provisions for that great monster, and for the behoof of the Indian
fleets. Cervantes was one of the four, Seville appointed his
headquarters, and his time most unpoetically employed collecting
imposts in kind from all tax-paying folk.
The regular clergy (houses of friars and monks) were at the time at
deadly feud with his Most Catholic Majesty, Philip II., and refused to
pay him tribute. They founded their refusal on a papal bull; and on
the other aide, the alcaids produced the royal warrant. Between the
contending powers the author of Galatea found himself sufficiently
embarrassed.
For some years Cervantes endured a troubled and wretched existence in
such employment as the above, in purchasing corn for the use of the
galleys, and in making trips to Morocco on public business. He
solicited the government for an office in the Indies, and was on the
point of obtaining it when some influence now unknown frustrated his
hopes. He describes his condition and that of many other footballs of
fortune in the Jealous Estremaduran:
"In the great city of Seville he found opportunities of spending the
little he had left. Finding himself destitute of money, and not
better provided with friends, he tried the means adopted by all the
idle hangers-on in that city, namely, a passage to the Indies, the
refuge of the outcasts of Europe, the sanctuary of bankrupts, the
inviolable asylum of homicides, paradise of gamblers who are there
sure to gain, resort of women of loose lives, where the many have a
prospect, and the few a subsistence."
Our poet not being born with an instinct for regular accounts and
being charged to collect arrears of tax in Granada to the amount of
two millions of maravedis, say £1,500, found his task difficult among
people who were slow in committing to memory the rights of the crown.
His greatest mistake was the intrusting of a considerable sum to a
merchant named Simon Freire de Luna in order to be deposited in the
treasury at Madrid. Simon became bankrupt, and Cervantes was cast into
prison for the deficiency in his accounts. He was soon set at liberty,
but the different appearances he was obliged to make before the courts
of Seville, Madrid, and Valladolid were sufficient to turn his hair
grey before its time. The judges reproached him for his deficit, the
people gave him no praise. The alcaids of Argamasilla in La Mancha
gave him particularly bad treatment. Perhaps he recollected it when
writing his romance.
{25}
Subjected to the interrogatories of the royal councillors, judges, and
even alcaids, a servant to all merely for means to live, and always
moving about, poor Cervantes appears at last to have given way. From
1594, when sent to collect arrears in Granada, to 1598, little can be
gathered concerning him, but from this last date till 1603 nothing
whatever is known of his fortunes. The probability is that he spent
part of the time in a prison of Andaluçia or La Mancha, and there
meditated on the vanity of human expectations, and wrote the first
part of Don Quixote.
HIS LITERARY LIFE.
Wherever he spent this interval his brain had not been idle--he had
passed in review the defects of the Spanish government and of the
Spanish character. He had been unable to rouse the king to crush the
power of the Algerine pirates, either by the memorials he had
consigned to his friend the secretary, or by the vigorous pictures he
had presented on the stage (after his return from captivity) of the
cruelties inflicted by them on their unhappy captives. He had failed
in his great and cherished object, but there remained one reformation
yet to be made, namely, of taste among those Spaniards, ladies and
gentlemen, to whom reading was a pleasure, and who could afford to
purchase books. To substitute a relish for healthier studies was a
darling object of our much worried poet for years. It was cherished in
prisons, and the first part of his great work written, or nearly so,
at the time when we find him again mixing with society in Valladolid,
where Philip II. held his court. This was in the year 1603. The
following extract concerning his residence and his mode of life in
that city, is taken from the work of M. Chasles:
"There is at Valladolid a poor looking house, narrow and low, hemmed
in among the taverns of a suburb, and near the deep and empty bed of
a torrent called Esguéva. There Cervantes came to live in 1603, in
the fifty-seventh year of his age. With an emotion which I cannot
express I hare visited this dwelling, which stands outside the city,
and which remains unmarked by stone or inscription. A well-used
staircase conducts to the two modest chambers used by Cervantes.
One, in which he slept, no doubt, is a square room with a low
ceiling supported by beams. The other, a sort of ill-lighted kitchen
looking on to the neighboring roofs, still holds his _cantarelo_ or
stone with three round hollows to hold water jars. Here lived with
him his wife, Dona Catalina, his daughter Isabelle, now twenty years
old, his sister Dona Andrea, his niece Constanza, and a relation
named Dona Magdalena. A housekeeper increased the family. Where did
all sleep? However that was arranged, they all did their work
together. The ladies earned money by embroidering the court-dresses.
Valladolid, adopted for abode by the new king and by the Duke of
Lerma, was then incumbered, as was Versailles afterwards, with
gentlemen, with the grandees, and with generals. Our impoverished
family was supported by this affluence. The Marquis of Villafranca,
returning from Algiers to the court, got his gala-suit made by the
family of the soldier-poet, with whom he had erewhile been
acquainted. Cervantes was occupied either with keeping the books of
people in business, or regulating the accounts of some people of
quality, or striving to bring his long lawsuit with the government
lo a close.
"In the evening, while the needles of the women flew through the
stuffs, he held the pen, and on the corner of the table he put his
thoughts in writing. There it was he composed the prologue of that
work which had been a labor of love in the composition, and in which
he employed all the force of his genius. In bringing it with him to
Valladolid, he experienced alternations of hope and fear, being
fully sensible that it was his masterpiece. 'Idle reader,' said he
in the first page, 'you may credit my word, for I have no need to
take oath, that I wish this book, child of my brain, were the most
beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most witty that any one could
imagine.' He had published nothing since the Galatea, which had
appeared twenty years before and was an amiable apology for the
taste of the times. The book about to be printed was a flagrant
attack on the same literature."
Those who despise the old books of chivalry, and have probably never
opened one, are too ready to undervalue Cervantes' apprehension about
bringing out his book, and the service it eventually rendered to
society and literature. We recommend an indifferent individual of this
way of thinking to peruse about the eighth of the contents of one of
the condemned {26} volumes of Don Quixote's library, and work himself
into the conviction that the body of the Spanish readers of 1603,
ladies and gentlemen, not only admired such compositions more than
living readers admire the most popular writings of our times, but in
many instances believed the contents to be true.
Let us hope that there is some mistake about the non-accommodation
afforded to the seven individuals of Cervantes' family, six of whom
were of gentle blood. It is easy to imagine what delightful evenings
they would have enjoyed if tolerably comfortable with regard to
furniture and space, the soldier-poet reading out some passages from
the Don, or the Exemplary Novels, or one of his plays, and the
well-bred women plying their needles, listening with interest, and
occasionally breaking out into silvery laughs at the comic misfortunes
of the knight, or the naive pieces of roguery of the squire.
We can readily imagine the desolation of Cervantes' spirit during the
troubled years of his official wanderings, his superiors urging him to
grind the faces of his countrymen and fellow-subjects, and these
entertaining most unfriendly feelings toward himself. The ladies of
his family--where were they during this nomadic life of his, and how
were they situated? Separation from their society and anxiety about
their privations must have added much to the present suffering, and
forebodings of things still worse, the companions of his lonely hours.
A pleasant interruption to the monotony and privations of the family
life must have been the appearance of the first part of the Don in
1604, and the popularity it soon attained.
HIS LABORERS AND THEIR REQUITAL.
Some who merely neglected the author till found by fame, were soon
ready to do him disservice by passing censure on the execution of the
great work, and even searching for subjects of blame in his past
career. Lope de Vega, as we have seen, had put it out of his power to
turn his dramatic talents to account. Further, he did not act in a
kind manner towards him in private, though outwardly friendly. But
Lope's friends and admirers so deeply resented an honest and judicious
criticism on the works of the prolific dramatist by Cervantes, that
they ceased not during the remaining dozen years of his life to do him
every unfriendly act in their power. One was so full of malice and so
unprincipled, that towards the end of Cervantes' life he wrote a
second part of the Adventures of Don Quixote, distinguished by
coarseness, dullness, and inability to make the personages of the
first part of the story act and speak in character. The impudent and
talentless writer called himself Don Avellaneda of some town in La
Mancha, but one of De Vega's admirers was supposed to be the real
culprit. Suspicions fell on several, but the greater number centered
in Pere Luis de Aliaga, a favorite of the Duke of Lerma, and the
confessor of Philip III. He was call, meagre, and dark-complexioned,
and had got the sobriquet of _Sancho Panza_, by antithesis.
The wretched attack, for it was no better, was published in 1614, two
years before the death of Cervantes, Though suffering from illness,
and overshadowed by the expectation of approaching death, the
appearance of the impudent and worthless production acted on him as
the bugle on the nerves of the old battle-steed. In the order of
Providence good is extracted from mere human evil, and to the false
Avellaneda the world is indirectly indebted for the second part of Don
Quixote, the wedding of Gamacho, the wise though unsuccessful
government of Barataria by Sancho, the disenchantment of Dulcinea, and
all the delightful adventures and conferences that had place at the
ducal chateau, province unknown.
{27}
But between the publishing of the first part of Don Quixote in 1605,
and the second in 1614, how had the great heart and head been
occupied? Probably with little pleasure to himself. On his return from
the wars of Portugal in 1584, he had the pleasure and profit of seeing
several of his plays acted, some expressly written to direct public
spirit towards a crusade on the Algerines. [Footnote 17] Of these he
thus speaks in the prologue to his dramatic works, published 1613:
[Footnote 17: Between the days of Lope de Rueda and those of
Cervantes' debut, Naharra of Toledo had made considerable
improvement in the mechanics of the art. The sack was rejected,
and chests and trunks held the properties. The musicians came from
behind their blanket, and faced their customers. He rejected the
beards except in the case of disguisements, and invented or
adopted thunder, lightning, clouds, challenges, and fights. He
himself was a capital personator of cowardly bullies.]
"In all the playhouses of Madrid were acted some plays of my
composing, such as the Humors of Algiers, the Destruction of
Numantia, and the Naval Battle, wherein I took the liberty of
reducing plays to three acts which before consisted of five. I
showed, or, to speak better, I was the first that represented the
imaginations and secret thoughts of the soul, exhibiting moral
characters to public view to the entire satisfaction of the
audience. I composed at that time thirty plays at least, all of
which were acted without anybody's interrupting the players by
flinging cucumbers or any other trash at them. They ran their race
without any hissing, cat-calling, or any other disorder. But
happening to be taken up with other things, I laid aside
play-writing, and then came on that prodigy of nature, that
marvellous man, the great Lope de Vega, who raised himself to be
supreme monarch of the stage. He subdued all the players, and made
them obedient to his will. He filled the world with theatrical
pieces, finely and happily devised, and full of good sense, and so
numerous that they take up above ten thousand sheets of paper all of
his own writing, and, which is a most wonderful thing to relate, he
saw them all acted or at least had the satisfaction to hear they
were all acted."
