Catholic Criticism in America: Studies of Brownson, Azarias, and Egan, with an Essay for Catholic Critics

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*r Edw&rd J* Bruaaond

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of tbs requirements for the degree of Doetor of Philosophy, In the Department of Snglish, in the Graduate College of the State University of lose May, 1942

ProQ uest N u m b e r: 10831760

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11

7 3 zj?

This dissertation owes much to Professor Austin W&rren.

The topic itself was suggested by his; his acute

,

and constructive criticism has been most helpful*

J % ^

in his debt for his very generous aid; it Is with real gratitude that X acknowledge ay indebtedness*

M \

X am

ill

m t m •Catholics, of all people,* wrote Theodore Maynard, "ought to he specially fitted for this department of litera­ ture Ci*e* criticism!, einee they hare a sense of the past, a deep culture available, and a unifying philosophy.•

la

spite of that special fitness Catholics in America have act produced a body of literary criticism distinguished enough to gain critical attention; indeed their cultural contribution here has almost wholly been neglected by stu­ dents of American letters*

thy has there been this dis­

crepancy between critical potency and critical act? to come at the matter from the other side.

Or

Has this body

of criticism, even If it does not merit to be termed out­ standing work, deserved such total neglect? there le a problem*

Either way

fhy has the wort of Catholic critics

in this country been almost wholly overlooked?

Or, If

their work has not merited any prolonged consideration, why have they not produced better criticism? An examination of American Catholic criticism is in order; it must be made before answers can he made to either Question*

It is true, moreover, that such an examination

is practically more important than furnishing answers for questions which look only to the past*

for the important

thing, from a practical paint of view, is to I s om from tbs poet for tbs future*

It would, then, be historically

useful to determine exactly what criticism there has been, to trace its patterns and general directions.

In particu­

lar what were the relatione set up between art and pru­ dence, and between literature and life!

It would be

critically useful to evaluate the work that had been done and area acre useful to offer some positive suggestions for the Improvement of this critical work. It was with the hope of providing such a survey of American Catholic criticism that 1 undertook this diseertatioTi.

A complete study, however, which would be both

historical and critical, was not possible for the present; it was necessary, therefore, to mark off some portion of the whole field. Several procedures presented themselves.

The first

was to start with the very beginnings and to carry the chronicle and ccamentary as far forward as the limits of time and materials permitted*

This plan was not adopted

because much of this early material is not available in the libraries of the middle-west; such a study of the be­ ginnings would, moreover, tend to be purely historical and bibliographical rather than critical in its scope. A second possible procedure wee to begin about 1900,

Y

or with the America or the Oowmoaweal. i®4 to consider only present-day writer# end problems*

this appeared, how­

ever, to urge a false division in the history of Catholic criticism; an understanding of the present seemed to oall for an understanding of the past* It was a third possibility to select a few represen­ tative Individuals and to make a thorough study of their critical work, on the assumption that if they were chosen from different periods seme of the broader outlines of American Catholic criticism could be seen and evaluated. This third course seemed most feasible.

So I have selected

Orestes Browstsen, Brother As&rl&e, and Maurice Francis %aa&*

They were important figures and their writing

covers the years from 1844 to 1934* fvea a selective history, however, which alas to be critical, seems incomplete without some statement of the historian* s own theory.

The concluding essay of this

study is, then, concerned with several aspects of the pro­ blem of literary criticism.

It Is included here not only

to indicate my own norms In evaluating the work of Brownson, Ararias, and Kgen, but also (and this was the more important reason) to offer a positive program for the im­ provement of American Oatholic criticism*

vi

COHTEIffS Page Preface

Hi

Chapter One

Create# A, Brownson , .

I fhe

HI

*

7

His Critical ^Judgments.......... . . . .

34

Brother Asarlas . . . . . . . . . . Hie

11

Sle

111

Bla

S7

Philosophy of the Word . . . . . . . . 37 Concept of Literature

. . . . . . . . 63

Concept of Critic!an . . . . . . . . .

Opinions and Judgments . . . . . . . . . .

Chapter Three

henries Francis fgan

I

Hia

II

Hie

111

Critical Poaltion

1

103

. . . . . . . . . . 102

Critic! an of the Brans

tie Criticise of Poetry

73 83

.......

. 113

Hie Criticism of the Bevel

Chapter four

..... 123

. . . . . . . . .

feeard# a Better Criticism

. . . .

141 136

Analysis of American Catholic Criticism • 156

11 III

farm of Practicality * *

20

I

17

1

fhe Bern of Intellectuality

Chapter fee

17

1

Hie Baale Principles

II

IT

.......

Art and Prudence

..... 162

The Tael of the American Catholic Critic . 174

Footnotes . . . . . . . . . .

......

191

Bibliography

.........

232

Appendices

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

....

256

1

ORBSTS8 A. BROWSOH I Hie contemporaries might not regard consistency as any guage of greatness, but even they ebook their heads over Orestes Brownson.

*As early as 1834 Dr. Ohanning had con­

fessed a mistrust of him because he had made Important changes in religion.*1

lowell compared him to a weather­

cock in 4 Fable for Critics.®

Still Browneon was a capable

man, and, as Sehlesinger points out, his *©ontemporaries were forced to try to reconcile his undeniable ability with his equally undeniable instability.*®

Browueon has been looked

upon as an escapist, or as one who blindly followed author­ ity from the day he heard Fanny Wright to the day he read CHobertl, or, finally, as merely a restless man bent on novelty.

Hone of theee Interpretations fit the facts of

hie life.4 *Hle predominant passion,* wrote one who knew him well, *was love of t r u t h . H e altered his beliefs, certainly, but his was the inconsistency of a firm and driving intelg leot hunting the truth, not that of caprice or stupidity. Brown son was too sincere to hold a position once he saw its falsity5 he did not, however, regard this releasing of the old to grasp the new as change. It was a going forward. *1 deny that I have changed, though I own I seem to myself

3

to have advanced*1,7 That paradox was open to at least one literal interpretation*

He was not changing his most funda­

mental principle - *1 sought the truth . . . that I might use it.*® Externally there did seem to be a good deal of shift­ ing about*

He had been raised a Calvinistic Congregation-

aliet and in 1833 had turned to Preshyt©rianiam. This re­ ligion, without assuming the responsibility of teaching with authorityf wanted him to accept its doctrines as if it did so teach*

Browneon rejected it as much because of

that inconsistency as for its hard theology.

Universal!am,

with Its doctrine of salvation for all, attracted him in 183b, but after a few years it pleased him just as little. It punishment were purely for the good of the individual, why could not the virtuous be punished as well as the bad? Hot only that, - if divine punishment were limited to this life, then the corollary seemed true, and bank accounts be­ gan to look like signs of divine approval.

Brownson was no

more likely to accept that error than was Marx*

During the

four year© that he did preach as an Universal!st minister his religious views had become increasingly liberal.

*He

commenced to transpose his sense of sin to society, tracing evil to the organization of the world instead of to the eouls of men.*®

*My Greed,**® which he set down in 1839 in the

Gospel Advocate, ipade it clear that he held little if any supernatural belief and that he was interested in social

3

reform based on humanitarian principles. It was in the same year that he first heard Fanny Wright. He was struck with her doctrines and within a short time he was editing the Free Inquirer, writing for the Workingmens party, and pushing the ideas of Owen and Wright.

Zealous as

he was to help the worker, and he newer lost that zeal, still he was not blind to the difficulties Inherent in the theories of Owen and Wright.

He newer quite believed the doctrine

that man was |ust a passive creature of circumstance; more and more he came to doubt that by bettering man*© environ­ ment you could make him a well-trained animal and perfectly happy.

Besides, as he realized very clearly, the man with

money and a vote would always be stronger than the man with just a vote.

So unless there were cooperation there would

always be oppression and conflict,

the ultimate betterment

of society and of the worker was going to be accomplished only by

cooperation of all classes of society*

And this

to be permanent could be brought about only by moral suasion, not by physical force.

Reform, if it was to be enduring,

must come from within. This idea became more and more a part of his thought. In 1833 when he took ©took of hi© position he found that he was again holding, or could hold once more, a kind of liber­ al Christianity.

Feeling that he now had a gospel to preach

which would help others, he became a Unitarian minister and preached humanitarian Christianity.

Soon his articles in

4

the Christian Examiner began to attract the notice of Boston readers*

Browueon had been reading philosophy and his study

of Cousin led him to believe that he could synthesis© the affirmations of Catholicism and Protestantism Into *The Church of the Future.*1 Leroux and the theory of *Providen­ tial Men* led him still farther from the transcendental position of Chancing, Parker, and Emerson. In 1838 he brought out his own quarterly, The Boston Quarterly Review. Parker thought It better than The Dial, and Alcott and Blpley regarded it as probably the best pub­ lication in America.

At this period Brownson, for all his

pushing on towards orthodox Christianity, still held that the voice of the people was the voice of Cod. was his infallible authority.

That voice

The election of *Tippecanoe

and Tyler too* changed that belief. came from the people themselves.

This defeat of democracy

They had been fallible

enough to sell *their birthright for a barrel of older.* Frew® now on Browasoa was completely convinced that the people of and by themselves could not work out their own salvation. They could not be relied upon to seek what was really their own good.

If there was to be good government, stronger

guarantees were required than popular suffrage, popular vir­ tue, and popular Intelligence.

The good did not well up

naturally from below; it must needs come down from above. Since *a man cannot lift himself by hi® own waistbands,*11 of something out sideband above nature must be communicated to

It to elevate, perfect, and enlighten it.

This something

he could find nowhere except in the "supernatural life and divine doctrine ©f the Catholic Church.*12

Brownson had

pushed forward the line® of thought along which he had been moving until he saw that “The Church of the Future11 was really the Church of the present and of the past.

He be­

came a Catholic in the fall of 1B44. Brownson had found his way home.

He did not, however,

sit quietly there warning himself by the fire.

He would try

his hand at a better arrangement of its literary, political, and philosophical furniture - especially with the last of these.

Metaphysics and the problem of knowledge had for

many years been a real and very personal problem for him. He had at one period found temporary refuge in the eclecti­ cism of Cousin but he soon abandoned that solution.

Prac­

tically he solved hie problem with his conversion, but not until after 1850 was he to hit upon a solution that com­ pletely satisfied him from a speculative and philosophic point of view*

He had admitted the keen analysis of Kant

but had ably criticised and rejected the solution given in Qvitioue of Pure Reason. Persistent as had been his opposition to all forms of German subjective idealism, he had been almost as little s sisfled with the eplstemology of scholasticism.

Finally, however, the principle “Being cre­

ates existences* resolved his difficulties.

This he held

to be the primary intuition and by it he thought the

6

subjective and objective orders were successfully bridged. Around this principle be gradually worked bis metaphysics into something like consistent shape.

Once that was done

be could set down, as he does in bis essay on Wordsworth, the outlines of an esthetic,*

Up till this time bis liter­

ary criticism was almost completely practical; it was based on the economic, moral, and theological beliefs which he was holding at the time a particular review was written,

After

1850 there were only minor changes in bis position and even these were rather a matter of emphasis than an Indication of an actual change in his views. When it is noted how often and how decidedly Brownson had shifted the basic principles of his belief, and that he arrived at a system of esthetics only after years of criti­ cal writing had been done, there ie little surprise in find­ ing that his esthetic ideas do not form one consistent body of doctrine.

He changed his metaphysics more than once and

he strove to keep the rest of his thought in line with those changes,

tn spite of all these intellectual mutations, how­

ever, two basic ideas can be found to underlie his critical writing - his norm of practicality and his norm of intellec­ tuality,

Those ideas tend to give his criticism coherence

in somewhat the same fashion that his “love of truth11, in a larger way, gives consistency to big seeming inconsistencies.

*0f, pp. 51-33 and Appendix #4 of this study

7

II Brownson was above all else a practical man; in spite of a really keen mind, be was in many ways a voluntarist rather than an intellectual1st.

His whole tendency was to

set before hi® some moral end, and to view everything else as a means which would help or hinder progress towards it* He had spent many difficult years in search of the truth; but as he correctly states it* *1 sought the truth in order to know what I might do* ami as a means of realizing some moral and practical end*

I wanted it that I might use it.®13

"With the truth he might save himself and benefit the world. Without it he was condemned to stumble blindly through a cold and sunless universe*#14 Since this bent for the practical was fundamental to his character, it is understandable how he could say, "The Greek mind was subtle, but sophistical.

It wanted balance,

the sober common sense, and the firm grasp of principle which belonged to the Roman mind. *

Quite obviously this

practical outlook would give a very definite turn to hie criticism.

"It has never been, and, probably never will be,

the main purpose of our Review to criticise books under a purely literary aspect . . .

It was originally devoted,

and will continue to be devoted, to what should be the ends and aims of literature itself.#18 This principle of criticism marked nearly everything he would write about literature.

He held it was ridiculous to

strive to create a national literature, for literature was a spontaneous growth. to accomplish.

Han create it because they have a work

"Before they create it, they must feel a

craving to do something to the accomplishment of which speaking and writing, poetry and eloquence, logic and phi­ losophy So

are necessary as too "the

means.®17

scholar

must have an

scholarship serves as a means.®1®

end to

which his

For Browueon saw the

scholar* as a "serious, hearty, robust, full grown man; who feels that life is a serious affair. . .12

He will pore

over the past Uandi survey the present , . . but all and always for some high and solemn purpose.®2®

Before he be­

came a Catholic Brownson had set down the end and mission of scholarship. my destiny?®21

Its end was to answer the question "What is And the intellectual1* mission was that of

"Instructing and Inspiring Hankind for the accomplishment of their destiny.®22 He must never forget, however, that ®the end of a scholar is not to be a scholar; but a man, doing that which cannot be done without scholarship.®22 had talents let him

that

use them

Such an Individual

raised him above his fellow for his

man;very well,

fellow man*"The mortalsin of

every aristocracy, whether literary, scientific, military,

"The word does not here have its more modern and some­ what specialised meaning. It is rather the Emersonian "scholar® or the Ooleridgean "clertous® which are intended here.

or political, is toy no means in the inequality it implies, produces, or perpetuates; hut in the fact that it regard© itself as a privileged order, specially endowed for its own special benefit. * . Greatness is conferred not to he min24 istered unto, hut to minister.8 Although he would continue to warn scholars that they did not belong to a privileged ©las®,25 Brownson would en­ courage the writer who was a scholar, for the scholar had a mission to perform.

But of the writer, who was only a

writer, he wag sharply critical.

Applying hie norm of prac­

ticality, Brownson wanted to know the end these men served. Such passages as the following show how strong his condemna­ tion could be. An author class, whose function Is simple authorship, has no normal functions, in either the religious or the social hierarchy. . . They have and can have no normal existence, for the simple reason that literature is never an end, and can never be rightfully pursued save as a mean®. Authors we respect, when they are au­ thor® only for the sake of discharging or better discharging duties which devolve on them in some other capacity. Author® whose profession is authorship are the lineal deecendent® of the old sophists, and are not a whit more respectable than the pagan ancestors.2® The word 8 sophists* might make it seem as if this criticism was aimed at such prophets as Carlyle and Emerson. son is not condemning them here.

Brown­

As writers they had set

themselves serious ends and seriously tried to compass them. While Brownson did not agree with a great deal of their doctrines, yet he respected them and had praise as well as

10

criticism for their work.

His proscribed list, which in­

cluded such names as Buiwer, Byron, Shelley, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Sand, makes it clear what sort of writers he had in mind.

They were poets and especially novelists* who,

at least as far as Brownson* s interpretation went, had little high purpose in their writing.

Mere entertainers,

jugglers of words, and too often all the more dangerous for it, they were positively harmful in modem society.

And as

for the less talented "professional* writers Too much encouragement is already extended to them, as the multitude of our petty novels, Knickerbockers, Graham* s Magazines, Lady Books, Saturday Couriers, and Olive Branches, oan abun­ dantly testify. Every dapper young fellow, every sentimental young lady, or not young, married un­ happily, or despairing of getting married, who can scribble off a few lines beginning with a eapital letter, or dash off a murderous tale about love, or an amorous tale about murder, is encouraged to turn author by profession, and finds no lack of opportunity to aid in deluging the land with cant, sentimentality, sensuality, obscenity, and blas­ phemy. . . let us hear no more about professional authors, of the liberal provision which should be made for them, the indifference of the public, the timidity or penuriousness of booksellers.®7 There are other passages which tend to modify such condemna­ tions.

Brownson finds ends that literary writers oan set

themselves to justify their efforts.

The old Hew England

spirit, however, was bred deeply in his bones; long after he had become a Catholic he continued to view the province

•Yet Brownson was, according to one who knew him well, *an omnivorous reader of fiction.* (A. Hewit, “Dr. Brown­ son*, The Catholic World. (June, 1876), p. 370.) For a note on Hew England and the novel, cf. Appendix # 1.

of art and literature with suspicion.

Nor were those sus­

picions lessened by bis faulty analysis of beauty and of the relation of the natural to the supernatural*

"Beauty

appeals, as beauty, not to the intellect, not to the will, but solely to the sensibility* . * Art, as art, deals with beauty alone, and Its aim is to affect the sensibility."88 As a moralist and a practical man and, as it will be pointed out later, an intellectual!st, Brownson had his doubts about sensibility and the emotions*

For at least some years after

1844 he tended to carry over something of the Calvinistie outlook as regards the opposition between the natural and the supernatural*

If an act or a work were not supernatural,

by that very fact it was opposed to the supernatural.

Logi­

cally he would conclude "all that 1® profane, or not religi­ ous, is hurtful in a greater or lesser degree."*

*Ibid., p. 335. It hardly needs to be noted that in his analysis of beauty and his stress on the total opposition between the natural and the supernatural Brownson was not a Thomist. Thomistic doctrine holds that beauty is essentially intellectual, and, as regards man, that the supernatural is built on the natural. Bewit appears to have feared that Brownson held man* s nature was not merely wounded but cor­ rupted in its essence by the fall* (W. Parsons, "Brownson, Hecker and Hewit," The Catholic World. GLIXI (July, 1941), p. 408.) That such was Brownson*s position cannot be proved from his forks; but neither can it be absolutely demonstrated from these writings that he did understand correctly the re­ lation of the natural and the supernatural* Hewit, of course, knew Brownson well and it is likely that he found implications in Brownson*® letters and conversations which logically pointed towards the position he feared Brownson to be holding. But that Brownson explicitly and consciously held man* s cor­ ruption Is clearly to be doubted* Of. Appendix #3.

12

All this emphasis on the practical view of art becomes even clearer as one examinea the articles by Brownson which deal with literature in general and with Catholic literature in particular.

He did sot believe, as he held critics of

his day did believe, that "back and Independent of all that relates to ®an*e belief and duties as a moral, religious, and social being . * * Is a broad and rich field for the man of letters, and the culture of that broad and rich field yields litersture proper.

It 1® something which inculcates

no doctrine, instructs man in no particular truth, and urges to the performance of no particular duty,

He maintained

that "a general literature, which teaches nothing special, is as unreal as man without men, the race without individu­ als. 1,30 The general end of literature was the general end of man - God.

The particular end here and now was - the

religious, social, and political needs of the country and its people.31 In reviewing Dana's works, Brownson wrote, "We are re­ viewers by profession, but reviewers of the subjects, doc­ trines, principles, or tendencies of book®, rather than of books themselves, as mere literary productions.

Wo prize

literature and art only as they subserve Christian doctrine and morale.

We are always obliged, whether we are reviewing

a work of science or a work of art, to review it under its relation to Catholicity."3®

His making such a judgment

should be entirely understandable to the proletarian critic.

13

Behind it lay the same principle which years before had led him to judge that American literature would spring only from an attempt to solve the problem of social equality;®® it would be a literature which would push forward successfully the *struggle between the accumlator of wealth and the sim­ ple laborer who actually produces; briefly & struggle between man and money, *34

In 1843 he had set down his dislike of

Balzac because at bottom this writer had no love for human­ ity,

and before that Brownson had condemned Wordsworth

because *hie song fetches no echo from the universal heart of humanity*

He Impersonates no cause; at least not the

cause which is dear to the millions**®® Before 1840 Brownson was sure the masses could raise themselves*

After 1840 he became more and more sure that

a higher and a supernatural force was needed.

But before

and after 1840 he wanted a literature to work for that end* How that he believed Catholicism was true he lined his cri­ ticism up accordingly; keeping to his principle of practi­ cality he strove to make his criticism real. He was inflexible, even rigid, in carrying out that principle; Protestant life and culture he viewed as essen­ tially antl-Oatholic®^ and objectionable.3®

He admitted

that to most of his Protestant readers he must seem *illnatured, harsh, and censorious, narrow-minded and bigoted . . . entirely wanting in literary taste and discrimination.w It was, however, by the contents and not by the religion

14

of its author that Brownson Judged a hook:*

More than one

Catholic writer was hurt or angered by his criticism of their novels*

They charged Brownson "with being invidious,

one-sided, bigoted, and ultra-Catholic. The writers of Catholic religious novels thought that they were doing something quite worth while and doing It fairly well*

Brownson had his doubts about the usefulness

of such work and his pessimistic certainties about the way it was being done*

He could see little practical value In

the average religious novel; It was definitely a mixed genre* a literary hybrid.

The religious part was likely

to prove to© superficial for either Catholic or Protestant reader*

About the best that could be said for It was that

it offered "a eertain quantity of light and sentimental read­ ing, on condition that one consents, without a wry face, to take a certain dose of theology, which, if he is well, he does not need, and which, if he is sick, is not enough to do him any good.*** Petty Catholic tales mixed a poorly managed love story with a dull and commonplace theological discussion; Brown­ son liked them for neither.

He was always strongly opposed

to sentimentality and the "love interest* in religious stories he completely condemned*

By making this a motive force in

the story, "the religious novel * . * becomes a mere vehiole for sentimentalism*

On the religious side he wanted not

more theology, but rather lees,43 certainly less theology

15

of the sort that was getting Into most of these books* In literature there was enough wielding of “the toma­ hawk and the battle-axe of controversy.s44 He was not seeking for more polemical writing*

Literature should be

instructive, “but as Beethoven* s Symphonies, Haydn* s Hass, or Mozart* $ Requiem are instructive.

It was not to be

formally dldaetle, for literature “addresses the sentiments, affections, imagination, rather than the understanding. Whenever the author reverses this, and seeks, under the poetical* form, first of all to instruct, to bring out a theory, or to defend a doctrine, he ceases to be the genuine poet, and becomes the doctor or philosopher. *4® the books Brownson was hoping to see would be recognized as Catholic by their spirit and tone and not by neat little morals Inserted in the proper places.47

The whole of the

novel should be permeated by the faith of its author; al­ though nothing might be said directly about faith or piety, still the story as a whole should be based on supernatural and not on merely natural principles.

And underlying even

the most serious writing there should be a deep spirit of Christian Joy and confidence.4® For several reasons, which were practical rather than esthetic, Brownson wished Catholic writers to write for

“Brownson regarded the novel as division of poetry. Its primary end was to please rather than Instruct; it called for the “poetic1* (making) faculty in its writer.

16

Catholice rather than to address themselves to the conver­ sion of Protestants.

Hot only was he doubtful about the

apologetic value of such boohs, but he was certain as well that they left unsaid the whole positive side of Catholicism as a way of life.

Furthermore, apologetic fiction was not

well suited to bolster the weaker Catholics.

And there were

many such at this period who were weighted down, particular­ ly on the social, economic, and political levels, with a sense of inferiority regarding their faith.

The Catholic

novelist who approached his material positively could str^pihen flexible back-bonea by his own quiet and joyful assurance.4®

He could give his readers a sense of Christian

solidarity, an understanding of the dignity of every Catho­ lic, no matter how humble and poor his position.

Then, as

much as at any time, Catholics as well as other Americans needed to be jogged out of the paths of snobbery and out of the ruts of self-sufficient individualism. Brownson did not soften all this advice by lightly passing over its implications.

Such writers had to be

Catholics in the full sense of the word with a knowledge and love of their faith.5®

"Labor and study, prayer and

mortification, abstraction from worldly thoughts and cares, subdued passions, and complete self-annihilation,*1 were re­ quired.^*

And they had to be artists.

not make up for slovenly work.®® theirs was no easy vocation.

Good intentions did

Brownson warned them that

*He who is not prepared for

1?

trial, for popular opposition, the wrath of demagogues, and of foolish men believing themselves wise, imprudent men be­ lieving themselves prudent, timid men believing themselves brave, ignorant men claiming to be wise, and impious men affecting to be pious, is no man to labor in the department of popular literature* His advice would certainly make for better artistic work, but it was primarily with the practical that Brownson was concerned.

Because Oatholie popular literature was not

attaining the ends that he thought it should attain, he wanted it bettered.

Something of the general nature of

those ends hat already been indicated; a more detailed ex­ position of them, however, will help to clarify some as­ pects of Brownson*s criticism. On the purely religious side he admiti ed he was satis­ fied If the book *maintalas the negative merit of not being in any respect irreligious.*^*

But as a practical critic

he was not satisfied unless a book was pointed positively towards some end.

The task of integrating the secular

and the spiritual aspect© of the ordinary man*s life was the most positive work he assigned to popular literature. Most men were not called to lead monastic lives; at the same time it was no man* s privilege to lead a life devoid of ethical and religious obligation,

If human beings were

not going to be forced into an impossible duality, there had to be a unification of the secular and the spiritual.

IB

The theory was clear enough; it was on the psychological level that the integration had to be worked out*

In litera­

ture Brownson saw a powerful instrument for effecting such unity.55

His criticism of Catholic novels was that they

failed thus to unify the two orders.

*0» their religious

side they smelt of the schools or the convent; on their secular side, of unregenerate human nature.#55 In another essay he stressed the cultural purpose such writing should effect.

#The office of popular literature

is not precisely to spiritualize, but to civilize a people, . . . to cultivate, refine, and humanize barbarous human nature.#57

Although somewhat vague, this sounds positive

enough; he continues, however, more negatively, #to remove | those obstacles to the Introduction of Catholic civilizai

ejQ

| tion.#%w

A still more negative function is assigned to

art and literature in his essay on Dana; they were #to tranquillize the passions and enfeeble their force.#5® #The sensitive soul,* so to speak, is for the time being overpowered and rendered unable to disturb us;#50

the in­

tellect and will, now no longer distracted, could concern

*By the #sensitive soul# Brownson meant the soul in so far as it was the vital principle for sensitive life. The phrase is old in philosophy. It was used by Aristotle and St. Thomas as well as by later theologians and philoso­ phers. These writers. It can be noted, did not imply by this phrase that there were three distinct souls in man. Other authors, Plato (according to Cicero in his Tusculan Disputations)„ Philo, and Awerroes did teaoh trichotomy; John Oliva in his writings at least implied this doctrine.

19

themselves with truth and goodness*

Continuing this line

of thought, as he turns to religious art, he is led in his concluding sentence into a liturgical heresy* This CtranquiUsing of the feelings and ele­ vation of thought] is what the church has always aimed at in her sacred art, whether manifested in her noble hymns, her grand cathedrals, her splen­ did ritual, or her solemn chants and soul-subduing music; - not, as shallow, heretical, and infidel travellers would fain persuade ms, the positive enlisting of the senses, the passions, and sensi­ tive affections in her service*®1* Brownson had criticised novels but he wanted to make it clear that he had not condemned books precisely because they had portrayed characters with faulty morals. We find no characters more faulty than those intended by the novelist to be perfect* They are always cold, stiff, formal, dull, prosy, crotchety, unhappy themselves, and rendering perfectly mis­ erable everybody within the circle of their influ­ ence * * • The novelist has the right to reparesent men and women as he finds them in real life, and the more faithful he is to reality, the more he is to be commended. It is a thousand times better that our youth should see life represented in litera­ ture as they must find it when they go forth into the world, than that they should amuse their fancy or exalt their imaginations with pictures of an ideal life, never realised, and never to be realized. The novelist has not only the right to repre­ sent characters as he finds them in real life, but he has a right to enlist our sympathies for them, to make us love and esteem them though they are marred by grave faults, even vices and crimes. . . The fault of modern literature is not here; it is elsewhere, in the fact that it enlists our sympathies, our love and esteem for characters because they are vicious and criminal. . . They Cmodem writers! might have painted the same amount of depravity,

* Gf. Appendix # 3

20

uncovered the game festering wounds, and exposed tla© same abyss of corruptions, and yet exerted a healthful Influence. . . All they needed to have done this was to have had a correct acral stan­ dard for themselves, and to have refrained from sympathising with the corruption they represented.63 For all his use of the principle of practicianty, Brownson recognised in theory the distinction between art and prudence.

He indicated this In his discussion of

Schiller®® and in his essay on Bana,®^ but his clearest statement is in 8Catholicity and Literature.* Between judging of a book as one to be com* mended to the public and judging its simply literary merits, there is a difference. . . For ourselves, we judge, and we cannot help judging all literary and artistic productions, when determining their doctrinal and ethical charac­ ter, by the standard furnished by our Catholic faith and morals; but in determining their purely literary or artistic merits, we Judge according to our literary and artistic cultivation, tastes, principles, as every man does, whether Catholic or non-Cathollc.85 Though he knew the distinction between art and prudence, yet In his actual reviewing he made little use of it. This was not because he did not regard it as a true and valid distinction; rather it was because he was above all interested in morals.

About art as art he was little con­

cerned; his attention as a critic was centered on the prac­ tical. in Reason is an important to remember as will in deseribin Brownson* s character.

Theodore Parker was not alone in

21

thinking *he had a hard head,* nor was his hatred of had logic a secret which only Isaac Hooker knew,

the reader who

looks at the whole body of Brownson* s writing is ©ore like­ ly to be impressed by his Insistence on a logical and reasoned solution of the problems under discussion than by his emphasis on the ©oral implications of such problems. And in his literary criticism the principle of intellectu­ ality is found to be almost as important as the principle of practicality.

Actually he related the two principles.

*?he feebleness and frivolousness of modem literature are due to no deterioration of man1s intellectual powers . . . but to the want of force and constancy of will.11 And this weakness of will was due •to the neglect of severe studies, the want of true philosophical discipline, and of high and noble aims.11®® According to the criterion of Rousseau, Mthe man who thinks is already a depraved animal,« Brownson was damned indeed.

He opposed the theory of man* s natural goodness

and wisdom, and he opposed it in all its corollaries and implications.

Against intuition, subjectivity, emotionalism,

he set up reason, logic, and objectivity.

Emerson*s theory

of poetic inspiration he called 0insanity11,®'7 although he was careful to explain how Emerson* s practice was different from that theory.®8

It was a *silly doctrine now prevalent,0

Brownson wrote, 0that the great and enduring in art must be a spontaneous production, and that a bprk-Ac ;wo?ti4 *ss^lh ’

22

proportion to the labor of intellect and will that its creation cost.

Poetry is not the instinctive and unpre­

meditated utterances of the spontaneous emotions and con­ ceits of the poet*

Xt might do to say,

Xeh singe wie der Vogel singt Ber in dem Zweigen wohnet If man were a blackbird;* ® but man was an unfeathered and rational biped. As a bulwark against such instinctive spontaneity and emotionalism Brownson proclaimed intellectual discipline and tradition.

He judged that it required *no great know­

ledge to forego all the accumulations of the race, to strip ourselves naked, and to run through the streets of the city calling out to the people to look and see what marvellous progress we have made.*

He was hoping that some 11strong

masculine voice* might make itself heard *amid the din and ohatter of the age,* a voice that would recall young Ameri­ can writers to *depth of thought, greatness of soul and impress upon their yet ductile minds the solemn truth that they must aim higher, Candl submit to longer and more rigid discipline.*^ Xt is true that no work of art is created unless the artist is fired with energy.

Yet Brownson was right in

maintaining that in great works of art this energy is under control,

a

work of art Is on© of the most human of man1s

activities; it is therefore an activity in which the specifi­ cally human faculties of intellect and will must play a decisive part.

23

Brownson had his ideas about growing in wisdom by a return to nature and they were not the ideas of Rousseau, Wordsworth, or Aleott.

So strongly did he lean in the op­

posite direction that he lost his balance more than once* As far as his outlook on nature was concerned he seems never to have lost a streak of Puritanism*

It was very

probably because of this, particularly during the first militant years after 1844, that he tended to see an almost complete dichotomy between religion and nature*

Because of

that opposition he wrote, "Religion always, and in all things, is obliged to resist nature, for the world and the devil tempt and injure us only in and through ii.*?&

His sue**

pieions and some unhappy logic would lead him even further* Hot only was a man to be on his guard against human nature, even inanimate nature was to be mistrusted.

Landscapes and

j sunsets "have become to us in consequence of sin a tempta­ His readers soon caught up with him. in answering their objections he modified his extreme statements and more carefully outlined his position*

Of

itself nature was indifferent, he acknowledged! as for beauty, the whole question from the moral point of view was - what use was made of it.^*

Actually, however, he re-

mained critical of what unaided human nature could do and his considerations of inanimate nature were tinged with suspicion.

♦Ibid.. p. 328. Heither of these statements,of course, are Catholic doctrine. Cf. Appendix # 3.

More sound and more insistent was another phase of Brownson* s opposition to anti-intelleotualis®.

His strong

voluntarism, his demand for logio, hie Hew England back­ grounds as well as his sense for Catholic dogma, all were forces which tended to make him highly critical of those who etreseed feeling rather than reason and thought.

Wher­

ever emotionalism appeared, in religion, in politics, in journalism, in literature, he attacked it.

Thus he con­

demned not only the message but the methods of many of the preachers of his day.

Their efforts were directed "at

producing, by various and complicated machinery, by a sort of spiritual mesmeric pasees and manipulations, certain emotions, or momentary states of feeling mistaken for piety, which come and go, and leave the sinner no less a child of hell than before.*75 In the world of politics he judged the majority of the political leaders and writers as no better than sound­ ing boards for public opinion. teach or lead the nation.7S

They echoed but did not

Between the people and the

light "stand ever this immense body of shallow-pated poli­ ticians, who dread nothing so much as popular intelligence, and whose sole chance of success is in shutting out the light, and making the people believe that they, the people, are already masters of political science.*?7 plenty of shouting but little thought.

There was

*1 blush to think,"

complained Brownson, "that when 1 would read a profound

work on science, whether moral, intellectual, social, poli­ tical, or religious, I must order it from France of Germany." The confused shouting and failure to think would go on un­ til "we cease to hold it democratic to echo only the thoughts of the people. . . We must dare seek for the truth, and dare utter it, and dare labor for the elevation of the people, instead of merely obeying them, which will never be obeying them, but miserable demagogues and the petty politicians.*7® "We would raise up Hind, high and through Scholarship, against Wealth.*8®

But if the majority of men were getting

their ideas from the popular press, and the press "with a few honorable exceptions* continued to do little more than echo the convictions of their respective parties, it was going to require a real resurrection to "raise up mind." At an early period in his writing he had praised the news­ papers of his day as constituting "in the strictest sense of the word a popular literature. "®*

In 1849, however, he

was having his doubts about the value of popular journalism. Xt tended to lower the intellectual and esthetic level of the people.

Solid works remained dusty on the shelves.

Writers who thought less and less were being sold more and more.8®

"Sentiment is placed above reason;*®® instinct is

declared "the great teacher of wisdom."®*

And what made the

Influence of journalism so dangerous was the very tyranny of the printed page.

All too many people confounded the

26

press with the Church and held that editors were gifted with infallibility.85 Brownson was just as insistent In attacking emotional­ ism and all its Implications in literature* The effect of the work CJulia Ormond] would have been better, if Abel*a objections had been silenced by the father* s logic instead of by the daughter*s beauty.8© Such a statement , although not altogether typical of his criticism, does reveal Brownson1s emphasis on logic and reason in judging literature.

It was to be expected that

he would continually object to the general run of novels "because they are sentimental, and make the Interest of their readers center In a story of the rise, progress, and termination of the affection or passion of love.11®^

It was

his contention in book-review after book-review that *senti­ mental tales, whatever the natural sentiment they are in­ tended to illustrate, are seldom unobjectionable; for they almost inevitably tendtto destroy all vigor and robustness of character, and to render their readers weak and sickly.1,88 Somewhat surprisingly he admitted the excellence of women as critics.®9

This judgment, however, was not in­

tended to encourage them as critics but to discourage them as creative writers.

Brownson would have been of one mind

with the Lord High Executioner concerning "that singular anomaly, the lady novelist# and he was just as certain “she’d not be missed.* More and more books, especially novels, were being turned out by these writers; if the evil continued,

27

Brownson saw ahead only the deluge of *emasculate thought11 gft and "weak and watery sentimentalism.* To prepare hie reviews he had to thumb hie way through many a tender and romantic story.

He had "no liking for feminine literature,

whichever sex has produced it.*®* Quarterly knew of that dielike.

And the readers of hie

"We have any quantity of

fictitious literature, fictitious In all senses of the term, produced chiefly by women, and therefore weak, sentimental, preventing Instead of aiding high national culture."®** "The curse of the age is its femininity.*®3

If "finer

natures* of "exquisite sensibility* had their difficulties Brownson would have given them a rugged "Everlasting Tea" to solve those difficulties.

"The great relief from the

ills of life is employment, in a word, work. Another form of emotional!era, with which he dealt very severely and In the main very soundly, was the idea of romantic love, an Idea prominent in the middle and late 1

nineteenth century.

A number of factors, frontier chivalry,

romantic idealism, and various Tictorianisras had tended to make prevalent and fashionable, particularly in American thought, the idea that woman1s love was somehow essentially thaumaturgio.^6

Of itself it would steady the flighty,

make the lasy man industrious, cure the drunkard, and puri­ fy the roue.

Authors had but to bring the heroine around

to modestly blush an

"I will*, note down a "happy ever

28

after/ and then writer and virtuous reader could rest con­ fident about the future#

Brownson was too much of a real­

ist and a Christian to have any such sentimental confidence. We have no more confidence in either woman* s or man’s love as a principle of virtue than we have in any other natural sentiment, nor half so much. Marriage may sometimes reform the rake of his rakishness as avarice will sometimes cure a man of Intemperance and sloth, hut it does not elevate him into the sphere of virtue. The fact is, nature is never sufficient, and always does and must disappoint those who rely on it.9® this form of sentimentality, which he criticized again and again, would he saw be overcome only by a return to the order which had been reversed - Hto the higher culture of reason and free will, not possible without faith In God and the Christian mysteries.*®? Se had a sharp eye for sentimentalism wherever it might appear*

Many critics of hie time professed to see

In such writers as Sickens, Trollop®, Thackeray a deoided reaction against sentimentality.

Brownson*s judgment was

different and more accurate. They have not ridiculed or reacted against the form of sentimentalism which substitutes the sentiment of philanthropy for the virtue of char­ ity. They encourage humanitarian!sm, and make the love of man for woman or woman for man the great agent in developing, enlarging, and strengthening the intellect, the spring of the purest and sub­ lime at morality. . . Religion is based on human­ ity, Cit] is only a charming sentimentalism, em­ braced for Its loveliness, not as a duty or the law which it would be a sin to neglect.®8 Although he never relaxed his opposition to humanitarianism and romantic love as substitutes for religion and

virtue , lie 414 gradually adopt a less rigid view of the emotions and the arts*

His own logic and a hotter under­

standing of Catholicism forced him to make distinctions* Since man was not a disembodied spirit— all intellect and volition —

he conceded that the arts should move him, with

the proviso always that they move man in line with the good and the true*®®

He even set it down that it was the primary

purpose of literature **to move and to please**1 It addresses the sentiments, affection, im­ agination, rather than the understanding. When­ ever the author reverses this, and seeks, under poetical form, first of all to instruct, to bring out a theory, to defend a doctrine, he ceases to be the genuine poet* and becomes the doctor or philosopher, and fails to preserve the requisite eongruity between the matter and the form of hie Actually Brownson had not shifted his position a great deal; rather he was restating it for the purpose of exactness and clarification* ciples.

He had not laid aside his fundamental prin­

For he made it clear that while he was not wishing

the artist to turn moralist, metaphysician, or sclent!st}®* he would continue to maintain that **no man can be a true poet, or artist, who has in his mind a false speculative system*«102 Consistent with this judgment was his analysis of the weakness of modem art* The flourishing period of true art is always immediately preceded or accompanied by a flourish­ ing period of philosophy, of moral science, and of religious truth; and just in proportion as men lose sight of the great and eternal truths of religion, of the discoveries and teachings of

sound philosophy, - that is, of the ideal truth in the supernatural order and in the natural, their artistic productions become mean and con­ tempt ihle.1?® It was for this reason and not because of any lack of men striving to he artists that there hag hee® no great art for the last two c e n t u r i e s . B e t w e e n the growing rejec­ tion of religious truth since the Reformation and the un­ sound metaphysics of philosophers, especially the subjec­ tivism of the German thinkers, objective wisdom on the natural and the supernatural levels was more and more ob­ scured*

less and less was left of vital reality for the

artist*

Brownson looking hack could see no great poet since

Milton; here in America he doubted that our first poet had as yet been b o m . ^ s Particularly was he critical of the tendency to regard beauty as subjective.

Be criticized the romantic poets

and the Transcendentalist writers for accepting this theory from the German philosophers.106

If the beautiful was en­

tirely a question of artistic creation, if it was just the projecting forth of what had existed before only in the artist* s mind, then, as Brownson realized, there would be no grounds for any objective critical standards or eystem of esthetics*

And not only would criticism become synony­

mous with impression and personal taste, but art itself would lack depth of thought {Brownson held that, with the exception of music, most of nineteenth century art was

shallow)j107 artists would lose themselves “in the pretty and waste rtheixJ energies in perfecting minute details.*1°® Works of art would fail to embody the "higher and loftier kinds of the beautiful,**®® Beauty was capable of being distinguished from truth and goodness but it was not separable from the®. truth, goodness, beauty, are only phases of one and the same thing. God is the true, the good, the fair. As the object of the in­ tellect, he is the true; as the object of the will, the good; as the object of the imagina­ tion, the passions, and emotions, the beautiful; but under whichever phase or aspect we may con­ template him, he is always one and the same infinite, eternal God, indivisible and indistIngulshable.110 The artist, though he was directly concerned with the beauti­ ful, was indirectly but necessarily concerned with truth and goodness.

So Brownson was able to keep two of hi®

chief principles in the main current of his criticism. Moreover, by this analysis of the triple aspect of reality, or more specifically, of God, as object of will, intellect, and imagination, he could line up his criticism with the esthetic theory he was now beginning to construct. If art I® to embody the beautiful, then for a true and complete understanding of art there is required a true and adequate ontology.

Brownson thought he found such an

ontology; it was an ontology which could be reduced to one primary, intuitional judgment - "Being creates existence. "HI*

♦For a discussion of this principle and the question of Brownson1s ontologism, of. Appendix # 4.

33

The artist whose task it was to imitate Hature, - Nature, however, in her creative role, - had now a double object presented to him for his contemplation and subsequent imi­ tation.

The artist could contemplate creative activity in

its relation to Being (God), or he could, contemplate this creative activity as manifested in the finite and communi­ cated activity of existences (creatures).

Contemplation

and imitation of the divine activity produced Hthe sublime* of Longinus who had instanced the words, “And God said, Let there be light and there was light,* as an instance of such sublimity.

Contemplation and imitation of the secondary

creative activity on the part of *existences* would give material for the beautiful rather than the sublime.^2*

♦It is not clear how the artist was to imitate the divine creative act rather than the finite activity of creatures. Two instances of his application of this principle may throw some light on Brownson* s meaning. He regarded modern art as usually imitating the finite rather than the divine creative act. For this reason modern art did not produce works which were sublime; it might at times embody the beautiful, but too often modern art was mere­ ly “pretty*. Furthermore, in looking over the history of art he judged that the ancients surpassed the moderns. Modern art “wants grandeur of conception, freedom and boldness in conception and is admirable only in petty details.8 (Works XIX, p. 423.) So too he thought of poetry as the highest cpecies of art because it surpassed the other arts in expressing the sublime, and because it was capable of expressing the sublime under the greatest variety of forms. 8The other species of art address themselves chiefly to the senses, and do not of them­ selves interpret to the understanding the intelligible or ideal. Music, painting, sculpture, architecture, must be Interpreted by the poet before their expression is complete. (cont'd)

33

Brownson thus saw the entire universe of being ?s con­ sisting of two cosmic cycles.

The first was the cycle of

efficient causality, the production of ereatures by God; the second sms the cycle of final causality, the return of creatures to Sod by tbe exercise of free will.

Imitation

of tbis second cycle was morality; imitation of tbe first cycle was art.

And so fee arrived at bis definition of art;

it was - *tfee imitation of divine activity as first cause or creator.*3*^ Probably it was precisely because of fele own strong stand witb regard to intellect and will tfeat Brownson was so sincere himself and so much respected sincerity in others. He preferred the hot or the cold to the lukewarm, and he held that the worst man was the hypocritical maa.3*3^

11The

man of strong convictions, who has the courage to act up to his convictions, a 3*3*® always gained Brownson* s respect. Almost thirty years after hie association with Fanny Wright, whose doctrines he had long since rejected and often criti­ cised, Brownson wrote of her with something like rough ten­ derness.

*She did great harm • • • but she noted acoording

* (eont#d from page 33) feeft to themselves, their ex­ pression is vague, dreamy, confused, revealing the splendor, it may be, but not the resplendent. The poet addresses him­ self not only to sense and Imagination, but also to the in­ tellect and heart. He expresses the true and the good under the form of the sublime and the beautiful, but so that the form, instead of concealing, reveals them, - reveals them as clearly, as distinctly, as does the philosopher, but, as the philosopher does not. in their splendor, their grandeur, and their loveliness.H 1Ibid.. p. 434.)

34

to her light, and was at least no hypocrite.

Many who con­

demn her have been and are greater sinners than she.#1*6 Brownson received hard blows from many sides during his long years of writing, but he did not complain of hard hitting opponents if they were sincere.

It was os the fuasy-

minded and the weasel-worded that he let his hands fall most heavily.

Friend and opponent have used various terms to

describe the man, but *insincere# was never one of them. IV

The book-reviews he wrote for his Quarterly were usu­ ally little more than notices; his longer critical essays were devoted not so much to a study or detailed evaluation of the work or author In question, but rather to an exposi­ tion of Brownson*s own views.

For all that, he has set

down here and there in various articles judgments and opin­ ions about a long list of writers, French, German, Italian, English,and American.

Sometimes It is no more than a

phrase; again it will be a paragraph or longer section of an essay.

A running survey of these evaluations will serve

to fill in, clarify, or perhaps slightly modify the out­ lines of his critical principles. Brownson gave due praise and recognition to the writ­ ing and thinking of the Middle Ages,117 - but he did not indulge in the sentimental nostalgia of the romanticists. *Bothing would be more amusing, if the matter were not so

grave,# h© write©, #tban to see our romanticists parading the old medieval romances, chronicles, ballads, lays, and roundelays, a© genuine specimens of Christian literature.#1*® #Th© popular literature in what Digby* calls *the ages of faith* was unchristian in its substance, and breathed forth the spirit of Graeco-Eoman geattlism, Celtic and Scandi­ navian superstition, or Arabic and Moorish sensualism.#*19 Except for Catholicism, Brownson found little to his liking in the Middle Ages, and, it might be mentioned, he never felt that his faith made reverence for Gothic architecture a spiritual necessity.129 Baste, whom he regarded as on© of the world* s great­ est poets, might well have #softened the asperity of his temper, sweetened his affections, and relieved the darkness of his passions, and made him Cself 1 more almable as a man. #121'l'# Chaucer he liked; his very faults flowed from an exuberance of life and health; hie influence was far sounder than that of a poet like Tennyson or a novelist like Bulwer.122

Bigby* s Mores Catholic!. Brownson called #a choas of erudition, faith, piety, sentimentality, and romance, which, indeed, may often be read for edification, . • . but which can seldom be consulted with confidence as a work of simple instruction.# (Works. X, 241.) He blamed Digby for not distinguishing between the divine and the human elements in the *age© of faith.* (ibid.. p. 243.) **Whatever the soundness of this moral advice, there is more than a touch of humor in hearing Brownson speak of #softness#, #sweetness#, and #amiability#.

Brownson did not regard the renaissance as an unmixed blessing.

Knowledge was broadened; it also became more

shallow.122 Much of the vital force of the movement was spent in resurrecting a ^petrified classicism#.124

As

classicism it was good; pagan ideas, however, accompanied it and they were to make themselves felt in society and politics,12®

And on the philosophical and religious levels

he could mark the movement as the root of many evils.126 His remarks about Thomas Sore were rather curious. *Hie Utoola is as little Christian as the Republic of Plato, and runs religious liberty into religious indifference, and indicates when it was written the author thought little of his faith and less of his church.#12^*

It is, however, a

good deal more surprising to find him declaring that, al­ though More died for the papacy, his life as a whole in morals and in doctrine prevent him from being regarded as a “true papist#.^29** Brownson had little to say about Shakespeare.

He re­

peated the judgment of Carlyle that *Shakespeare belongs to the Catholic world not the Protestant.#129

He warmly

admired the simple grandeur and majesty, the controlled power, of this dramatist; Shakespeare never lost command of

*There is, however, a difficulty in reconciling Hythlcday and More. Of. Appendix # 5. **St. Thomas More was canonized in 1935.

37

his verse.*30

In connection with this fact of self—posses­

ion, Brownson maintained that Shakespeare was not the char­ acters he created, "no more Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, than ♦ . , Iago, King hear, or Jack Falstaff."*3* Hot all the critics of the nineteenth century were as wise. It was, literally, characteristic of Brownson to find himself as much at ease in the neo-classical period of literature as he did.

Although he pointed out the weak

pantheistic strain in the "Essay on Man",*3® and thought that the didactic element made wThe Hind and The Panther11 in spite of all its merits a “heavy book",*33 Brownson held that both Pope and Dryden were better poets than Wordsworth**3*

Swift was another writer of this period

whom he regarded very highly.

He disapproved of the Dean's

religion, his cynicism, and his coarseness, but he admired “hie rare genius, his satirical wit, his etrong masculine sense, "*^ and he respected “his political sagacity and wisdom.**2.36 Because of its subjective metaphysics Brown­ son condemned The Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful as "not worth naming, far less worth reading."*37 was another great name for Brownson.

Yet Burke

He criticized Burke's

periods as "over-loaded" and thought that in sheer oratory he was surpassed by Webster;*3® still in the realm of politics the Englishman was a "profound and comprehensive thinker,"*3® and "the most eminent among the distinguished statesmen who have written or spoken in our language."

U A

38

Before setting down his estimates of those Englishmen and Americans who were his contemporaries, we might here insert a few of Brownson1® opinions of some French and Ger­ man authors*

Most of what he wrote concerns French and

German philosophers.

Such article®, though they embody

the best exposition and aoutest criticism that was being written at this time in America of European philosophies, will, because of the limits of this study, be passed over. "France,* he declared, "has never excelled in art, for her genius Is not philosophical, does not aspire to the higher love of truth, is turned to objects of sense, to the outward world, and seldom rises above secondary ideas.*141 that is certainly a very cool nod to Frenchmen, but before this in 1S43, he had given the French the snub direct. "France has few, if any writers that can compare advantageous­ ly with Scott, Bulwer, Washington Irving, or even Charles Dickens."*4^

la the same essay, however, Brownson noticed

with respect the work of Hugo, although he thought this marred by its accent on the grotesque.

He praised George

Sand for her style, and said that there was little of the woman in the vigor of her thought and expression.*4^ Spiridlon he recommended for its analysis and Insight. Balzac he set aside as having no real love for humanity.*4® A few years later, however, he was accusing all three with sympathy for the vicious and of a lack of moral standards.*4®

39

Their writings stirred up rather than tranquil!zed the pas­ sions.147

“The simple, natural majesty* of Bos suet Brown­

son always admired}14® still fee declared that Pension was not only the more amiable man but the sounder theologian of the two.14® For Pascal, in spite of his “brilliant genius11 and “profound thoughts*, fee eared very little.1®®

The

sharpest Judgment fee made of any French literary figure was his analysis of Chateaubriand; it was the bind of Judgment we would expect from Brownson. He C8aint-Bonnet3 is a disciple of the modem romantic school, and, like Chateaubriand, sacrifices at times distinctness of thought and exactness of doctrine to aesthetic effect. The church in the catechism is always clear, dis­ tinct, exact, and precise in expression and in reading the brilliant pages of the author of Ms S&X&32.& Bad M genie du Christlaalsme. we often wish that fee had taken pain® to learn it.AOA Another time fee marked for condemnation The weak and sentimental tone, affected phraseology, and literary claptraps, which of­ fend us in such writers as Chateaubriand and Orsial, and other well meaning but not very healthy Frenchmen, who seek to arrest the atten­ tion of modem society by their literary capers, and by means of a pious romantic ism to cheat tfeeir readers into a weakly and sickly devotion.1®3 Since the romantic movement in Germany had a pronounced Catholic tendency,1®3 and since some of its leaders were Catholics, it might be thought that Brownson would show a sympathetic interest in this literary period or, at least, pay some attention to its writers.

He does mention Friedrich

Schlegel a number of times,154 mainly in connection with his

Philosophy

of Hi story i but the rest of the writers are rare­

ly if ever named.

The movement itself, whatever accidental

good effects Brownson may have seen in it, he did not ap­ prove at all* He was consistent in hie continued opposition to all romanticism; he criticised it for its dependence on German philosophy,155 its emphasis on spontaneity and the imagina­ t i o n , i t s worship of inanimate nature*1®7

Its concern

with the past he looked upon as an effort at “developing the barbaric elements of the middle ages, and realising them independently of the Greek and Eoman elements and also of Catholicity*w158

The past with which the romanticists

were concerning themselves was, as he beheld it, a “rude, uncouth, barbaric heathenism, with its grotesque images, Its gigantic figures, its huge disproportioned shapes, its hideous and grinning monsters, which no Christian art can baptise, no power lick into Christian shape. . . Bo the best possible, it will always remain the man-bear of recent German romance**15® Goethe and Schiller were the two German literary fig­ ures of whom Brownson had the most to say*

The latter*s

poetic genius, he maintained, was crippled by his Kantian outlook.15®

Schiller lacked the ease and insight of

Goethe;151 Goethe* s writings were always marked by “a quiet strength and majestic repose which Uwere] surpassed only by the very best ©f Greek and Homan classics*1,153 He was “the

41

most readable of all the Germans,*a,6S a great man, and to bo praised for M s culture and freedom from cant.

Brownson,

however, strongly disagreed with Goethe1e mala doctrine, •that the end of education, and therefore, of life, is selfculture, or the harmonious and complete development of all the natural faculties of the soul.*164 Wordsworth was the only English poet of this period to whose work: Brownson devoted a complete essay.

Before it

was written Brownson had already disapproved of the Rous­ seau!stic doctrine he found in some of this poet#s writing.165 Brownson was, furthermore, far from wishing to "merge with the landscape*; he was "weary half to death of his intermin­ able descriptions of natural scenery, mountain and lake, hill and dale, park and paddock, woodland and meadow, cloud and sunsets.*166

Still in M s essay he showed that he was

not unaware of the poet’s merits.

He thought that Words­

worth had "Just notions of the vocation of the poet and of the noble mission of poetry.*167

He praised Wordsworth for

striving to discover "the Ideal element", "the something divine", in the commonplace; he eensured hi®, however, for not infreciuently conceiving this "something divine" in a pantheistic sense.166

Moreover, in searching for the ideal

in the commonplace, the poet too often gave the reader only the commonplace and not the ideal and the poetic.

"The

Idiot Boy", "The Waggoner", "Peter Bell* are instanced by Brownson as "veritable prose®.166

He acknowledged that

Wordsworth had "rendered a service to English poetry by avoiding the turgid diction of the feeble imitators of Bope and Dryden . . . but he had done our poetry an equal disservice by rendering it tame and feeble.*170 The American critic admitted the Englishman’s capabil­ ity at lesser tasks; there was poetic value in such pieces as "The Pet lamb", "We are Seven", "lines on Tintern Abbey* "Yarrow Revisited".

8If the poet had been less ambitious,

he would have been more successful.

His mistake was in be­

lieving that he was bora to be a great poet;*171 he lacked the intellectual power to be truly great.176

Other men had

praised the philosophy of Wordsworth, but Brownson failed to discover any all-embracing system embodied In his poems. "They reveal or conceal no such philosophy; they reveal to us only phases of the poet’s own mind."176 He attributed the popularity of Wordsworth’s poetry "to the frivolegga of the modern cultivated Glasses, and to a sort of dreamy and misty German subjectivism, which tends to conceal his poverty of meaning and his want of manly vigor.*

lV 4 r

Brownson was a strong character; he disliked weakness in any form.

For that reason he much preferred Byron as a

poet to Wordsworth, although he neither admired Byron per­ sonally, nor did he agree with hi® socially or politically. For all that Byron abused his genius, still he was a genius and in Brownson’s opinion, the greatest genius of his day.

43

Byron had the frailities of a man, but at least he was a man;175 about Wordsworth Brownson remained very doubtful# In 1838 and again in 1843 he gave warm praise to Car­ lyle and his book on the French Revolution,

It was *a

great work, and almost the only one In our language de­ serving the name of history,11*7®

It was more than history;

it was an *epie poem*, *a seer1® second sight of the past,*1*77 Brownson declared that its spirit was reverential on the 178 religious level and that, on the human level, it showed true and deep sympathy for man.*79

Carlyle gained his re­

spect because this writer was an earnest, real man#*®® Although he wrote that he liked the book "not by reason of its style, but in spite of it,11*8* Brownson commended Carlyle*& writing for its freedom, its conversational directness, its color and variety.

He realised Carlyle*s

mastery of words and credited him with understanding better than any other writer 11the profound philosophy there is in 188 the ordinary term of every-day life.# ttHe lays open the word,* wrote Brownson, *and makes you see the faot, the thing, of whieh^was originally the sign. . .

It is

no doubt overlooked by the great majority of his readers, who, because they overlook it, ©all him obscure and unin­ telligible***88

Tears later this estimate was to be much

qualified; Carlyle may have served society by exposing many cants, and demolishing numerous shams, and in calling

44

attention to the eternal verities;1®* bat of true eternal verities, Brownson declared, Carlyle was ignorant.185

His

supernatural!sm was really naturalism;1®® Hhe bag deified force, and consecrated the worship of might In the place of right.**18^

Brown son did not approve of Heroes and Hero-

worship and refmeed to aceept many of the doctrines of

garter Hge&CSM* With the exception of Hew®an - and here the concern was with philosophy and theology - Brownson did not dwell long on any of the literary figures of Victorian England. It Is not altogether clear why1®® he disliked the novels of Dickens, but dislike them he did. We have set our face against Charles Dickens from the very beginning of his literary career, before we had become a Catholic, and have re­ garded his popularity as one of the worst symptoms of the age in which we live. He had wit and humor, if you will, but no elevation of mind, no lofty aspirations; his nature was low, grovelling, and sordid, and his morality a vague and watery phi­ lanthropy* Thackeray had great faults, but him we ©an endure; for, though apparently a realist, and cynical even, he had at bottom a rich and gushing human heart, and aspirations above the world he too faithfully painted. He was an ideal­ ist as well as a realist, and his idealism redeems his realism* But Dickens had no redeeming quality; his good people are remarkable only for their in­ sipidity.1®® Poor Sam Weller would have been hurt!

Though there Is some

truth in Brownson1e remarks about this author* s vague phi­ lanthropy, still in the main these remarks are not best understood as judicial criticism; rather they mark his dis­ like for the writer Charles Dickens.

Most Catholic critics have found a good word if not large praise for Tennyson* s poetry; not so Dr. Brownson, who could not *disoever any other merit in hi© than harmoni­ ous verse and a little namby-pamby sentiment.*1®0

*He

strikes us,* Brownson went on to say, *as a man of feeble intellect, as wanting altogether in the depth and force of thought indispensable, not to the poetic temperament, but to the genuine poet.*1®1 Newman probably never did completely understand Brownson, and Brownson could never have completely under­ stood Newman.

It was no wonder, then, that the American

with his rigid, logical approach and his very different backgrounds argued long against Newman* s more flexible theory of certitude and hie theory concerning the develop­ ment of dogma.1®®

The controversy was closed in 1853.

later there was to b© the invitation to Ireland by Newman and the review by Brownson in the Quarterly about Loss and Cain.183

Still the criticism which Brownson set down about

Newman when debating with W. Ward and the Dublin Review is sufficiently typical to stand as Brownson*© estimate of Newman.

♦Brownson acknowledges that he would not have criti­ cised Newman*© *theory of development* as he did if he had read boss and Gain. Brownson was willing now to accord New­ man much higher praise as a thinker. The American reviewer declared that this book had given him a better understanding of Newman and of the Oxford Movement. It was, so Brownson sees it, because he had come into the Church by a very dif­ ferent door than Newman had that misunderstandings had arisen in the past.

46

Dr. Newman is in some respects, w© grant, clear and acute as a thinker, and choice and ex­ act as a writer; hut he is a man of a sharp rather than a broad and comprehensive intellect. Be has little faculty of grasping a subject in its unity and integrity, and he never masters a subject by first seising its central principle, and thence descending to its several details. To use a form of expression borrowed from himself, he tabes in anfc idea, not as a whole, but by reviewing it suc­ cessively under a variety of separate aspects, by walking around it. • . He thus attains only to particular views, never to unity of view, or to the comprehension of the idea as a whole. No man has, within the range of these particular views, a clearer and keener insight than he, and no man can more clearly, vividly, distinctly, ac­ curately, or forcibly express what he thus appre­ hends. But nevertheless, whenever he attempts to mould his particular views into a systematic whole, he becomes confused, obscure, vague, and vacillating. His mind is purely an inductive mind, the imperson­ ation of Inductive philosophy, and proceeds not from unity to multiplicity, from principles to facts, but the reverse. He will seize on a particular fact, and generalize it into the basis of a universe. In consequence of the narrowness and unphilosophical character of his mind, his attention is fixed for the time being always on one particular aspect of a subject, which he necessarily treats provlsorlly, as if it were the entire subject in its unity. His language chosen for the expression of that particu­ lar aspect, lacks breadth, comprehensiveness, and becomes inappropriate, obscure, and false as the representative of the truth, not merely as he views it, JgJ as it really is in itself independent of There is some acuteness in this analysis of Newman, but it is two-edged criticism; in telling the reader about Cardinal Newman, the writer reveals as well, something about Orestes Brownson. While his Americanism was am important element in his total thought,* It can scarcely be called a principle of ♦Of. Appendix # 6 for a note on Brownson* s Americanism.

47

his literary criticism.

Here and there, however, in his

essays he did have some interesting things to say in refer­ ence to the question of Americas literature*

In 1839 he

set down what he held to he the causes of the lack of an important American literature.

This lack was not due to

the youthfulnesa of our nation, for the people possessed a culture that was actually very old; nor was it due to the democratic spirit of the c o u n t r y * T h e r e were rather other reasons - the country* © long dependence on English culture,3*®® the frontier condition© which turned American energies in other direct ions,3*97 and the want of an appreciative understanding of democratic principles* American literature would come into being when the American people turned to that which was really their work - “to the problem of social equality*113'®®* A quarter of a century later he gave a somewhat dif­ ferent analysis of the obstacles in the path of American writers*

The commercial spirit of the cities left the

average American with little time or energy for thing© of

Hot a few of Brownson*s phrase© at this time sound like the chant of Granville Hicks in The Great Tradition* Our work is the “struggle between the accumulator of wealth and the simple laborer who actually produces; briefly a struggle between man and mosey.® (Works, XIX, p* 35.) "The American poet must sing for the human race; draw his inspiration not from Oastaly, or Helicon, but from the human heart; and the orator must not study to turn and polish his periods, but to kindle up his country men, to compel them to arm and march against the enemies of freedom, truth, Justice, and love.® (Ibid., p. 38.)

48

the mind.

And if time and energy vere left most Americans

were still too immature to develop an American culture. They regarded themselves as colonists and parvenus. In literature and art we are provincials, striving to ape metropolitan fashion®. Hence our literature is constrained and stiff, and has a certain vulgar air and tone. Like the American people themselves, it lacks free, manly, Independent thought. . . What will they pay? has more Influence with us than with any other people on earth, . . In literature we copy or try to copy, the English, the French, or the German seldom venturing to give free play to our own original cowers, or even sus­ pecting that we have any.200 Brownson hoped that American O&tholiee would take a large share in developing a national literature.201 Here, for the first time in the history of Christendom, have we found a civil order in harmony, as to its principle®, with the church. Here, then, only that can he our national litera­ ture, which accords with Catholic faith and morals. And here, for the first time since the founding of the Christian Church, has such a literature been possible.203 As the principles of our government were not those of Europe, so our literature must not take European literature as its model.

Thus far we do not have a great American litera­

ture because our hooks have not been inspired by American life and institutions, but have been rather copies of Old World literature.202

He urged Catholics and encouraged

there to study their religion and their American institu­ tions .so “that they may give ue a literature which shall respond to both.1*204 To core® to his judgments of American writers.

Brown-

49

•on had a rather high regard for Cooper and sympathized with the task this writer undertook 1b his later novels, though Brownson felt that more tact and amiability might well have been employed,205

He acknowledged Irving1® wit

and remarkable purity of style but thought that a certain monotonous sweetness weakened M s work.20®

hike Hawthorne,

Irving was easy and graceful but deficient in strength. 11They are,* Brownson asserted, *pleasant authors for the boudoir, or to read while resting one’s self on the sofa after dinner.

Ho man who has any self-respect will read

either of them in the morning.*207 Despite this classifica­ tion of Hawthorne’s work as leisure reading, Brownson termed The Scarlet letter a work of genius; he criticized it, how­ ever, as no story to be told in popular literature*20® The Bllthedale Romance was accorded a mild sort of praise,20® and such things as Hawthorne’s satire of the modem com­ mercial spirit in *The Celestial Railroad* won Brownson*s positive approval,210

Twice at least he would declare

that Hawthorne was the best novelist in America. There were things that Brownson liked in Longfellow’s poetry; it might not be great but had its own kind of charm and appeal.211

He criticised the poet’s use of the hexa­

meter, a meter which did not accord with *the genius of our language;*212 blank verse was more suitable to English.213 A little surprising was Brownson1® recommendation of vari­ ations in rhythms; what he had in mind was the principles

50

and practice of Coleridge in a poem like "Olaribel*.2*4 Although this critic praised Longfellow for having per­ ceived the beauty in the Catholic Church and having written “like an upright, earnest, pure, benevolent man? still Brownson did not mean that he was a great poet.2*®

Hie

poetry, for all its charm, Hcannot boast that Indefinable magic . * * which it is not in man to resist.*210 though Richard H. Bans (pere) occasionally made the mistake of thinking human love a kind of moral panacea,2*7 in the main Brownson esteemed his writings as sound.