Good-hearted, generous Cervantes, who could so dwell on that success
in a rival which condemned himself to the wretched life of an inland
revenue officer, to the hatred of non-payers of tax, to prosecutions,
and to the discomforts of an Andaluçian or Manchegan dungeon, and
separation from his niece, sister, daughter, and wife, whom, in
absence of data to the contrary, we take to be amiable and
affectionate women.
When the court returned to Madrid he and his family followed it, but
we find no employment given by him to the printing presses of that
city from 1604 to 1613, when he got published the collection of plays
and interludes before mentioned. In the same year he published his
twelve Exemplary Novels, [Footnote 18] dedicating them to his patron,
Don Pedro Fernandez de Castro, count of Lemos. This nobleman, in
conjunction with Archbishop Sandoval, and the actor, Pedro de Morales,
had succeeded (let us hope) in cheering the poet's latter years. In
the preface he gives a portrait of himself in his sixty-sixth year,
distinguished by his own charming style, always redolent of
resignation, good-will, and good-nature. He pretends that a friend was
to have got his portrait engraved to serve as frontispiece, but, owing
to his negligence, he himself is obliged to supply one in pen and ink:
[Footnote 18: The Lady Cornelia, Rinconete and Cortadillo, Doctor
Glass-case, the Deceitful Marriage, the Dialogue of the Dogs
Scipio and Berganza, the Little Gipsy Girl, the Generous Lover,
the Spanish-English Lady, the Force of Blood, the Jealous
Estremaduran, the Illustrious Scullery-Maid, and the Two Damsels.]
"My friend might have written under the portrait--This person whom
you see here, with an oval visage, chestnut hair, smooth open
forehead, lively eyes, a hooked but well-proportioned nose, a
silvery beard that, twenty years ago, was golden, large moustaches,
a small mouth, teeth not much to speak of, for he has but six, all
in bad condition and worse placed, no two of them corresponding to
each other; a figure between the two extremes, neither tall nor
short, a vivid complexion, rather fair than dark, somewhat stooped
in the shoulders, and not very light-footed: this I say is the
author of Galatea, Don Quixote de la Mancha, . . . commonly called
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. He was for many years a soldier, and
for five years and a half in captivity, where he learned to have
patience in adversity. He lost his left hand by a musket-shot in the
battle of Lepanto, and ugly as this wound may appear, he regards it
as beautiful, having received it {28} on the most memorable and
sublime occasion which passed times have ever scene, or future times
can hope to equal, fighting under the victorious banners of the son
of that thunderbolt of war, Charles V. of blessed memory. Should the
friend of whom I complain have no more to say of me than this, I
would myself have composed a couple of dozen of eulogiums, and
communicated them to him in secret," etc.
THE CLOSING SCENE.
Cervantes' Voyage to Parnassus, in which he complains to Apollo for
not being furnished even with a stool in that poets' elysium, was
published in 1614, the second part of Don Quixote in 1615, and that
was the last book whose proofs he had the pleasure to correct. He was
employed on his Troubles of Persiles and Sigismunda, [Footnote 19]
and wrote its preface, and the dedication to his patron the Count of
Lemos, while suffering under his final complaint, the dropsy, and
having only a few day to live. From the preface to the Persiles he
appears to have received extreme unction before the last word of it
was written. From the forgiving, and patient, and tranquil spirit of
his writing, even when annoyed by much unkindness and injustice on the
part of the Madrid coteries, from the spirit of religion and morality
that pervades his writings, and the care he appears to have taken to
meet his summons as a sincere Christian, we may reasonably hope that
his sorrows and troubles for time and eternity ended on 23d April,
1616 the day on which a kindred spirit breathed his last at
Stratford-on-Avon.
[Footnote 19: It was published by his widow, Dona Catalina, la 1617.]
And indeed in our meditations on the characteristics of the author and
man in Cervantes, we have always mentally associated him with
Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott. We find in all the same versatility
of genius, the same grasp and breadth of intellect, the same gifts of
genial humor and the same largeness of sympathy. The life of Cervantes
will be always an interesting and edifying study in connexion with the
literature and the great events of his time. We find him
conscientiously doing his duty in every phase of his diversified
existence, and effecting all the good in his power. When he feels the
need of filling a very disagreeable office in order to afford
necessary support to his family, he bends the stubborn pride of the
hidalgo to his irksome duties--and it is not easy for us to realize
the rigidity of that quality which he inherited by birth, and which
became a second nature in every gentleman of his nation. In advanced
years he still vigorously exerts his faculties, and endures privations
and disappointments in a resigned and patient spirit; and when
complaints are wrung from him they are neither bitter nor ill-natured.
Even his harmless vanity has something amiable and cordial about it.
When he has just reached his sixtieth year he effects a salutary
revolution in the corrupt literary taste of his countrymen and
countrywomen, and save a few coarse expressions separable from the
literature of his day, a deathbed examination would have found few
passages in his numerous writings which it would be desirous to find
omitted. He closed an anxious and industrious life by a Christian
death.
NOTE.
Towards the end of Cervantes' life he belonged to the third order of
Trinitarian monks, and was buried in their church with his face
uncovered. These brothers having quitted their convent in 1633, the
site of the interment could not be discovered when a search was
afterwards made. The house he occupied in Madrid being pulled down
about twenty years since, his bust has been placed in a niche in front
of the new building.
------
{29}
SILENT GRIEF.
You bid me raise my voice,
And pray
For tears; but yet this choice
Resteth not with me. Too much grief
Taketh the tears and words that give relief
Away:
Though I weep not, silent and apart,
Weeps and prays my heart
You like not this dead, calm,
Cold face.
So still, unmoved, I am.
You think that dark despair begins
To brood upon me for my many sins'
Disgrace:
Not so; within, silent and apart,
Hopes and trusts my heart.
Down underneath the waves
Concealed
Lie in unfathomed graves
A thousand wrecks, storm never yet--
That did the upper surface madly fret--
Revealed.
Wreck'd loves lie deep; tears, with all their art,
Ne'er could show my heart.
Complaint I utter not.
I know
That He who cast my lot,
In silence also bore His cross.
Nor counted lack of words or tears a loss
In woe.
Alone with Him, silent and apart,
Weeps and prays my heart.
--------
{30}
Original.
THE GODFREY FAMILY;
OR, QUESTIONS OF THE DAY.
CHAPTER I.
MR. GODFREY AND HIS FAMILY.
About the time the events of the era 1792 were creating a panic
throughout the European world, an English gentleman sat at breakfast
with his wife and children in a noble mansion on the south eastern
coast of his native island. The newspaper was unfolded with more than
usual interest, for the Honorable Mr. Godfrey's sister had married a
French nobleman, and the daily accounts from France struck every day
new terror to the heart of this gentleman. Until now, he had been what
is termed a liberal in his politics, and, alas! an unbeliever in his
religion, and had prided himself on bringing up his family free from
all bigotry and superstition; he had kept up correspondence with men
of science all over the world, and fondly hoped that the reign of
intellect "would emancipate the world from evil." His children had
been brought up under all these influences, and thus far with success
to his scheme. Accustomed from infancy to refinement, elegance,
domestic happiness, and intellectual culture, these young people felt
that in their case goodness and happiness were synonymous. All that
was beautiful they loved, for they had cultivated tastes; all that was
noble in sentiment they admired, for their father prided himself, and
taught them to pride themselves, on their noble ancestry, whose deeds
of daring and renown he was never weary of recounting. Fame, honor,
and glory were their idols. Brought up among such genial influences as
foster agreeable manners and bring out the most lovable of earth's
dispositions, together with an intellectual expression of beauty, and
a poetic appreciation of nature's charms, it was little wonder that
they mistook strong impulses for principle, thought themselves firm in
integrity of purpose, and were disposed fearlessly to launch their
vessel on the ocean of life, secure that intelligence and high aims
would guard them for ever against shipwreck. But now a change seemed
pending. The fear engendered by the French Revolution had somewhat
revolutionized Mr. Godfrey's mind, he was becoming more cautious in
his theories, and more morose in his temper than he had ever been
before. His wife hesitated ere she asked: "Any news of the countess
to-day?"
"No; though affairs are getting more desperate every hour. Would she
and the count were safe in England."
"But, in that case, their estates, would be confiscated, would they
not?"
Mr. Godfrey rose uneasily and paced the room. "What is the world
coming to?" he said.
A loud ring at the outer gate prevented reply; it was early for
visitors at the front entrance. They paused, and listened; soon a
servant announced "M. de Villeneuve."
"M. de Villeneuve! why, what can bring him here? Where have you shown
him to?"
"He is in the library, sir."
Mr. Godfrey hastened to receive his visitor. "I thought you were in
America," he said, after the first greetings were over.
"I went back to France to finish arranging some affairs for my father;
{31} and well for me that they were settled before these scenes of
blood had crazed the populace, or we should have lost everything."
"And now------"
"Now, everything of ours has been favorably disposed of, and my father
and his family are settled in America without loss of property; my
father is delighted at the prospects of the new world, where every man
is to be EQUAL before the laws; you know he is an enthusiast."
"Yes, but it is an untried experiment yet, and France is presenting a
very fearful spectacle at this moment in endeavoring to follow in the
track."
"It is of that I came to speak to you. You have relations there?"
"My sister--do you know anything about her?"
"I and some other friends brought her and her husband's daughter
across the Channel last night."
"Last night! across the Channel! And her husband----"
"Has perished by the guillotine!"
"Great God!" Mr. Godfrey hid his face in his hands. "My poor sister!
how did she bear it? where is she? how did you come?"
"We came over in an open fishing boat--the Countess de Meglior,
Euphrasie, the priest of the old chateau, and myself; it was all we
could do to escape detection. I, of course, passed unnoticed, as an
American citizen; but the Countess of Euphrasie and M. Bertolot had to
disguise themselves and to suffer many hardships. The countess now
lies ill in the little inn at New Haven; she sent me on to tell you of
her situation."
"My poor sister! My poor sister! Has she lost all?"
"Nearly so. The estate is confiscated, and save a little money and a
few jewels she was able to save nothing; indeed she was too much
terrified to think. Mademoiselle de Meglior had been sent for on the
first alarm from the south of France, where she had been educated; she
arrived in time to throw herself into her father's arms as the
officers were taking him from his house; and in less than a week he
was no more. Secret intimation was sent to the countess that she and
her daughter were both denounced, and they fled, as I have told you."
To hasten to his sister's aid was, of course, the first thing to be
thought of. It was some days before the countess was sufficiently
recovered to be able to be removed to her brother's house; and even
after removal she was for a long time confined to her room.
Euphrasie, her step-daughter, tended her most assiduously, but the
poor lady could scarcely be comforted. To have, lost everything at
once--husband, estate, wealth, power, and position, and to be reduced
to depend upon a brother's bounty--it was not wonderful that she
should feel her situation acutely. She had lived exclusively for this
world's honors; every duty of domestic life had given place to her
love of the court and its pleasures. Euphrasie, brought up at the
convent and under the guardianship of her paternal grandmother, was
almost as much a stranger to her as the nieces to whom she was now
newly introduced.
. . . . . .
It was a long time ere the Countess de Meglior rallied sufficiently to
appear in the drawing-room of the mansion, and meantime her
step-daughter, Euphrasie, was simply her slave. Madame never
considered her welfare, or seemed to think she was in any way
concerned in the misfortune that bad overtaken them; yet never,
perhaps, was a child more fondly attached to a father than had been
our heroine. Although since the death of her own mother she had for
the most part resided away from him, yet her father's frequent visits
to his ancestral chateau, and the still more frequent correspondence
with his mother and daughter, had kept up a warm interest. At the
death of her grandmother she had received her education at a
neighboring convent, for her step-mother {32} declined taking charge
of her. She was summoned home at last in consequence of the troubles
of the times; arrived in time to be torn by force from the arms of her
father, into which she had thrown herself; passed days of agonizing
suspense, which were terminated only by hearing of his death.
Paris was no longer safe; advertised of her own proscription, Madame
de Meglior, almost in a state of frenzy, excepted the kind offices of
M. de Villeneuve, and, with the old family chaplain, had fled the
country, taking with her Euphrasie, with whom she so suddenly became
aware she was connected, though a stranger alike to her character and
disposition.
Euphrasie, though overwhelmed by the blow, was constrained to hide her
own emotions, the better to console one who seemed so inconsolable as
the countess, her step-mother. Truly, the poor girl did feel she was
as a stranger in a strange land. Until the storm broke forth which
drove the nuns from the convent, and let infidelity and irreligion
like "the dogs of war" loose over the fated kingdom, Euphrasie had
dwelt in happy ignorance of all grosser evil, and with light and merry
heart, chastened by earnest piety, pursued her innocent way; but
suddenly awakened by such horrors to the knowledge of crime, vice, and
their concomitant miseries, she shrank from entering into a world
which contrasted with the abode she had left, seemed to her
over-excited imagination filled with mysterious terrors, and fraught
with indescribable dangers.
She met, then, the advances of her entertainers with constraint; kept
the young people absolutely at a distance, and would more willingly
shut herself up in the apartment of her peevish, unloving stet-mother,
to whom she manifested the affection and paid the respect of a
daughter, than join with Adelaide or Annie either in study or
amusement.
Adelaide, the eldest daughter of Mr. Godfrey's family, was within two
months of her eighteenth year--Eugene, the only son and heir, was then
sixteen--while her sister Annie was but a year younger; and the merry,
laughing Hester had scarcely counted thirteen years. With the
compassionate eagerness of youth they crowded round Euphrasie, whom
they persisted in saluting as "cousin," and were not a little
chagrined to find their advances met in so chilling a manner; they
spared no pains to distract her from her moodiness, or hauteur, or
ill-temper, or whatever it might be, that made her so different from
themselves. Yet moodiness it scarcely could be, for the young French
girl was cheerful in society, so far as the expression of her
countenance went; and when surprised in solitude, a calm serenity sat
on her youthful brow, and she bore the ill-temper of the countess with
wonderful sweetness; her mother's impatience, indeed, seemed but to
increase her patience, and the harshness she underwent served but to
make her more gentle. She was a mystery to her animated young friends,
who, loving a life of excitement and intellectual progress, could not
understand how Euphrasie could exist in so stupid and monotonous a
course.
Yet was the young French girl far from being deficient in those
branches of accomplishments which are especially feminine. She played
and sang with taste and feeling, but I the airs were generally of a
solemn character. She loved, also, to exercise her pencil, but it was
to delineate the head of the thorn-crowned Saviour, of the penitent
Magdalene, or of, "Mary, highly favored among women." Earthly subjects
and earthly thoughts had no attraction for her, yet there were moments
when, as if unconsciously, she gave utterance to fancies which
startled her young companions. She would walk with them by the
sounding shore, and while they were busy gathering and classifying
shells and sea-weed and geological specimens, she, too, would seem to
study' and listen and learn a lesson, but a far {33} different lesson
from the one they sought. The young ladies Godfrey were scientific,
though in a playful way; there was aim, object, utility, in short, in
all their seekings. "Knowledge is power," was the axiom of the family;
and the members of it might fairly challenge the world for the
consistency with which they sought to carry that axiom into practice.
But Euphrasie would wonder and ponder, and philosophize unconsciously.
She did not decompose the fragments of the mighty rocks with acids as
her young friends did; she did not classify and dissect the lovely
flower; but she stood in mute wonderment at the base of the rocks, and
heard their disquisitions on its strata having been once liquid and
gradually consolidating, and said: "What a wondrous history! what a
sight for the angels to behold the atomic attraction forming the
worlds grand order! A true theory of geology would be like a chapter
of the _life of God_--a true revelation of his spirit to man."
"Yes," said Adelaide; "science will yet and if superstition from the
earth."
"Superstition!" said Euphrasie. "Yes! if superstition means false
views of God's relation to the human soul. True science is mystic, and
must reveal God interiorly; but true science can scarcely be attained
by guesses or dissection. You destroy a beauteous flower by pulling it
to pieces, but I do not see how its separate petals and crushed leaves
can speak so plainly to the soul as the living plant on the stem, or
how your anatomy is a revelation."
"Nay, we discern the uses of the different parts thereby, and admire
the structure, seeing how each organ fulfils its office duly, in
minuteness as in grandeur."
"But your long words," said Euphrasie; "do they too reveal God? To me
they hide him in a cloud of dust. I feel the order, I love the beauty,
I am elevated by the grandeur of creation, because nature is a
metaphor in which God hides himself and reveals himself at once, but I
distrust a mere human key. How can we be sure of systems, unless we
spend a life in verification? Did not Pythagoras teach astronomy in
the Copernican fashion? and yet the world did not receive the teaching
till centuries after. The world receives the theory of Copernicus now
on trust; would it be wise to spend a life in verifying it?"
"Have you any other key?" asked Annie.
"There is a key to the lesson which nature teaches," said Euphrasie,
in a low tone; "but not so much as to its formation as to its being a
manifestation of God. We must not speak of these things; they are too
high for us."
"Nay," said Eugene; "they are the very things to speak about,
especially if, as you say, they lead to higher things; my idea of
science is utility. The old Magian astrologers, the Chaldean sages and
Eastern sophists, studied cloudy myths and wrapped up their theories
in a veil of obscurity; but the modern idea is usefulness; an
abridgment of man's toil, and promotion of his comfort. Do you reject
all human research?"
"I reject nothing that God has given," said Euphrasie; "but truth is
one, error is many. The science first to be taught, is how to discover
truth--the next, how to apply it. You say the ancients applied
science to other purposes than we; if they applied it to learn the
qualities of their own souls, and we apply it to the comfort of our
bodies merely, which is the highest object?"
"What, then, would you do?" said Adelaide, a little impatiently; "shut
up our books, and sit and dream on the sea-shore on matters beyond all
practical use?"
Euphrasie answered very gently, as she rose to walk to the seaside, "I
am not a teacher, _ma cher cousine_, but I think mind has its laws as
well as matter, and as on the government of our minds so much depends,
even in {34} our researches after material knowledge, it is likely
that the science of mind is more important than that of matter, and
necessary for the truth-seeker to study first. But I am getting quite
out of my depth; let us go and throw pebbles into the sea."
. . . . . .
Mrs. Godfrey was a kind-hearted and very reasonable woman, in the way
in which she understood reasoning. She was bent on rousing her young
inmate to energy and action. She was but a _girl_, she said--a girl of
seventeen could not have been so spoiled by the insipidities of a
convent as to be beyond reclaiming for the tangible world surrounding
her; or was it that her thoughts were with the dead, and that the deep
sorrow she had undergone had penetrated to the depths of her being?
Whatever the cause, Mrs. Godfrey was dissatisfied with the result, and
her motherly warmth of heart yearned to comfort the young orphan in
her desolation. She let a few weeks pass away in hopes of witnessing a
change, but when none came, or seemed likely to come, she thought it
her duty to remonstrate with Euphrasie, the more so as the countess
being now recovered sufficiently to join the family circle, Euphrasie
had no plausible excuse for passing hours together in the solitude of
her own chamber.
"It is not good for you, my dear, to be so much alone," said Mrs.
Godfrey to her, as one day she intruded on the young girl's privacy.
"Rouse your energies to some good purpose, and employ your mind in
some definite pursuit; it is very injurious, I assure you, to let your
faculties lie dormant so long."
Euphrasie laid aside the embroidery on which she had been employed,
and answered meekly, "What shall I do to please you, my dear madam?"
"Why, exercise your mental faculties--study."
"I am most willing to do so, madam; but what shall I begin?"
"Why, languages if you will; but you know enough of these, perhaps;
your own language and that of this country may content you. Or will
you study German and Italian?"
"I will, if you wish it, though I confess I have no great inclination.
It seems to me as if to learn different names for the same thing were
not very profitable; and unless I had occasion to visit the countries
in which these languages are spoken, I think it would be time thrown
away."
"How time thrown away? Could you not read the literature of the
languages? That will expand your mind."
"Literature? Do you mean poetry and fiction--such as your daughters
read? I do not care for them. I want to study truth."
"Truth? Yes, but fiction may be covert truth. Tales show us mankind as
they are. Literature has a refining tendency, and gives us elegance of
taste."
"I should defer to your opinion, madam," replied Euphrasie, with a
resigned air; "and when you wish, I will begin."
"Yes," said Mrs. Godfrey, "but not as a punishment; it is as a source
of attraction, of interest, that I wish you to cultivate literary
tastes."
"I cannot feel interest, madam, in that which will unfit me for my
duty."