He

liked Dana for daring ttto intimate to his countrymen that their march of Intellect is downward not upward, and to labor to recall their attention to the good old things that have passed or are passing away.11212 His conservatism in the matter of poetry likewise pleased Brownson and he praised Dana's sense of rhythm, his thought, and his easy Intelligible language. 219

lB reviewing Dana's works E. P.

Whipple had used the opportunity to analyse the man rather than his writings.

Brownson rebuked Whipple for his "psy­

chological lucubrat 10118" and set down a critical principle as he did it.

"The author, in so far as he enters into

his work, that is, as strictly the author and distinguished from the man, is, no doubt, the proper subject of criticism, but beyond he is not, for beyond he does not publish him­ self and is not amenable to a literary tribunal.**220

In a thorough examination of Ifoe Vision of M r Laui*fal221 Brownson correctly noted that Lowell has sentimen­ talised the old legend.

The poet made charity and merit

depend not on duty and the will hut on the feelings.222 Lowell had said He gives nothing but worthless gold Who gives from a sense of duty. Still Brownson may have been somewhat severe; for all that Lowell wanted to say, though he stumbled in saying it, was that the cold categorical imperative of Hew England was a very different thing from Christian charity.

In summing

up, however, Brownson did put his finger on the real weak­ ness of Lowell.

He Judged that the poet had genuine abil­

ity, a sensitive nature, and power of expressions more than that, Lowell loved moral truth.

Tet intellectual discip­

line was wanting; Lowell never had "submitted himself to the serious and patient labor of thought, necessary to reduce the potentiality of his nature to act."222 Brownson* s estimates of the Hew England transcendentalists are more interesting; he had pounded out his argu­ ments with them at George Ripley* s home and knew them well. William Ellery Channlng he looked upon as a great moral man but as no great thinker.224

Still Channlng had helped

Brownson during one crisis in his life and Brownson was always grateful to him for it.220 Of Thoreau he had little to say although Thoreau had

referred to his six weeks stay (1835) with Brownson as "an era in my life - the morning of & new Lebenstag.»338 Carlyle may have confused Bronson Aloott with Brownson,227 but the latter would not have been pleased with the mis­ take.23®

Aleott after a conversation with Brownson felt

that the man only chopped logic; but Brownson was sure that Aleott did not even know what logic was, and pointed out how Alcott had sentimentally confounded the subject with the object in cognition. "I am God," said Hr. Alcott, one day to the writer of this CBrownson^. "I am God; I ami greater than God. God is one of my ideas. 1 therefore contain God. Greater is the con­ tainer than the contained. Therefore Z am greater than God."22® Margaret Fuller was right in not wishing the Bostem Quarterly to be made the official press for transcendental­ ism; her contributions would have been rejected.

Brownson

disapproved of her ideas and her style and Miss Fuller her­ self.

Her writings "are sent out in a slipshod style,"

Brownson declared, "and have a certain toss of the head about them which offends us.

Miss Fuller seems to us to be

wholly deficient in a pure, correct taste, and especially in that tidiness we always,look for in a woman."230

He

asserted that her Woman in the nineteenth Century had "neither beginning, middle, nor end, and may be read back­ wards as well as forwards."231

Brownson affirmed, however,

that "she has a broader and richer nature than Mr. Parker, greater logical ability, and deeper poetic feeling; more

boldness, sincerity, and frankness, and perhaps equal liter­ ary attainments.232

Still Brownson had criticised Parker

for the unorganized character of his style and thought.233 Theodore Parker might be "a scholar of more than ordinary attainments,"234 but Brownson looked upon him as a "very different man from Mr. Emerson."33® Emerson was the literary figure about whom Brownson wrote the most.

He has an essay on hie poetry, another on

Emerson1s prom works; there are besides Brownson*® three articles on transcendentalism.330

In these he paid respect

to Emerson as the greatest American poet and willingly ad­ mitted that some of his poetry surpassed the work of any living writer in England, Prance, or Germany.237

Borne of

hie verses were rough, Brownson thought, but this was not because Emerson insisted on following his own poetic theory of completely spontaneous inspiration.

In practice thie

poet m s cool said deliberate as a stone cutter squaring his block of granite.

Underneath his poetry, particularly

in a piece like "Threnody", Brownson caught a tone of stoical sorrow (yet Brownson himself had cried with emotion when he read "Threnody" to a friend).23®

Such poetry be­

tokened "the longing of his spirit for a truth, a morality, a freedom, a peace, a repose, which he feels and laments he has not."240 We know Mr. Emerson; we have shared his generous hospitality, and enjoyed the charms of hie conversation; as a friend and neighbour, in

54

all the ordinary relations of social and domestic life, he is one it is not easy to help loving and admiring; and we confess we are loath to say aught severe against him or his works; but his volume of poems is the saddest book we ever read* The author tries to cheer up, tries to smile, but the smile is cold and transitory* . • There is an appearance of calm, of quiet, of repose . . . ; but it Is the ealm, the quiet, the repose of despair* * * The world is no joyous place for him* It is void and without form, and darkness broods over it* True, he bears up against it; but because he is too proud to complain, and be­ cause he believes his lot is that of all men and inevitable* * * Tel this stoical pride and re­ solve require a violent effort, and bring no peace, no consolation, to the eoul*&il There is a manly tenderness running through much of this review of Emerson; it was perhaps not meant so much as a review as a personal appeal to the poet for him to seek peace where Brownson had found it. Tears later when he reviewed Emerson1© prose works, Brownson confessed We have been struck, as we never were before, with the depth and breadth of his expression. We appreciate him much higher both as a thinker and as an observer, and we give him credit for a depth of feeling, an honesty of purpose, an earn­ est seeking after truth, we had not previously awarded him in so great a degree, either publicly or privately.3*® And as for Soerson*s ability to handle prose, - *110 living writer surpasses him in his mastery of pure and elassle English, or equals him in the exquisite delicacy and finish of his chiselled sentences, or the metallic ring of hie s t y l e * T h i s was different from his first pronouncements over thirty years before in 1839:

We cannot analyze one of Sr. Emersons discourses. He hardly ever has a leading thought, to which all the parts of his discourse are subordinate, which is clearly stated, system­ atically drawn out, and logically enforced. He is a poet rather than a philosopher, - and not always true to the law© of poetry. He must be read not for a work of art, which shall b© per­ fect as a whole, but for the exquisite beauty of its details; nor for any new or striking philosophical views, but for incidental remarks, frequent aphorisms, valuable hints, rich and original imagery and Illustration.344 Still at the end, though Brownson continued to believe that wanting faith in Christ, Emerson wanted all,34® and though he wished that Emerson had not always regarded Catholicism as res judicata. the old **logic~chopperH continued to think of Emerson as *no ordinary iaan% “as one of the deepest thinkers, as well as one of the first poets, of our country, . . . a polished gentleman,• “a genial corn346 panion, and warm hearted friend.1* It was to Daniel Webster*s Works that Brownson gave, if not his highest, at least his most unqualified praise. These measured up according to his principles of practi­ cality and intellectuality.347

Webster was free from the

fault© found in most American writers.343

In particular

did this critic mark for praise Webster*s simplicity and calm sens© of power.34®

One of the few instances of some­

thing like close, stylistic criticism by Brownson is found in this essay where he analyzes some of Webster*s prose.3®0 This perhaps was something which Brownson might have at­ tempted more often if he had not thought that moral and

58

intellectual judgments were more important, and that it was his task to pass such judgments and to defend them. This was the work he set himself to do as a critic; all of his critical writing marks an endeavor to do just that work. Orestes A. Brownson had his fault© as a oritie.

He

was rigid and even narrow in his judgments; he was often apparently unappreciative of literature as art.

His criti­

cism was frontal, and he placed more reliance on the mace than on the rapier.

But he was a man, a courageous, sin­

cere, and very intelligent man.

He was greater than his

literary criticism; it was perhaps the weakest side of the many-sided Brownson.

He deserves a great deal more

consideration than he has heen given by the historians of American economic, philosophical, and political thought. Still even his literary criticism is very far from being the feeblest written in nineteenth century America; its incompleteness is the most serious charge whioh can be made against it.

There are signs of an awakening interest in

Brownson; this revival of interest may gain for him hie rightful place in the history of American criticism.

BROTHER AZA R IAS

X Patrick Francis Mullany was bora in a family that was not without a love for good reading.

His home training

would engender a love for books; his year© at the Chris­ tian Brothers* Academy in Utica, Hew York, and the stimu­ lating influenoe of Brother Justin sharpened his desire for learning.

Patrick felt himself called to be a religious

teacher and at an early age (he was not quite fifteen) en­ tered the novitiate of the Brothers of the Christian Schools in February, 1863.^ There he took the name HBrother Asarias*' and, after his novitiate and a somewhat abbreviated course of studies, began teaching in the schools of his order.

For all his

classroom duties his education went steadily ahead.

By

the time he was twenty he had made some studies in French, Latin, Greek, and philosophy* His first interests had been in mathematics but after he came in 1868 to Rock Hill College, near Baltimore, he began to be more and more absorbed with literature, phi­ losophy, and later with education.^

Brother Asarias taught

here for ten years, during which period he put to good use the libraries of Baltimore and Washington.3 In 1877 he made a two year trip to Europe.

He had

taken the journey with the hope of restoring his weakened

health, hut he used not a little of the time to visit fam­ ous libraries in England and France.^

On his return - he

was then thirty-two years old - he was made president of Rock Hill College.

In 1886 Brother Azarias made another

two year trip to Europe.

Friendships with writers and

scholars were renewed; new ones were formed.

Again he

worked in libraries gathering materials for his studies.^ When he returned to this country he was stationed at Be La Salle Institute, Hew York.

Here as professor of Eng­

lish literature he did some teaching, but most of his time was engaged in collating and organizing the fruits of his work in Europe,

Brother Azarias died, August SO, 1893,

at Plattsburg, lew York, where he had just completed a series of lectures for the Catholic Summer School.* Those who read Azarias, or who invited him to lecture, or who heard him speak, must have looked upon him as both a scholar and a Catholic.

For in his writing and thinking

Brother Azarias did not separate his religion and his scholarship; instead he brought each to bear upon the other.

He used his religious beliefs to throw light upon

fields of history and literature, while his work as a student deepened the appreciation he had for his faith. If truth and reality were one, and he was sure they were, then nothing that was true or real must be overlooked

*cf. Appendix #14.

or thrust aside; all must he integrated.

Each aspect of

truth and reality wag to be studied in the light of the rest of known truth and reality.

It was as a Catholic

and as a scholar who worked from such a principle of in­ tegration that he wrote and lectured on philosophy, edu­ cation, and literature.* The problem of integrating art and life is one which must be faced by every literary critic who is not a com­ plete relativist.

Even if he does not attempt to answer

It, he must at least acknowledge that the problem exists. The critic who proclaims the summura bonum of life as es­ thetic solves the problem bymaking the aim of art and life identical.

The ideological critic, whether of the

left or right, who sees only the molding power of litera­ ture will use his philosophy of life as the ultimate canon of art.

Something can be said for either of these criti­

cal positions; there is a certain truth attached to each. The fact remains, however, that art Is not a mere means to an end outside itself.

But it is even truer that art is

not the absolute and ultimate end of life and living.

The

problem is, then, one of correctly integrating art and life.

•For an outline of his work cf. Appendix # 7. ••A literary critic may, of course, mark off for him­ self a fractional domain in the field of total criticism and properly devote himself to that. But as a responsible human being he must acknowledge that it is a fractional domain and admit that there is a problem of integration.

Somewhere in a total 8wisdom* a place must be made for art, a place which takes care of the important facts regarding both life and literature. As a thinker Brother Azarias was aware of the influ­ ence of history on thought and literature; as an educator he was equally aware of the influence and power of litera­ ture; as a sensitive and cultivated reader he knew that literature was art; finally, as a Catholic he had the cer­ tainties of his faith.

In his literary studies he endeav­

ored to find and to outline a theory of literature and criticism which would take into account all these various aspects and correctly place them. The main ideas of hie theories of literature and criticism can be found, at least germinally, in his first book, Philosophy of Literature. Azarias had been strongly influenced by F. Schlegel*s ideas on history and art, particularly hie emphasis on the place of the divine Word In history and art.

The Christian Brother took over that

idea and made it central in all his thinking.

He thus sets

it down in a formula or principle - "God actualizes the Cosmos by the Word, and completes its end in the Word.1*® This principle he held to be the key to philosophy, history, and art because it was a synthesis of all reality and truth, both natural and supernatural.*

•For further exposition and criticism of. Appendix # 8

As Azarias explains this formula, all existing things outside of God were actuated by the divine creative power acting through the medium of the Word.*

Before this

creative flat they had only an ideal existence in the eternal cognition of God who beheld the divine essence as imltable ad extra and saw 11in the Word8 8these archetypes8 of things.7

The master-pattern, so to speak, wae the Word.

All the truth and beauty and goodness in any being was there because that finite being possessed something of the infinite truth and beauty and goodness of the Word. nAnd completes it® meaning in the Word.8

By this

addition to the Globertlan principle, Azarias brought in the Incarnation and the supernatural order*

For an

infinite God to have an end worthy of himself it was nec­ essary, Azarias argued, that God raise up the cosmos to a

•When he writes of the Word as 8the medium of the creative act8 (Philosophy of Literature, p. 231 and Essays Philosophical. pT^lSTThie terminology is not too happy. The Word cannot be anything like an instrumental cause for the divine operations ad extras in all such operations the Three Divine Persons act as one principle. Wor, moreover, is he quite accurate in the emphasis he places on the Word as an exemplary cause of creation (Philosophy of Literature, p. 221); God beholds the 8ereatables’* (exemplata) in the divine essence; which is not the same thing as saying that God sees them in the Word — an idea which Azarias seems to imply in his whole doctrine of the Ideal. In Phases of Thought and Criticism (p. 60) he is more accurate in his theological explanation of these same matters, but his ’'therefore8 (ibid.) which leads up to his own doctrine of the Ideal is inconclusive.

supernatural level through the Incarnation.*

According

to his principle, then, Azarias saw the Word "as the cen­ tral point of history, giving meaning and significance to all other f a c t s . T h a t is something which every Chris­ tian holds, hut in the matter of philosophy he went much farther.

The Word was not only the ontological cause of

our intellect, it was the ultimate reason for certitude.** Finally, in the realm of esthetic®, he saw it as the ex­ planation of the beautiful and "the ideal*. Actual, existing things had their reality not because of their actual existence but because of their finite mir­ roring of the uncreated Word, the infinite Ideal.

The

actual was really a symbol of reality, for "the actual has meaning only by reason of the ideal it expresses,*9 and actual beauty "is only the expression, more or less perfect,

Most Catholic theologians hold that the Incarnation was only hypothetically necessary, i.e., on the hypothesis of the Fall and God* s redemptive plan. Mo Catholic theo­ logian holds that the supernatural order was a necessary con­ sequence to creation; i.e. a purely natural order was perfect ly possible. **Although he quotes St. Thomas in support of this doc­ trine (Phases of Thought and Criticism, p. 25) all that St. Thomas was maintaining was: (a) our reason is a separate and finite participation of the divine intelligence, (b) in the ontological order things are ultimately true because of the essence of Cod. St. Thomas did not hold that somehow we know and possess certitude because we behold things in the essence of God, or in the eternal archetypes, the exemplata. as mirrored in God*s essence, (cf. Gilson, The Philosophy SL .§!* Thomas. (trans., by E. Bullough, edit. G. A. Elrington)Herder Book Co., St. Louis, 2nd edit., 1929, pp. 244-48) The position Azarias takes with regard to knowledge is not that of St. Thomas but rather that of St. Augustine with his modified Platonism.

of [Ideal beauty! • • .wiO

Hence it was that the artist

is never satisfied with even his greatest work; it fails to measure up to the vision of the archetype, the finite ideal which he has seen.

This same ideal, underlying and

symbolized by the work of art, explained why our feeling of pleasure on beholding a masterpiece “has the character of a dim recollection slightly awakened."11

That feeling

"is due to our recognition of the type of the perfect im­ planted in our natures by the creative act.®12

II It has seemed necessary to set up this background of explanation, first, because his Philosophy of Literature is the book most closely connected with his name;1® second­ ly this philosophy is back of his understanding of litera­ ture and his theories and practice of criticism which we wish to discuss in subsequent sections*

To turn now to

his concept of literature. Azarias regarded the work of an author as a kind of finite creation; it was the bringing into existence of an artistic work which had previously existed only as an ideal In the artist*s mind*14

It was this ideal which became

“the animating principle® giving organic unity to the work

and shaping the form it would take.1®*

Before it was

given outward shape in the work of art, the ideal must have already been in the mind of the artist.

There it was

clarified and made strong "by reading, or reflection, or study, or experience, or all of these combined,"1® until it finally took “possession not only of the intellect, but of the whole man, [giving! hi® no rest till he [found! it an adequate expression*"1^ In seeking to express hi® idea the artist can lay hold of everything about him, "the true and the false, the good and the evil, the beautiful and the deformed'*1® molding them to his own purpose.

All ie plastic material

for the writer*s mold, because "literature is the verbal expression of man* s affections as acted upon in hie rela­ tions with the material world, society and his Creator."1®

It might be noticed that the Aristotelian concept of "form" is very different from the notion often enter­ tained by literary critics who speak of "matter and form." In the first place Aristotle thought of form as that force which shaped the matter, organizing it and rendering it vital; thus what critics mean when they say "matter" or "content" in several ways is nearer to a concept of Aris­ totle* s "form" than to what he thought of by "matter". Secondly, "form" was not a something which could be cut out from the individuu® (now a strict unity though composed of aatter and form) and considered completely and adequate­ ly all by Itself. What Azarias in thi® place denotes by the "ideal" is, then, quite close to the notion of Aris­ totelian "form".

Whatever is «human in man* can he made the subject of litera­ ture** In his studies of a people’s culture, particularly as it was set down in their writings, Azarias laid stress on that people’s history and environment, physical, social, and intellectual, as forces which conditioned their cul­ ture, ♦^

Since literature was a part of human culture, it

too was subject to and influenced by these forces*2^ Literature is the outcome of the whole life of a people . . . To understand it aright, it must be studied in connection with the sources and Influences that shape it. To consider it apart from these were to misapprehend its nature and bearing. It were to lose sight of the real character of thought. . . Time, and place, and person, and manner, and matter should all be duly considered.33 Azarias followed his own theory in his practice and employed this historical approach in every literary study that he made.

Hot only was a poet like Dante Ha sealed book to

any man not familiar with the history, the thought and poli­ tics of the thirteenth century,*23 but 8no author can be taken out of his mental environment*

Even a Shakespeare

and a Goethe have their local coloring.*2^

Philosophy of Literature, p. 11* Azarias condemns the doctrines and practice of extreme realists 'he was thinking of writers like Eola and not of men like Howells) because they were expressing only half of human nature. *By all means, let ug have observationand experiment. But distin­ guish between observation that regards only the material side of nature,* and observation that regards the whole man. (Phases of Thought and Criticism, p. 68.) He maintained that in his actual life the realist was not a realist at all; the men and women whom such a writer knew, with whom he (cont’d)

tn this question of factors which condition a people’s culture and their art, *sarins placed not a little emphas­ is on the *time~splrit* of an age.

It brought him to real­

ize what most of his contemporaries did not realize that our modem age would not produce great art until It found an all-absorbing idea, for it was a great "idea* or a great *ideal* which vitalised the eultnre of any par­ ticular period.**

Because every literary work directly

or indirectly expresses the spirit of the age in which it i® written,3^ because modern society had not found for itself such a unifying principle as the Idea of Rome had been for the Romans and the kalon kagathon had been for the Greek®,3® this age find® itself In a process of dis­ integration under the divergent pulls of a multitude of half-truth®*

Here was the reason why "modem artists do

not produce great work®.*3^

Though "strikingly beautiful

passages* can be found in their book®, still those books fall short of expectation. ures.

"They are, in a manner, fail­

They only reflect the discord of the age, its party

spirit and its partial truth®.*33

*(edit’d from page ®?) talked and lived, were not just brute® and criminal®; the realist was the complete realist only in his library or at his writing-desk. (Ibid., p. 69.) Azarias insisted, moreover, that while "art cannot ignore nature* (Ibid.. p. 07), it must do more than merely imitate. "Art is not Imitation; art is interpretation.* (Ibid.) #*cf. Appendix #9.

67

Since the beginning of Christianity there has been a struggle to reconcile “the secular and religious ele­ ment of s o c i e t y , a n d while that struggle lasts, he held, “we cannot hope for a literature developed in all its re­ lations.*^

Azarias studied the solutions that were being

preached in his day - positivism, evolutionism, Hegelianism, pessimism - and strove to evaluate them critically.*

The

general fault he found with all of them was their failure to account for the whole man and the whole of his experi­ ence. Nor could an “agnostic spirit bring about this har­ mony* modern man was seeking.

The solution could ulti­

mately be found only in religion.

For religion could

supplement the knowledge of reason with the knowledge of faith; it could clarify the principles of moral action and furnish them with stronger and loftier motivation; It could, finally, not only mark out the domains of the tem­ poral and of the spiritual, but could also indicate the principles of their integration.

The thesis of Brother

Azarias is very like that of Ghristopher Dawson. American had written:

The

“All civilization is rooted in re­

ligious worship, and has ever been fostered by religious worship;

the English historian has said:

“In a very

real sense the great religions are the foundations on which

*cf. Appendix # 10.

the great civilizations rest.

A society which has lost its

religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture.*3® ICore specifically, it was, Azarias wrote, “the basis of literature; for while literature “has its roots in humanity, it . . . receives its strength and greatness from religion.*33 Consistently with his emphasis on the historical ap­ proach this critic, after viewing the history of men and letters, saw in that history a “law of literary epochs. “Whereever there has been an advanced civilization,11 he declared, “it has been adorned by . . . a golden era of letters,*33 the greatest literature [normally the drama! is written during this period of national maturity.3®* Since he maintained that; literature was so closely related to thought,3^ he would look upon “the history of literature • • . fasl the history of ideas and their influence.*3® Concerning the rise and fall of ideas he has a curious doctrine.

Today man sees one aspect of truth, tomorrow

he will see truth from another side; a thousand years from

Although he states that this is a law, it is at best only a description of what happens. Scientific laws are, however, for the most part no more than general descriptions of observed phenomena. Still his description is not a to­ tally accurate summary. “The law of literary epochs is this: When a nation has grown to maturity and arrived at the pin­ nacle of her prosperity, she possesses a strong sense of security, and devotes herself to peaceful pursuits, especi­ ally to literature and architecture, and gives utterance to her thoughts in language, strong, clear, effective, such as becomes her maturity, and dignity.“ (Philosophy of Litera­ ture. p. 43.)

now the idea that was dead today will rise up again to become the actuating

thought of that age.3^ This almost

has the sound of relativism; site pole.

actually he wasat the oppo­

For though 11one side of truth is presented at

one tl®e,#4G 11the universal history of literature,* he wrote "goes to show that the sum of natural truth is a constant quantity.

This is the most general law of thought.

If the sum of knowledge was a constant quantity and men could not create a single new idea, then originality would consist •not so much in saying something that nobody ever before said, as in moulding an idea into shape, and giving it a hue that stamps it as characteristic. • «

So,

the great genius, he said, His not over-particular about the materials he uses.

He pieks those nearest at hand; he

stamps them with the

impress of his genius,and so fashioned

they ever after pass

as his, and his alone.

Because of his concept of the •ideal* In art and lit­ erature this critic might have been expected to stress their contemplative rather than their practical function. He ideas, however, on this matter are not capable of being neatly synthesized*

Although for the most part he tended

to emphasize the practical function of literature, it is not easy to arrange his various statements into a wholly consistent body of doctrine.

♦of. Appendix #11.

In one lecture he would say,

•After the grace of God flowing to us through the channels of prayer and the sacraments, I know of no greater solaoe to the soul than the soothing words of a good

b o o k ; *

44

but previously to that he had written, “Poetry and music are poor substitutes for prayer and reliance upon a Pro­ vidence.*^

yet In that same book he declared that “it

is well to commune with the great masters of thought . , . [who! wrote because some great thought oppressed them;“46 it was worth while to come in contact with great thinking. And Azarias held, it should be remembered, that “ideas are of value only in proportion as they strengthen man in the battle of life.*4^

Somewhat different from any of

these statements were his remarks about literature as a romantic escape from the dusty, humdrum every-day round of existence into an ideal world where man*s restless spirit was more able to find peace.48 One final pair of as­ sertions will serve to mark these apparent oscillations of his thought on this subject.

Speaking of the literary ar­

tist Azarias wrote, “His aim — the aim of all literature is to solve life1© problem;*

against that was the earlier

statement, “All this tthe reforming and perfecting of man* s moral nature! is beyond the sphere of literature.*^0 One quite evident reason for some of these apparent inconsistencies is the fact that Brother Azarias was some­ times speaking as a critic, sometimes as an educator.

That, however, does not explain everything.

His esthetic

theory of the ideal would, under several of its aspects, logically demand that a contemplative function he assigned to art; still, his general outlook was Platonic and prac­ tical.

This will account for some of his shifting.

More­

over, within the realm of the practical he tends to take now this position, now that, because he was looking at religion from two different aspects.

In so far as he was

regarding his faith as opposed to naturalism and material­ ism, he would emphasize the aid that literature could fur­ nish; when he regards that faith formally, and hence supernaturally, he rightly questions the possibilities of any direct assistance from art and literature.

To conclude:

any of his statements can be argued if taken by itself; taken altogether they are difficult to defend. Still in spite of shifts and even inconsistencies, his judgments can be lined up sufficiently well to give at least a general impression of his conception of the function of literature.

“In the history of civilization, literature,*

he affirmed, “has been the one essential element made use of in raising a people from barbarism to culture and re­ finement.

*It possesses a formative character that, in

the end, triumphs over material force, be its energy what it may.*®** As literature could mold nations, so it could assist

72

the individual in the process of self-integration by re­ vealing to him the hidden relations between himself and the material world.53

Such revelation was not given in

a merely passive enjoyment of literature.

The individual

must read seriously, bringing to the work his 8closest attention and best thoughts if thel would learn the whole S4 message it would impart.8 The great works of literature, moreover, have a full meaning only for the ©an with faith. For the man who is without belief in other than a material world such writings can afford only esthetic pleasure; “they have lost their power of giving direction to life.1,55 Finally, literature could but aid in this process of integration; complete integration, like morality, and a true and adequate spiritual outlock, came only from re­ ligion.

If love of philosophy and ethical culture were 56 not substitutes for religion, neither was love of art. He was in complete agreement with Newman57 in declaring that a “sense of beauty has never been able to stand be­ tween human selfishness and the gratification of any pas­ sion.

When exclusively cultivated, its tendency is to

render men and women rather effeminate and weak."35 While Asarias, then, was not always in complete agree­ ment with himself in explaining the function of literature, he was very sure that it did have a function, perhaps sev­ eral functions on different levels.59

Art was not made

73

for Its own sake, not “the art that endures for all time.n Great art was

purposeful;®^

this was nowhere more evident

than in the world of letters.®***

Writers may have been

conscious of it as they worked or they may not have been, but 3as surely as their work expresses an ideal, so surely does it embody a purpose.

XII Such was his concept of literature and such his ex­ planations of its ends.

While these judgments reveal some­

thing of Aearlae as a critic, they do not, of course, pro­ vide a complete picture.

That will require at least some

exposition of hie criticism itself.

Her© then we shall

deal with hie theory of criticism, supplementing this ex­ position with some of hie remarks on reading and an explan­ ation of hi® “spiritual sense3. In the final section (IV) w© shall take up his critical practice, noting the judg­ ments he made of literary periods a® well as of individual books and authors. For the genuine critic, Azarias had a high regard. The critic* s position was a responsible one; he must be alert and sensitive, “fearless in exposing shams, just in

^Brother Azarias quoted with approval the remark which W* D. Howells, "one of the most successful of living Ameri­ can novelists3, made to him in a conversation. The novel­ ist affirmed that “he could no more conceive a novel with­ out a purpose than an arch without a keystone.3 (Books and Reading, p. 53.)

74

lvis estimates, and at all times truthful**6^

Azarias has

a description of criticism at the end of his first book "The basis of criticism is knowledge, and its object is t r u t h . T h a t might seem too brief and too general. But he meant those words ’’knowledge11 and ’’truth”; they were words weighted with implications and he wished them to be so weighed by the reader. Knowledge there must be if there was to be complete and accurate critioism; knowledge there must be for the sake of the truth.

So he was accustomed to look upon all

writing; **lts object is truth; whether it be truth in the moral, physical, or metaphysical order - in the domain of history, or in that of poetry and fiction - truth it ie pure and simple, the truth and the whole truth,”®® critic, then, could not "be afraid of the truth.”

A ”It may

tell,” he warned, ”against your favorite author, or favor­ ite principle. . . But facts are of more worth than mis­ placed admiration or misconceived theory.”®?

A critic

should ”let in the light*68 from every possible window and not live in some closed room that he had built for him­ self.

It was not criticism, according to Azarias, "simply

to search for that which is not contained in a book; nor to commend a book merely because of the pleasure it gives without paying due regard to the truth or falsity of the opinions or principles upon which that pleasure is based; nor to carp at that which may run counter to one’s pre­

75

judices ox preconceived notions, fox one’s prejudices may be unreasonable and one’s notions may require revision. Criticism meant *the careful examination of a work in order to determine its nature and scope, how far it speaks the truth, and what standard of taste and excellence it has attained. Genuine criticism, then, was wtruth-loving and hon­ est.

To exercise such criticism the literary critic

must be a man of good will and a man of knowledge. ing the former, how was he to acquire knowledge?

Suppos­ First of

all, that knowledge was not to be limited to the realm of art; it was to include religion, philosophy, and history ae well.*

Since the implications and place of these three

for literature and literary studies have been suggested on previous pages, our main concern here shall be esthetic knowledge•** ♦Wh&t he says of the student in general would in his mind have applied a fortiori to the literary critic. He writes: H£We acknowledge! the wisdom of not allowing the student to stop short at the study of a single language or a single science, or the history of a single country. His knowledge becomes rounded and completed by coordinate and supplementary studies.11 (Essays Philosophical, p. 201.) Of. IT. Foerster “The Study of Letters,w Literary Scholarship, pp. 20 and 22. **Though Azarias could distinguish between art and pru­ dence in the matter of literary judgments (of. Philosophy of Literature, p. 255), his main concern was with a complete or total criticism. #That criticism that busies itself solely with the literary form is superficial.tt (Phases of Thought and Criticism, p. iv.) So besides esthetic knowledge he re­ quired a critic to use historical, philosophical, and especi­ ally religious knowledge. Such knowledge, however, was to be employed positively, i.e., to discover and appreciate the *ideal** which made the book the work of art it was.

78

This knowledge w8,s, as he quite rightly understood , acquired, empirically; the law of criticism was "to know what is best in thought and style, and to make thereof a criterion whereby to judge literary work according to the degree of its approach to the ideal s t a n d a r d . S u c h was his statement of the theory; in the actual functioning of esthetic criticism he would allow for even more empiricism and subjectivism.

"That criticism is the most probably

correct which agrees in the main with other from different quarters, representing opposite or divergent interests. 1,76 "There is nothing infallible in its judgments.

There are

no standards, except of a vague nature, by which all can be ruled5 and even were there, each critic would apply them differently, according to the cultivation of reason and taste.

We say reason and taste, for a literary work is not

judged by reason alone."7*

"Criticism, like medicine,* he

concluded,His a matter of empiricism.®76 In the exercise of knowledge, Azarias had a word of warning and a word of advice for the critic.

Azarias had

emphasized in many places that no man was set apart from the period in which he lives; his thought was more than half formed for him by his intellectual milieu.

So he cautioned

the critic about the necessity of dissociating himself from what was merely temporal in his environment.76

Azarias was

willing to admit that few critics could so approach their tasks; this did not mean, however, that serious efforts

77

should not he made.77 mere slothfulneos.

Too often failure here was due to

HIt is so much easier," he rightly

pointed out* "for us to remember and repeat than to think."78 Particularly did he condemn such slothfulness when It al­ lowed the critic to slide into a "groove-spirit".

For then

he "finds praise for Wordsworth*s baldest and prosiest 79 lines," "sees a mystic meaning in Shelley's most meaning­ less rhapsodies*"®® "persists in finding in Browning's poems meaning that the poet himself never put into them."®3. Popularity was one thing, truth was another.

The critic

got at truth* and kept himself from being carried away by what was merely fad and fashion, by thinking his own thoughts and by basing them on what he really knew.®® More on the positive side was his advice to the critic to make his first approach to a book from the point of view of the author.