"Unfit you for your duty! what do you mean?"
"Pray, madam, pardon me; I, of course, defer to you."
"I want no deference, child, save what your reason gives. Explain your
meaning."
"I only mean, dear madam, that too much refinement and elegance might
make us forget our inherent weakness; teach us to set too high a value
on exterior accomplishments, and to forget the tendency to sin ever
abiding within us."
"The girl is raving! Now, Euphrasie, do you honestly believe in the
corruption of your heart?"
{35}
"I know I am prone to evil in many ways, and that I must keep a
constant watch over all my dispositions. I suppose I do not know the
extent of evil in my own heart--that were a rare grace, vouchsafed to
few--but I see nothing in myself to lead me to suppose that I am
naturally better than the men who murdered my father."
"Do you feel disposed to murder, then?"
"No; but the very indignation I often feel at their crimes teaches me
not to trust myself. Did we give way to our passions, and had we
power, who can tell what we should do? Nero showed good dispositions
when he began his reign. Alfred the Great was a licentious youth till
Almighty God chastened him by adversity, and humbled him through life
by inflicting him with an incurable disease, which kept him ever
mindful of his former delinquencies."
"Do yon think that disease was a good to Alfred?"
"Decidedly; it helped to keep him mindful of the ever-present Deity
whom his former life had offended, and probably prevented his
relapsing into sin."
"You foolish child! his disease was probably occasioned by the
hardships he had undergone during his campaign; it was the natural
consequence to damp and wet and bad living. You must study science,
Euphrasie; that will rid you of all these foolish notions."
"I will study what you please, madam," replied Euphrasie.
But Mrs. Godfrey's endeavors to make her young _protégé_ comprehend
results as _inevitable_ signally failed, to her own great
astonishment. The girl pursued easily and willingly the course of
study marked out for her; was somewhat amused by chemical and other
experiments, but could never be brought to declare them necessary
results in the absolute sense. "The action of the same spirit that
established these relationships" said she "might at will disturb them;
even as the chemical relationship between two substances is disturbed
by the presence of a third substance more potent in its affinities."
"What, then, is a natural law?" demanded Mrs. Godfrey.
"A natural law," replied Euphrasie, "is the ordinary mode in which
Divine Providence causes one portion of insentient matter to act on
another portion of insentient matter."
Her instructor would object to this. "Nay, but there are natural laws
affecting mind also."
"Doubtless," said Euphrasie, "there are ordinary modes of acting upon
mind, both by the action of matter and by the action of other minds;
but as the special object of this life is to reunite, to re-bind man
to his Creator, supernatural means are ever at work to effect this
object, and of these we can predicate nothing certain."
"Supernatural nonsense, child--who put this precious style of
reasoning into your head?"
"Does not religion mean re-binding, madam? Was not man severed from
God by disobedience? Was not the whole spirit of religion, both before
and since our Lord's advent, founded on the fact that the mercy of God
wished to provide a remedy for that fatal act of Adam and Eve? And has
not insentient nature ever been made to depart from her ordinary
rules, when such departure could forward the cause for which Christ
died?"
Mrs. Godfrey was silenced. She did not wish to avow her scepticism and
infidelity, but in secret she rejoiced that her own children were free
from such a bar to improvement.
The arrival of a box of books as a present to Euphrasie from M. de
Villeneuve, who, in a note addressed to the countess, asked her
permission "to be allowed to present to the daughter of his departed
friend a few works which, he believed, would suit her taste, and which
she would be scarcely likely to find in Mr. Godfrey's library,
valuable as that library was in many respects," came to help the
enemy's {36} cause in Mrs. Godfrey's view of the case, for among the
works were selections from St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, from Bede, St.
Thomas Aquinas, and others of the fathers of the church. "I did not
know you read Latin, cousin," said the girls in surprise. "Nor do I,
except church Latin," said Euphrasie. "I learnt church Latin on
purpose to study these books, which my father had promised me as soon
as I could read them. M. de Villeneuve must have heard of this promise
from M. Bertolot. It was very kind in him to send them to me."
"I wonder you did not say 'it was a special providence'," bantered
Annie; but Eugene looked at her beseechingly and reprovingly, so she
said no more.
In spite of the new attraction, Euphrasie continued to study the
course appointed by Mrs. Godfrey, but in learning thus there was so
evidently a want of appreciation of the importance of the
study--science seemed to her so very little higher than a game of ball
with a little child--that her instructors were fairly discomfited, and
inclined to turn her over to the musty old fathers she had the bad
taste to prefer to their intelligent elucidations.
The young people, too, were annoyed, for they could not attribute to
stupidity the indifference she manifested, and that indifference
seemed felt as a tacit reproach of their own eagerness.
"She is not only not stupid,"' said Adelaide, the oldest of the girls;
"she is absolutely clever; she intuitively comprehends what it takes
me hours to make out. I began to explain algebra to her, and before a
month was up, she knew more of it than I did myself; and when I spoke
to her of this new discovery of locomotive power, which has taken us
so long fully to comprehend, she gave me what she calls the course of
the ordinary sequences of matter, in proof that the invention must
succeed, if this course of sequences be properly applied; and that
then we may travel without horses as fast as we can reasonably wish;
'but,' she added, 'it will be worth no one's while to perfect such an
invention, for, travel as fast as we may, we cannot run away from
ourselves by any material means.'"
"She is a monomaniac," said Mr. Godfrey; "sensible on all points but
one."
"Unless," urged Eugene, "it be true, as she once said, that there is
higher science than the science of matter, and that that science is
the necessary one for us to study."
"_Et tu, Brute_," shouted the father indignantly. "Now, children, let
us have no such trash in my own family. Pity your young friend, and
withhold your censure. Remember, she was brought up in superstition
and ignorance. It cannot be expected that her mind should awaken at
once to the beauty of the physical law. But for yourselves, after the
pains that have been taken to keep your minds unfettered by the
trammels of superstition, it were a disgrace indeed to see you yield
to any such worn-out fancies. The close of the eighteenth century must
witness higher thoughts."
"The close of the eighteenth century has witnessed terrific doings
over the water," said Eugene.
"Yes, and see there the effects of superstition," answered his father.
"Had those poor wretches been taught an enlightened philosophy instead
of an abject superstition, the reaction would not have produced such
awful results."
"Do you then believe, father, that when Euphrasie throws off her
religion, she will become such as these men are?"
"No; Euphrasie is better educated already, even from her intercourse
with us; besides, she is refined and elegant."
"But so they say is Robespierre. A Frenchman, and one not friendly to
him, said to me the other day that his house is the very picture of
simple elegance. Besides, the Roman emperors were excessive in their
luxurious magnificence at the very time they {37} were murdering by
wholesale. Nero sang to his lyre the Siege of Troy while Rome was
burning. What if it were true that he set the city on fire merely to
revel in the luxury of a new sensation, and to realize the emotion he
deemed he ought to feel at such a catastrophe?"
"Why, Eugene," said Hester, laughing, "you, too, are growing
metaphysical. What will come next?"
"Why, next we will inquire how far metaphysics are true when they
teach that mental sensation and moral power are distinct from each
other, and that a man may be consequently imaginatively great--capable
of every grand mental sensation--and be morally weak; nay, the very
slave of his lowest propensities. We have many examples of this."
"So says Euphrasie; and therefore she insists that what we call mental
culture is at best but of secondary value, well enough as an assistant
agent, but not to be considered as a principal means in attaining the
ultimatum of life."
"Euphrasie is a simpleton," said Mr. Godfrey.
Eugene rose to quit the room. He was considering within himself
whether Euphrasie were not in the right.
CHAPTER II.
THE EARTHLY UTOPIA, AND THE LOST EMPIRE.
In a little country town where society is scarce, it often happens
that people associate together whose rank is dissimilar, for the mere
sake of relieving ennui of solitude. Thus in Estcourt a half-pay
captain, his wife, the clergyman and his family, the lawyer, the
doctor, and their incumbrances, were occasionally admitted as visitors
to Estcourt Hall, as Mr. Godfrey's residence was called; and here,
though somewhat restrained by being found in such aristocratic
society, opinions were sometimes broached which plainly manifested
that "the spirit of the time" was working even in that remote
district.
St. Simon, Fourrier, Owen, had not then developed the social system
which is now endeavoring to sap the foundations of all that antiquity
held in solemn reverence; but the principles of socialism to which
these men afterwards gave a "shape" were even then fermenting in the
minds of many. Disturbed spirits were questioning the rights of landed
proprietors, while the sudden introduction of machinery was raising a
faction among the displaced artisans. Ominous signs were visible on
the political horizon, and perhaps an English "reign of terror," that
would have vied in horror with that of France, would have been
inaugurated, had not the threatened invasion of the island by Napoleon
united all classes anew to repel the foreign foe.
Certain it is that, early in the nineteenth century, it was found
necessary to have government agents in many a petty country town in
England to watch the progress of disaffection, and five or six
shopkeepers could hardly assemble together without the fact being
recorded, and inquiries set on foot respecting the purport of their
meeting. Rebellious spirits were mysteriously _pressed_ to man the
royal navy, and the magistrates not only connived at such kidnapping,
but frequently designated the individuals whom it was desirable to
remove.
This process, comparatively easy when it concerned apprentices,
journeymen, or those belonging to the laboring population, could not
be brought to bear upon obnoxious members of the gentry with equal
facility. Now, Alfred Brookbank was one of these. His father was
rector of Estcourt, and, independently of his living, was proprietor
of a pretty landed estate, the whole of which by right of
primogeniture was to fall to the eldest eon, a careless, unprincipled
prodigal, who had already involved his family in pecuniary
embarrassment {38} by his reckless expenditure, and brought disgrace
on his father's cloth by his loose morality.
His brother Alfred was the reverse of this--astute, aspiring,
ambitious, he was smitten with the prevailing mania, and at times
talked loudly of the folly and injustice of sacrificing the interests
of a whole family to one selfish fool. The girls, too, whose fortunes
had been injured by the elder brother's extravagance, lent no
unwilling ear to the doctrine of equal participation of property.
Alfred Brookbank was gifted with an eloquent tongue, an insinuating
manner, and a gentlemanly deportment. His figure was good, and his
features, without being handsome, were agreeable from their animated
expression. He was a general favorite; and being prudent enough to
avoid the expression of his opinions before the elder branches of the
family, it was seldom that he was suspected of spreading sedition and
disaffection among the young.
Of Mr. Godfrey's three daughters, the second one, Annie, was, at this
period of our tale, by far the most susceptible of these novel ideas.
She professed that she would follow truth wherever it should lead her,
even though it involved the relinquishment of her own superior rank in
society. Mr. Godfrey only laughed at such protestations from a girl of
seventeen, well knowing they would not stand the test of experience;
but however harmless might be her sallies, he had not calculated on
one result of freedom of opinion; Annie began to take pleasure in
Alfred Brookbank's attentions, and to feel flattered when he
expatiated to her on the beauty of such a system of co-operative
industry as would banish vice and misery from the globe and renew the
golden era.
"Is it to be wondered at," said Alfred, "that revolutions take place
in blood, when property is so unequally divided? nay, when oftentimes
the property is in the possession of the fool, while the wise man has
to get his living by hard labor? Look at the _rationale_ of the thing!
One man holds wealth, as it is called, and on the strength of it he
must compel fifty men to work for him, while be fives at his ease--the
roasted pigeons flying into his mouth, crying, 'come eat me!'"
"But some one must work," argued Annie.
"You mean to say," replied Alfred, "that food most be raised and
clothing furnished. True. But how many are employed in really useful
labor, compared with those whose occupations might be dispensed with
without loss to society, and those who are mere appendages of
wealth--mere creatures of idleness--men who, by forestalling their
master's wants, make _him_ dependent on themselves; who, by
surrounding him with luxuries, effeminate him; and who, by pandering
to his pleasures, surfeit him, at the same time that by doing these
things they degrade themselves; for why should one man be a mere
appendage to another?"
"But if all must work," said Annie, "all cannot work in the same way.
We most have hewers of wood and drawers of water, as well as poets and
philosophers. A community needs a head, as well as hands and feet.
Suppose you were elected head of a community, you would need servants
to do the manual labor?"
"True, but I would not badge them for it," answered Alfred, glancing
at the liveried servants, who were then bringing in refreshments. "All
men must work for the common weal; therefore, all labor is honorable;
and no man need lord it over another, as if himself were made of
porcelain, and the other of earthenware. An American philosopher has
lately calculated that in order to supply the world with necessaries,
if each grown individual were to work four hours a day, the whole
population of the world might be far better provided for than it is
now."
"And what would they do with their spare time?" asked Annie.
{39}
"What but improve their minds, and employ their energies in loftier
labors--what but grow out of the drudge into the man! Oh! we have yet
to learn the wonders that are to be achieved by a well-regulated
community. Men are scarcely men yet. Half of them are slaves to the
mere bread-winning to support their bodies, and the other half are
seeking phantoms--they are trying to find pleasure in lording it over
their fellows, or they are driven to excess by the mere necessity of
passing away time. It is an unfair position to place a man in, to set
him above that reciprocal dependence which binds man to man as equals.
It is a practical injustice to individuals to sever them thus from
their kind, and prevent their feeling their brotherhood." Alfred
continued, warming with his subject:
"There are, deep seated in the human heart,
A thousand thrilling, yearning sympathies--
A thousand ties that bind us to our kind--
A thousand pleasures only there enjoyed
In cheering intercourse with fellow-man.
'Tis thus the voice of nature speaks aloud,
Proclaims from pole to pole the heav'n-born truth:
'Ye are the children of one only God.
Learn to acknowledge your fraternity.'
I think you have not seen my poem on Human Brotherhood, Miss Annie?"
"I have not, but to judge from the specimen you have just quoted, I
should like very much to read it. These truths seem so evident now, it
is wonderful they have not been discovered before."
"They have been discovered, though not acted on. The fact is that
men's minds have been so trammelled with superstition, they have been
afraid to tread out of the beaten track. They have been afraid to
reason, I scarce know why, even on their own grounds. Yet matters are
mending in this respect. I was present the other day when an indignant
orator thus addressed his audience:
Shall he, the Author of life and light, who has given to man, as the
reward of the use of reason, the power of traversing the trackless
deep, and of drawing down the lightning innocuous from the
skies--shall he deny to his creature the privilege of using his own
gift on themes that more immediately concern man's happiness? Oh no!
believe it not! Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above,
and cometh down from the Father of light, with whom is no
variableness, neither shadow of turning.' The audience he was
addressing shouted applause; so you see the people's cause is
progressing, and even Scripture is called in to aid this desirable
change."
"I wish Euphrasie could hear you speak," said Annie; "she might begin
to believe that there is some good in human learning, and that it can
promote true happiness. I must introduce you to her more particular
acquaintance."
"No; if she is a votary of ignorance, pray don't. I dislike silly
unideaed girls--they are the pest of society."
"But Euphrasie is neither; she is only original and opinionated. Ideas
seem to grow with her indigenously; for no one can tell how she gets
them; but they are very crude, and directly contrary to the spirit of
progression. I wish you would convert her."
"I doubt it would be difficult, and, to say the truth, I do not wish
to attempt it. She is not my taste at all. I prefer animation, zeal,
sympathy. She looks like a marble statue of Contemplation; well enough
in its way, but possessing no interest for me, who am all for
practical life."
"Euphrasie is a great thinker, and thought aids practice. You had
better enlist her on your side; for there is no saying how much she
might assist you, if once she could be brought to see how happy a
paradise you have planned for the human race."
But Alfred was by no means anxious for this. He evidently felt that
Euphrasie would not listen to him. Perhaps he feared that she would
set Annie against himself, and mar his own schemes in her regard; {40}
for different as was their rank in life, and improbable as it was that
Mr. Godfrey should condescend to ally himself with aught save the high
aristocracy, this young man intended, if possible, to secure an
interest in Annie's affections. Not that he loved her; his self-love
was so absorbing that it was almost impossible for him to love any one
save himself; but he thought such an alliance would forward his
ambitious projects, and enable him to begin life under favorable
auspices.
Annie had no idea whatever beyond the amusement of the passing hour,
and was more intent just now on making a convert of the young refugee
than in paying regard to the homage tendered her by Alfred. Euphrasie
was a difficult subject to deal with; but there are some minds to whom
difficulty is an incentive.
She was one day sitting in the library with Eugene, intent in
depicting on canvas the glories of the "Golden Era." Euphrasie
entered, and sat down to some work. Annie called to her:
"Now, my dear Euphrasie, come to me. You are a judge of painting; tell
me what you think of my picture."
Euphrasie drew near. "It is very pretty," she said, "but what does it
represent? Those peasants resting under the fig-trees, those
vine-dressers plucking the beautiful grapes, have very graceful
figures, and most happy and intelligent faces; but what do they belong
to?"
"To the new Utopia," said Annie, "where all are intelligent and
beautiful, and where discord enters not."
Euphrasie looked dreamily in Annie's face, and said doubtingly:
"Heaven? This is no picture of heaven."
"No; it is an earthly paradise, _ma chère amie_. One need not die in
order to enjoy it," laughingly rejoined Annie.
"Oh! a fancy piece," said Euphrasie; "well, it is very pretty, but I
am no judge of fiction;" and she sat down.
"Fiction or not, I cannot let you off so," said Annie; "do you not
think it would be very pleasant to dwell with a goodly number of
intelligent people, each taking his own share of work, and aiding in
making life happy--all good, all instructed and accomplished?"
"Pleasant? Yes, very pleasant I have lived with such," said Euphrasie;
"but their happiness was of a very different kind to that which is
delineated here."
"You have lived with such! Where, in the name of wonder?" asked Annie.
"In France," said Euphrasie.
"And what sort of happiness was theirs?" asked Eugene, now thoroughly
roused.
"I cannot tell you--that is, I could not make you understand. Excuse
me," said Euphrasie, evidently sorry she had said so much.
"And why not? why could we not understand?" asked brother and sister,
both in a breath.
"Because your principles are so different."
"Nay, then, explain the principles, _ma chère_. You have excited our
curiosity; you must gratify it now."
"Nay, I know not how. The principles belong to the interior life, and
on that I cannot speak."
"Why not? are you sworn to secrecy?" asked Annie. Eugene looked his
request for information, but spoke not.
"Not so," said Euphrasie; "but, in the first place, I am no teacher;
and, in the second, there are some subjects which can only be
approached with reverence, and I am afraid--" she hesitated.
"You are right, mademoiselle," said Eugene; "we have too little
reverence."
Euphrasie looked distressed. But Annie broke in with--"But we can be
reverent, and we will be reverent when the case demands it. Tell us
your principles, dear Euphrasie."
{41}
The young girl, with evident reluctance, said:
"My friends held that the soul had been originally endowed with power
over the mental faculties, as also over the senses and the appetites
of the body, and all inferior nature; and that that empire had been
lost through man's fault. They believe that no lasting, no high
enjoyment can be procured until that empire has been regained."
"What kind of empire do you mean?" said Annie.
"As thus," replied Euphrasie. "We _will_ our foot to tread here or
there, and it obeys us. We _will_ our hands to grasp or to work, and
it is done. But when we _will_ our feelings to be calm, or our
appetites to keep within certain limits, they do not always obey. We
resolve, and find that our resolutions fail. We determine, and do not
act. When children, nay, when grown people, are taxed with doing
wrong, they reply, 'I could not help it.' This is a confession of
failure in self-government, or, as might be said, a proof of empire
lost."
"That is, supposing it admitted such empire once existed. But do you
seriously think that perfect self-government may be acquired, or, as
you say, regained?"
"At least a near approach to it may, if the proper means are used."
"And those means?"
"Are too serious for me to mention; besides, they are paradoxical in
appearance; for, though impossible to mere humanity, they are
nevertheless possible. But you must carry your inquiry to a better
teacher than I am;" and Euphrasie rose to depart.
"No; we have no other teacher near us, and I shall not let you go
until you have told me what I want to know;" and Annie laid her hand
somewhat forcibly on the young stranger's arm, and compelled her to
reseat herself.
"Well, then," faltered out the poor girl, "when the soul was in
possession of its pristine empire, it had also the power of communion
with high spiritual intelligences--nay, with the highest--even with
the creative intelligence. The same fault that lost man the high
empire over all inferior natures, and over his own appetites and
passions, by disturbing the equilibrium which primarily existed in the
higher part of his soul, also severed the bond of that high spiritual
communion; and that bond must be reunited ere the empire be restored
to him. Man of himself cannot reunite that severed bond, nor can he be
happy without such reunion; because the higher part of man's soul was
created for such high spiritual communion, and can no more be content
without it than could our inferior senses without the gratification
they require. But what he cannot do will be done for him, if he
prepare himself duly. He must build the altar of sacrifice, lay on the
wood, prepare the victim. Fire from heaven will then descend for his
enlightenment, for his purification, and more than he had lost may be
regained."