"Divest yourself for the time being," was

his counsel, . . . of your own standard of oriticism. The critic could thus "enter into his Cthe author* s 3 inten­ tion and determine how far he has carried out his projected 84 plan." Only after that was the critic able to take up the work to pass judgment on it.

This is sound advice, for un­

less a critic makes such an approach there is the possibil- J ity of his using the work under discussion as a spring­ board for his own ideas.

Even if such a possibility is

aot actuated, there Is still the danger that the book will be praised or condemned for what it does not say, or for

78

what the author sever had in mind. Two other recommendations he made to critics.

A

work was to he approached as a toturn quid, a whole; 85 its ®central conception® must he grasped.

If that were thor­

oughly understood, then not only would the main meaning of the novel or poem he comprehended, hut the critic would he ahle to *throw light upon many a dark corner within its structure.®88

Again Brother Azarias suggested to the cri­

tic the possibilities of using both an analytical and a synthetical method in his work.

By the former Azarias

meant that ®criticism which resolves a subject into component force®. . .

It traces the work hack to its sources.®8?

This concept of *analysis® did not imply, therefore a close scrutiny of the text under discussion, hut rather emphas­ ized again the historical approach.

Synthetic criticism,

he explained, ®consists in the reconstruction of the work out of Its component parte; or rather, it Is building up in the mind of the reader, a just conception of the work, after it had been thoroughly analyzed.®88

Such synthesis

required that the critic had already formed for himself an ideal.88

By that last word Azarias was bringing criticism

and the critic around to a principle central in hie own thinking. It may throw some additional light on his critical position if some of his remarks on actual critics and their

79

work are set down*

The Appreciations of Walter Pater he

judged rather favorably, saying with regard to that cri­ tic’s opinions:

"though not always clear, and somewhat

wordily written, they are pitched in a high hey of critioisra calculated to quicken thought.*

W, S. Henley he 91 found "short and crisp and suggestive," and regarded his essays in Views and Reviews as "models of good taste and sound literary judgment."99

He praised R. H. Hutton high­

ly, particularly for his "fine discrimination", "clarity", his sensitivity to language, and his breadth of view." He spoke of the "trained critical talent"94 of Matthew Arnold and remarked that "In matters purely literary that author’s judgment

is almost as delicate as that of his

master Salnte-Beuve."9S

Among the American critics Asari-

as had a word of commendation for Lowell and his Among My Books, although some of the essays were "too long drawn out."9®

Whipple, Woodherry, and Stedraan were some of the

other names he noted as worth respect. In his discussion of Augustine Birrell, however, Asarias made it clear that, while he has praised many of these men for their critical work, he did not think of them as total critics. Mr. Birrell does not attempt the higher con­ structive criticism. He does not go deeper than the purely literary qualities of an author. He does not seek the central thought that gives mean- , lag to the hook; he is content to Impart to you the flavor and bouquet of its style. Herein Mr.

Birrell follows the method of nearly all modem English criticism, from that of Matthew Arnold down to the estimates of Mr. Walter Pater and Mr. W. E. Henley. That criticism is of the surface. It deals chiefly with style; occas­ ionally it examines method. It tears from the context a specimen of wit or humor, or of polish­ ed construction. What are the chief aims and purport of the book, its underlying idea, its definite place in the literature of the subject, its relative value? - these are questions un­ asked and unanswered by modern English criticism. In consequence the reader of such criticism is in no better position to understand the book or the author.97 It was different with Salnte-Beuve, "that prince of critics. Many of his critical essays were "ideals of 0x111018®." "You are given," Asarias said, "not only a conception of an author’s style and method, but you are initiated into the very mainspring of his action; those traits of charac­ ter, those mental peculiarities, those historical Incidents that colored the author1e views, are all made to bear on the book under review." Since the purpose of more than one essay and lecture of Brother Asarias was intended to make the reader of books something of an amateur critic in his own right, some of that advice he gave can help fill in the outlines we have drawn of his critical theories. Though he strongly encouraged serious reading, declar­ ing that books "are aids only inasmuch as they help our thinking,"1"

he acknowledged that books might be read for

a number of purposes. ture*

There were various levels of litera­

There was a place for Longfellow; there was a place

for Tennyson, and for Milton and Shakespeare.191

He would

distinguish also between matter which the well-educated might read, and that which was suitable for the simple reader for whom everything in print had the force of "the categorical imperative."109

Still reading on any level

should be thoughtful; he decried mere aimless browsing and termed any habitual absorption with popular fiction "intellectual suicide".10®

The reading of worthwhile books,

on the other hand, conferred a double benefit - intellect and character were both developed.104 It was frequently as an educator rather than as a literary critic that he gave such counsel, although he probably would not have separated these roles very sharply. In one of such essays, however, he has set down a very sound and fertile observation:

"philosophy deals with ab4

©tractions;" "poetry is concerned with the concrete."105 Though he calls this "the fundamental distinction between poetry and philosophy,"10® he does not develop the idea to any length.

What implications there are in this idea can

be seen in Gllby* s Poetic Experience. To conclude this section something should be said about his doctrine of the "Spiritual Sense", for Azarias intended it to be important in his theory of criticism. This doctrine forms the main thread of one of his better known books - Phases of Thought and Criticism; furthermore he used the theory in three of his longest critical essays

and made It the central idea in his lecture on Dante to the Concord School of Philosophy. It is not easy to get a clear and exact concept of what he means by the * spiritual sense"; his descriptions of its object and operations have their difficulties. an exposition of it has been left to an appendix.*

So

This

we have felt the freer to do since Azarias decidedly shif­ ted the meaning of "spiritual sense" when he attempted to employ this concept in his critical approach to The Divine Comedy.107 the Imitation of Christ.109 and In Memorlam.109 In these essays "spiritual sense" did not signify an opera­ tion of the soul, but indicated that these three works were to be studied for their spiritual meaning.

To put it an­

other way; the term here implied that the "central concep­ tion" of the three books Is spiritual, i.e. concerned with God, the soul, and the solution of the problem of life.

Os­

tensibly each of these three essays was engaged chiefly with elucidating and interpreting the central concept under dis­ cussion; actually two of Agarias1 critical approaches were very much in evidence - the approach through history and the approach from the "ideal."110 As critical essays**these pieces stand in their own

*0f. Appendix # IS. **For some cormaents on the essay on "The Imitation" of. Appendix 13. His ideas on Dante are noted pp. 87-88 of this dissertation and of Tennyson on pp. 93-93.

right and to comprehend them there Is no need for any ac­ curate understanding of his 11spiritual sense® with which the preceding essay in the same book*^^- particularly con­ cerned Itself*

As pieces of criticism they do throw light

on the works which they are discussing.

They are evidence

of the fact that Azarias was far more capable at a work of concrete criticism than he was at constructing an abstract theory.

His wide reading,^"12 his scholarship, and his cul­

tivated taste were used well in such studies, whereas his eclecticism and dislike of ®schools of philosophy® would tell against his constructing any tight and consistent ab­ stract theory for the whole domain of art and literature. IV Such a statement of his strength and weakness does not imply that there were no good things in his Philosophy of Literatures still its best sections seem to be those which deal with the factors which have influenced litera­ t u r e . Phases of Thought and Criticism, though warmly praised in the Atlantic Monthly.*** was considerably better in its critical than its philosophical essays.

And in his

collected philosophical essays the best study was an his­ torical examination of the influence of Aristotle.*

In his

♦The book Aristotle and the Christian Church was re­ printed in his collected philosophical studies - Essays Phi­ losophical . pp. 15-130. An excellent piece of work on the historical side, It has, however, isolated passages with which a strict philosopher would quarrel; but its main ideas are very sound.

84

222M

and Heading it was his essays on Wordsworth, Tenny­

son, and Browning as well as his shorter critical passages on a number of other individual writers that gave the book value as criticism.

In some ways, certainly, his The De­

velopment of Old English Thought (though the limited range of the literature of that period naturally limited the ex­ ercise of his criticism) shows at what type of criticism his talents were most successful.* This book is accurate, scientific, scholarly; its author was well aware of the source materials for this study and used them competently.

In the literary criticism

made in the book, Azarias showed his originality chiefly in the matter of his taste.

His style while quiet is in­

teresting, and the tone of the whole book has an echo of Bede.

It was one of the first books (first edition, 1879),

If not absolutely the first book, to be published by an

•The preface is clear and worth reading; it outlines the scope of this book on Old English literature and the forces which influenced that literature. ^The Continental Homestead11 is the opening chapter; the beginnings of the Teutonic people are indicated, their soil, climate, racial character, their laws and customs are all surveyed. Next an examination is made of their language, poetry, and phi­ losophy. Azarias then takes up the Celtic influence and has some enlightening remarks to make about its contribution to English culture. After that he treats of Gregory the Great, Augustine and P&ulinus, and the coming and impact of Christianity. The succeeding sections of the work are con­ cerned with Whitby and Cedmon; Canterbury and Theodore, Aldhelm, Cynewulf; Jarrow, York, Bede and Alcwin; Winches­ ter and Alfred; Abingdon and the t-ro Alfrics. After a sur­ rey of tenth century poetry he pointedly summarizes the work in a short concluding section.

85

American on Old English literature.

Still a very respec­

table hand-book on this subject and one of the few books that endeavors to survey the whole field, this study by Brother Azarias was a credit to the age in which it was written and a work of which American scholarship can be proud.* Though he never left a complete work on other litera­ tures or on other periods of English letters, a consider­ able portion of one of his books was taken up in tracing the rough outlines of a history of world literature.

It

reveals the wide extent of his reading, and is one more indication of the way his criticism revolved about histori­ cal backgrounds and about the “ideal8. In a rapid survey of eastern thought Azarias manifes­ ted knowledge not only of old Testament writings but also of such men as Confucius, Peta-Hotep, Zoroaster, Lao-Tsze, and Gautama, to mention only some of the names he refers to on his pages.

It was the ethical contribution of the

East that mattered, for “in the East had originated every great moral t r u t h . I n speaking of the Greeks he made much of Plato and Aristotle and Homer, and gives at least

•The above paragraph is a summary of some remarks made to me by John C. McOaXliard who was kind enough to give his judgment of the work. John 0. McGalliard (author of “Lan­ guage”9 literary Scholarship and of the forthcoming study ?? Medieval Romance and Classical Mythology) lectures on Medieval Literature at the University of Iowa.

36

passing mention to various historians, comedians, philoso­ phers, mathematicians, and lyric poets; it is rather strange, however, that he had so very little to say of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides "Rome," he quite correctly saw, "was a nation of one idea and that idea was Rora©."*^

To Homan literature it­

self he gave little space, for he realised that her genius was expressed in her system of Jurisprudence rather than in her literature which was largely a borrowing from Greece. His discussion of Alexandrianisra was really concerned with the schools of Alexandria.

He had a sympathetic ap­

preciation for Justin Martyr, who had stressed the one­ ness of knowledge, a oneness going beyond the bounds of systems.

He praised the statement of Clement of Alexan­

dria and the Eclectic School as a description of "the true philosophical spirit."*

In his remarks about the Esthers

he pointed out the growth and influence of sacred oratory in the sermons of Chrysostom, the two Gregorys and Basil in the east, and Ambrose in the west.

While short, his

appreciation of Augustine and his Confessions and The City of God wag both pointed and sound. 13*8

♦Clement of Alexandria had said: "By philosophy I do not mean the Stoic, or the Platonic, or the Epicurean, or the Aristotelian; but whatever has been well said in each of these sects, teaching Justice and a science pervaded by piety - this eclectic whole I eall philosophy." (Quoted in Philosophy of Literature. pp. 68-9 from the Stromatum, Lib. I, cap. 7 of Clement.}

87

Although Brother AsaTias never turned his studies of the Middle Ages into any unified and complete work, with the exception of his Aristotle and the Christian Church and hie The Development of Old English Thought, he had a very thorough knowledge of the various aspects of this cultural period*^.®

He was acquainted with the main lines

along which the romances had developed; he comprehended the position and influence of the Schoolmen; he appreciated the period of mysticism and gave understanding praise to the Miracle and Morality Flays. Azarias has written more about Dante than about any other literary figure.

Some Indications of his treatment

of this poet can be noted before going on to the renaissance. In one of his lectures

he had some practical things to

say on the reading of The Divine Comedy. To be sure of a completely sound exegesis of The Divine Comedy, not only the text of the epic but Dante's other writings should be studied.

And he pointed out that the frescoes of such

painters as Giotto, Memmi, Orcagna, Raphael, and Michelan­ gelo would be of much help in coming to a complete under­ standing of the poem.1®^ In seeking for the central idea of the poem Azarias endeavored to follow the advice he had given others*

HIt

is not enough that he ta student of Dantel finds a meaning for each allegorical expression in itself; the meaning must harmonize with the other expressions. . . It must throw

88

additional light upon the sense of the whole allegory."*23* This oentral idea, as he saw it, wae that "true wisdom consists in right-knowing and right-doing.***

As evidence

Azarias offered Dante*s ©pistle to Can Grande della Scala*2^ as well as the text of thepoem itself.

Dante was not only

a scholastic, he was a mystic;*23 the whole course of the spiritual life is traced in hie poem.*23

So The Divine

Comedy was "the story of a soul seeking perfection in unison and harmony with the Church, by the light of Faith, and borne upwards by the supreme law of Love,w*2^

Particularly

does Azarias stress this law of Love in order to bring home to the student how deeply Dante, at the end of his poem, had comprehended the truth that "the law of action shall be the Love that rules the universe.**122

As Milton should be read within the hearing of the deep and solemn tones of an organ, so "Dante should certainly be read within sight of those allegorical pictures that breathe his spirit and are so many interpretations of his poem." (Books and Reading, p. 149.) **Azarias admitted that "other senses are to be found in the poem. In parts it has its political sense; in parts it has its purely moral sense; in others again it has its philosophical sense; but the sense that pervades the whole, determines its meaning and bearing, and makes of it one of the great world-poeme, is the Spiritual Sense, The other senses are employed critically; to find fault, or to sound the note of warning; to praise, approve, or commend; to ex­ pound a theory or explain a difficulty. The Spiritual Sense is used constructively. It has built up the poem into that grand climax of thought and aspiration - among the grandest ever reached by human genius — with which the poet closes." (Phases of Thought and Criticism, p. 180-181.)

89

In tracing the rise of the revival of learning Azari­ as saw its beginning in the eleventh rather than in the fourteenth century; this was not the usual way of putting things in the text-books of his day.

It was not so much

the revival of learning, he thought, which characterised the renaissance of the fourteenth century, as the beginnings of the spirit of rationalism.

In speaking of the writers

of the period Azarias had little to say about Chaucer; it is clear, however, that he had read considerably of his writings and was, moreover, well acquainted with Middle English Literature. Here and there Azarias has dropped phrases which re­ veal his mind about many figures of the renaissance, but Shakespeare is the only Englishman that he discusses at any length.

Shakespeare was great in the eyes of this

critic for his **power of almost infinite suggestiveness,* because in him Azarias *read a sense of power held in reserve,

and most of all, because his writing was on that

ideal level where poetry and philosophy were harmonized.131 In hie more strictly literary criticism, Brother Azarias did not offer a great deal that is new, though he summed up in his $ild and easy way much of the then cur­ rent scholarship about the work of this poet.*^

The son­

nets he looked upon as primarily a revelation of Shakes­ peare*^ own life,^® but declared that this writer meant them to portray more than mere personal history; the whole

9o

sonnet series, Azarias held, #represents the struggle be­ tween the spiritual and the carnal man.*1^ ^

Unlike Dante

and Petrarch, Shakespeare did not rise from human love to the love of God and, as far as this element i® concerned in his sonnets he does not reach the higher levels these two Italians and even his contemporary, Edmund Spenser, reached 135 Brother Azarias has no long discussion of any writer between Shakespeare and the nineteenth century.

About the

writers of that century he has written considerably; suf­ ficient matter can be found, particularly with reference to certain individuals, to bring out clearly some of his views on poetry, the novel, and the essay. This critic would have found himself in sympathy with several aspects of the romantic revival, especially with its opposition to cold rationalism and with its endeavor to establish a bond between man and nature.

Still Azarias

would have demanded that Hthe reason . . . should always remain supreme and always govern*1^3® and not be Hdethroned and merged in the imagination. i37

Hor would he have

stressed communion with nature to the point of romantic reverie; this he thought of as weak sentimentality, a kind of refined sensualism which would demoralize the soul.-*-3® Just as decisively was he opposed to the subjectivism that came in with the romantic movement; he disagreed with a philosophy of literature which aimed at promoting w8ome

view of speculation of the author,8 rather than giving "the reader objective reality***13$ Even more decisive was hie opposition to pessimism, which like Irving Babbitt he saw as one of the off-shoots of romanticism.

Whether

it took the form of "morbid sensitiveness** in "Kubla Khan,** "the night-mares of Poe,*1 Hthe world-pain of Heine and Leopardi,** he would allow it no claim as great art.3*4® Four poets of the nineteenth century did mean a great deal to Brother Azarias - Goethe, Wordsworth, Tenny­ son, and Browning.

Goethe he had set apart as one of his

group of "world-authore"; he was praised with Leibniz and Burke, who were "intellectual giants of their time;*141 Faust was looked upon as the world-poem of his age as Dante*e poem was for the thirteenth century.3-4^

Heverthe-

lese Azarias criticized Faust for the lesson which he read in that poem - "Only through the experiences that come of all manner of self-tndulgence and self-gratification may one reach the broader view of life and attain perfection."3,43 Goethe*s treatment of struggle and salvation was very dif­ ferent from Dante* s; In The Divine Comedy there was repen­ tance for the past, but In Faust there was no repentance, only a forsaking, some regrets, but of Christian sorrow nothing.3*44 Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning towered "above their contemporaries as the highest and best representatives

93

of English poetry. **145

Thus Wordsworth was in especial

way the "poet of nature.*14® He saw her ttwith a spiritual discernment*14*^ and by *lifting Mature up to the sphere of companionship with man, Wordsworth introduced a new ele­ ment into modem poetry.*14®

He invested *the material

universe with a new dignity’ ;14® yet the poet was *n© pan­ theist.*150

“His are Christian feelings,* Azarias wrote,

*and he thinks in a Christian spirit.*15*

In the poet*®

ability to catch the *ideal* in the peasant*s life, this critic likened him to the painter Millet.15® Tennyson in the Judgment of Azarias was "a poet of thought as well as a poet of sentiment.*

This critic

cautioned his audience at a lecture not to be Bbeguiled into the Illusion that upon a first reading you have grasped the whole meaning of the poem C*In Meraoriam"J,*155 to *mistake its exquisite simplicity for poverty of expression.*154 Azarias had observations to make about Tennyson's other poems155 but of *In Memorials* he had made a complete study. This he Judged to be Tennyson’s greatest work, a poem which not in *greatness and fulness of expression, but in kind*, has a claim to rank with Faust and The Divine Comedy. This poem was an *expression of the heart-hunger of a soul grop­ ing after the fulfillment of its desires and aspirations, searching science and art, and challenging heaven and earth to yield up the secret of happiness and contentment,

93

and in the primitive instincts of human nature together with the essential truths of Christian religion - in these alone interpreted in the light of faith - discover­ ing the meaning of life and. answers to the questionings of doubt and materialism."*®®

For Azarias, Tennyson was

without a peer among the poets of his age*3,57 Browning was regarded by this critic as "one of the great forces in English literature"*®® because there was 8much in his poetry that is intensely earnest and sug­ gestive, much that is new, fresh, broadening, and forma­ tive. 8*®®

To read his poetry with understanding called

for "mental alertness;* it called for "double thinking" to get at Browning’s meaning.*®®

The poet was original

rather than obscure; he was employing a new poetic method. Here was the reason why some readers were disappointed with Browning.

They made the mistake in seeking in his

writing something the poet never intended to put there.*®** Though in the main Azarias thought Browning a lover of "beauty and truth, and all art as the expression of beauty and truth,"*®2 he felt there was an underlying streak of Puritanism in Browning* s nature which entered

*Azarias was correct in saying that we cannot right­ ly quarrel with a poet precisely because his rhythm is complex and his sense involved. "If artistic condition under which he constructs his poems are novel and do not fit into our present standards of criticism, it remains for us - it is the part of wise criticism - . . . to en­ large our standards." (Books and Reading, p. 87.)

94

hie art and tended to render it "cold and crotchety and narrow in sentiment."'**®3

Furthermore, while he was will­

ing "to accept Browning’s work at its full value, Ass&rias wanted to enter a protest against the poet* s in­ terpretation of things Catholic, being taken as the cor­ rect measure of Catholicism.

Moreover, though Browning’s

optimism placed him on the side of the angels in the eyes of this critic, he rightly pointed out the Illogicality of the extreme position that Browning took.

So too with

the poet* s creed; it was Christianity, but it was a vague and watery kind of Christianity which was more of a senti­ ment than a positive religious faith. It was both as an educator and as a literary critic that he would speak about fiction; still those remarks were not tinged with the suspicion which had marked the criticism of previous generations.

While he disapproved

of young people reading Sola, Ibsen, and Tolstoi, it was not a narrow and blind disapproval.*

These novelists

might call themselves "social physicians",*®5 but Azarias remained doubtful of their diagnoses as well as their operative technique.

He preferred Cervantes’ way of handl­

ing an ill of society; the evil was removed "without

♦Thus when speaking of Emerson, whom he called a "lover of the beautiful", Azarias wrote, "The deeper reali­ ties of life he overlooked . . . Those seamy sides which Tolstoi and Ibsen place before us, were ignored by Emerson. His intellectual vision was too near-sighted to perceive them." (Ibid., p. 14.)

destroying with it either morality, religion, or the whole­ some customs of society."16®

He was not asking for the

"happy ending" in his stand against the "novel of Pessi­ mism” , It was rather that he could, not understand how men and women could be adequately drawn against a back­ ground of complete agnosticism or positivism; or, if they were so drawn, he could see no value in a book which con­ cludes in a hopeless or railing submission "to the mustbe.”167 He noted this in speaking of the novels of George Eliot.

Though he found much to admire in her work, and

he gave the reasons for his admiration, he also saw much to criticize in "her novels both as works of art and in regard to their moral tendency."16®

In her later work where

she more and more consciously preached the gospel of posi­ tivism, there was a consequent falling off in her art. was, however, only "a partial failure". wrote, "has more force than her science.

It

"Her art," he She could never

make her genius wholly subservient to the full requirements of her speculation."16® Brother Azarias did not see that there had been written any great national novel for England and America such as Bon Quixote was for Spain, or I, Proroessi Sposi for Italy, or Anna Karenina for Russia.

Still he had praise

for Scott, Oiekens, Hawthorne, and Bulwer Lytton*176

96

W# D* Howells he looked upon as one of the Mmost success­ ful” of living novelists.3*73- Meredith* s work, although he would not recommend it fully, he held as likely to en­ dure and looked upon Biana of the Crossways as worth %erious study*’.3'73

It was Thackeray, however, that he

liked probably best of all.

He was the Bgreat modern

master of novelists,m3*7^ who wrote such ^classic proae-^7* and set down such -character studies”, who was -that great lay preacher and critic of manners.u^7^ Outside the field of fiction, with the exception of Newman and Emerson, this critic did not put forward a great deal about any nineteenth century writer of prose. He notes that there are Hsome quickening thoughts in Car­ lyle* s lecture on the poet in his Heroes and Hero Worship,t*3*7** and elsewhere sets down a remark or two about his other works.

He did not, however, think that Carlyle had a mes1*77 *

©age for the world of today. rr

Azarias has some appre­

ciative words for Ruskin; he had done Bgreat service in his day for the cause of beauty and even yet there are lessons we can learn from him, m3*7®

In another context he

writes of ^eccentric Thoreau;”3*79 the adjective Is under­ standable; some of Thoreau*s own contemporaries might have

*Azarias thought that for various reasons a book im­ portant to one age may not be important to another. A new age will have *another set of wants, calling for another set of thoughts.” (Books and Reading. p. 31.)

97

used it.

More erratic is another description of the hermit

of Walden — flThoreau was only a human mole , and his thoughts are of the earth, earthy, Emerson he placed on a much higher plane, was like the Aeolian harp.

°His mind

It was awake to the most deli­

cate impressions, and at every breath of thought it gave 101

out a music all its own,8

The secret of Emerson1s

success was in his not isolating a thought, hut studying it instead in all its relations *as far as his intellec­ tual vision r a n g e s , A z a r i a s realized, however, that there were limits which Emerson's horizon had set to that vision*

He criticized the Concord Philosopher for hie easy

view of e v i l , f o r his Ignoring the supernatural and his viewing religion as of purely human i n s t i t u t i o n . T h i s critic summed up rather well the good to he obtained from a study of Emerson, adding as well the cautions to accom­ pany that study,

♦Azarias had been speaking of the truth in Thoreau* s condemnation of the mere accumulation of material wealth instead of the treasures of the mind and imagination. The Brother then remarked that even this second treasuring was not enough if done simply for its own sake or from a spirit of self-sufficiency. The treasures of the mind and the imagination were to be ultimately understood and used in the light of a spiritual world and a divine reve­ lation. (Of. Phases of Thought and Criticism, pp. 11-12.)

Could one Imbibe his sympathy for Nature without becoming imbued with his pantheism; could one acquire his culture without the dilet­ tante iem that accompanies It; could one make his love for the beautiful in all shapes and under all conditions one's own - looking above all beyond the mere surface into the deeper and more spiritual beauty of things - one would be learning a valuable lesson from Emerson's in­ tellectual life.185 Azarias had met Newman at the Birmingham Oratory in 1377188 an(j again in 1889;187 it was perhaps at this second visit that the Cardinal had "recognized and ap­ proved" 188 the outline Azarias had given ofthis writer,188 This outline, although sound, is too general; for in a brief space Azarias tried to give a rather complete pic­ ture of Newman and his mind.

It is, however, very clear

from this study as well as from other passages that the Brother was in oomplete admiration of the man.

He had

high praise for Newman's style and thought.180

"Though

endowed with the delicate sensibility of the poet, Car­ dinal Newman never permitted sentiment or feeling or in­ clination or confirmed habit to control or divert the severe logic of hie noble reason."181

His mind never

rested till it "struck the central idea of a system."182 Apologia is ranked with the Confessions of Augustine,

193

and the Grammar of Assent was "another chapter contributed to the history of human thought."194

In many ways, making

of course obvious allowances, the character and outlook of the American critic patterned fairly closely the more

gifted English writer.

This is probably why the Chris­

tian Brother was in such close sympathy with so much of the Cardinal's thought.

And most of all did he find him­

self In sympathy with Newman's "religious mind" whiGh had seized upon God a© its fixed and central thought.18^ In speaking of American Catholic writers, Azarias has set down a list of novelists, poets, essayists,188 But most of them are dismissed with a bare mention of their name; others are marked with a phrase or two of com­ ment; there is no lengthy discussion of any of them. Brother Azarias has devoted some appreciative pages to Brownson,197 to Isaac Hecker and his work with The Catho­ lic Worldt188 to Msgr. Corcoran, the learned and extremely capable editor of The American Catholic Quarterly Review,188 Dealing with American Catholic crltioism he had two points to make.

The first was a condemnation of any "log­

rolling" by Catholics in their reviews of Catholic writers, "It is not necessary," he wrote, "to establish two weights and two measures for our Catholic authors,"

200

"Catholic

reviewers must plead guilty to the impeachment of having been in the past too laudatory of inferior literary work."201 Furthermore, he demanded that Catholic reviews be either excellent or be discontinued.

Supporting incompetent

periodicals was merely blocking "the way for something better*"202

"The namby-pamby and the goody-goody have no

place in modern thought,"202 and he could see no reason

why "our journals • . . Lshould! make their pages the re­ ceptacles of school-hoy e8sayb and school—girl romances.*204 His second point was intended to check Catholics from re­ taining an inferiority complex towards their own writers who deserved recognition; they were not to wait until such men had received outside approval before giving them criti­ cal acceptance,

George Miles, Patmore, Aubrey de Vere are

cited by Azarias as instances of writers who were acknow­ ledged fey Catholics only after non-Catholics had discovered and praised them.288 Art wag not an end; Azarias had looked upon it as "a means making for a higher purpose.*208 Man had two op­ posing elements within him; true art by presenting him with the "Ideal* tended "to raise up and spiritualize" the material side of man.207

It was this positive aspect of

literature which the Brother stressed as a critic, for he had "no heart for the mere negations of criticism and the barreness of controversy."208 However good or necessary they might be in their way, these bore no germs of life.808 He felt that the age in which he lived called for such a positive and spiritual approach; back of rationalism and agnosticism of the day Brother Azarias read "a strong religious feeling* that was seeking "life and light."210 Most earnest in his own faith, he endeavored to make such an approach to literature not only that literature itself

101

might be better understood, but that other men might share his "life and light*.

For it was this, the "Ideal", after

which all art and all living were finally patterned and which gave both art and living their ultimate values. The desire to integrate the values of literature in­ to the values of life was behind his work as a critic his reading, his research, his lectures, his books.

There

were weaknesses in hie theory of literature; there were inadequacies in hie critical practice.

Still his know­

ledge of literature kept him off the shoals of narrow and simple apologetic!sm, and the high purpose of ultimate integration, too high for his powers to compass perfectly, kept him far from the shallow and neutral waters of merely academic criticism.

He may not have solved it, but he had

faced the problem every critic must face if he is to re­ gard his own critical work as of any ultimate importance.

MAURIOS FRANCIS EGAN I American diplomats have turned to literature at least by way of histories and memoirs; men of letters have been made consuls, ministers, ambassadors.1

But with Maurice

Francis Egan it was not really a turning towards or a being made; he had always been a diplomat and he had al­ ways loved books.

This was true during his early years

with Freeman* s Journal (1881-1888) and in his years of teaching at Motre Dame (1888-1896).

While he was on the

faculty of the Catholic University (1896-1907) he was not only lecturing in the class-room, writing criticism, an occasional sonnet, and the "Sexton Maglnnis" stories, but he was also exercising the office of "unofficial diplo­ matic adviser" to three p re s i d e n t s . A n d later during the eleven years of his very capable administration of

Egan’s abilities were recognized at the White House. Cleveland and McKinley offered him diplomatic posts. He was of considerable assistance to T. Roosevelt in iron­ ing out difficulties concerning the religious administra­ tion of the Philipoines after the United States had taken over these islands. (Cf. Recollections, pp. 200-204.) In connection with Egan’s being both diplomat and man of let­ ters, it is Interesting to note that it was because of an idea received from Egan that President Roosevelt wrote his essay "The Ancient Irish Sagas". (Recollections, p. 20&) Roosevelt’s essay was published in the Century Magazine, vol. LXXXXX (1907), pp. 337-336.

103

his poet In Denmark he found time for books and letters at least until the outbreak of the first World War.

He

not only kept up on his reading but, In addition to arti­ cles on diplomatic topics, wrote a few short poems, gave the Turnbull Lectures at Johns Hopkins and another series at Harvard, published a novel, The Ivy Hedge, and another book, Everybody*s Saint Francis. Since our special interest lies with Egan the man of letters the diplomatic chapters in his life will be passed by.3 He was not a great writer or a great critic; still, in the main his ideas about literature and criticism were on the right line.

Literature was important and deserving

of serious study for what it was rather than for what it did.

That was his final answer in his Confessiona of jl

Book-Lover.^

It was, in a true sense, his real position

all through life, though he himself may not have realized it.

Indications that it was his position can be found; he

did not, however, state it clearly in hie early writing before 1900.

He was a professor and judged that in his

writing he must show a sense of responsibility towards the student; he felt obliged to take into specific account not only the poetical but also the rhetorical element of the works under consideration, to set down prudential as well as aesthetic judgments.

Moreover, he was not yet clear in

his own mind as to how literature could be Important and

vitally related to life unless it were more or less di­ rectly connected with ethical action. Within the year of his coming to Wotre Dame he pub­ lished his Lectures on English Literature.^

Writing on

“Literature as a Factor in LifeH® he took exception to the Amoldean view that literature is the great highway to the good life for the modern man.

Whatever support a

man might find in culture and art, these were not Christ and hi® Church*

As a Catholic Igan was never in any danger

of placing his ultimate faith or hopes in literature.

He

saw no reason to substitute poetry for philosophy and re­ ligion, or to take his stand on Dover Beach. Just a® sure and even more vigorous was his condemna­ tion of pseudo-estheticism and its fin de sleole enthusi­ asts.*^

Igan remained critically allergic to sun-flowers,

and regarded them as decadent and un-American.

fi

Though

willing to give literature no finality in life a® end or means, still he was far from any tendency to regard art and letters as mere amusement, as the cultured way of avoiding boredom.

In all this early writing he repeatedly spoke of

the importance of literature, but his touch was not as sure when he described the reasons for that importance. Thus he wrote of literature as a “factor in life11 be­ cause of the supoorting power of motives and ideals which literature sowed in the readers mind.

Under such influ­

ence men who had read wisely and well were not satisfied to walk a drab and mediocre way in life.®

These dynamic

ideals had an especial value for a time of crisis when immediate action was demanded* called for sound motivation.