"You speak oracularly, _ma belle amie_, but I want something more
tangible yet. Tell me some of the practical rules observed by your
friends; may be I shall better understand your sybilline wisdom then."
Euphrasie shook her head. "They are too minute," she said. "You might
even think them childish." But Annie had not yet relaxed her grasp,
and appeared determined to be satisfied; so Euphrasie continued:
"Nevertheless, if you will promise to let me go immediately after, I
will give you one of their rules of action."
"One, only one?"
"One will be enough at a time. When you have solved one rule, it will
be the time to ask for more."
"Solved one rule? What do you mean by that?"
"There is a body and a soul to every religious rule--the letter and
the spirit. Observance must be yielded to both. I can only give you
the body. God only can teach you to understand the spirit of it."
{42}
"Well; proceed with your enigma."
"You promise to let me go, whether you understand it or not."
"Yes, provided the rule is practical," said Annie.
"Well, then," said Euphrasie, "one reason that my friends were so
happy together--that though there were fifty of them, there was no
quarrelling, no ill will, no envy--was, that they constantly
endeavored, each one of them, to choose for herself the poorest
things; in her diet, the poorest fare; in her clothes, the coarsest
habit; in her employment, the most humbling functions."
"Impossible!" said Annie. "Stay, cousin!" But Euphrasie had already
made her escape, and her reluctance to dwell on these subjects in that
presence was so evident that Annie did not choose to pursue her, and
she was left to conjecture whether the young French girl had been
playing on her credulity or not. The mere fact that fifty ladies had
been guided practically by such a principle as that given, was clearly
beyond her belief. Not so, however, did Eugene decide. His interest in
their young and mysterious inmate was ever on the increase. Each word
she uttered was gathered up as food for thought. The ideas were new to
him, and, not only so, they were contrary to those in which he had
been educated, and he had but a faint glimmering of their meaning. Yet
they worked strangely within him, and fain would he have sought
explanation from that pale sybil, but that for to-day she had
forbidden it.
When Annie also had left the apartment, he walked up and down in deep
thought repeating to himself:
"Man has lost the empire over himself and over inferior nature."
"Man has lost the power of high spiritual communion."
"_But these may be regained._"
"If this be true, any privation or sacrifice may be undergone for
their repossession; too small the price, whatever the cost. But then,
how can contentment with the meanest things, or filling the humblest
offices, assist this conclusion? And this is but one rule; are the
others of a like fashion?" The young man was fairly mystified; that
the oracle had emitted truth, he doubted not; but a clue to the
meaning of that truth was wanting, and where should he find that clue?
CHAPTER III.
THE "MARIAGE DE CONVENANCE."
There was a visible excitement in the house; even Mr. Godfrey, ever so
solemn, and latterly so inclined to severity, put on a cheerful
appearance; people outside the family were _guessing_ at the cause.
For a long time, guessing was the only thing they could do; even
Madame de Meglior was not in the secret until one morning she received
a letter from M. de Villeneuve, which appeared to contain some news,
for she said to Mr. Godfrey, who happened to be the only one present:
"Brother, can this be true?"
"Can what be true, my good sister?" was the question returned.
"That the Duke of Durimond is coming here to marry Adelaide?"
"Why should it not be true?"
"Why, the duke is an old man!"
"Not at all; he was quite young when he made proposals for Adelaide;
surely you remember them."
"Remember them! Do you mean the agreement you made at the
dinner-table, when Adelaide was two years old."
"The agreement was made before, between his father and me; it was
ratified, then, by himself; he had just come of age."
"And that is sixteen years ago. Will you give Adelaide to a man of
seven-and-thirty?'
"Why not, if she makes no objection?"
"Has she ever seen him?"
{43}
"Yes, she saw him in town last winter; 'twas there he renewed his
offer; but, in fact, we have always corresponded. The duke is fond of
the arts; 'twas he sent those fine pictures you admire so much."
"He can't know whether he likes Adelaide or not, and she never struck
me as being in love all this time."
"Pshaw! The duke has proposed; Adelaide is satisfied. The marriage was
agreed upon years ago; what would you have? I thought you' knew the
world by this time."
This was taking madame by her foible, so she said no more. Mrs.
Godfrey was simply quiescent: she was not accustomed to oppose her
husband's will, and, incredible as it may seem, the young girl herself
offered no objection to the marriage announced to her. To deck her
brow with a coronet had charms enough for the deeply fostered pride of
that young heart to induce her to forego the prospect of love,
sympathy, and domestic happiness; she simply coveted rank and power.
The duke had immense revenues; he offered ample settlements: what
mattered it that he was thirty-seven, and she but sweet eighteen?
Marriages occurred every day in which the disparity was more glaring.
What mattered it that she had scarcely seen the noble duke; that she
knew little of his private life, or of his tastes and feelings? He was
a nobleman of high birth; he paid her courtly compliments, presented
her with a magnificent casket of jewels; pleaded his long absence on
the Continent in excuse for his apparent want of attention to herself;
and urged his long friendship and unbroken correspondence with her
father as a plea for hurrying on his happiness; and thus, almost
unwooed, the fair Adelaide was won. Poor girl, the chief idea in her
head was that she should like to be a duchess; and thus both she and
her father contrived to overlook the fact that but little allusion had
been made to the proposed alliance in the sixteen years'
correspondence on art and science that had been maintained between the
gentlemen. The matter had been settled years ago. There was little
occasion for the world to interfere, if the parties concerned were
satisfied. The father's scientific friend was necessarily a fitting
husband for the daughter. And so the preparations went forward. The
house was filled for a time with dress-makers and bandboxes, and when
these were dismissed, there came guests to witness the bridal. Among
these was the Comte de Villeneuve, whom we have already introduced to
our readers; a friend of both families was the comte, and had been a
friend too of the late Comte de Meglior. This made him welcome also to
Madame de Meglior and Euphrasie; indeed he treated the latter with
distinguished attention, and she seemed more at her ease with him than
with any person at the Hall. M. de Villeneuve was thirty-five years of
age, but good-looking and animated, and Madame de Meglior was in some
slight degree uneasy at first at the evident friendship he evinced for
Euphrasie, for she did not approve of disproportionate marriages, and
she thought Adelaide's example a bad one. Gradually, however, she
became so absorbed in the duties imposed upon her by Mrs. Godfrey of
directing the embellishments, that she forgot to look after the object
of her solicitude in the subject which suited her better. Living as
she had been wont to do in the gay circles of Parisian exclusives, she
was regarded as a very oracle of fashion and elegance, and
consequently she willingly took the lead in planning the arrangements
for the bridal day.
The young people were in a puzzle, Annie especially. It was the first
act of unblushing worldliness she had ever witnessed. She felt as if
she did not know the world she lived in. She looked at her mother;
there was no joy on her face; she looked at Adelaide; already the
young girl had {44} assumed her rank; the calm hauteur, the majestic
politeness, with which she received her guests, astonished every one.
Adelaide was born to command, every one felt it; none more so than
Annie, who had been so fondly attached to that sister from whom she
felt already severed.
"O Euphrasie!" she said to her cousin, as they were walking together
in the grounds that surrounded the house, "you must be my sister when
Adelaide is gone; it will be so dreary to have no one of my own age to
love and talk to; will you not try to love me?"
"I love you already, dear; you must not talk in that way--how can I do
other than love you?"
"I was afraid you thought me a reprobate whom it was a sin to love."
This was said half playfully, but the tears started to Euphrasie's
eyes.
"You a reprobate! a sin to love you who have been so kind to the poor
orphan girl! O Annie! have I really been so ungrateful as to give you
this idea?"
"No, dear, no! not so; but I seriously thought you deemed all human
nature utterly depraved, and did not wish to form strong attachments
with those not of your creed."
"If human nature were utterly depraved, how could it hear the voice of
God in the soul? and if you here were utterly depraved, would you have
opened your house and your heart to the wandering outcast?"
"Then you do not think religion essential to goodness? How is that,
then?"
"Man was made in the image of God, my dear Annie, and even his natural
qualities bear witness to this, unless, indeed, he become utterly
depraved."
"You do not, then, exclude us from your heaven," said Annie, embracing
her. "I am so glad; you will be my friend and sister, Euphrasie."
Euphrasie warmly returned the embrace, and said: "I have no heaven to
exclude you from, dear Annie, but if you wish for eternal bliss, you
must offer your natural qualities to him who alone can stamp eternity
upon them."
"And how shall I do that, dear?"
"Pray to God, and he will teach you."
"I would rather have your teaching just now; tell me, if you believe
human nature to be good, what is meant by 'original sin,' as it
affects us. I know the story of Adam and Eve, but not what it means."
"Adam was created with certain natural qualities, even as the inferior
animals were, adapted to the part he was to perform as lord of earth;
these qualities were good, nay, in Adam perfect. They are transmitted
to us, shorn of their brightness by the fall, but still they are good,
though imperfect now. Natures differ in individuals, but some have
very high qualities, very lofty aspirations. Have you not noticed
this?"
"Well, I used to think so, but--"
"But what?"
"No matter what; tell me, what are we to do with our high qualities
more than cultivate them, and act upon them?"
"Bring them under supernatural action, that they may be purified,
refined, and stamped with the seal of immortal truth."
"Is this your religion?"
"I know no other."
The approach of M. de Villeneuve, who was gathering flowers for Hester
to make into bouquets, prevented further conversation. The merry girl
was making garlands, and flung them round Euphrasie and Annie as they
approached. "Now sit down here," she said, "and I will crown you both
as victims to the sacrifice. M. de Villeneuve shall be the priest.
What deity will you offer these victims to, monsieur? They are ready
bound."
{45}
"That is a serious question; we must take time to consider, and
luckily here comes Eugene to solve the question for us. What divinity
rules here, young man? your sister wants to offer up these two victims
to the genius of the place."
"Indeed, it were difficult to say; ours is a pantheistic worship just
now, and we will defer the rite until we know what star is in the
ascendant. What beautiful ceremonies those old worshippers used to
have! We might raise an altar to Flora, I think, just to use to
advantage Hester's flowers."
"Mademoiselle Euphrasie would find a use for your flowers, without
going to a heathen goddess," said M. de Villeneuve. "All beauty
symbolizes good with her, and all nature reveals some truth."
"What a splendid idea, monsieur!" said Annie. "How did you know that
it was Euphrasie's? did she tell you so?"
"Not in words, but I know her of old; to her there was a spirit in
every flower, a mystic word in every form. Matter was the expression
of mind, its language in a certain sense; and she was ever inquiring
its meaning."
"You are laughing at me, monsieur," said Euphrasie; "but those were
pleasant days at the old chateau, when you used to scold me because I
would not reason, but only enjoy."
"Nay," said Annie, "by monsieur's account you did reason, and very
beautifully too. Some people want hard words and long-drawn deductions
for apprehension of what to others is inspiration. I like the
inspiration best."
"It is the easiest, at any rate," said Eugene.
"To those to whom it comes," said the Frenchman; "the materialism of
our day stifles inspiration; men see only in rocks and stones a
moneyed value. Niagara is valued less than a mill-turning stream.
Inspiration is no longer believed in."
. . . . . .
The wedding-day approached, and all were busy trying to make a show of
gladness, which, however, they but imperfectly succeeded in effecting;
but what was wanting in hilarity was more than compensated for in
dignity and magnificence. M. de Villeneuve acted as groomsman, Annie
and Hester as bridesmaids, Euphrasie excused herself on account of her
mourning habit, which she declined to remove; she was not visible
during the whole day and one or two subsequent ones. And now the hour
was come which was to place a coronet on that fair brow; but could the
courtly bridegroom have seen how little he entered into the thoughts
of his young bride, perchance he had been but half pleased, even
though she was as stately and as fair as his great pride demanded. But
love, esteem, or mutual respect entered into the thoughts of neither
during the time that the Bishop of Chichester was marrying them by
special license, in the drawing-room at Estcourt Hall.
This same arrangement was a great disappointment to the townspeople.
They had been desirous of witnessing the ceremony, and were not
well-pleased that the duke had not honored the church with his
presence. The duke, however, liked not to be gazed at, and the
sight-seers had no opportunity of gratifying their curiosity till the
bridal party left the house.
The public entrance was besieged by expectant congratulators, who
waited to shower bouquets over the blooming bride. But here again they
were doomed to disappointment; for, to avoid this publicity, which was
distasteful to them, the bridal party walked through that portion of
the splendid grounds which had been specially decorated for the
occasion, and entered their carriages at the opposite side of the
park. They were, however, obliged to pass through part of the town,
and shouts of "they come--they come!" resounded as the carriages made
their appearance. The road lay down a deep hollow, on the turn leading
to which stood a small inn. The road was so steep that the drivers
necessarily checked the horses, in order to pass safely down the
declivity. At the cry raised of "they come {46}--they come!" a woman
elegantly dressed ran out of the inn, and gazed wildly at the
carriages. At that moment the duke put his head out of the window to
see what occasioned the delay, caught the eye of the woman, turned
pale, and hastily bade the coachman drive on.
The woman shrieked, rather than said, "Tis he! O my God!" and fell to
the ground in a fainting fit.
The bystanders raised her--the carriage passed; but the spirit of the
crowd seemed changed, they scarcely knew why; they crowded round the
woman; they questioned her; and each seemed eager to afford her help.
But, as soon as her strength permitted, she withdrew without
gratifying their evident curiosity, merely apologizing for her passing
weakness, and deliberately saying she would recover best when alone.
The style, the manner, the elegance of the stranger interested them
all, and with difficulty did they persuade themselves to abandon their
inquiries. The groups which had collected to congratulate the bride
were now occupied in discussing the appearance of the stranger, and
many surmises were hazarded as to her connection with the newly wedded
pair.
Meantime that lady ordered a post-chaise to be got ready, and, ere
half recovered, entered it, to the great discomfiture of the gaping
crowd, whom she thus left to their conjectures.
The landlord was now besieged with questions, but he could tell
nothing of importance. The lady came the previous evening; gave her
name as Mrs. Ellwood; made many inquiries concerning the family at
Estcourt Hall, and had the duke's person described to her; seemed
restless, agitated; went out, and hovered round Mr. Godfrey's
residence till nightfall; then returned and locked herself immediately
in her bed-chamber. In the morning she rose late, ate little or
nothing, but sat watching and listening intently, till she issued
forth to enact the scene described. The townspeople shook their heads,
and wished Miss Godfrey, now the Duchess of Durimond, might not be the
worse for it. Adelaide had been very popular among them, and the
public festivities on the occasion of her wedding were not so mirthful
as, but for this incident, they would you have been.
The inmates of the hall, however, were as yet in happy ignorance of
the ominous conjectures raised respecting the fate of the fairest and
cleverest daughter of their house. The incident we have related came
to their knowledge as an accidental circumstance, altogether
unconnected with the wedding. Mr. and Mrs. Godfrey were well pleased
at their daughter's accession to rank and power, and the merry Hester
laughed delightedly at the anticipation of shortly visiting the
ancient castle of which her sister was now mistress, promising herself
much interest and delight in rambling amid the ancient chambers, which
had been the scene of famed historic deeds. Annie was pondering
whether her sister's rank could consist with the newfangled ideas of
liberty and equality that the times were teaching. She was wondering
whether high rank were a fetter or a privilege--a relic of man's
ignorance or a help to man's advancement, Eugene hoped that the "old
man" would use his sister well. He had not been pleased with his new
brother-in-law; he was too courtly, too stately for friendliness, and
altogether the whole affair had looked too much like bartering youth,
beauty, and intelligence for rank and wealth. He had entertained high
ideas of woman's purity, of woman's devotedness, of woman's
disinterestedness, and what was he to think? His beautiful, his
gifted, his cultivated sister had sold herself for a ducal coronet!
Was it true, then, as Shelley sings, "that all things are venal, and
that even a woman's heart may be put up in an auction mart?"
Soon after the wedding, the young man sought but did not obtain
permission to go abroad. In default of this he went to Cambridge, and
said to himself he intended to find out TRUTH.
{47}
The society of an English University is very various. Almost any
disposition may suit itself there. The boisterous, the idle, the
reckless, the gay, the meditative, and the sober, with the refined and
the sentimental, alike are there, and it is of no small importance to
a young man to be well introduced on the outset. Mr. Godfrey, himself
a Cambridge man, could not fail to procure every advantage for his
son, and that son felt himself entitled to stand proudly on his
father's position, not only as a country gentleman, but as a
scientific man, for, as we have already hinted, the Honorable Mr.
Godfrey was an exception to the ordinary stamp of the English country
gentlemen of that day. He cared more for his library than he did for
his hounds and horses, and though he himself was far from being a
profound searcher into nature's secrets, he was a great patron of
science and of scientific men. Eugene had then little to fear from
friendlessness; he was well cared for, and his friends were sober,
well-conducted men.
But accompanying him to college was one whose society he would not
willingly have sought.
Frederic Morley, son of the lawyer at Estcourt, had early given
evidence of a studious disposition, and his father wished to bring him
up to the church, as, by means of Mr. Godfrey's patronage, he hoped to
push him into some church preferment. The young man, however, was in
fact a sentimentalist, a transcendentalist, too refined, too
sensitive, for this world of stern reality. Petted at home as a poet,
he held himself superior to common influences, prided himself on
having a fine mind, on possessing elegant and cultivated tastes, and
affected disgust at the coarse, homespun ideas of ordinary people. He
wrote pathetic tales of unrealities; touching verses of despairing
affection, with which it was his delight to draw forth tears of
sympathy from young lady audiences.
A more uninteresting companion Eugene Godfrey could scarcely have met;
yet as his disposition was naturally kind and urbane, and as Morley
was without friends or acquaintances in the university, he continued
his friendship to him, and endeavored to direct his attention to
earnest themes and loftier subjects. This, however, was unwelcome to
so clever a person as Morley believed himself to be. He wanted no
direction even from the cleverest. All he sought for was appreciation,
sympathy. He could think for himself, and guide himself. The study of
Aristotle's Ethics was in his case soon supplanted by Paine's Age of
Reason and Volney's Ruins of Empires. The coarseness of the former
author he termed "wit" and the sophistry of the latter passed with him
for "wisdom." Eugene felt sorry for these freaks, for in indulging
them Frederic Morley was throwing away his livelihood; he endeavored
to reason with him, and then he became vexed that he had so few
efficient arguments to bring forward, and none but interested motives
to present. Was he to tell Frederic to be a hypocrite, and to study
theology for a "living?" He felt rather than knew the foolish boy was
pursuing a phantom, and was urged forward by very selfish motives, yet
he could not explain his own ideas, vague, mysterious, and undefined
as they were.
"There is a fire
And motion in the soul, which will not dwell
In its own narrow being; but aspire
Beyond the fitting medium of desire,
And but once kindled, quenchless evermore."
This Eugene felt, but why he felt it, or how to satisfy it, he knew
not. The words of Euphrasie, "that perhaps there is a science of mind,
more worth than all the science of matter," recurred continually, for
in that science must lie the solution of every difficulty that beset
him. How could he learn this science? how investigate this truth, if
truth it were? And he wandered hour after hour on the banks of the
Cam, in profound meditation burying himself in the thickets near to
avoid observation.
{48}
"O truth!" exclaimed he aloud one day, in the intense excitement of
his feelings--"O truth! if ever thou deignest to visit mortals, reveal
thyself to me; teach me the way, and by all that is holy or dear to
me, I swear to follow thee!"
He was leaning against a tree; the drops stood on his forehead, caused
by the depth of his emotion, and suddenly the answer came: "PRAY,
child of aspirations, bow in prayer."
Eugene started; looked around; no form was visible, but again the
words were repeated: "Pray, seeker for truth, pray! it will come to
thee."
CHAPTER IV.
MAGNETIC INFLUENCES.
"Behold he prayeth."
"Pray, pray!" repeated Eugene; "what is prayer? Is it to hold
communion with a higher being? To be raised above the mists of this
murky earth? If so, how glad I should be to pray!" and involuntarily
he exclaimed: "O mighty Being, who rulest all, if indeed thou wiliest
to communicate with man, instruct me how to approach thee; my mind is
dark and sad. Oh! teach me truth." Eugene Godfrey was sincere; he
wished for truth; but educated in scornful intellectual supremacy,
educated to tolerate religion as a means of keeping in order the lower
classes, it was difficult for him to comprehend how "faith" could
exist otherwise than as a beautiful poetic fancy, to be classed with
the imagery of the Iliad or the Odyssey.
The real, the sentient, had been his study, and till the horrors of
the French Revolution turned his mind to consider how man could
influence man by higher motives than merely getting "good things for
one's self," he had been satisfied to leave these themes unthought of.