Such action to be sound Time would be lacking for

lengthy deliberation but the pressure of crisis would bring forth sound motives if their seeds had been sown in the mind by good reading. Egan, however, did not seem satisfied with this de­ fense of literature*

In his next important critical book,

studies in Literature.3*® he made another approach to the problem.

After a plea for the study of English as litera­

ture and not just as a text for philological investigation * or philosophical discussion and evaluation, he tried again to account for the importance of literature in its own right.^

“All art,*1 he wrote, “must have an object, and

this object will be, except where the art is a mere copy of things that seem to have no soul, either God or Satan, Christ or Pan.“^ against Him.

Literature “will always be for God or

And the greatest literature is called divine,

*He was willing to acknowledge the importance of philology and philosophy not only as disciplines in their own right but also as valuable aids in approaching litera­ ture. But literature was something more than philology and philosophy and for that something it deserved serious study; it had the right, so to speak, to be studied as literature.

106

because it is with Hira."1® life.

Literature, then, reflected

As life must be turned to God, so must its reflec­

tion.14 tion.

Great literature was idealistic, full of aspira­ It not only expressed life but transmuted it.

Art

was man groping upward to ideals, towards God and immor­ tality.

To back up his analysis Egan endeavored to show

this idealism at work In all great authors; he discerned streaks of it even in the work of writers like Swinburne and Zola.15 Egan now began to put more emphasis on the contem­ plative aspects of art.

Literature would have permanent

value If it were written *in the presence of God and one's soul to bear witness to the truth.**1® He understood that literature had its value, as life and man himself have their value, from its relation to God.

For all that, Egan

still tended to explain this relation mainly in terms of ethical action; he built his real line of defense by con­ necting literature with good doing.

Literature was ae-

pirational and idealistic;17* literature was what man was and man waswhat his literaturewas in the present and what it had been in the past.1®

Egan was not yet to go

all the way in bringing out the contemplative aspects of art and defending it on that basis.

•Of. Appendix # 15.

107

Various essays^® written during his first years at the Catholic University showed him still working to ar­ rive at an exact definition of literature. essay was devoted to this subject.^®

One complete

Here he set it down

that *literature is the expression in writing of thought, experience, observation, emotion, mood, knowledge person­ ally expressed.1*3^

Such a description, a mere working

definition, he admitted had little practical value.

He

was doubtful in fact if any definition or description was broad enough to include all literature; for so closely was it connected with life that it could not be defined in terms narrower than life itself.^ Such a definition reveals nothing of his reasons for holding literature of high importance.

Here and there in

this and other essays written about this time h© repeated some of his previous statements on this subject.

Two pas­

sages throw some light on the direction of his thought. The first is negative; he was sure what literature was not, for what, in its own right, it was not important. Literature is not, as Mr. Louis Stevenson once defined it, a mere fill© de joie. to be enjoyed and oast aside, — a ballade for the ears of the banqueting prince, a precious rondeau for the languid lady in the balcony; literature is not, as Gardinal Newman implies, only the person­ al use of language; it is not as Mr. Matthew Arnold would have us believe the ethics of the philosophy of life; it is not, as Mr. Swinburne insists, at its culmination only imagination and harmony.23

108

Xa another place speaking of the attitude of some scien­ tists who scorn literature as unscientific, Egan indicated that both science and literature have their distinct do­ mains, that literature has its ends and values as well as science. There ©an he no conflict between litera­ ture and science* There could he no conquering of one by the other, nor driving of one by the other out of its proper domain, unless the long­ ing to draw nearer the immortal, the love of harmony* the interest in other lives, the desire for the ideal, the yearning for a broader and a better life were taken from our existence here; for literature, the production.of life, answer® to the burning needs of life.24 Heither passage indicates decisively that Sgan was setting the value of literature on a practical level or that he was not*

nevertheless in the same collection of essays

sufficient remarks can be found to establish the fact that he himself was coming to esteem literature for its nonpractical values; he would, however, continue to set up some practical ends as a concession to those reader© who felt safer behind such defenses. Thus the imagination was to be developed by means of great literature; new beauty and emotions were given to the old commonplace things and the most ordinary object took on a suggestive power.^®

wThe memory becomes a

precious collection of dynamic associations.1,26

HTo store

vital impressions and to so employ the© that they may add to the joy of life is not the exclusive birthright of the

109

poet;#2^ this was something that belonged to every intel­ ligent and sympathetic reader of literature. In several places Egan had pointed out the necessity of the development of good taste.

When he gave his reason

why it was a necessity, it became clear not only what he meant by taste but also why he valued art and literature, Good taste was necessary not in order to furnish the es­ thete with a sympathetic audience, nor to develop an inbred and self-satisfied aristocracy of culture;* not even, as far as primary reasons went, because “good taste is one of the surest tonics for moral thinking,"28

Good

taste was worthwhile and important in art and literature, because by it and through them the reader or the beholder could come to see and contemplate "that beauty which God gives us on earth as a help to the knowledge of Him,"28 Egan had arrived at a concrete statement of his principle; art was important not for what it did but for what it was. All this came out in many pages of his last book on literature - Confessions of a Book-Lover. Books were "an

*Certain passages in his Recollections of a Happy Life plus his reiterated demands for good taste might lead to some suspicion that he was calling for mere external good fora in life and letters. Good form he appreciated, but only because of what it stood for. His religion, his ap­ preciation of art, of man, and of life were much too deep for him to have ever been satisfied with such a shallow view of things. We shall merely refer to his judgment of the phrase ‘‘belles-lettres'*, "the phrase •belles-lettres' is a delusion and a snare; it never meant anything, except in aristocratic salons." (Studies in Literature, p. 48.)

110

30 unfailing source of pleasure and even of joy.H

Memoirs

and diaries mad© him very conscious that "Life 1& worth living."3*

Hovels had the power of *taking me out of

myself ," he wrote, "of enlightening me as to my own faults and peculiarities, not by preaching hut by example, and of raising me to a higher plane of toleration and gaiety of heart*"33

And as for poetry - "I have never

found any poet excepting King David whom I liked because he taught me anything*"33

It was not for its lessons that

he read poetry but for the visions he found there - "glori­ ous visions of truth at a white heat."34

Egan read books

because he enjoyed literature.* In spite of his very genuine appreciation of books, such of Egan* s critical writing cannot be taken seriously. It Is not that it was stupid or wrong; it was often too light to be worth serious study.

Hot a few of the arti­

cles appearing under his name In dozens of Important and unimportant periodicals were mere chats about books*

""Enjoyment" is still linked with unfortunate con­ notations* "Grandma called it carnal;" some of her children think of it as smacking of Saturday Evening Poet mentality, as unscientific and unrealistic,as betraying the petty bourgeois spirit. Actually every human faculty when it finds its proper object is satisfied and tends to produce a state of enjoyment, and the more specifically human the faculty the more human the enjoyment. The man who reads and finds truth and wisdom and beauty in the book, naturally and very truly enjoys that book. Cultural history sometimes spoils good words.

Ill

Some of them have hardly a critical remark to interrupt their expositions! flow.

If the American Catholic Quar­

terly Review could say that one of his better (but by no means best) books was a series of "pleasant chats rather than profound studies,"®® it was not surprising that the Hat Ion condemned the less able and far more elementary Introduction to English Literature with, "It does not rise to a level where serious criticism can touch it."®® Egan had gotten printer*s ink into his veins at an early age and he bled very easily; he simply wrote too much to maintain a high average of excellence.*

Mr* Egan

was a very practical man and knew that if a writer was to be a "business success" he had to get his writing into

At least he was not afraid of work. To cite two passages fro® his Recollections. "During the period of ray associate editorship of theHew York Freeman1s Journal* I kept up almost ceaseless literary work. I wrote book reviews for the Hew York Times, sometimes for the North American Review* conducted for a year or two The Bulletin in Harper1s Magazine: occasionally at the request of Mr. Dana, I wrote for the Sun." (Reoollections. p. 131.) "I had produced during my residence there each week un­ failingly from ten to fifteen thousand words, which in­ cluded a number of books now entirely out of print and dimly remembered." (Ibid.. p. 157.) Mr. Dana of the 8un might have thought that Mr. Egan and Mr. Howells were the only Americans with a good English style; but it took more than style to write consistently good criticism.

113

print - and often.*

He

was continually dashing off his

manuscripts and seeing that they went just as speedily to the printers.

And his rang# of writing was wide Indeed!

There are short stories and boohs of poetry; there are novels, appreciative biography, political evaluations, criticism; there are articles on nearly every conceivable subject - cooking, manners, geography, diplomacy; there is, if we include his work as an editor and translator, a drama staged by Augustin Paly, a handbook on science, a volume of spiritual meditations, and encyclopedias; if prefaces are to be considered the limits must be pushed out to bring in Plato and Aristotle. Egan wrote, it would appear, almost continuously and on a multiplicity of subjects (actually by far the great­ est portion of his writing was concerned directly or in­ directly with literature); nevertheless he had other motives than that of making a "business success" of writ­ ing.

It is not necessary to look upon his work only as a

prolonged effort to earn money and to avoid life in a *Kre. Huneker had asked Mr. Egan to keep a pro-paren­ tal eye over dames when he came to Mew York. Egan besides endeavoring to encourage dim Huneker in his religious duties (the two had been neighbors in Philadelphia and quite good friends) tried to steer him from music into the ways of literature for Which Egan realised Huneker had a real criti­ cal talent. "It seemed to me," wrote Egan, "that he was certain to succeed, although he had no business capacity whatever - a capacity more necessary then for success in the career of writing for the public than genius." (Recol­ lections. pp. 133—134.)

113

garret,

Catholic writing in hie time was all too likely

to be either rhetorical apologetics, anemic fiction, or Irish history.

Mr. Bgan wished **to create a taste for a

broader kind of literature**^ and to promote Oathollc li­ terary expression In the fields of criticism, fiction and poetry when such expression was notably lacking. Still the w r y amount of his output was against his doing excellent work.

He must hare realized that, while he

had talent, time was required if that talent was to func­ tion at a high level.

Hot taking that time the quality of

his work, even of his work in criticism, is very uneven. But looked at from another point of view his critical work is fairly consistent.

Hi© principles do not shift about a

great deal and for the most part his principles are not un­ sound.

When he applied them carefully a good piece of

criticism was the outcome. In defining his critical position it is easy to say what he was not.

He was not an impressionist, nor was he

a rigid ethical critic although he posted warning signs with reference to certain authors and their works. was he in any narrow sense an ideological critic.

Neither Finally,

although he spoke of the value for the critic of the his­ torical approach and the comparative method, in his actual work he paid little heed to the former.

And the comparative

method, when he did employ it, was used mainly with refer­

114

ence tp French literaturej even here Egan worked with a light touch.

Thomas Meehan who knew Egan well speaks of

hi© as an »interpretative critic**.38

The phrase if the

whole body of Egan1® work is considered is ^ust and accur­ ate « Egan held that the beauty and the meaning of litera­ ture was often hidden to most men because they had not be en educated to discover it.

**In our depths we have a

tradition that, while reading and writing do not come by nature, the power of perceiving the beauty of works which God takes thousands of years to formulate requires neither 39 systematic education or cultivation.® And the same happy innocence befuddled many a person in his approach to litera­ ture. There is a feeling among us Americans that every man who votes is able to understand any­ thing symbolized by English words. To read, with us, means to understand. To admit that anything in English letters is beyond our capacity is unAmerican and un-English. If the careless tyro, fed on newspapers, finds Newman or Tennyson or Browning incomprehensible, it is the writer who is obsGurei In China they are more civilized than this.40 Egan*s criticism, then, turned on the work itself and on the worker.

If the work of art itself was the thing to

be considered in criticism, the poet was to be held im­ portant precisely because he was a poet.

Chaucer was

most of all a teller of tales and a poet, not a polemist, an apologist, a reformer, a crusader, or an agnostic.4^*

115

Nor did Egan believe in that reverence for Shakespeare which tries to make him a **philosopher, a historian, a sociologist, a conscious psychologist, a doctor or laws in everything but title, a politician, a hater of the exist­ ing form of government, a conspirator against it in words, a devout and learned theologian, a reformer, an accom­ plished courtier, and a hundred other things; when, after all, he was something at least as great as all these fin© 42 attributes of man, - a poet,11 Her did this critic pass judgments on a writers work in terms of his moral life.

It was ttin his work and only

in his work Cthatl we should seek him.l|4s As for trying t© settle the questions of a writer1® personal relations with God, Egan thought it as useless and often as malodor­ ous as Hthe cooking of stale cabbage over farthing can­ dles. #44

He pointed out, however, quoting with approval

the words of Coventry Patmore, that **in the very greatest poets, the standard of human law has been absolute sanctity. . , . And every poet - the natural faculties of the poet being pre-suppGsed ~ will be great in proportion to the strictness with which, in his moral ideal he follows the counsels of perfection.*145

“This", Egan continued, «is

the standard by which the poet must be judged. . . But we logically look into the work of a poet, to form an ultimate opinion, not Into his life, in whioh no man, -

116

not even a judge and jury, with crowds of expert witnesses can give the final verdict*"46 Finally, he did not employ theological norms to ar­ rive at a purely artistic judgment and thus confuse art with theology*

Ugan was a very firm and devoted Catholic;

no reader of his criticism could remain doubtful about that writer*s very strong beliefs*

As a critic he touched

sympathetically upon a number of writers great and small because they were Catholics*

It is quite true, moreover,

that prudential judgments accompanied much of his criti­ cism, and that in such judgments his faith was normative. But in his artistic criticism he did not reward writers merely for their correctness in theology.

Kgan was scep­

tical of "the thesis that either the Oathollc Church or the Protestant opinion makes or unmakes a poet, or that either or any other religion 1gives birth to a poet*11147 In another place he wrote, "It would be absurd to claim that Calderon was a poet because he was a Catholic."48* Because of their actual sine of partisanship or at least their tendency to dally with such temptation, Sgan had little sympathy with scholars' efforts to decide an au­ thor* s religion, especially Shakespeare* s religion. is in love with truth and beauty.

"He

Writers like Father

♦Still he was to write, "It is certain that Dante and he CCalderon] would never have been great poets had they not been Catholics." (Ghost in Hamlet, p. 174.)

117

Bowden, Mr* Simpson, and certainly most men who make Shakes­ peare^ genius depend on his religion seem unwilling to leave much to God.8^®* Maurice Francis Egan was really more of a book-lover than a book-crittc.

Books were friends.

Their good qual­

ities were taken for granted and an endeavor was made to overlook and to avoid being influenced by their defects* When the bad outweighed the good, when they were dull bores or mere brutes, there wag no sense in striking up a friend­ ship.

Books like friends did not always have to be fudged

and sentence pronounced upon them every time their name was mentioned.^

Nor was there any necessity for always

either recommending them or preaching against them.

wBe­

sides it is too dangerous,1* he thought, Mto recommend unreservedly or to condemn unreservedly**

As a critic

Egan was at his best in introducing his friends to other people and helping those friends to be tinderstood for what their true worth really was.

♦Of. Appendix # 16* ♦♦Be goes on half good humoredly and half seriously to excuse himself altogether. “The teachers of literature have undertaken the recommendation of books for the young; there are schools of critics who spend their time in ap­ proving of them for the old; and the MIndex* at Rome as­ sume® the difficult task of disapproval and condemnation. That lets me out, I feel.* {Confessions of a Book—Lover, p. 156.) ~

118

II Perhaps because the stage so well combined seeing and doing, the contemplative and the practical, it pos­ sessed the attmotion for him which it did,

Egan had al­

ways shown a keen interest in the theater, an interest which he never lost for all his devotion to literature and diplomacy. The theater, he wrote, "was an Integral part of every child*s education in our neighborhood, There was always talk at home about John Drew, Edwin For­ rest, and Macready.®^

When Maurice Egan went to New York

he became a close friend of Augustin Daly#

It was for

Daly that Egan translated Frangois Ooppee*s "Le Pater"; this was named "The Prayer* and performed by Daly*s com­ pany.^

ggan*s interest in the stage remained to the end;

his last written remarks on art have to do with Shaw and Cteesar and Gleopatra.5^ About the stage of his own day Egan wrote very little criticism.®^

Modern work might have dramatic qualities

of action, but for him it was lacking in literary qualities. Whatever their effectiveness in the theater he judged that most contemporary productions were not dramatic literature;*

♦Egan thought that "the theatre, under present manage­ ment which is largely commercial, is not really friendly to the highest art.* (Recollections. p. 365.) Still in minor ways there was fine art. He willingly acknowledged "that in the United States we had the best character (cont'd)

119

not the adjeGtive but the noun disqualified them.

Egan

has written some criticism concerning poetic dramas of nineteenth century Englishmen,5® the dramatic work of Calderon,57 and the work of Shakespeare.

His most inter­

esting work is don© in connection with Hamlet.58 was published in book form in 1906

When it

it was lost in the

wake of Bradley* s Shakespearean Tragedy which came out two years previously.

Still Egan*s critieis® of Hamlet had

for its own day independent and important suggestions to make; even now some of these suggestions are decidedly not without value. There is little need to delay over his remarks on the plays of Browning, Shelley, Swinburne, Tennyson, and A. Defers.

For all their poetry and grace such writings

were closet-dramas, even though their authors may have in­ tended, as Tennyson did intend,58 the production for the stage.

Egan*s discussion of DeVere*s St. Thomas of Oanter-

*{Cont*d from page 118) actors in the world. I have not yet seen any great American actor; but for stage man* agement in the best of our theatres, for the selection of types, for the fine art of acting what is called character parts, there are no better players in the world today vc. 1934), not even excepting even those of the Oomedie Frangaise or of the Moscow Art Theatre, than the American." (Recollect1ons. pp. 364*65.) ♦♦Most of the essays in the book, The Ghost in Hamlet. had been previously published as articles in The Catholic University Bulletin and The Catholic World. Thus they were written before Bradley* s work appeared.

bury and Backet has its interest today in the light of T. 8* Eliot*s work.

Tennyson*& play missed because in

great tragedy higher qualities are needed than pictures­ queness, grace, and delicacy. tic force.

It lacked passion and drama­

And as for Tennyson*s seeking a romantic solu­

tion to this problem, his creation of a love-interest and the Rosamond episode, Egan had only critical contempt. Ho excuse can be offered for Tennyson*a falsification of the character of a Becket not even an excuse that he needed dramatic color, He had a noble figure and a sublime time, and he belittled them both, because he would not understand them.®8 BeVere, a Catholic, came off much better. had intended a closet drama.

First of all he

Again in contrast to Tenny­

son hie line® have color and force; there is elevation of thought and there is asense of history. its virtues as poetry,

St. Thomas

could never succeed on

the stage.

During the last third of the

Tet in spite of

was nota drama, forit

nineteenth century a

great many Continental plays had been adapted for the American stage.®8

It was Egan*s suggestion that American

playwrights might do well in going to Spanish sources, es­ pecially to hope de Vega and Calderon,®5 instead of un­ earthing forgotten French comedies*®^

The dramatic work

work of these two men Egan looked upon as romantic in

131

theme and democratic in presentation."*

Lope de Vega oould

boast that he gave the people what they paid for (i. e. genuine entertainment). And Calderon in spite of his mathematical precision and even artificial form, in spite of being hemmed in by rules stricter than those faced by Corneille and Racine, could force his way through to the common people. Calderon especially was placed on a high pedestal. Egan thought of him as bringing to perfection the dramatic work of his predecessor.

His disciplined hand, his purity,

his faith gave his work strength.

In back of Egan* s ad­

miration of Calderon was the same reason that Frederick Schlegel had given, "In this great and divine master the enigma of life is not only expressed but solved."®®

And

so he reverenced this Spanish writer as "the greatest

♦Egan tended to connect romanticism with democracy, and this in 1900 (of. The Ghost in Hamlet. pp. 398, 399, 300, 303, 304, 307). But his connection is not that of Bernard Smith in his Forces in American Criticism nor even that of Van Wyok Brooks (e.g. The Opinions of Oliver Allston. footnote pp. 170-71). Egan uses the words "romanticism" and "democracy" in several senses, some of which the two critics mentioned above would not emphasize even if they would allow them. "Romanticism" for Egan sometimes meant merely the picturesque, or again, any opposition to a rigid pseudo-classicism. "Democratic" literature meant writing that appealed to, or interested, or entertained the populace. It did not mean proletarian literature, much of which Egan would have denied being literature at all, whatever its other qualities. It is interesting, however, that he did connect these two words. It might be added in connection with pro­ letarian literature, that Egan’s novel The Ivy Hedge (1914) is really a plea for justice for the worker. That merit it has, for all its little merit as literature.

122

draraatio poet of Spain, twhol lacks only the humor of Shakespeare to have been the greatest dramatic poet of the world."67 For all that reverence and admiration, Egan had no praise for the splendid hut empty spectacles which Calderon as director of the court theater had been forced to prepare. These were his weakest and most unsatisfactory productions,®® the work rather of the hard pressed 8court mechanic8 than of the then leading dramatist of Spain,

Calderon, so Egan

judged, was unwittingly opening the way to dramatic deca­ dence; these performances at Buen Retire were as ruinous to the Intellectual enjoyment of the drama as were the frivolity and licentiousness of English Restoration

comedy.

To turn to Egan#s studies of Hamlet. T. S. Eliot would have acknowledged, it appears to me, that Egan was one of those 8few critics8 who have 8admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary.8^® tainly an artistic

Egan did not regard the play as 8cer­ f a i l u r e , 8?^

but he did regard it as the

important thing, and he did seek the solution of Hamlet the Dane in Hamlet the play. Nineteenth century criticism was strongly influenced by the Coleridgean interpretation of Hamlet the man, 8liv­ ing in meditation, . . * continually resolving to do, yet doing nothing but resolve.8^®

This influence of Coleridge

123

meant not only that the leading critics of the nineteenth century would continue, with some modification, so to in­ terpret the man Hamlet,76 but this Influence also meant that critics would interpret only the man and neglect the play.

If such oritics did not declare with Lamb #how much

Hamlet is made another thing by being acted, **74 or if they did not walk home with the Danish prince Htalking to him as if he was a real figure,"^ as Anatole France pre­ tended to do, critics did minimize the play by attempting to solve it entirely in terms of Hamlet the Dane. As Egan saw it, when he was writing these essays about 1900, there were three reasons for the difficulties about Hamlet,

Insufficient attention had been paid to

the text and too much attention had been given to what critics said about the text; there was a rather general neglect of literature contemporary with Shakespeare; fin­ ally, there was the tendency to guess at Shakespeare*s meaning from a purely modern point of view.76

In his

own approach Egan made use of the first and last of these reasons;arested his arguments for his interpretation on the text of the play and on the backgrounds of the audi­ ence that witnessed the performance. The important thing to be kept in mind about Shakes77 peare*s plays, Egan maintained, was that they were plays.

124

Certainly their meaning suffered when these dramas were read as if they were intended merely to he read.?®

f0

the Elizabethan audience Hamlet had been above all a play; it was not "an enigma to be thought about, written about, discussed as a problem in philosophy."

If this

drama had not been at least fairly comprehensible to Shakespeare* s audience they would have wanted nothing of it. S°

The earl who loved music and bear-baiting did not Hamlet with a zest for solving problems about the

real meaning of the play.8^ According to Egan, then, Shakespeare did not make a mistake when he adopted the dramatic form for his great thoughts about Hamlet; it was not only great litera­ ture, but it was a successful play.

The drama does not

become logical, however, unless it is remembered that it was written for the stage and made actual by the "business” of the theater.®** This theatrical business makes clear and coherent what had seemed inconsistent, and therefore deep and even occult to isolated scholars.®®

The stage

directions for Shakespeare* s Company, if they were known, would clear up all the serious difficulties of this play. Because he tries to fill in this business, the actor usually gives a clearer picture than the student.

An

actor may use "the play as if his own personality were the first thought and the meaning of the author the

125

second#®® (Egan would allow that much to Charles Lamb* s contention); still in general the actor realizes, what the critic does not always seem to know, that “no accom­ plished playwright wants to obscure the processes or ob­ jects of his drama and to convert an acting play into an elusive

s t u d y . #84

In Egan* s judgment #considered as a play, treated as Intelligent actors who desire simply to bring out its meaning would treat it, ’Hamlet* ceases to be a puzzle.#®® Still sheer insight on the part of the actor, Egan went on to say, could not do everything.

Only if “the his­

torical sense is cultivated in the theatres’* could any­ thing like complete light be thrown on all the passages of the drama.®®

In his own solutions, then, of the mean­

ing of the play, of Hamlet’s delay, and of the two sides of Hamlet* s character, Egan endeavored to base his argu­ ments on what the text would have meant to the Elizabethan mind.

Briefly, the play depicted the struggle of a man

who, sickened by doubts and uncertainties, has fallen in­ to a subjective lethargy; from this lethargy he can rise only to the level of passion for a private and personal revenge.

Hamlet is the story of a man who is finally des­

troyed because he can be neither base nor truly great. Thus the Ghost was looked upon as no empty unreality or mere stock figure,®^ but as the key to a sound inter-

136

pretation of the play and of the man Hamlet.22 Hamlet*s plain duty, in the tragedy, is to obey the command of his father*s spirit. The Elizabethans saw it this way. It was clear, ac­ cording to their ethics, that Hamlet’s struggle was a struggle against duty, not a virtuous doubt as to whether it was right for him to des­ troy CClaudiuej. . Claudius had obtained the throne by murder and hence was not legally king at all!

in striking down the king "Glau-

dius had struck down religion, truth, loyalty, the very essence and flower of law and order."®®

So when the Ghost

appeared bearing the royal arms, he was appearing not so much as Hamlet’s father as the former king of Denmark. The text too, Egan thought, bore out the fact that he came rather to save and avenge Denmark than to seek re­ venge for his private

person.®^

The Elizabethan audience

would have caught this, for the sacredness of kings as representing and standing for the state was a concept they knew well.92 The action now lay with Hamlet but his will had been rendered weak by "the philosophic doubt of Wittenberg,"92 too weak for deeds that are simple yet great.

In spite

of the warning, "taint not thy mind," Hamlet was excited to personal anger not to practice.

But even on this level

he could not act. He has fixed his thoughts on the mere kill­ ing of Claudius, and a mind so over-scrupulous, so delicate as his, shrinks, after all is said, from murder. . . He refuses to grasp the high

127

meaning of M s mission. He is not great enough, faithful enough, simple enough to toe Denmark saving Denmark.®4 Continuing with his theory Egan judged that: Passion [the desire for personal revengeJ has made him tardy; he has doutoted and raved, and longed to taste the sweetness of satiated hatred, yet never dared to strike. It is passion or doubt, or doutot or passion, - whichever is uppermost, - that has frozen action. He has killed CPoloniusl, and he wills to kill; he is not the Prince seeking justice for a crime against the nation, tout a mere individual not even justifying the means toy the end; he knows the end is toad.®** For Hamlet the appearance of his father*s spirit had only a personal significance.

Egan*s final judgment was that

Hamlet was not notole and great enough to interpret the message of his father.®® If he would toe royal, if he would be grand­ ly notole, if he could conceive for an instant what hie destiny should toe, if he could soar above the Ego, if his doutot did not stand in the way of his desiring real happiness and perfection, he would not work the ruin of all about him. . . Doubt has blinded him; he cannot seebeyond his small subjective world; his mind is a kingdom in which he is a mere subject. He cannot toe great and he cannot toe base. He cannot accept the high and he will not unreservedly accept the low. Heaven dazzles him and hell affrights him, and he is too fine to be content with earth.®7 Whatever the value of £gan*s criticism it is certain he was not just following the great nineteenth century tradition of Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, with its emphasis on Hamlet the man, whether that man was such a one as Turck or as Bowden interpreted him to toe.

Egan*s emphasis

X28

on the play Hamlet was definitely twentieth century criti­ cism.

His stress on Shakespeare1s toeing first and fore­

most a dramatist recalls something of Stoll’s approach to Shakespeare.

Egan’s declaration that the play was not an

enigma for Elizabethans and that the theatrical business made it clear were points which Quiller-Oouch and CluttonBrock were later to stress in their critical interpreta­ tions of the play.

If w© grant that Hamlet the man was

more than tinged with scepticism (and a good case can toe made) then it may not be necessary to go all the way with Hotoertson in seeing the character Hamlet as an un­ successful stratification of a barbarian and a subtle Elizabethan.

Egan’s analysis of a mind ^sicklied*1 over

with doubt, and a will in consequence which could rise quickly to the level of passion but could rise no higher, can explain not a little of Hamlet’s two-sided nature. Egan’s principles were sound - go to the play re­ membering it is a play; interpret it in the light of the text, of literature contemporary with Shakespeare, and in the light of the Elizabethan audience.

His solutions of

the various problems concerning Hamlet were, as far as the general trend of previous criticism is in question, quite strongly in the right direction; viewed in them­ selves, however, his solutions are probably more question­ able.

They were ultimately based on the theory that the

129

Ghosts command was royal rather than personal and pater­ nal; it wag an invitation to do justiee not an incitation to revenge.

Arguments can be offered for this very in­

dependent and quite interesting interpretation; still it does not seem to fit in well with the atmosphere and some of the details of the drama.

This theory unless it be

strengthened by further reasoning and research seems too narrow and too weak to support the meaning of the whole play. Ill Egan's criticism of the novel is disappointing; little of it is worth saving - perhaps the essay on Irish novels,®^ the study “Hew Handbooks of Philosophy®,§9 his article on Henry J a m e s , a n d the chapter "Certain Novel­ ists® in Confessions of a Book-Lover. is not great criticism.

This remnant

If it is termed good criticism

it is not so much beoause it is remarkably good work; rather, it is distinguished from criticism which is no­ tably mediocre or very definitely bad.

These four pieces

are sound but they show no significant critical insight except, it may be, in an isolated statement here and there. If there is anything remarkable about Egan1s criticism of the novel it is his ability to read and write so much in the midst of editorial or professorial duties; about hig thought there is nothing remarkable at all.

130

It but increases one’s feeling of irritation to real­ ize that Mr* Egan might well have written good criticism if he had given himself time and forced himself to think. His reading was wide and in many ways his taste wag wellformed*

He was well aware of the importance of the novel,

regarding it as the characteristic nliterary expression of our time,1*1^

and as that part of our modem literature

whioh was serious and significant.1®*5 He was acquainted with work being done by French critics and recommended that Americans learn from a man like Brunetiere to ap­ proach their work seriously.104

There was scholastic

philosophy and Catholic theology to which he might have turned; these could have taken his work out of the shal­ lows and given it a much needed depth.

Even the Marxist

critic could not have found an easy reason for Egan’s failure by pointing out his unawareness of social problems. Though Egan may not perhaps have been as sensitive about these problems as might be wished, yet he was aware of them and did want to do something about them in fiction as far back as 1914.105*

Egan was opposed to radical socialistic solutions of the problem, but he did seek justice for the worker. Even la The Bisappearance of John Longworthy (Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1890^7 a*6 least some few indications of this same awareness can be found. He never forgot that his father had once declared that if young Maurice wanted a crest for his note paper (a step-aunt with memories of French nobility was insisting on a coat-of-arms) that crest should be the words *1 hammer.M Egan’s father said that he himself had earned his first money by making nails. (Recollections. P. 19.)

131

In spite of these influences and possibilities he was not a good critic of the novel.

His facile expression

and his wide reading were used to turn out chatty little pieces expositionally padded with extracts from the book under consideration and dimly illustrated by references to other books and other authors.

His taste too often

concerned Itself with mere surfaces.

It was not energeti­

cally exerted and forced to give a reasoned judgment for its preferences; it was allowed to grow comfortable and fixed. Whatever his lectures may have been in the class­ room, his books and articles do not force the belief that he was taking the novel as a *teacher0 and a *factor in life* too seriously, at least as far as mature men and women were concerned.

Much of his writing was apparently

addressed to the young reader.

There is little to show,

moreover, that he devoted 8great attention to the develop103

ment and scientific causes of the novel,8

or that,

save in a vague and general way, he based his criterion on 8some fixed standard of philosophy, morality, and art.**107 There were no deep or lengthy studies in which Mliter­ ary manifes tat ions8 were considered not only flfrom the point of view of art, but from the point of view of phi­ losophy. 8108

Some excuse can be offered for his not

132

bracing his criticism with scholastic metaphysics.

Egan

had little training in philosophy,^*^ and neo—scholasti­ cism was not yet making Itself felt as a critical force when he was doing most of his work with the novel. To Scholastic philosophy he paid a decent but distant reverence.

And while he did not go to it for mere names

with which to confront an adversary, as some have done, neither did he use it as a source for ideas in the light of which he might discuss the novel critically. He might have employed, however, in a more vital way Catholic culture and Catholic theology, using them as a background for his work.

Egan was conscious of their

value; the general tone of certain essays as well as phrases scattered through most of his writing make this evident.

It is quite clear too that while he was sure in art was distinct from religion, he was very sure it was not separated from it.^*^

But he did not bring Catholic

culture to bear upon his work forcefully and positively; Instead he employed it rather negatively and even primly. A good deal of his judgment about books was moral and prudential; that he made such criticisms is not our com­ plaint.

The passing of such judgments is one way, of

course not the only way, a Catholic critic can bring Catholic principles to bear upon his work.

Our complaint

is that Egan’s prudential judgments were not deep.

They

133

have the sound of olloheas they gave no impression of solidity even when they were true. Better practice might have been looked for from Mr. Egan.