But now they were forced upon him. Events unprecedented in the annals
of the world bade him lay aside physical science and tun to study
mental and moral influences. He had heard enough in the little town to
which he belonged to feel sure that the multitude must be cared for,
most be looked to. He saw his father uneasy at every commotion, lest
the English aristocracy should likewise be sent on their travels. He
saw Alfred Brookbank hating his own brother, because that brother
stood between him and a property; and his sister--his fearless
sister, accomplished, beautiful, the very epitome of a refined
lady--he dared not think of her! Oh! for a motive to raise these
groveling aims! Oh! for purity, heroism, good. But for the vision of
Euphrasie, all would have been darkness then. Such were Eugene's
thoughts as he bent his steps to his chambers and sat down in his easy
chair to indulge in this absorbing reverie.
How long he sat he scarcely knew, but at length he became conscious
that he was not alone. He had forgotten to "sport his oak" (as closing
the outer door was called by the students) in token that he wished to
be alone, and Frederic Morley had entered, and, perceiving him so
engrossed, had quietly seated himself without speaking, till Eugene
gave signs of life.
"Ah, Morley, is that you? how long have you been there?"
"I scarcely know, Mr. Eugene; I have been watching your absent
thoughts. You were so still, I might have supposed you magnetized, but
I suppose the great wizard would not take so great a liberty with
you."
"What wizard?" asked Eugene.
"Have you not heard, then? There is a man here who can throw a person
into a trance, and make him reveal all kinds of secrets," answered
Frederic.
"Pshaw!" said Eugene.
"Nay," answered Frederic, "I will tell you what I saw. I was at Mrs.
Moreton's yesterday evening, singing duets with Isabel, and young
Moreton came in with a tall, dark-haired, mustachioed, whiskered
fellow, with eyes {49} like lighted coals, they were so large and
piercing. Where Moreton picked him up, I could not find out, but he
was evidently fascinated with him. He introduced him laughingly to his
mother as a great wizard, and they interrupted the music to hear him
talk. He was grandiloquent enough, told tales of spirits and
influences that haunt me still; but more than this, he insisted that
mind can influence mind irrespective of matter; that the old tales of
magic were true, and the deeds wrought by men of wondrous power, who
had found the key to nature's nighty secrets--only nature with him
does not mean inert matter as we mean by it, but matter and
intelligences who act upon matter. The universe, he says, is peopled
by wondrous forms, and these forms can be communicated with by a
privileged soul. Oh, he is a mighty man!" and Frederic shuddered.
"And you have no more sense than to believe such a cock-and-bull story
as that? Fie, Morley, I am ashamed of you!"
"But let me tell you what I saw with my own eyes. He first threw
Isabel into a trance, from which neither Mrs. Morley, nor her brother,
nor i could awaken her. Then when Mrs. Morley grew frightened, he
assured her there was no danger, that she was only bewitched by his
art, and that he would make her talk as he pleased. Then he put her
brother's hand in hers, and bade him think of the walk he had taken
that afternoon, of the people he had met and spoken to; he did so, and
the wizard bade the girl speak, and she recounted the events of the
walk from his leaving college to his meeting with the wizard, and
their entering the room in which we were--all, as her brother
declared, correctly. The wizard then disenchanted her, and she slowly
roused herself, pale and listless, but quite unconscious of what had
passed."
"I have heard of animal magnetism before, quietly responded Eugene.
"Have you? But do you know its power? It is absolutely frightful. He
lifted my arm before I knew what he was about, passed his hand two or
three times above and below it, and there it remained fixed
horizontally from the shoulder, without my having power to move it up
or down. Young Moreton tried to put it down for me, but he could not;
and there I stood fixed till it pleased the wizard to unloose the
spell he had cast around me."
"Yours was not an agreeable position, truly," said Eugene, "but he did
not hurt you; you are safe and sound now."
"Yes, but the most wonderful is yet to come. Little Helen Moreton came
into the room to bid her mamma good-night. Seeing the stranger, she
was shy, and went to the window-curtains to hide. Mrs. Moreton called
her, but she looked out for a minute, seemed to take a greater dislike
to the stranger than before, and hid again. Mrs. Moreton was annoyed,
and the wizard said: 'Do you want her, madam? If so, I will bring her
to you.' But Mrs. Moreton replied, 'Oh no! if you go near her she will
shriek and cry; she is so shy.' 'Nay,' said the man, 'I will stand
here, and here she shall come without a shriek, and lie down at my
feet.' What he did we could not find out, for he seemed perfectly
still. The window-curtain unfolded, and apparently against her will
the child came forward. She caught at a chair, as if determined to
resist the influence, but that seemed to urge her forward; she let it
go, and then grasped the table with both hands, as if determined to
resist. She pouted, she frowned, she strove to keep her place, but
keep it she could not. Step by step she came and laid herself quietly
down at the wizard's feet. Mrs. Moreton almost shrieked, but the child
lay as if she dared not leave until the magician gave permission."
"Well, and what do you infer from all this?" asked Eugene.
{50}
"I hardly know; I am terrified; what if it is true, as this man says,
that weak minds must obey the strong; that resistance is useless? I
should not like to become the slave of a spirit such as his."
"You believe him to be a wicked man?"
"I do, yet I know not why; I should not like to meet him when
unprotected."
"Why, Morley, you astonish me; I could not conceive you so weak. These
fears are unworthy a noble mind."
"But what are we to do if such theories be true?"
"They are not true--at least not in the way you state them. There are
protecting, counteracting influences for the weakest. I cannot explain
all this to-night; but all history, all experience go to prove that
the 'race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong'
--that bad power is often overcome by weak means. I will repeat to you
a piece of advice I received myself to-day, and which I intend to
take. It is one you must often have received, for your father intends
you for the church. Pray, Morley, to the highest of all intelligences,
to the greatest of all powers. The strongest will then be invoked to
your aid."
"_Pray?_ Are you serious, Mr. Eugene?"
"I am serious; why doubt it?"
"An advice so contrary to the spirit of the age! why, it is the last
to be expected."
"Perhaps so; but listen: That mind is not matter, your experience
proves, as does that of most people. What mind is, perhaps we do not
know; but that mind acts upon mind, irrespective of space and
obstacles, we feel. Listen! you know my family; a family less
superstitious scarcely exists. We are too much wedded to cause and
effect lightly to believe. My grandfather was as little credulous as
my father. Now hear what happened to him. He had a brother to whom he
was fondly attached, and by whom he was as fondly loved. Their
correspondence was constant. That brother went to India, as an
officer. One night about twelve o'clock, as my grandfather was going
to sleep, having sat up later than usual, the curtains at the foot of
the bed were with drawn, and his brother, pale, but in full
regimentals, appeared and said, 'Good-by, Frank.' My grandfather
related the circumstance at breakfast next morning, and noted it down
in writing, being confident that he was not asleep. After due time the
Indian mail arrived, giving an account of the brother's death on the
field of battle at the exact hour and day specified. Ere his spirit
winged its flight, we know not whither, it had communicated with the
being it loved best on earth."
Frederic turned pale. "What do you infer from this?" he asked.
"Simply this," returned Eugene; "that 'there are more things in heaven
and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,' and this
influence of mind on mind is one of them. If the Supreme Ruler have
made a law that man, to be assisted by him, must pray to him, must put
himself in communication with him, who are we that we should refuse
the means? If you fear the evil spirit in a man, try if there be no
good spirit capable of protecting you. The universal testimony of
mankind is in favor of supernatural agencies. We should ponder well
ere we throw from us such aid."
Frederic smiled, and rose to take his leave. Advice so different from
what he had expected was scarcely likely to be well received. He had
no answer ready, so he left the narrow-minded religionist to his own
crude fancies.
And Eugene closed the oaken door, and returned, and for the first time
of his life knelt down to beseech light from the Author of
light--light to guide him through these wearisome shoals of doubt and
darkness--light to show him something more than how to render matter
subservient to animal comfort--light to enlighten the {51} inward
feeling. Good and evil, what are they? Mind and matter--which is the
true reality? What are we to live for--the animal life, or the
spiritual? And is the purely spiritual distinct from the purely
intellectual as well as from the animal? Is there a soul, the
functions of which are different, distinct, from those of the body,
and to the knowledge of which mere intellect cannot arrive? What is
nature? What is revelation? How do they act upon each other? What is
the office, what the aim of each? Revolving these themes, it was deep
in the night ere the young man sought his couch.
TO BE CONTINUED.
--------
ORIGINAL.
INDEPENDENCE OF THE CHURCH.
Our age is more sentimental than intellectual, more philanthropic than
Christian, more material than spiritual. It may and no doubt does
cherish and seek to realize, with such wisdom as it has, many humane
and just sentiments, but it retains less Christian thought than it
pretends, and has hardly any conception of catholic principles. It
studies chiefly phenomena, physical or psychical, and as these are all
individual, particular, manifold, variable, and transitory, it fails
to recognize any reality that is universal, invariable, and permanent,
superior to the vicissitudes of time and place, always and everywhere
one and the same. It is so intent on the sensible that it denies or
forgets the spiritual, and so engrossed with the creature that it
loses sight of the creator.
Indeed, there are not wanting men in this nineteenth century who deny
that there is any creator at all, or that anything has been made, and
maintain that all has been produced by self-development or growth.
These men, who pass for the great scientific lights of the age, tell
us that all things are in a continual process of self-formation, which
they call by the general name of progress; and so taken up are they
with their doctrine of progress, that they gravely assert that God
himself, if God there be, is progressive, perfectible, ever proceeding
from the imperfect towards the perfect, and seeking by unremitting
action to perfect, fill out, or complete his own being. They seem not
to be aware that if the perfect does not already really exist, or is
wanting, there is and can be no progress; for progress is motion
towards the perfect, and, if the perfect does not exist there can be
no motion towards it, and in the nature of the case the motion can be
only towards nothing, and therefore, as St. Thomas has well
demonstrated, in proving the impossibility of progress without end, no
motion at all. Nor do they seem any more to be aware that the
imperfect, the incomplete, is not and cannot be self-active, or
capable of acting in and from itself alone, and therefore has not the
power in itself alone to develop and complete itself, or perfect its
own being. Creatures may be and are progressive, because they live,
and move, and have their being in their Creator, and are aided and
sustained by him whose being is eternally complete who is in himself
infinitely perfect. They forget also the important fact {52} that
where there is nothing universal, there can be n
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