He himself had known better when he was writing

how all art reflects man. The Gothic cathedral is the reflection of centuries when literature spoke slightly, and yet it tells the same tale as literature. It reflects man; his hope® - above all, his hopes - his fears, his temptations, the anxi­ eties of his daily life. There are strange domestic imps and elves in the dark corners of its stalls, and from its roof - as from the roof of Notre Dame of Paris - hideous chimeras scowl and snarl. The motions of the senses are not omitted; they are depicted rude and naked. But the spires point to God. . .^13 There was no need then for a mildly scandalized tone, when in a novel glimpses were caught of misshapen limbs or twisted and leering faces.

Egan might have been expected

to regard the whole work of literature and to judge its parts in relation to the design and purpose of that whole. He ought never to have been deceived by the fact that fly­ ing buttresses did .not point the same way as the spires. When the average reader can regularly forecast with fair exactitude the line a critic will take in discussing a particular book, it is time for that critic to examine his conscience.

It may be that the critic has not gotten

into a rut and that he is not doing careless work, but the odds are against it.

Egan’s readers might not have been

able to give our regular predictions about his articles

on novels, but they never eould have been startled or even mildly surprised.

The accepted things were said;

the regular phrases were used; no sentences called for thoughtful re-reading.

The subscribers to the Atlantic

Monthly. The Bookman, The Catholic World. The Catholic Heading Circle Review, the Century. each group of them, could go leafing the pages without feeling disturbed enough to nod their heads in affirmation.

That he could thus meet

the requirements of different audiences did not imply that Egan shifted or compromised his position; it was rather that h© had adopted no strong critical position which he was determined to defend strenuously. It was this weak dabbling that prevented him from do­ ing any effective critical work with the novel.

If he had

limited himself and worked in a restricted field, he might have succeeded better; there is, however, hardly an essay that confines itself to a single novel and only a few that treat but a single author.114

It is “Some Novels of the

Past Year**, “A Chat about New Books'*, "Some Women Writers", "American Family in Fiction", Some American Novels".

His

book, Modem Novels and Novelists.11^ averaged less than two pages of discussion for each novel treated, and this email bit grew smaller still when it had to contain a passage or two from the book being discussed.

In his

criticism Mr. Egan made no detailed examination of a

135

writer*s technique, nor, in general, any studious effort to get at the writer*s real purpose#

As a result no ac­

curate criticism could he made about the author* s success or failure in hie purpose*

There was no real evidence

gathered on the basis of which a moral or esthetic judg­ ment could be based*

When Egan ticked off a novel with a

phrase or two he was running the risk of being unfair to writer and reader alike# All this was to practice criticism badly.

To oome,

however, to some exposition of hie critical attitudes to­ wards the novel.

Through most of it runs a current of op­

position to realism and scientific natural!sm.*

Wow it

may do to have bumped the pompousness of some advocates of these theories, who spoke about "observation*, "scien­ tific experiment", "discarding the mysterious forces out­ side the determinism of phenomenon*, by claiming that Jules Verne was a great novelist according to such canons.116 It was one thing to have marked the inconsistencies of

*Egan did not define these terms except by implica­ tion. Sometimes he distinguished between them and by realism meant such theories as Howells preached (but ac­ cording to Egan did not practice) and by scientific natur­ alism meant the theories and the practice of a novelist like Zola. At other times Egan seemed to use the terms indifferently.

136

Zola*s philosophy of literature and to note how, in spite of his ories against metaphysics, he rationalized his "scientlfictt position by appealing to a metaphysical prin117 ciple. It was on© affair to approach the naturalistic novels and naturalistic theories critically; it was quite another to paste little labels on books.* Personal taste and temperament give no sure footing to the critic who wishes to oppose naturalistic literal ture on that ground.

Egan might think of the novel as

giving us an emotive picture *in which we are shown to be a® we would like to

Evidently on this ground he

would reject novels which gave a pessimistic view of man and of the w o r l d ; b u t it would be easy to question the solidity of the ground on which he had taken that stand. At least as far as his critical practice went he failed to differentiate sufficiently well the subject matter of the novel from the novelist1© attitude towards his subject matter.

♦To be fair to Egan it should be stated that he did intend much of such criticism as a guide for young readers. He explicitly said this in the preface to Modem Hovel® and Hovellsta* Still at least something of this tendency can be found in many of his periodical articles, nevertheless Egan must not be thought of as tinged with prudishness, for there is nothing of the prude in his life or his personal likes in literature. Confessions of a Book-Lover (passim) is evidence enough for that. It is also evidence that he belonged to the wgenteel tradition*1. As an Individual he had nearly all the virtues of that tradition (and there were virtues), but he also had some of its faults.

137

Even Egan’s opposition to naturalistic novels on philosophic and religious grounds was not well made.

He

did not seize upon the arguments he might have used, and those he did employ were not put to very forceful service. It was almost as if he felt that as a Catholic critic he should give every naturalistic novel, or what he thought was a naturalistic novel, a semi-official non placet. But analyses were not made; discriminations were not shown; judgments were not always passed on the different levels of art and prudence.

Ineffective criticism naturally re­

sulted. Of the English novelists his preference was for Jane Austen, Dickens, and Thackeray.

Miss Austen, for all her

recommendations as general family fare,12^* for all her artistry,1^1 had nothing which moved a reader to acknow­ ledge there were finer things than a comfortable income, pleasant acquaintances, and a bright grate fire.122

Yet

in later life Egan acknowledged that he read something of her nearly every year.1^

In Dickens there was no *lack

of understanding of the real pathos of life? or a *want of a spirituality without which no great work can be ef­ fective.*^4

His form and technique improved with his

later books; nevertheless the real *flavor of Dickens* was to be found In his earlier novels.1^

While Barnaby

Budge was artistically the best of all his works, Egan

138

acknowledged that he got more thorough enjoyment from the Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby.*2^

For all hie love

of Dickens, Egan did not feel that one could read him over and over again, Hag one can read Thackeray.H*2?

In an

early piece of criticism Egan had looked upon him as Engipo

land1s greatest novelist; that opinion.*®®

he probably never changed

Egan, however, did little to analyse

his regard for Thackeray.

His preference for that novel­

ist continued to be based, perhaps, on the reasons Egan had noted earlier s *Thackeray had genuine humor; he de­ tested all shame; he loved simplicity and honesty, and he had the keenest possible perception, as well as a deep

heart***®® The years that Egan spent on the continent, the pleasure he found in French literature, his admiration for Dickens and Thackeray, these were not signs or causes that Egan could not appreciate American writing.

He lost

his early liking for Mark Twain*3* but praised Moby Dick as truly American,*3® and thought that by itself The acarlet Letter was evidence enough that there was an Ameri­ can literature**33 He liked Howells* work and stated that it was not realism.*

This writer impressed Egan as Ma

sincere and pure-minded gentleman who arranges his group,

♦Of. note on p. 135 of this study.

139

carefully chosen, each member with his working-clothes on, 134 and then photographs them*“ Egan recognised Henry James* genius as literary artist - he was the “most dis­ tinguished of all American prose writers*3*3® - but criti­ cised hi® for his tone of doubt.3,3®

Egan also felt that

at times the content of hi® novels ran a little thin3,3^ and that Henry James manifested a timidity to go beyond the surfaces of life.3,3®

Egan, however, declared that

James was no egoist or poseur.3,39 He thought of the novel­ ist, moreover, as an American and one who could “never 140 have been produced outside of Hew England.* Of Catholic novelists Mr. Egan had most to say about the English lady Georgians Fullerton and the American Marion Crawford.

The former he praised for being purpose­

ful without allowing her purpose to interfere with her art.1^1

Though he noted a streak of sentimentalism in

her earlier books,3,43 in speaking of her later work he drew some very favorable comparisons between her writing and Jane Austen's.3,43 Particularly did he commend this Catholic novelist for her ability to recreate an atmos­ phere of a bygone age*

In this respeot her best work,

Constance Sherwood, was nearer to Thackeray* s Esmond. Egan declared, than critics have admitted.3*44

Marion

Crawford was said to be “a master of the art of narration* but no master of the art of construction.

145

9

Although his

140

average work did not measure up to Howell® or to James * Crawford*s Saracinesca was said to surpass anything written by those two novelists,14®

Some of Mr. Egan*® judgments

in the preceding paragraph must not be taken more serious­ ly than he took them himself,

in his last book on litera­

ture , which is a sort of literary autobiography, there was no mention of lady Georgians Fullerton, of Constance Sher­ wood. or Saracineaca. and Marion Crawford was given but on© cool nod.14^ The fiction of Maurice Francis Egan does not throw much light on his criticism.

Some of it was sheer pot-

boiling, a fact which h© himself admits about his early novels;^4® much of it was for young readers. stories have often a *pious* turn.

His ghort-

In his beet work, the

Berton Ma&innis stories, however, the touch was light, whimsical, humorous; the insight was sharp and the obser­ vation shrewd.

Two of Egan*s last novel®, which I have

lately read, - The Disappearance of John Longworthy and The Ivy Hedge - are not books anyone will re-read.

As far

a® their literary qualities are in question they are neither worse nor better than the average novel of their time.

♦Egan’s nod to Henry James was just as cool: H0ne may go back to Henry James, in order to discover whether one thinks he means the same thing in 1923 one thought he meant in 1912.w CCTohfessions of a Book-Lover. p. 153.)

141

These novels tend to confirm one judgment that might he made about Egaa*s criticism of the novel; he tended to criticise the novel for what it did.

One reason for this

was that a great deal of this criticism was being written when Egan had not yet satisfied himself as to the purpose 149 of literature. Still this was not the chief reason for his failure in this field of criticism; it was due most of all to a failure to think deeply.

Maurice Francis Egan

was a good Catholic and he criticized novels, but his work here should not be held up a® Catholic criticism, IV If there was to be poetry there must be music; this was one of two principles which Egan appears to have made central in his criticism of poetry. related to song.^^

Originally poetry was

English verse, moreover, was intended

primarily for the ear.*®^

Its form might change with

changes in speech and culture, but poetry must retain its 1K9

m u s i c ; n o amount of splendid visualisation could make up for a lack of It.153 Egan did not, however, understand music in any narrow sense.

It was more than mere melody,15^ a great deal more

eompler than that.

In poetry, since the music of poetry

was a different thing from the music of music, it was a question of rhythms and time-beats, of harmony, of tone-

143

color, of pauses.155

Ultimately Egan seems to have held,

it was a matter of rhythms; or rather, since rhythm might mean mechanical scansion, the music of poetry lay in *the vital qualities of rhythm.*

And it was the pause (this

included more than the caesura) and its time-beats which chiefly furnished these vital qualities**55

Thus two

poems might be capable of the same metrical scansion, but, due to a difference in the placing of the pauses and the difference in value of the time-beats of these pauses, the two pieces would have movements decidedly different in character,157 Some of his remarks on Tennyson, Shakespeare, and especially Patmore may assist in understanding Egan*s views of music in poetry.

As a lyricist Tennyson was as

delicate and as musical as Theocritus.15®

It was the

lyrics which alone gave **Maud* any value;15® the lyrios in *The Princess11 kept this poem from lapsing into medi­ ocrity.1®®

•Break, Break, Break,* was cited as a perfect

example of the crystallisation of a poetic mood.161

It

was for the music of his poetry that Tennyson would be re­ membered and not for those medieval figures - •King Arthur*, •Sir Salahad*, *Sir Percival* - who were too much like what the English people at that time insisted the Prince Oonsort was.1®®

While admitting that Tennyson could never

have touched the sure-hearted gaiety of many of Shakes­ peare^ songs,Egan was willing to compare the lyrics of

143

Tennyson with those of the Elisabethan poet.

163

It was not, however, only In his sonnets and his songs that Shakespeare1s music could he found.

Since he

could not depend on scenery and setting to give his audi­ ence the illusion of another world, Shakespeare heightened hie poetry to catch up the lounging apprentice or the non­ chalant noble and to sweep them along with the movement of the play.*®4

His comedies, Egan thought, were deficient

in good dialogue, dramatic interest and action; they were too completely unrealistic, to be successful as comedies, but their music made the® highly successful as lyric poet­ ry. 165

The structure of Ag, You hike It was really nearer

to that of the opera than the drama. To illustrate this lyrical element in Shakespeare*s comedies Egan turned to Mollere for a comparison.

The es­

sential difference between the comedies of the French dramatist and the Englishman was (leaving aside their dis­ similar views of art and life) the difference between poetry and prose.16^

And again in making another comparison,

Egan declared that there was no wide gulf between the classicism of Sophocles and the romantic lyricism of Shakespeare.*®® While it was true that Racine and Cor­ neille were nearer to Aristotle169 than Shakespeare, still Shakespeare was nearer to Sophocles and Euripides than Racine and Oorneille.170

144

Patmore was warmly praised for his management of the pause in varying the music of his odes.171

He had been

correct, Egan felt, in departing from some of the stiffer and more ordinary forms of English versification.

For

English was not a musical language; there was a great deal of noise in English words.

To surmount this difficulty

and to get music into his writing the poet, Egan declared, must he allowed considerable freedom in versification.17^ It was for this reason that Egan wrote, flthe practice of Patmore is a sign of a purer conception of the clothing of poetry. . . I believe Patmore*s variation® from the classical English verse indicate that the poetry of the twentieth century will achieve the expression of subtler meanings than the poetry of any preceding era.“173

Egan

regarded the ode® of Patmore as precious for that type of high culture recommended by Sidney Lanier.

These ode®

♦•might lead to greater and more splendid forms of utter­ ance in the future than either Shakespeare or Milton had 174

caught and gave forth.0

From hie insistence on freedom in versification it will be easily guessed that Egan would not regard rime, as in any way very essential to poetry.

He looked upon

the regularity of recurring rimes as spoiling the effect of a long poem.17®

Dante was successful but he wrote in

Italian; in that language a poet all but stumbles over

145

rimes*

As evidence that this regularity tires in English,

Egan cited the poetry of Pope.176

This same regularity

was one of his reason© for his giving Patmore's ,rThe Angel of the House** no high place as poetry.177

Tennyson was

praised for his once more discovering how musical poetry may he without the aid of rime, and hie **Tears, Idle Tears** is pointed out as an example of how deeply musical such 178 poetry may he. What Egan wished, however, was not to discard all rim© in poetry, hut to make rime an integrated part of the music of the poem and to employ it only in so far as it was such an integrated part.

Him© was to be a musi­

cal accompaniment which would furnish a background for the poem or stress and accent phrases which needed emphasis.17^ Thus it might be employed to denote subtle changes as Newman does in the ffream of Oeroatius:16^ it might b© used as Patmore used it in his loftiest poetry where rim© be­ comes an echo** It was no great step from all this to vers llbre. Certainly Egan could understand why modern readers grew tired of **academic poetry*.

Such poetry tended more and

more to divorce Itself from music and to become the slave

♦And not the “mere imitation of an echo.** in literature, p. 91*

(Studies

146

of fixed rules and meters which could not he successfully followed in English. 181

was why the sincerest of the

younger poets, according to Egan, were inquiring into the problem of versification and through their inquiries were being led to throw aside the older conventions.

With

the general theories, then, of free-verse, Egan was far fro® having any quarrel.183

Free-verse had its place, a

high place, but it was not for the inexpert, the lazy, or the ignorant in whose hands it becomes merely "lawless 164

verse". w

The poet who attempts it must have a perfect

ear for the nuances of music and great art in managing his technique.185 Of the contemporary workers in vers llbre Egan par­ ticularly liked that leader of the Xmagists, Amy Lowell. He rather warmly appreciated her poetry commending her concentration, her naturally good ear, her feeling for color.188

Perhaps it was this last which made Egan es­

pecially sympathetic with her work.

For it was a feeling

for color, rather than any noticeable musical quality which characterized much of his own poetry.*

•Mr. Egan1s poetry was not unmusical; still it is not music but color which is noticeable in his poetry* These two passages illustrate this. The poems, however, from which they are taken are not Intended as illustrations of his best work. (Cont*d.)

147

While Whitman18 choice of rhythms was not always good (Egan confessed he could not discover the method for the poet’s choices), still the "Good .Gray Poet* In hie best works makes It quite clear that “he understood thoroughly that poetry, expressed poetically, must be musical.**8^ This critic, however, always remained doubtful about some of Whitman’s lack of reticence; but his questioning was based on grounds of taste and not on grounds of morality. It was really Egan* s ne quid nimls which led him to admit that he did not understand why Whitman often selected such a rude utterance for some of his noble ideas* 188

Or if

Egan did understand**88 he was not in sympathy with the performance.

*(Qont*d from page 147.) * - I glide through the lucent green, Through turquoise blue, through changing hues of red, Vermilion, scarlet, wild roee, and the glare Of ruby fire, - on golden stars I lean, Then float 'mid tangled rainbows in an emerald bed.u - from the “Swimmer at Elsinore11 (Scribners. OVI (Sept. 1914), p. 406.) “The fair facade, the carved acanthus leaf, The sparkling sea where clearest blue meets blue, The piled-up roses, steeped in silver dew Upon marble tiles, the white-robed chief Of some great family, seeking coo}, relief, Upon a gallery, hung with ©very hue That glads the eye, while violets slave girls strew To cithern sounds; - this picture artiste drew. - from “The Joy-Bringer* (Oatholic World. LIV (Oct. 1891, p. 10a)

148

This same ne quid nimis was back of Egan* s judgment that some of the poetry of Southwell and Crashaw was over­ wrought.*^

Certainly Egan did not appreciate the conceit

which “even the spiritual Southwell did not escape,*^! and which exasperates and wearies the reader of some of Crashaw1® poetry.

IQS*

Egan did not hold that poetry could he approached from the angle of utilitarianism.*®^ to something else. communication.

It was not a means

Basically, poetry was expression not

It was written not to communicate ideas

hut to express some insight the poet had caught*

The poet

need not try express this insight for all men; he might even write (as M, de Guerin did in ttLe CentaureM) Mfor God, silence, and himself.w*®*

A serious approach to

*A better understanding and appreciation of the con­ ceit would probably have bettered Egan*s own poetry, for it would have forced him to make his thought concrete. Egan1® poetry is marked with one rather consistent weak­ ness; his thought remains abstract. We are told how we ought to feel; but we are not made to feel. The ideas are not forced into sharp and relevant images. Too many of his poems are plan® for a poem and not really poetry. He has too few lines like that which opens the commemorative sonnet BHow could I beat against the door of fate With angry hands. . - from MTo John Augustine 2ahmtt (Catholic World. GYV (Apr., 1922), p.63.)

149

poetry, then, implied a serious study of the art of expres­ sion.

That was why Egan devoted much of his critic!am to

such study.

Declaring that poetry was essentially musical,

he made this statement one principle of his criticism.

But

since expression connotes something to he expressed, his second principle would logically be concerned with that something.

And it was.

For Egan, poets were men in love

with beauty and truth, and men who could express the vis­ ions they had seen of beauty and truth. The greater the 195 poet the stronger was hi® love. Great poets, even when they did not know him by that name, were in search of God.3,9® Xt might be Eature, Beauty,Truth, but the genuine poet desired to find, to be united to, and to express the visions he had caught of Absolute Perfection.3,9*^ The test of the poet, then, was his allegiance to high beauty and truth.19® The Greeks had caught such visions, but since the com­ ing of Christ and God1s revelations of himself and man's high destiny, loftier and truer visions could be seen by the poet.

This Christian Hwisdom” has become part of man's

tradition, even his unconscious tradition.

Putting it

positively, Egan declared, "The English poets owe all that is best in them to the inspiration of Christianity; and when I say Christianity, X mean the highest form of Chris­ tianity - the Catholic Church."3,99 That "wisdom" could not be put aside without the poet blurring the vision of

150

beauty and truth that wag open to him, for the MChurch is the spouse of the highest Truth and Beauty.*200* In practice this was far from meaning that Egan ap­ proached the task of criticism armed with a philosophical scalpel or a theological fluorescape,

HWhen people praise

Thompsons ‘Hound of Heaven1, because it is dogmatic,M he wrote, 81 am surprised - for if I found anything dogmatic in it, it would lose all its splendour for me.

The Apoca­

lypse and #The Hound of Heaven1 are glorious visions of truth at a white heat,#20*’ And he quite definitely did not regard systematic training in theology or philosophy as a sure, short way to poetic art.

81 oan*t help think­

ing,8 he remarked, 8that Oonde#s poetry suffered from his devotion to scholastic philosophy.8202*** what Egan did

*Ega» would certainly have admitted that he could not completely enjoy literature whose content or meaning opposed his beliefs, whatever other qualities of art might recommend that piece of writing; or rather, his enjoyment was lessened by the extent to which it was positively non-Catholic. (Studies In literature, p. 13.) **Conde Fallen was a poet, editor, and eritic who did much of his work in St* Louis. His interpretation of the M i M of the King was commended by Tennyson. Egan thought Pallen*"s poetry showed promise, but qualified that statement with the observation quoted above. And again: MTheology is not the most tender nurse for the poet art." (Lectures on English Literature, p. S5.) In their context the quotations show that - they should not be pressed to mean more than this - abstract and logical studies do not foster poetic expression which is intuitive and concrete.

151

mean is set down on the title page of his Songs and Son­ nets - *Art is true art when art to God is true!1,202 This was his second principle of criticism.

He employed it not

to make prudential judgment but to judge the work as art, to discover what truth and beauty had been expressed in it. Applications of this principle as well as his own sympathies would lead him to Gatholic poetry.

There were

longer pieces on Dante, Chaucer, Grashaw, Be Vere, Pat­ more, and Francis Thompson; half-forgotten poets like Habington and Southwell were treated, and little known writers (at least when he wrote about them) Ilk© Alice Meynell,

a.

Proctor, E. Donnelly, and the Canadian, Louis

Frechette, were dealt with at greater or shorter length. This is understandable; but Tennyson, or at least Keats and de Guerin, and certainly Theocritus, seem somewhat out of line with all this.

Yet Egan warmly appreciated the

last two writers and had not a little admiration for all four. He found beauty in Keats and de Guerin204 and beauty was what Egan looked for in poetry.

There was to be fall­

ing off In his liking of Keats; he came to seem “less Greek8 than Egan once thought him to be;205 but de Guerin

152

and Theocritus were always warmly admired.*

The lyrical

and very human Theocritus could be unaffectedly pagan; he “wrote before Pan said his despairing good-bye to all the Grecian Isles.

But a later poet who would treat

“our lives as if Christianity did not exist lacks that very satisfactory quality which one finds in Dante, in Calderon, in Sir Thomas More, and in Shakespeare.1,207 Egan* s remark© about Dante were not particularly noteworthy; they give the impression that this critic had no deep understanding of the Italian poet.

Egan1s treat­

ment of Chaucer was good but there was not a great deal in it that calls for special attention in reference to the two critical principles of Mr. Egan.

His studies of

Southwell, and Crashaw gave recognition to poetry which at that time was not very widely recognized.

He noted that

in Southwell there was never a conflict between the spiri­ tual and the sensuous as in de Guerin,^® or as he might have said - in Donne.

Between “St. Peter*s ComplaintH

and Shakespeare*e HLucreceH Egan saw a similarity of

♦These two Inspired Egan’s best known sonnets - “The­ ocritus” and “Maurice de Guerin*4 (Songs and Sonnets, op. cit.. pp. 4-5). Whitman liked the latter and quoted part of its sestet in his Prose Writings (of. Recollections, p. 99). Matthew Arnold has given both of the sonnets very high praise. (Of. Recollections of a Happy Life, p. 125; “Authentic Sketches of Living Catholic Authors", Catholic World. LXXV (Hov., 1896), p. 278; M. Earle, “Maurice Fran­ cis Egan; Reminiscence”, Catholic World. CXL (Oct., 1934), p. 40.)

153

poetic treatment but maintained that Southwells poem was the stronger in both motive and treatment*2®2

It was

Orashaw*& spiritual devotion which gave fire and poetic glow to hi® poetry. 21®

Though #an occasional earthly con­

ceit clogs its ascending rush®211 its whole tendency was upwards.

Crashaw* s very fervor was the real explanation

for these Hexasperating11 conceits. think of his mode of expression.

The poet “did not He tore out the words

that came nearest to him, in order to build a visible thought •**212

However it might be excused, the conoeit

remained in Egan* s eyes a poetical extravagance. There were a good many observations made about Tenny­ son1s poetry but only those about In Memorlam need be noted here.

Although perfect in poetic form this work

lacked genuine spontaneity and tenderness;212 it was too graceful, too reticent.

The artist seemed sometimes more

apparent than the mourner.21*

For all its measured and

decorous grief it afforded no genuine consolation,2^

cer­

tainly nothing approaching the consolation a Catholic can gain from his faith.21®

Tennyson may have done the best

with what he possessed, but this work did not measure up to Newman* s Dream of Cterontius.

That poem, Egan declared,

HFor exalted purity, for terseness and beauty of expres­ sion, for musical cadences. . . stands first among the few great poems that depict life after death.*21?

154

Francis Thompson was one of Egan1s best loved poets. Most modem writers of poetry, as Egan saw them, were not rich as this poet was.

“They are poor,® this critic

wrote, “because they seem to leave out God.®2^2

And many

of those poets ttho did seek God, but in their own way, men like Wordsworth and Emerson, did not seek him with fervor and high d e s i r e . T h e y did not have that ecstasy of love, a love which easts out fear, that marks the poetry of Francis Thompson; modern poetry seemed pale beside his flaming gold and crimson.220 A re-reading of some of Egan’s criticism has brought it home to us that in some ways our treatment of him has been unfair and that in other ways it has been, perhaps, too fair.

Pieces of his criticism have been sorted over

which were not worth the sorting; but on the other side there has been a failure to give a true picture of Egan* s genuine appreciation of works which he really enjoyed. Probably we have missed most seriously in speaking of his criticism of poetry.

There is a warmth in “Poets and

Poetry®22^ which we simply have not accounted for.

The

criticism of Egan, however, does not give itself to easy analysis.

He was essentially an interpretative critio.

And it is difficult to give an adequate exposition of in­ terpretative criticism.

One either merely repeats or one

tends to lose the whole effect of such criticism and to give a false impression of it.

155

In the matter of critical content Egan is not impor­ tant.

He ha® some good things, but the average of his

whole work is not high.

He did, however, tend to take the

right approach to literature, to criticise it for what it was, rather than for what it did or might do, though he was not consistent here in his treatment of fiction.

His

work, particularly his Confessions of a Book-Lover. tended, moreover, to give a larger outlook to .American Catholic readers; it indicated that there were better things, if they would know how and where to look, than the books with which Catholic readers were usually satisfied. Egan*s real merit as a critic was that he loved books for what they were and that he tried to get others to know them and love them as he did.

He seldom went beyond this

work in his criticism and it has been weakened accordingly. The work, however, of an interpretative critic, he could and did do quite successfully.

156

TOWARDS A BETTER CRITICISE* I If a critic*s importance is to be fudged by his theories, his critical practice, and the influence which he exercised, Egan, Azarias, and Brownson are not impor­ tant for the whole of American criticism.

The theory of

Azarias was weak; Brownson*s principles were incomplete, and Egan* e were too vague to be stated except in general terms.

In practice their criticism was uneven and their

best work far from great.

Egan left an interesting survey

of his personal impressions and Azarias a still useful book on Old English literature and culture.

To the Catholic

writers of his time Brownson preached the important mes­ sage of integral Catholicism and an interest in the Ameri­ can scene, but the message was not heeded.

Sentimentality

and Mpietism** would continue to mark much of the fiction and poetry turned out by Catholics in America; Guiney would go to England; Marion Crawford and Henry Harland (after his conversion) were to find their material in Italy and Rome.

Though there has been some revival of in­

terest in Brownson since Daniel Sargent* s Four Independents,^ Egan, Azarias, and Brownson have had little influence on the course of American criticism.

The works of all three

15?

gather dust on the shelves even of Catholic libraries. Whether Theodore Maynard*s assertion, HAs for Catho­ lic criticism, it can hardly be said to exist in this country,110 needs some qualification or not, it still re­ mains true that Catholic American criticism, regarded as a whole, has been neither great in quantity nor high in quality.

There were reasons in the past and there are

reasons at present which explain, even if they do not altogether excuse, the condition of Catholic literary criticism in this country.

Our interest, however, is

not so much with excuse or explanation as such, but rather with those reasons which have stood in the way of better Catholic criticism*

Such reasons, it would appear, ul­

timately come to thiss

Catholics in the United States

have never seriously felt that literature as a fine art was of any decisive importance. Frontier conditions, the economic pressure of making a living (the average Catholic was poor), the necessity of preserving his faith in a Protestant milieu and of fronting more than one wave of anti—Catholic bigotry, all these were factors in making the average American Catholic very ‘’practical** indeed.

The immediate ends before him

were the preservation and betterment of his economic and religious position.

What could not be directly related to

these he was likely to regard as a luxury, a good to be

JLDb

sought in less strenuous days.

He was building now; roofs

and walls were the things that counted; the murals could come later.

Furthermore, having his Catholic faith, he

never felt the need of making literature important, as if it could give him ethical standards and motivation or fur­ nish him with deeper Insights into reality than he already possessed. The average Catholic might have been able to respect something of the arts of music, of painting, or of archi­ tecture, because these could be related directly to the service of religion.

Accomplishment© in the field of

politics and apologetics he could value; such writing© were means to quite definite ends.

He might be interested

in the broader relations of literature to morality and truth.

But literature as an art and the criticism of lit­

erature a© an art were for hi® no imperative interests. Whatever excuses or explanations there may be for the fact, it was and remains a fact that Catholic literary criticism in the United States has not been great and valuable enough to call for any high praise.

Many non-

Catholio American critics have noted this fact either by an uncomplimentary silence or by a very rapid and very definite condemnation of Oatholic literary criticism and all its intentions and judgments.

Such silence and such

dispraise have often enough been aimed at all of Catholic

iby

criticism.

This is crude aiming and is practically an in­

dication that such writers have not read or could not read French, German or Italian;4 certainly Catholic criticism in Europe - in England as well as on the Continent - can­ not be so easily overlooked.

Still, in the United States

Catholic criticism has been such that silence or cursory condemnation is understandable. That It i© understandable does not, however, imply that one fully agree© with all judgments made about it. Qrestee Brownson is not to be dismissed with a shrug.

And

to wav® away everything written by Asarias, Egan, Repplier, or by Maynard, Shuster, and Michael Williams, is bias or ignorance.

If the historian of American literary criti­

cism sets his standards so high that he finds nothing in their writing© worth saving, then he will dieoover, if he uses such standards consistently, that he is forced to reduce the whole of American criticism to a rather small corpus indeed.

For all that, confessedly, the general

average of Catholic criticism in this country has not been and is not high. criticism.

It is weak on the side of artistic

It has manifested a tendency to judge litera­

ture, particularly the novel, entirely for what it might do rather than for what it is.

Some critics

have based

their evaluations on isolated passages instead of judging the impact of the work as a whole.

Finally, it is fair

ADV

to say, Oatholic critics have usually approached their work negatively rather than positively*

And when they have ap­

proached their work positively, they have too often heen general and vague. In the last few pages the term literary criticism has heen given a wide interpretation; actually there is not a great amount of strict literary criticism written hy Catho­ lics in this country.

Spirit is the only Catholic periodi­

cal of any standing in the United States which is devoted to literature; it, of course, is entirely concerned with poetry.

Criticism, as opposed to practical guidance (guid­

ance is valuable hut It is not literary criticism), is found only in America, Commonweal, Catholic World, and thought. Even in these four magazines, because of the exigencies of space (each publication alms at covering a variety of topics) and because of the wide range in the character and needs of their readers (Thought is an exception here), not a great deal appears of what can be strictly termed literary criticism. In this stricter sense of the word, then, no great amount of literary criticism is being written by Catholics in this country.

Furthermore, in such criticism as they do write,

Catholics do not reach the same level that they do in dis­ cussing books of science, education, history, philosophy, and theology.

One reason is, obviously, that there are

Oatholic journals devoted to education, history, philosophy, end theology.

Another reason is that the non-

161

literary criticism is undertaken by experts or by men well qualified to discuss the particular subject and the par­ ticular book.

The same level of qualification is not gen­

erally reached by Catholics who write literary criticism. The reviews and articles are not composed by men, what­ ever their qualifications in other fields, - in philosophy, theology, economics, or even ^creative* literature, - who are highly qualified ae literary critics.

There are ex­

ceptions, but stated generally the judgment stands. If, then, American Catholic criticism is to be im­ proved, it is essential that the critic be an expert.

His

expertnees, supposing fundamental critical talent (intel­ lect and sensitivity), rests on the knowledge and the practical use of a correct philosophy of criticism.

Such

knowledge and use implies a true understanding of art, of prudence, and of the relations between art and prudence. An endeavor will be made to lay the basis for such an under­ standing and to outline briefly the procedure for the critic*

There is no intention of setting down any complete

theory of esthetics or a complete theory of literary criti­ cism.

The points selected and stressed are those which

it seemed important to emphasise in order to point the way

*The remarks that follow about art and about prudence owe an obvious debt to the studies of J. Maritain, Mortimer Adler, T. Gilby, Bede Jarrett, and 1*. Callahan. l ?fe wish to acknowledge that indebtedness here rather than to insert a multitude of footnotes.

to better Oatholic American critical writing# II Art taken generally is concerned with making.

Fine

art Is a making to express beauty; literature is a making in order to express beauty by means of words# “beauty# has its difficulties#

As a word

It seems too narrow to

cover all the making with which fin© art is concerned. #Beauty# seems to emphasise and to include only what is lovely, fair, delicate# Raphaelitism,

Art has wider limits than Pre-

the beauty in Ifelasques*® Crucifix ion or

Michelangelo1s Pieta is not lovely, fair, or delicate. Is beauty the right word to apply to the materials Wilia Gather uses in her Nebraska novels where there is winter as well as summer, and mud, and “saddles#?

What of the

factories and shabby dwellings in the first part of Thomas Walsh* & Out of the Whirlwind and the cripple in Stephen Benet*s “The Bishop's Beggar#?

How does beauty fit the

hard, clear realism of Graham Greene* s The labyrinthine Nays? If these are novels, if they are not great art, what then of Dante* s Inferno? It is no satisfactory answer to say that the artist here uses the stern, the deformed, the ugly as a foil for beauty as Rembrandt used shadow and darkness#

The slums

and “soddiee#, the crippled bodies and deformed souls are

the very material with which these and other writers have worked,

Nor is it pertinent here to reply that, while art

is concerned with expressing the beautiful, the artist can be concerned with other ©ads besides the work of art.

This

does not directly touch the particular problem under dis­ cussion, for here there is no question about the end of the artist as distinguished from the end of the work of art* The definition, then, of fine art as a making to ex­ press beauty seems to run counter to the fact that art Is often engaged with depicting the stern or the ugly; and the stern and the ugly are certainly not beautiful. No, they are not beautiful, but there is an element of beauty in them.^

For beauty is a transcendental, whereas

the terms ugliness, beautiful really express relations. An object I® regarded as ugly or beautiful in terms of some standard we have set ourselves; the word© are as re­ lative as the words hot or cold. But beauty is as trans­ cendental as being. No matter how low in the scale of beauty a thing may b®, no matter how far its small elements of proportion, Integrity, and splendor are outweighed by opposites so that it deserve© the predicate ugly, still if that thing has any being, if it exists at all, it has something of proportion, integrity, splendor; some little beauty is there.

164

So the artist may, as lie looks upon the stem, the ugly, the deformed, seize intuitively upon the element of beauty there.

By this intuition he vitalizes that raw

matter with the clarity of a new form.*

If he has suf­

ficient technique to embody forth his artistic intuition he may give us a Winterset with Mio, Mirianne, and Judge Gaunt moving tragically against a background spanned by a Manhattan bridge.

Or he looks over some scarred battle­

field and behind its very present reminders of agony and violent death finds a deep reality to be expressed in a Gettysburg Address. He may give the world a King Lear blind and mad upon a stormy heath; or, to move in another direction, he may write a Stabat Mater or paint an Eoce Homo.**

The artist, it is well to remember, cannot set

the time and place for hie intuitions; they are, from several points of view, "given” him.

It is only the

beauty which he has seen that he can express as an artist; but it is beauty, not ugliness, which he does express.

♦"Form* is used in its Aristotelian sense. ♦♦If the two last examples do not seem evidence for our position, it may well be because religious art has in many Instances softened the two scenes in question. A bit of meditation on the bare, unemotional Gospel texts, filled in with the knowledge gained from Josephus or from Roman historians should make it very clear that these two ex­ amples are much to the point in this matter.

165

There axe difficulties, then, about the word »beautyrt in connection with a definition of fine art.

Yet most of

the difficulties disappear if it is remembered that the word is used in a transcendental sense, that it is not used narrowly to connote only the pretty, the fair, or the lovely.

Finally, some word must be used to express

the object of fine art; other words than 8beautyn, when they do not break down philosophically, at least bring with them even greater difficulties; for they carry a heavier connotative burden than Hbeauty* does. To resumes with beauty.

literature is a fine art and concerned

Taken formally or strictly, it is not con-

cemed with the communication of truth or the promotion of the good.

Its purpose is to express beauty.

This has

given trouble to more than one serious-minded person from Plato onwards.

Wherein ie the worthwhileness of art, its

dignity or its necessity from any human point of view, if the purpose of art as art is not to communicate ideas, or to promote the good, but only to express beauty? The formal values of literature are not directly propagandistie (whether for economic, social, ethical, or theological ends) but contemplative.

A novel, a poem, a

drama furnishes men with an object of contemplation, a new insight into reality, contemplation.

Man by his nature is pointed for

Practical-doing, whether in the realm of

166

economics (ultimately to obtain leisure) or in the realm of moral prudence (to obtain peace and quiet of soul) is instrumental to a higher end - to contemplation.

So lit­

erature a® a fine art affords man an object for fulfilling his highest act as man. Again, man has a desire to know, to possess reality. But most of his searching, performed as it is by reason, gives him only universal, abstracted, notional reality, this will give him truth, but not a truth and reality that give joy, the joy of possession and union.

That joy comes

only when one possesses, is united to, truth and reality as they actually exist - in individual, concrete things. And because human reason is what it is, a faculty which obtains truth and by abstracting it from concrete and in­ dividual things, man is partially thwarted in his effort to possess and be united to truth and reality. But the intuition of the artist, which is not a logi­ cal or reasoned process although it is an intellectual action, finds such truth and reality.

The artist catches

a vision of the splendor in the concrete thing and expresses as best he can the vision he has seen.

Thus literature,

like all art, helps man fulfill his deep desire of pos­ sessing truth and reality concreted in Individual things. This links up with the idea expressed by St. Thomas. If a man does not have the pleasures of the spirit he will

167

seek those of the flesh.*

One of the reasons for the

strength and immediacy of the pulls exerted by things of sense is that sensations are not abstractions; they put man in immediate touch with individualised reality.

Sen­

sations do not give the whole of reality; nevertheless, as affording a union with the individual rather than the abstraction, sensations do partly fulfill man* s desire so to know that he is closely united to the object of hi® knowing.**

*St. Thomas here is speaking of the necessity for some kind of pleasure to enable man to re-create his powers and recreate himself after a period of mental or physical work. ttHo man can live without pleasure. Therefore a man deprived of the pleasures of the spirit goes over to the pleasures of the flesh.8 (Quoted and discussed by Maritain in Art and Scholasticism, p. 80.) Mortimer Adler (Art and Prudence. esp. pp. 84-92) makes a good deal of this argument in finding an end to justify art. Their recreative possibilities give art and games a standing against the charges of Plato and Bossuet. Certainly the argument can be used for games, but to press it hard in the case of art is to equate art and games. Fur­ ther, it should be noted, the essential end of games is to recreate. But recreation (strip the word as bare as you please of pejorative implications) while it may be an ef­ fect produced by the novel, the play, or the poem, is quite definitely not the formal and essential effect and end of literature and art. **Sense knowledge as intuitive is more perfect within its kind of knowledge than rational knowledge, though this latter belongs to a higher type of knowing. From this point of view art is an endeavor to bring to intellectual know­ ledge something like the perfection of sense knowledge.

168

literature, which is an end in itself, has therefore its dignity and worthwhileness for man in terms of itself as an end.

It affords man objects of contemplation and

it affords him the joy which comes from getting at and being united to Individualised reality* Yet while art is an end, there is also a sense in which it is a means*

Art is no ultimate end for man;

since it is subordinate It must be in some way linked to the end that is ultimate for man. an end and a means?

But how can art be both

The solution of this problem is not

arrived at merely by setting down the distinctions between, or the relations of, art and prudence.

It is a problem of

integration which cannot be solved by the artist or the moralist or the critic; it is a problem for the metaphysi­ cian and the theologian.'*

To the critic, indeed, the so­

lution will not be of immediate practical import.

Still

it is only in term® of art *s integration with manfs ulti­ mate end that the critic can assign any ultimate values to art. A completely integrated philosophy should, therefore,

♦Wisdom (Sapientla). whether its source be reason or revelation, sees things in relation to ultimate causes, it is for wisdom, then, to order all the realms of human activity into their proper place in the hierarchy of things. That is why the office of integration belongs to the meta­ physician and the theologian; they are concerned with a knowledge of ultimate causes.

169

allow for art (1) as an end, (3) as a secondary, an infra-valent end.

Within the realms of art, art is supreme,

independent; there all things else are means (materials, knowledge, action) and have value only In terms of the end - art.

But the whole realm of art in the hierarchy

of human ends Is subordinated to man* s ultimate end, an end which may be described as man’s total betterment; described another way it i® simply - God. Mew art, though an end, can be integrated and related to this final end.

By affording him objects of contempla­

tion, art and literature better man, make him more a man. This making more, this bettering, it Is well to note, is not directly a question of ethical doing but a question °* toeing - Gf being all that a man can possibly be*

More­

over, the beauty which is set down in art can and should lead man to the Infinite Beauty of God (via contemplation!®), at finite being can and should lead man to Infinite Being (via ration!®)• This last statement is normative and not descriptive. to turn aside.

Men always have it in their power to falter, There is always the temptation to stop

short, to worship self or the creature.

Yet an Augustine

is evidence that a man can rise through finite beauty to the HBeauty whloh is ever ancient, ever new.H

And men

after Augustine who have realized their hunger for beauty was too deep to be eased with finite crumbs and fragments have walked the same way.

170

Art concerns making (faottblle); prudence concerns doing, action (aglblle).

The two orders are as distinct

as science and morality are.

Thus whether a particular

mechanical technique will work is a question of science; whether It should he used is a question of prudence.

So

prudence says nothing about literature as a fine art. The writer, as a literary artist, is perfectly free in the world of his art.

He Is, however, not Just a pure

and disembodied writer; he always is and remains a man. As a man he is hound to he guided by prudence in all his actions. First of all he must he responsible to himself.

As

an artist he can seek beauty anywhere; hut as a man he may not seek it in such ways that he will he turned aside from what is good and what is true.

Prudence reminds him

that he owes an allegiance to these before hie allegiance to beauty and art.

Actually, when the artist or writer

so turns aside, it is not that he has been turned by beauty - hut by those objects, those surroundings, those guises la which he has found beauty.

Beauty is always to be

loved, but prudence warns the individual man that he may not yet be strong enough to contemplate beauty everywhere he discovers it.

He may not yet be a sufficiently ordered

and well-integrated man. A writer, moreover, because he is a human being, Is

171

responsible to others as far as his actions touch them. His work, if he gives it to the world to seet is read not just by pure beholders of the beautiful but by men who, like the artist, are bound by prudence,

fhe beauty the

writer expresses must not be set forth in such a way that the reader (the beholder of his art) will be attracted solely by the wanner in which beauty is depicted.

For

then he is distracted from the beauty and perhaps turned aside from what is good and what is true. The artist, however, does not have to suit every possible audience and every individual temperament.

The

critic has no right to condemn the writer because his books are not suited for the adolescent; he should rather blame parents, or librarians, or book-sellers, or the ado­ lescent himself.

The artist is responsible only to the

audience for whom he is expressing his intuition.

Suppos­

ing an artist works only for himself, then he need measure his search for beauty only by his own strength as a human being.

If hie work Is for an audience, then prudence de­

mands it be measured by the strength of that audience as men.

The writer can set himself a particular and limited

audience.

But the limits should not be purely fictional.*

♦How this would be worked out practically is a com­ plex and difficult question. To settle even the general outlines of an answer would go far beyond the scope of this study.

172

He bears some responsibility for seeing that his audience remains thus limited. Seme persons may here object that all truth and good­ ness and beauty demand is a fair field*

This trinity will

ultimately win out in conflicts with the ugly, with folly, and with evil.

Unfortunately, the history of mankind is

against such an optimistic theory, however plausible it may be made to sound at a first reading.

In actuality

truth and goodness and beauty never have a fair field in any such conflict, for man is not perfectly ordered.

His

distinct desires, eye and ear and taste and touch and mind and will, are each bent on seeking its own specific end or good without any reference to, and often at the expense of, the good of the whole man.

Man1s seeking on various

levels must, them, be ordered by prudence. In speaking here of prudence and art one thing more might be noted before turning to their application in criticism.

It concerns the end of the artist as distin­

guished from the end of the work of art.

A symphony, a

novel, a mural, as a work of art, is its own end - itself. This, however, does not mean or Imply that the artist has or should have the work itself as his only end.

He

may be working to earn a living (one of the purposes of Pope); he may work to be a successful playwright (as Shakespeare did) { he may write a HMllton! thou should1st

173

be living at tfeie boar® to save his country; he may have worked with that high end in mind that moved Dante or Fra Angelico or thoee master-builders - Robert of laizarohest Sudee do Montreuil, Hugo Llbergiers whose cathe­ drals stand in Amiens, Paris, Hheims. But whatever ends he has as a poet, or a sculptor, or a painter, he must attain these ends through his art; art requires that nothing shall come into the work except through itself (art) as an intermediary.*

The greatness

03? weakness of his art will not be directly affected by the greatness or the weakness of those ends and purposes which reach beyond the work of art. they will affect that work. man.

Indirectly, however,

For the artist is always the

The complete work depends, then, upon the artist

working artistically as the complete man.

Increase the

man and you increase the artist and his art.

•Whatever its value as a sociological document (it Is so used in the department of sociology at one univer­ sity I have heard) Steinbeck* s Grapes of Wrath violates this principle. Too often the author works directly at arousing an emotive state to be productive of action rather than at writing his novel. The same error mare the last half of Thomas Walsh* s Out of the Whirlwind. The conversion of the hero is used too directly for the purposes of Catholic apologetics.

174

XXI To make some application of all this to criticism. Literary criticism should manifest an "unusually persis­ tent concern for the fullest apprehension and comprehen­ sion and appropriation of literature,*®

While this ie

certainly true, it is also true that the final and essen­ tial act of criticism is judgment.?

Criticism is more

than Impression or expression; it ie judgment.

And total

literary criticism involves two sets of judgments which, although distinct, are to he combined in a complete evalu­ ation of the work of literature*

Formal literary criti­

cism concerns only the work as art.

Since, however, the

artist and the reader are always men, since, moreover, the artist can have other ends besides the work of art itself, "the total act of literary criticism must he a total judg­ ment*;®

and this Involves prudential decisions as well

as esthetic evaluations. to turn first to formal or esthetic criticism. retically the matter can he put simply. three questions to answer: art? ceed?

Theo­

The critic has

(1) is it a piece of literary

what did the author intend? {3) how did he suc­ Was the work worth doing, as far as the complete

sense of that phrase is concerned, is not properly a ques­ tion to be asked here.

If it is a work of literature it

175

is eoneerned with beauty, and beauty is worthwhile as be­ ing and truth are worthwhile.

To go beyond this in exam­

ining the worthwhlleness of the poem or novel or play, is a matter for prudence not esthetics. The actual practice of formal criticism is very ob­ viously far more complex and difficult than this simple one, two, and three.

The many books and essays which treat

of formal criticism and the scarcity of expert practition­ ers of this criticism are evidence that it is neither simple nor easy.

The few remarks that follow are not made

in any naive attempt to analyze thoroughly or even to enum­ erate all the important points to be covered In formal criticism.

The few points noted are intended principally

to call certain matters to the attention of Catholic critics, for Catholic literary criticism in this country has been weakest on its esthetic side. the three questions which the critic must answer can­ not be completely separated.

Any complete reply to one

of them requires a partial answer to the other two.

Still

the critic can, for the sake of clarity, emphasize now one and then the others la his study of a piece of literature. Before taking up the first question - is this poem, novel, play, a work of artt - some clarification of intuition. art, technique is in order.

176

Intuition a m be understood in several senses; two of these are pertinent to this discussion.

As an act it

is the immediate grasping of concrete reality; as a re­ sult of that act it is the vision seen.

As this vision

it is the object to he expressed In the work of art hy the virtue (virtue) of art.

Technique is not the virtue

of art hut rather an external yet requisite condition of the work of art.

Technique in this sense refers to the

muscular control of the brush or the dexterity of the musician1s fingers or, what Is analogous to these in literature, a knowledge of metrics, stage-eraft, novel organisation, and the like.*

The virtue of art is essen­

tially intellectual and in its perfection consists, ac­ cording to St. Thomas, in the aot of judging.

By the vir­

tue of art, the artist judges how the brush, the fingers, metrics are to be employed. of art may still result.

If the hand trembles a work

The crudeness of touch in the

Primitives and old ballade is proof of this.

It was not

the intuition or the virtue of art but the technique which partly failed.

Crudeness and clumsiness, as Marl tain has

noted, of themselves have no charm; where they are delib­ erately contrived and parodied they are to be despised.

*It is clear, X hope, that this ie not the old dichotomy °f matter and form. On such a division of the work of art of. Appmdix r v n

177

Bat In the Primitives and old ballads and folk-poetry these were weaknesses which revealed the subtle intellec­ tuality of art. So it is not on the technique but rather on the in­ tuition that the critic oust focus his attention is at­ tempting to discover whether a piece of writing is a work of art.

If there has been a genuine Intuition of reality,

the writorts technical weakness will not completely prevent the work from reaching the level of literature; lacking such an intuition an author cannot create a work of liter­ ary art whatever his technical skill or ingenuity. Intuition ie therefore essential and crucial.

Since

intuition, as an act and as a vision, is in the artist1s mind, the critic cannot get at it directly.

Bor Is there

any necessity of his doing so; his direct business Is with the artist as maker not the artist as seer.

Whether "mute

inglorious Miltons1' have existed or not, the critic9s conoem Is with those who have not been mute; the crltio Is to judge the work and not the man.

Has there been an

intuition embodied In the work of art by the virtue of art?

the answer to this will determine whether a piece

of writing is literature or not. longfallow* s "The Arrow and the Song* expresses no intuition but only a concept, an abstract notion of friendship.

The expressed likeness of arrow and song fits

178

only the abstract Ideas the likeness breaks down completely and the poem falls to pieces when its concrete Implications are weighed.

This poet* s first sonnet on the Birina Com-

media, however, dees express an intuition of the deep peace found in religion,

the individual images, the emo­

tional overtones, all focus on giving this concretely and not as some abstract statement.

The poem does not crumble

to bits when the figures expressed in it are required to offer more than a vague reference to an abstract Idea. When the virtue of art is apparently having a recess (as it does in the following lines) there is no reason what­ ever to suspect that the poet was overwhelmed with any Intuition so far as these passages are concerned. Once more the Ass, with motion dull, Upon the pivot of his skull Turned round his long left ear.9 The Sternal heard, and from the heavenly quire Chose out the Cherub with the flaming sword, And bad him swiftly drive the approaching fire From where our naval magazines were stored.10 In judging of the presence or absence of intuition the critic must not make his decisions on the obscurity or clar­ ity of the piece he le examining.

The poet* s intuition has

some similarities to the mystic*s vision.

St. Theresa of

Avila in her writings would stop to protest how little she wae giving of what she had experienced and how impos­ sible it was to express that experience; poets have felt a similar impoteney to give adequate embodiment to their

179

Intuitions.

Am Intuition is after all a non-rational or

*trans-rational* act and experience,

It cannot be com­

pletely expreseed in notional language.

Poets know this

and metaphysicians admit it; critics must also realize the fact* Obscurity and clarity by themselves are then no sure criterion.

Edgar Quest1s verses may be simplet but they

are merely rhymed and sentimental statements*

But neither

is there intuition in those concatenated complexities called *chain-poema* in few Directions.**

fhis m y be

esoteric entertainment for the initiated, but it is no more art than the whirling of a kaleidoscope.

Gerard

Hanley Hopkins "Windhover* is not simple (I. A. Richards and la. Imp eon have wrestled with it - and not very suc­ cessfully), but it certainly has an intuition of the hidden fire of sacrifice as contrasted with the shining splendor of achievement and fame.

And there is an intu­

ition in the ©ore simple ’‘Mending fall* of Robert Frost and even in the hurdy-gurdy music of Alfred Boyee "The Barrel-Organ*. The simple clarity of a poem or of a novel may be due to the author* s genius, or to the particular nature of the intuition he is endeavoring to express, or it may be due to his lack of intuition.

So too with difficult

ISO

and obscure work; this way be the result of the author* s partial Inability to handle bis Intuition, or of the nature and greatness of that particular insight; and it way be the result of the author1e newer having had a vis­ ion at all* One final word about intuition and literature*

the

orltie wwst not regard a subjective blurring of reality as the genuine thing; to we ”Kubla Khan* still rewains a doubtful poem*

Art implies a great deal wore than any

were expression of the ego. And yet intuition, although It must grasp reality* remains subjective in that it Is eminently personal*

It is not something that other men

can give; it is not something that is accepted or believed or wished for*

It must be experienced.

Many a pious

lyric remains only a pious and well-intended piece of verse because there was no personal insight*

The writer

merely expressed what he or she wished to feel*

Here is

the difference between the poems of Sister Made leva and the wistful* sentimental verse that today often goes by the name #religious lyric*• In attempting to get at the Intention of the work of art (the second question) it is clearly a mistake to rely on isolated statements placed In the mouths of cer­ tain characters in the novel or the play.

Furthermore,

the indirect evidence gained from a knowledge of the writer*s biography is only a clue not a conclusion.

Finally,

isi

the critic is on no absolutely sure ground even when the author inserts explanations in the work itself ae Haw­ thorne often Old.

Reeent studies on this writer,*2 even

though they are not correct in all their judgments, serve at least to indicate the dangers of a too complete reli­ ance on such direct evidence.

Support nay be gained from

such intrinsic and extrinsic sources, but ultimately the intention of the work must be discovered from the work it­ self.

And the discovering of that intention ©alls for

careful and discriminating analysis. In judging how the writer has succeeded the critic again must be mainly concerned with the work.

Wide and

Intelligent reading, an appreciative understanding of great works of literature are a necessary preparation for any critie.

But such reading must not be allowed to

crystallise his critical thinking.

A critic1s thought is

static and almost useless when it begins to lay down ab­ solute and §. priori rule for works of literature.

Success

in art and literature is measured not by an approximation to rules but by the approximation with which this par­ ticular novel, this poem, this play, accomplishes its artistic purpose. ?h© novel, the poem, the play are thus not only the work to be measured but also an indication of the stan­ dards by which it is to be measured.

Suppose a short poem

Is to be criticized.

From an examination of this piece

of writing it becomes clear that it was intended to be a piece of lyric poetry.

Structure, form, image, versi­

fication are the basis for this judgment.

Since it Is a

lyric it must be judged by the general norms applicable to this literary genre: these general norms, furthermore, will need some modification in the light of the particular end that this poem attempts to compass,

thus the poem

itself indicates the standards by which it is to be meas­ ured.

Applying these standards, tone-color, form, unity

of Imagery, strength of impression, versification, and the rest, the ©ritlc may point out that the poem lack® unity, or that the images are not consistent, or that the versification does not fit the Intuition.

The poem

itself has become the thing measured and the medium through which the critic arrives at the standards to measure it. To come to prudential criticism. cerned with the whole domain of doing.

Prudence is con­ A man can be pru­

dent economically, socially, politically, as well as pru­ dent ethicallyj they are distinct but not completely separated fields of action and of prudential judgments. There are some implications in all of these fields of action of which prudential criticism must take account. The Catholic critic1s chief concern has been with prudence

183

in the realm of moral action.

Perhaps fee has overlooked

certain implications in those other fields where prudence can apply, hut fee was correct In feeing chiefly concerned with prudence and morality. In the first place, morality ie of es­ sential importance for man as man; secondly, if the oritic is logical and persistent in treating prudence and morality, fee will also touch upon the economic, social, and political realms in so far as they are of vital importance for man as a human feeing. Quite obviously moral principles are required to judge prudentially.

Here the Catholic oritic feas no difficulty;

such principles are part of fels permanent *wisdom8 given fey reason and fey faith.

That these principles are universal

and absolute does not, however, make the judgments of pru­ dence simple or easy.

The vast amount of writing done fey

moral theologians, who are expert fey profession in the matter of prudence and morality, shows that they have not regarded such judging as simple and easy.

The principles of morality

do not change but the oases (casus) do; hence the need for *casuistry1 *.

Since prudence is the application of a prin­

ciple to a concrete situation, prudential judgments are al­ ways particular; often they can fee arrived at only after a complexity of circumstances and Intentions have been weighed. Prudential judgments must fee made carefully. But they must fee made; they constitute a part of the total literary judgment.

It is not only doubtful that

there is such a thing as “pure literature*, but it is

184

certain there ie no human being who is a ‘•pore artist* or a "pure beholder” of art* man remains man until he ceases to exist.

So a total judgment of the work of literature

must be total in reference to the whole man - writer as well as reader.

There is, moreover, another reason why

prudence has a right to give part of the total literary judgment.

As has been noted, the writer can have other

ends beside and beyond the work of literature which he produces.

Since these are non-literary ends they should

be evaluated by prudence.

And yet, although they are non-

literary purposes, the value assigned them is part of a total judgment.

For, as was pointed out earlier, these

ends must be attained artistically, that is, in the very work of art itself. So it is quite possible that on the purely literary level two works might be of equal standing, but in the total and final judgment of the critic one work of litera­ ture might be assigned a far higher place than the other. It is these extra-artistic ends as well as the depth or magnitude of the writer* s original intuition which ulti­ mately mark off great literature from lesser work.13 Prudential criticism deals with the relations of the writer and of the reader to the piece of literature.

In

judging the relations of the author to his writing the critic must fix his eyes particularly on the work itself.

1S5

He may gala clues from sources extrinsic to the poem or novel ae to the artist* s extra-artistic ends, bat such knowledge should remain only a clue; it must not bring the critic to see, for praise or for blame, more than is ac­ tually in the individual poem or novel. Finally the critic must remember that he Is not judg­ ing the conscience of the writer; that is something the critic has neither the right nor the duty to do.

He can

leave it safely up to God who judges in the light of his infinite knowledge and infinite mercy.**

It is well for

literary critics to remember that they are not thus endowed.*

•Katherine Mansfield may have grieved over the imper­ fections she saw in her work and felt “that she had written no single story that she would like to show to God.* (Ameri­ ca, May 30 f 1936) But the fact that God is the ultimate judge of even man* s artistic work could be a source of con­ solation to the writer; Gerard Manley Hopkins used it to console his friend, Canon Dixon, a faithful but unsuccess­ ful poet. *The only just judge, the only just literary oritic, is Christ, who prises, ie proud of, and admires more than any man, more than the receiver himself ©an, the gifts of His own making. And the only real good which fame and another* s praise does ie to convey to us, by a channel not at all above suspicion but from circumstances In this case much less to be suspected than the channel of our own minds, some token of the judgment which a perfectly just, heedful, and wise mind, .namely Christ's, passes upon our doings.* (Quoted from *Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Wat son Dixon* in America. May 30, 1936, p. 184») As Theodore Maynard notes: *fven in the matter of the use of our artistic gifts we may appeal from earth to heaven, ^remembering! that after the reviewers have done their best and their worst, Christ is our critic.* (Ibid.) (Oont*d.)

186

Besides the prudential judgments about the relations between the writer and hie work, the critic must also judge about the effect that the particular piece of literature will have on other men.

It will not do to argue, because

of its essentially fictional character, that literature has no effect on men.

While the effect of a book or play

upon mature men of wide reading is unquestionably less than upon the less intelligent and the emotionally imma­ ture, still the effect of a given work on a given audience must be weighed.

Wo beholder of art is a 11pure beholder0.

In theory, distinctions can be made between the ways a man is able to give his attention to any particular ob­ ject.

It may be sensory or it may be intellectual atten­

tion; it may be intense or relatively passive.

In actu­

ality, however, man is a uaums in no part of his ego is an effect felt which does not set up at least slight echoes throughout his whole being. An admission of all this does not settle the issues that the prudent critic must face; or, if it does settle them, it does not simplify the®. In the first place, obvi­ ously the oritic must distinguish between the matters

* (Ooatfd from page 185.) There Is a lesson for critics in all this. It can recall tb them the double fact that they are not the ulti­ mate judges and that they, like the artist and every other man, have a responsibility to employ their critical talents, five, two, or one, as perfectly as they can.

187

treated and the manner in which they are handled.

Field­

ing* & boisterous foa Jones deserves the prudential award over the "hot-house* and calculating morality of Pamela. Gil Blag is not the same kind of book as that tawdry quondam best-seller, Anthony Adverse. And evidently the hearty robustness of Chaucer and Cervantes ie not the same thing as either the hard, but half-visioned, case studies of Farrell* s south-side Irish, or the muckingfor-money of William Faulkner* vft In considering the moral influence a book will have the critic must keep in mind the audience at which it Is aimed.

In estimating the influence on that audience he

cannot, without further consideration, make himself a norm* the critic himself may be above or below such an audience in sensitivity to matters treated in that par­ ticular book,

fhe critic must remember too that sex is

not all of morality and that a false philosophy of life sympathetically portrayed can do more damage to many readers than any amount of pornography. In judging prudent tally, a Catholic critic would do well to point out the mawkish sentimentality which is found la what is often regarded as wholesome, or at least in­ nocent, fiction.

Small doses of sentimentality may do no

harm, but large and continued dosing harms a reader from a spiritual as well as from a purely human point of view.

isa

Again, the Oatholie exitto might question the pietistic book in which the virtuous are all rewarded and the bad reform.

To go “all out* for #poetic justice” and to judge

a writer1e point of view by noting whether virtue is re­ warded or evil punished in his novels and plays is short­ sighted for a Christian. ity.

Complete justice is for etern­

To encourage such writing because It brings about

a neat balance In some temporal span is wrong.

Such books

will tend (supposing they are readable) either to promote Rotarias morality in the simple or to disgust the more intelligent reader with the idea of virtue altogether. The task of the critic in making prudential judg­ ments ie not simple or easy.

He has to get below surface

appearances, to analyse more than the obvious factors. And the task of total criticism is yet more difficult.

It in­

volves the integration of formal criticism (with all the different complexity of approach for poetry, for drama, for the novel) with prudential criticism. why great critics are rare.

It is understandable

It is also understandable why

so many reviews written by Catholics are guides for readers rather than literary criticism.

The average book is not

worth the serious and prolonged study which the critic must give to it if he ie to render a total judgment. The fact that the Catholic critic has principles of

189

morality upon which he earn rely, and that there is a Catho­ lic tradition in art toy which he can he guided, does not make the task of the Catholic literary critic easy in the United States.

The artistic tradition of the Catholic

Church too often has to he called to the attention of her children hy mon-Oatfeolics before the children them­ selves will recognize it.

The tendency to take a 0prac­

tical view11 as well as a tinge of something like J&aseaIsm still mark the attitude of many American Catholics towards the fine arts*

That is the weight with which the

Catholic critic has to contend oh the one side; on the ether he has to meet the whole weight of Secularism, the mind of this world whose only concern Is with the materi­ al, the external, the temporal*

The very odds and dif­

ficulties he has to face ought to stir the American Catho­ lic oritic to give of M s best. At least a sense of duty and responsibility must move him*

9What I believe to be incumbent upon all Chris­

tians is the duty of maintaining consciously certain stan­ dards and criteria of criticism over and above those ap­ plied by the rest of the world***®

And all Catholic

critics might use as a pledge those words with which Eliot concludes his essay:

*We shall certainly continue to read

the best of its kind, of what our time provides; but we must tirelessly criticize it according to our own prin­ ciples, and not merely according to the principles admitted

190

by the writers and by the critics who discuss it In the public press. Still in spite of Its difficulty and complexity, criticism, like so many other complex and difficult things, can be summed up simply,

lean Galvet has said that the

wAma et fao quod rig.*17

The critic*s task is to dis­

cover whether the writer was a lover and with what he was in love.

0o hie books show an artist prone to the idolat­

ry of self, with a heart set on sensations, on gain, on fame?

Or is his heart set on beauty?

If it is beauty

that he truly loves, then, whether he knows it or not, he is in love with Ood.

fe his work, to the art ist-

writer, to the man, and to other men, it makes all the difference In the world.

191

poofiroygg TO OEAPTSH I XA. M, Schle singer, Jr. , Orest eg A. Brownson. Little Brown and Company , Boston, 1939, p. 277. 8J. R. Lowell, The Poet leal Works of James Russell Lowell. 4 vols., Houghton Mifflin Co., RewYork, 1890, foil III, p. 44. 3Sehleeinger, p. 280. 4Cf. ISM., pp. 276-83. T. Heeker, *Br. Brownson and Catholicity,* The Catholic World. Hov., 1887 (XLVI), p. 234. 6Schlesinger, p. 288. 7Oreetes A. Brownson, Brownson* s Quarterly Review. Jan., 1844 (I), pp. 3-4. ®Brownson, The Works of Orestes A. Brownson. 20 vols., ed., H. F. Brownson, Detroit, Mich., 1885, 7, p. 39. (Hereafter this work will he referred to as Works.) %ohle singer, p. 14. X8H. F. Brownson, Orestes A. Brownson* s Barlv Life. Detroit, Mich., 1899, pp. 25-39; 30-34. xx8r©w»sea, forks. I, p . vii, quoted by H. F. Brownson. x% . F. Brownson, introduction to Works. I, p. vii. x%orks. 7, p. 39. x*Sohleelager, p. 382. x%orka. XIX, p. 129. X6Ibld.. p. 447. 17Xbid., p. 19. I8Ihid.

192

19Ibld., P. 66* % » ■

.

p. 67.

21lbld.( p. 80. "ibid.. p . 70, % M . .

p. 87,

24Ibid.. p. 78. "ibid.. XV, p. 298; XIX "ibid.. XIX, pp. 218-17 "ibid.

39Ibl& , p. 20S. *°31M »jbid "ibid , pp. 317-18. 33ibia s p. 37. "ibid , p. 20. "ibid , p. 48. "ibid , X?, p. 43. "ibid f XIX, p. 101 "ibid 39Ibid , p. 100. 40Ibld , p. 80S. 41Ibtd , p. 144. "ibid i p. 150. "ibid , p. 245. "ibid , p. 136.

. 438.

193

1MM* *

p

p

§lM * »

2X0

p

53rbtd,, p

2m 254 399 IMd., p

298

Italios ars ours. p. 331.

.f pp. 262-3. , p. 126.

448 303.

ibid.. p y p. 316.

194

70Ibid.. p. 874. 71I M d . , p. 31B. 73Ibld.. pp. 7SIbld.. p, 313. 74lbld.. p. 366. 78Ibld.. p. 79. 7gIbld., XV, p. 300{ XIX, pp. 88—3. 77Ibid.. XV, p. 300. 78Ibld. ^Ibld. “ ibid., XIX, p. 99. 81Ibid.. p. 14.

"ibid.. p, 274. "ibid. 85Ibld.. p. 378. 88|fejd., p. 154. 87Ibld.. p. 144. "ibid.. p. 63* Xt is a pleasure to note that he saw through the sentimental ity which was hack of the "happy ending8 in most religious novels. He strongly objected to the popular tales that "feed their aimable little hoys and girls with sugar-plume and reward them with sugar kieses* They may he passably sound in their didactic chapters, they may contain some wholesome common­ place morality, and abundance of fine sentimentalizing about piety and devotion; hut their practical influence on their readers is to enervate their minds, to render their hearte weak and their imaginations morbid, to confine their aspirations to this world, and to induce them to look for an earthly recompense, - a happy marriage, riches, or

195

worldly distinction. Seldom does the author, or rather authoress, dare propose spiritual consolation here, and eternal life hereafter as the adequate reward of suf­ fering virtue and patient piety.11 (Works. X, p. 360.) 8%Skfi, XIX, p. S3. "ibid.■ p, 598 ^Ibld.. p. 496 93Ibid. 93Ibid.. p. 497 9*Ibid., p. 59. It might be noted that Brownson pronounces the Tea on a practical rather than an intellec­ tual level. ^Xbld.. pp. 341-3. "ibid. OTIbtd.. XI?, p. 435 "ibid.. p. 433. "ibid.. XIX, p. 366 I°Olbid., p. 236. lOljrtia., p. 312.

loaibia. 103Ibia.. p. 313. 10*Ibid. Although he saw a complete wisdom Catholicism supplemented by the truths of a correct philosophy, he did not for this reason exclude fro® literature the works of those who did not hold hie philosophy or believe his faith. If such authors had gotten hold of sufficient truth and reality to serve as the material or basis of the artistic work in question, that work would measure up as far as his principle of in­ tellectuality was concerned. (Of. Works. XIX, p. 329.)

196

108lbld., pp. 190 and 429. 107Ibld., p. 429. 108lbtd. 109Ibid.

1M rbla. „ p. 190. 11]-Ibta.. p. 421. U 8 Ibld. 113lbld.. p. 422. X1*Ibld.. 9, p. 47. u soa.a.. xix, p. 178. , V. P. S9. U 7Ibld., 71, pp. 529-39. *. P. 381. 119Ibld.. p. 360. p pp • 36X**2» m

lbtd.. II, p. 124.

188lbtd.. XIX, p. 151. 188lbtd.. 17, p. 444. la*Ibtd., X, p. 259. 135Ibld.. XI, p. SOS. lp X | 300 • 137Ibld.. XII, p. 177. l2BIbld.. p. 178. 139Ibld.. 71, p. 537. 13°Ibld., p. 29,

197

lslIbld. II, p. 70.

134IMde , P. 428. 135I M d . , P* 336* 1S6IMd. f P« 337* P. 419* P* 376* X39Iblde 140lMi*i P* 377. P. 314* p. 48. 14sI M d . , P. cfl 144m a . , P. 65. a P* 49. 146Skia-> P. 263. 147Ifeld.. P. 520* 148iSli»» P. 377. 149Ibld.. XX,, p. 893 1S0Ibld.,

p. 351.

151Ibld.. XIV, p. 214. 152rbld.. X, p. 451. 1630f. A. T. jr. Hemy, "German Literature", Cathollo gaoyolonedla. 71 f p. 525; R. H. Weraaer, Romantlcigm and Romantio School in Germany, Appleton and Go#* lew *Mk7l810, pp." 148-150T IS4Workg. IV, p. 411; X, p. Ill; XI, p. 511; XIII, PP. 366f 4601 588.

198

155Ibid.. XIX, PP. 37-8. ^ % b i d .. pp. 36-7. t pp. 38-9. ^ M d . , X, pp. 259-60. 159|bid., p. 360. 160IM4» # *IX» P* 3X4. 16IXbfd.. p. 104.

162|M4e, p. 877. im Tbia.. p. 104. .«f p. 447 ^^Brownson was timet m e to #eit down by the cradle of the infant and learn the profoundest secrets of the divine Wisdom.* (Ibid.. p. 90.) 385.

t., p. 437, t*• P* 439, I*y. p. 437. i.> p. 488. 175Ibid., p. 429. 176Ibld.. IT, p. 423. m

m a .. XIX, p. 42.

178Ibld..

to.

45-6.

199

179Ibld., p. 44. 180jbl4., IV, p. 433* ^ I b l d . , XIX, p., 46. 182Ibld.. IV, p. 423. ^ ^ b t d . , P. 434. 184Ibid.t Ill, p. 330, 185Ibld. 186Ibld.. II, pp. 374, ssq 187Ibld.. III, pp. 338-9. I®®Besldes tli© reasons Indicated In the passage fro® Browason, another reason that may hare assisted in turn­ ing him against this writer was a remembrance of Dickens* visit to America* during which he had strongly urged an international copyright for authors* - *lugging it in so impertinently aaad in such had taste in all his replies to the civilities our citizens extended to him, * . . that we had never been able to hear of an international copyright since* without a certain nausea of the stomach. (Ibid., XIX, p. 317.) Brownson went on to say that if British authors had remained silent* and if lir. Charles Qickene had stayed at home, the law would long since have been passed. Americans did not like legal dictation from foreigners. CIbid.. pp. 317-18.) 1B9Ibld.. XIX, p, 569. 190Brft8e8 at Thought and Grit let am. p. 138. 143IMS*» P* 136. 144Ibtd.. pp. 136-38; Of. Philosophy of Literature. P. 141. 1*SSSm

SS& Heading. P. 73.

U 6lbld.. p. 76. U7S M * I48Ibld.. p. 77. U 9lbld.. p. 76.

213

150Ibld.. p. 78.

153Ibld.. p. 81. 15SIbld.. p. 113. 154Ibld. > P* Working from a manuscript copy of the "Daley"which he had, he puts in a considerable amount of close critic!s® in •a Peep into Tennyson*s Workshop.® (Ibid., pp. 205-13,) 156P|aS2t Si .SfefiHght, and Criticism. p. 3S4. ^ B o o k s and leading, p, 109. p. 108. 159iMi.» 160Ibid.« p. 89. 161Ibld. 162Ibid.. p. 90. 163Ibld.. p. 101. 164tbld.. p. 102. Azarias was acknowledging that while Browning1s talents were suited for depicting a, Fra hippo Lippi better than a Fra Angelico, a picture of the former was not, for all that, a complete or a necessarily typical picture of Catholic!em. These men call themselves social physicians. But the respectable physician confines his lectures and experi­ ments to the dissecting room, where they are understood and appreciated.® {Ibid.. p. 13S.) ISfrphiioEoohy of literature, p. 97. 167Books and Reading, p. 51. lg8Ibld.. p. 169. 189Ibld.. P. 173.

314

170Ibid., p. 53. 171Xbld.. p. 63. 172Ibld.. p. 50. 172Ibid., p. 52. I7*lbld. X75Ibld. 176Xbld., p. 154. 177Ibid.. p. 33. 172Ibtd., p. 33. Of. e.g. tbs words of Brio Gills “Well, following Mortis, following Buskin, following the universal practice of the world, except in eccentric periods such as that induced by our irreligious commercial­ ism and the insubordinations which made that commercialism possible, we were in revolt against the whole conception of art as being irrational** (Sric Gill, Autobiography* Jonathan Gape, London, 1940, p. IS?*) *7%hages of Thought and Criticism, p* 11* 180Ibid* *8*|btd«f p. 13. 182Ibtd., p. 15* 18gIbld*. p. 14. I84Ibld** p* 15* 185I M & *» P. 16. 186Ibld*, p* 17. X87lbld«* p. IS. ^®®Ib|d., “Preface11, p. iii. 189Ibld., pp. 16-25. i88S*g. Ibid., p. 25$ Philosophy of Literature* p. 268*

215

191Phaeea S£. I b e m M SSi Criticism. p. 19. 193Ibld.. p. 17. 19gBoolce and Beading, p. 47. 194m a .. p. 60. •’*. . .tbs thought of two and two only abeolate and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator. * (Apologia Pro Vita Sua. J. H. Cardinal lawman, (edit. 9. 0*Connell) Loyola University Frees, Chicago, 1930, p. 33). ^^Lady Georgians Fullerton, Kathleen 0fMeara, John Boyle 0*Reilly, Rosa Hmlholland, Christian Held, Mrs. Elizabeth Gilbert Martin, Mrs. Cashel-Hoey, Richard Mal­ colm Johnston, Marlon Crawford, Mrs. S&dller, Mrs. Hanson Dorsey, James Jeffrey Roche, Charles Warren Stoddard, Maurice Francis Egan, Louise Imogen Ouiney, Agnes Supplier, Eleanor 0. Donnelly, Katherine Conway, Mr®. Mary E. Blake, Mrs. Margaret F. Sullivan. (Books and Reading* pp. 54-55.) 197Ibld., pp. 135-38. *America has produced no more powerful intellect than Brownson.* (Ibid., p. 125.) 198Ibld.. 123-30. 198Ibld., pp. 131-35. Under his editorship the articles whether theological, philosophical, scientific, or literary, in general measured up to a very high standard of excellence; the magazine as a whole could be favorably compared with similar English and Continental reviews. 390Ibid.. p. 202. 301Ibid. 30aIbld.. p. 204. 203Ibld. 804Ibid. 305Xbld.. pp. 302-03. seays Miscellaneous, p. 81. 307pfaasee of fhought and Criticism. p. 57.

216

™ 8 i w w MiBcsllaneoiis. p. 170. 209Jbld. 310Xbld.

31?

FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER III ^Washington Irving, Motley, Lowell, Hawthorne, Bret Harte, Howells, Thomas Kelson Page, and M. Van Dyke are prohahly the most Important names. % . P. Egan, Recollections of a Happy Life. Geo. Doran Co., Mew York, 1924, p. 1 9 3 . (Hereafter this work will be referred to as Recollections.) ®Those chapters were well done. Egan had retained his post In Denmark under three presidents, Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, men who differed widely in most of their policies. He had been offered a more important post but preferred Denmark as a "listening post* in Europe. On his retirement the King of Denmark, Secretary Lansing, and President Wilson praised him with a good deal more than the customary complimentary phrases. *%an, Confessions of and Co., Hew York, 1923.

Book-Lower. Doubleday, Page

5Bgan, Lectures on English Literature. Sadlier, New York, 1339. 6‘Ibid.. pp. 1-31. ?Ibid.. "The Real Meaning of Aesthetics,* pp. 41-60. 8lbtd., p. 60. 9Ibid.. p. 10. *%gan. Studies in Literature. Herder, St. Louis, Mis­ souri, 1399. "The Sanctity of Literature,* pp. 43-63. i, p. 44. 13Ibld.. p. .6. ^Charles Phillips in “Our Maurice Francis’* (Catho­ lic World. OVI (Mow., 1917), p. 333 ) wrote, "With him, Indeed, literature is a symbol of God. 'Life has always turned to God, and literature echoing life, has always written the symbol of God!1 And again: ‘God who is the

318

center of the written expression of life, which Is litera­ ture.1 This le Kaurice Francis Egan's literary creed,* Phillips could have easily set down a great many more sentences than two as evidence for his judgment about Egan*s literary credo* ^Studies in Literature, pp. 51-53. 16Ibld.. p. 66. 17Ibid., p. 50. 18Ibid.■ p. 56. ^93ereral of these had first appeared in the Catholic UniTeraltY Bulletin: later they were collected and pub11shed in The ghost In Hamlet and Other Sssaya. A. 0. MoClurg and Co. / bhicago, 1906. (Hereafter referred to ae 3 M G&ogt in Hamlet.) ®®*A Definition of Literature11. The Ohost in Hamlet, pp. 369-93. ~ 21Ibid.. p. 880. 3BXbld. asIbid.. pp. 373-74. 24Ibid.. p. 387. ^Xbld.. p. 93. 26Xbld.. p. 94. 37lbld.

39lbld.. p. 104. ^Confessions of a Book-Lorer. p. 338. S1Ibld.. p. 339. 33Xbld.. p. 341. 53Xbid.. p. 339.

American Catholic Quarterly Review, XI? (1889) , p. 575* Egan* e Lectures on Eng 11eh Literature was the book being reviewed* N a t i o n . LXXIII (Bee. 19, 1901), p. 472. The Ration made the mistake of taking the book too seriously or rather of taking it in a way Egan had not intended it. It was meant to be a handbook, arranged historically, to assist the student to an appreciation of literature. But viewed even thus, it still remained a weak book. It was no great loss that its author did not bring out the companion vol­ ume, introduction to American Literature is English which he had premised in the preface. ^Recollections. p. 144. 3% . Meehan, *4 Biographical Rote11, appended to Recollections. p. 373. g9&tudies J&

PP* 32-33.

40Xbld.. p. 38. 41Ibid., 41Some Words on Chaucer*1, pp. 5-27. mmk M

Wmtel* p* ss.

4%tudlas la Literature, p. 13. ^Quoted from Charles Reade, in Studies in Literature, p. 10. ^Quoted from Patmore* s Belialo Foetae in Studies in Literature, p. 10. msm« 47Cf. in this connection T. Gilby, Poetic Experience. Sheed and Ward, Raw York, 1934, and J. Marita in, & & and Scholasticism. Chas. Scribner*e Sons. Hew York. 1938. pp. ispsk— ■— 48fhe Ohost la Hamlet, p. 54, 4^Ibid., pp. 55-56. The book referred to is - H. S. Bowden, The Religion of Shakespeare - Chiefly from the Writings of the late Mr. Richard Simpson, Burns said Oates, temdon, 1899.

230

500oafess Ions

a Book-hover. p. 156.

^Recollections. p. 23. **• 5^Ibid.. p. 366. One of these performances of *The Prayer* was given, June 15, 1891, at Notre Dame; Egan was then on the faculty of this university. (d* F. Daly, The lilfe of Augustin Daly, The M&emillan Co., New York, 1917.) ^^Recollect1ons. p. 366. ^5Hie The Theater and Christian Parents, which I have heen unable to examine, was obviously not intended as literary criticism. SSftflro Dramas fey Tennyson and Aubrey Be Vers*, lec­ tures on English Literature, pp. 110-51; *Imitators of Shakespeare*. The Ghost in Hamlet. pp. 301-53. ^*fhc Greatest of Shakespeare1s Contemporaries*, ShSL H & g j 4S §£3i§l* PP* 171-99. 58#rhe Ghost in Hamlet*, The Ghost in Hamlet, pp. 1147; *fhe Puzzle of Hamlet*, Ifeld.. pp. 139-69. 59feaaysonfs play, Beeket. 1884. sofeectnre8 on Bngllgh Llteratare. p. 125. S1&>£ gJfeoe* IS gamlet, p. 233. 620f. The bibliographies of plays listed fey A. H. Quinn, The History of American Drama f r m M Civil Jta to the Present X)a.rSY+ S. Qrofts and 0o7t Sew fori, J§36, pp. 251-52; 334-39; 345-46. ^fhus Daly, who had adapted many plays from French and German sources, turned to Spanish material only once tin Drama Nuevo (1867) fey Tamayo y Bams. (Quinn, oj>. clt., p. 33.) ' ,r ®*The Ghost in Hamlet, p. 173. 65Ifeid.. p. 194. ®®Quoted in *Calderos de la Barca*, fey M. F. Egan, in The Catholic World. XXXIII (July, 1881), p. 475.

321

6?The Ghost in Hamlet, p. 174. 682M£-* P* *»• 68Another passage puts It even more strongly. It has the sound; however, of Egan's having read those his­ tories of Spain ?/hieh were written by stout Anglo-Sassoas. *Calderon making spectacles for the court* while the enemies of Spain were dismembering her* and her soldiers in new lands sowing the seeds of hatred in the name of God* whom their lust outraged* was a symbol of his coun­ try* forgetting the ideal of other days and substituting for it emptyQ Qsplendor and worthless gold.■ (fhe Ghost in W o *h 1 — ld., p. 98. 214 "Introduction to the Study of Tennyson", (part IlirT Catholic Circle Heading Heylew. IX (1896-97), p. 317, SlS^ectures cm English Literature. p. 98, 216«introduction to the Study of Tennyson11, loc. clt.. p. 317. 8*7Pream of Oeroatius. edt by M, F. Egan, ££. cit.. p. 7. ^^Confessions of a Book-Lover. p. 129. 319rbid.

230

gQOTHQTES 10 CHAPTER IV ^Daniel Sargent , Four Independents. Sheed and War$, Hew Tork, 1935* % . Maynard, The Story of American Catholicism. The Macmillan Co,, NewYork, 1941, p, 568, Sfl#

n

KKft*

ft

If

flhna'fa*

tfrh«5*

vival, The Bruce Publishing Co,, Milwaukee, 1935, pp. 301W. %ames Harrell, A Hote on literary Criticism. The Vanguard Press, Hew Tork, 1936, pp. 23-24, is an instance of what is meant. 2nd pp. 5-8. ^Austin Warren, literary Scholarship. *Literayy Criticism** p* 174.

%illiam Wordsworth, *Peter Bell". *%ohn^Brydea, nAnnus HiraMHe*. ^Hew Directions. 1940 (ed., James Laughlin), Hew Directions, Norfolk, Conn., 1940. Of. esp, *Duo Ho. 3#, pp. 371. *%. Rahy, wTh© Dark lady of Salem”, Partisan Review. VIII (Sept,-Oct.,.1941), pp. 362-81; P. I.' Carpenter. »Puritans Prefer* olondes11, Hew England Quarterly. IX (1936), pp. 253-273, ^Gf. T, 8, Eliot*e statement: *7116 •greatness1 of literature cannot be determined solely by literary stan­ dards, though we must remember that whether it is litera­ ture or not can be determined only by literary standards.H (T. S. Eliot, Essays Ancient and Modern. ^Religion and Literature*, SrH a t o fTBYagg W m 05.T H . T., 1932, p. 93.)

231

**0f. M. F. Egas, Studies la Literature. p. 10. *5?. 3. Eliot, Essays Anoleat and M o d e m . “Religioa and Literature*» p. 113* 16IM4*» P. 115. 17^esua Calvet, P*ane critique catholique. *Sdltion Spes*f Paris, 1937, p. 195.

333

The bibliographies appended to Chapters I, II, and III are not intended to cover all the writings by or about Brown son, Azarina* and Egan* Of secondary source material only directly pertinent articles and books are noted; of primary material all books are given, and of periodical articles only item* that bear more or leas directly upon their criticism are included* Although no claim is made that this list of their critical writings is exhaustive, still none of the omitted items is of such a nature that it would notably modify any of the main outlines which have been drawn of these three individuals* s m i *

m m m s

Brownson, Orestes A*, Addjgss Putnam, Boston, 1837.

Popular Education. d,

©res Bo.toa Quarterly Rerlew (Complete "EetT &ESM«8g!l*-t Quarterly Beyl** (Couplet. agtfsp&Mag 9 & W m $ i X m sai i M «?, Sew Tork, 18W* M

Convert; heaves from gv .sSaSToros*, few fork, ill?.

ggfaBMU MStiE £&

, Kenedy, Sew fork,

«

■

-_. . flkpe of Q m f m i t i m and v » ^ v * a* f e&., 8* 'Battle, l M s 7 Thorold, Ontario, Canada. .- ., literary. Scientific, and Political g l M i of Orestes A. Browson, ©d. , h T F* Browneon, Bensiger Bros* * lew Tork,1893.

333

___________________ 2S M Ohn^tAanitjr, Sgc.jetv. awl t W gtosA, J. Wunroe antI Co.. Boston. •the P M losophy of the Supernatural#, |aerlcanflathollc Quarterly MSk&L* * (1876), pp. _______________ . J M Splrlt-Rapper: an Autobiography. little, Brown and Go, , Boat on, 1854* t

-------------_ |£* BBragffi, »• s. 0*»oiXX# ed*# T«ofeayt Illiaoli, 19X0.

---------- 3_____ J& S.IfttiMM Of t * . a* iroTOBon. ed., H. F. Browaecm, 2 0 rols., Detroit* 1883-87.

fi?,aW i a g . i ! i a g 8‘, w ' *■— Bates, S. a., “Orestes Augustus Browneon*, Dictionary of imsigaa lisgshs&z, nx. pp. i7s-i. Brooke, Van Wyck, S iS S S S im M . SSS. jag-iWi. S. P. Button 4 Co., too., 1940. Browne, S« M.t ^Browneon: Militant Philosopher#, Boaaaonwei III {4pr. 14, 1938}, 827-8. Browneon, I. *0reetes augnstu® Browason#, Catholic? laovolQDedla III, pp. 1-3.

------------- ---

Sggittgg A* £s>msg°Lf. Sa^iz. SIMM* sM

totter Life. 3 vole., Detroit, 1698-1900.

■Browason'• Szpo.ltIon of Hlneelf*, Princeton Review.XXX (Jan., 1858), 117-180. ■Browneon's Polltloal and Literary tssays*, Month. LV (8ov., 1885), 439-443. ■Browason*e Quarterly Review*, Dublin Review. XXX (Dec., 1846), 390-400. *Brewa*aa'e Works*, Month. XIVXI (Harob, 1883), 429-431; LIIX (March, 1885), 444-448.

234

Burton. Katherine. ®A Kan of Our Bey®* OosMnweal. xxyil (Apr. 33, 1033), 7X9. .

In M ftrange feeai. hangmans, Cress Co*, few Tork, 1943*

flie Cambridge History of Americas* Mteratiire. ed. , f. P. fjSatV J* »re«ie # P. K e i S i , 0* fen Boren* S vole., fhe Macmillan Co., Sew fork* 1933. Charles llwecd: or the Infidel Converted*, Christian Re▼lee. 7 (Kept*, 1940), 419* 0* J* P., *Orestes A* Srownaoa* e Argument for the Homan Church®, ChristianExaminer,117111 (March, 1850), 237* Ooafcley, fhomee 7., *Oreetee A. Brown son* * America. X? (Sept. 18, 1918), 549. Conroy, P.JU,

A* EaUi&Mi Dissertation, St. tools University, Missouri, 1937.

Corrigan, Sister M. Felicia, 3*1.., Sobs Qool&l ^ ^ .. Oy..t.» 1, gyoimroa. Oian.rt.Uon, Oatho: lversity, fmshiiigtcii, B.C., 1939.

f

®fhe Death of Orestes A. Browmson, LL.B.®, Ave Marla. Ill (1378), 380. Blethas, Sara I*, *A Megleoted Catholic Champion3, Amerl Baris, K., *Greek Meets Creek®, Oimaaonweal. XX (May 11, 1934), 40* •A Pee fords on Dr, Browason1s Philosophy*, Dublin Review* O T H I (Jan., 1878), 38. frees, J. E., *Orestes A. Browncon®, Historical Bulletin. XVI (Jan., 1938), 29.

•the Friends cf Browason" * Commonweal. IV (June 16* 1926). M7 . --------01Idea, William 1., *An English View of Brownson* s Conver­ sion*, Catholic World* L U X (Apr., 1899), 14* Cchdec, 0. I*. F*, Periodicals of Amor1gen TranscendentalIsai. Bake fairersityrreeg, Durham* 'forth Carolino, 1931* Bergen, M* 1., "Orestes A. Browason, W»*9, *A Han of Courage and a Creat American* *. Catholic World, i m (Apr*, 1904), 1* Hooker, I* T., "Or* Browason and Bishop Fitspa trick*, OMhollo World* FLV (Apr., 1887), 1* ....

-_jr.

*Br. Brewasen and the Working-Men* s Party Ago*, gathollc SasM. «■» (»«y, 1867),

fifty tsars 800.

"Bf* B*««a«a to Boston*, S&thoJAa WgaM.

(July, 18®7), 486. . ...

.,... *8r. Browason1s Hoad to the Church", OathoHa2S£M. (Oct., 1887), 1.

-...... "Or. Brownson and Catholicity", Catholic World. XLVt (Kov., 1887), 328. Hewit, A. f,m, *Br. Brownson*, Oathollo World. Will (June, 1878), 368. tads, Arthur I., ‘Political Ideas of Orestes A. Brownson, Tranaeeadentallet*, Philological Quarterly. Ill (July, 1833), 380. tathrop, a^ P . ,^»Orestes^Brownew^, M M B l l a ifflltMX. "Literary,.Scientific, and Political Views of Orestes A. Brownson", reviewed, gathollo ferld. ivi (Karch, 1893), 878. McLaughlin, J. r., *A Study of Or. Browason*, Oathollo world, u m i (Jans, 1903), 310, Keshan, ?. P., [Letter to Sditori Aaerloa. tV t (Oct. 4, 1941), 718.

333

nickel, Virgil 9. , The Critical Principles of Orestes 4* m m n r n m ^ e e e T ^ U m . Catholic Onlversfty, lilS. *Brownson* s Poll tleal Philosophy and

WXtIV, (Apr., teMlga,S^g.Ut amku&i ssxisl, 19X9}, 193.

*Ore etas I* Brown eon - Bis Critical S>rlneipl«8», Catholic fforld. CXJCCT (July, 1927), 439. ^

•Brownson, A Ban of Ben*, Catholic

, S U V (Sept., 193?), 7§S*

Men, P. U, 4 j|.9jgp M 45S$lm

X*.

Harvard Balverslly Press, Cambridge, Bass*, 1888.

•lew Views of Christianity, Societyf and the Gfcerch*, samnira Examiner. XZII (March, 1837), 137. •Orestes A* Brownson - la Memorials*, American Catholic B m sM srn StsiSE. I (isysi.^iggr •Orestes A. Brownson’s marly life*, reviewed, Dublin Ievlev. Q t t t t t (Oct., 1398), 430. •Orestes A. Browason*» Biddle life11, reviewed, Dublin Bevies, o r m t (July, 1900), 193. •Orestes k . Browneon* s letter Ufe«, reviewed, Dublin levlew. 0X1li (July, 1901;, 189. •Orestes A. Brownson* s Barlv hife*. reviewed. Hatton.

arm (sept, is, lsea), los.

«***»•

•Orestes A. Browason* e Biddle life*, reviewed, Vation. LXX1 (July 38, 1900), 77. •Orestes A. Brownson* s hatter life*, reviewed. Bat ion. M X t t t (July 4, 1901), 18. [0* Sullivan, John h.1 , *Br. Brownson* s Recent Articles in the Democratic Review*, Democratic Beview. XIII (Dee*, 1843), 883.

337

Farrington, T. W , m a S S $ S B M M i p i l m B s ^ l » | toIs., Haroourt, Brace and Co*, Sew York, 1930• Parsons, Wilfrid, "Brownson, Becker and Besrit*, ffiathollo I w M . 8 U I I (Jaly, 18*1), 398. Pfulf, 0., S.J., »Sln grosser Oednobtnistag f&z die Xirke dsr Vereinlgten Stantea*, Stiiagten ana Marie t*ach. m {Atig., 1903}t 145* ^e » er e f Sydney •». Anselm* s Priory» Wa^iisit^, S. 0#> 19Si. Remy, A* F. J., "German literature*, M f e M iM VI, §17*

Mm&lmgSM.*

[Ripley, George!, "Browason** Writings* , Oial. I (July, 1840), 33*

Ryan, Xdwia, 11Browason and Wewnaii*, American Socleeiaatim . ISSMB. W I C191B), I d T ™ Ryan* f.* "Constitution a M tie Glmreb** Catholic World* O t t i m {Oct., 1938), 75* *fn Ref ease of Brownson111, Commonweal, X U (Jane 30, 1939), 057.

Sargent, 0*, "Orestes A* Browneon", Commonweal, XXI {Bor. 0, 1934), 34. Four' Independents* Sfeeed and Ward, Wen tork, 193! 55* Sewage, S., "Catelegiiia**, Mtkollo. InotQlopeiia. XI, 357. Sehlesinger, A* M. , Jr., Orestes A. irowason; A H l g l M l l Progress. little, Brown and Oo*, Boston, 1939. s.* I m s g it MflJlfm S g l i M l m * Harcourt, Brace and Co., Few Tork, 1939* G»itb, Reuben, «Brotmaonfe envelopment of Himself", Princeism Bssisw. m (Apr.. 1858). aao. Teimay, H. e , , "My Grandfather - 0. t. Brosfneon", Oathollo horld. 01 (Oct., 1939), 93.

238

9Theological Brrere of the Say, Brownson1® Review*, thrtftia Review. U T {Jan., 1B64), 58. Ward, W. s., *Mr. Brownson on Developments*# ftufrltn Review. IXIII (Qfd»| 1847)| 373* f. ©. w. , *A Review of Brownson1e Oharles Rlwood* , Chris­ tian Wraalner. i m i ! (May, 1840), 180. Whalen, Sister Rose Gertrude, fgge M M t l t M.

M l m m

j£ ®zpM m A* B i g a m m m i a ^ e s a s s e ^ u u Mssertation, Metre Bane, Indiana, 1933.

*Mewman of America*. Ave r n n r r m s r m , m s ) , sts. -.... . ........ . . *Aa Important lame Missing*, £ 2 2 .$ m & , i& n m r s®, 1937), sts. Whalen, Doran, Granite for God* s House* Sheed and Ward, »ew rS?S, f§41. ®?he Worts of Orestes A# Browason®, reviewed, Oathollo World. XXXTI (Bee., 1882), 427, intermittently fSrough to XL7 (Sept*, 1887), 855. •The Works of Orestes A. Browason*, Month. £17X11 (July, 1883), 439.

239

ffTOTHSR « I M M Azarlaa, Brother. 'Amlel aad Pesalaiaa*, Catholic World. L (Oct., 1889), 110. Chrlatlan Chtmrtt. •BooJta and Bow to Dae The**, World. I U I (1889), 447 and 637. ___ £ss&£ 2Sf Bssgiag' library Association, Mew fork, 1898a

Cathedral

#The Oatholic University Question in Ireland and England®, M M i P J m IMMkkS.

Berlew. HI (1878), 577.

______

*Chareh and State*, American Catholic

SmutUxXr. lewiaw. x n (lan), go.

_ *doletral School**, Mar-lean iloal Revlew. I? (1391), 241.

I*St Parelot»Cttt o£ QM Bngliah 2|psfe£.

3rd edit*, Apple tern and So* f Sew Tork, 190S*

•Bdaoatlonal Kpooha*, gethollo Basing Bartow. Ill (1893-93), m . ..

*Tbs English In Their Continental Home*g|rtean Sm sSm & l I SZiSS.. «

~— - M Contributing: to & Phliosphy M ier&ture * ill » M t . , , Philadelphia,

g

J. JF. Kefey

, Do H. McBride and Co., ___ Icaars Klaoellaneoaa. 0. H. McBride aad do., Chicago, 1898. Bessys Philosophical. 9# H. McBride and Co., Chicagot 1998.

340

• b t t l M B Q*Me**a». #r* Koria. XXVIII T 1 S W , 848. -----•titevary and Scientific Habits of T g g r t J F * *

1

_ »Mary and the Faithful Departed* f Are f XXI (1888), 8X3* ______ *Msryla Heaven* * Av© Marla. XXXII (1891), 408 and 440. -

wrT *M. Gabriel Oompayr© as m Historian

, tegjloaa

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L L1. *tbe Motive of George XXietfs Hovel®* # dat&oitc Reading Oirele Review. II {1891-83}, r f^s§s 2 £ „ a a s g | s m p m s x m * H o l t o n St3FM* ^ IOrK# *ffee Primary Schools in the Middle Ages*, eaal Review. I (1891), 330* .. Hit

®Religion in Education*. American Cathos m i m * *** (ifl9i) ; ?I6*

"Robert Browning*, fltffaaUft f o f M . M I 7 1891), 88? r *Thm Spiritual Idea in Dante* $ Divina

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S&I&SUS SaSStoftl SStiS2.

"SyabollsE of the Cogaos*^ »aerlean >aHo Q a m e r l v Review. II (1 University Colleges; Their Origin and Their"'Method*, American Catholic quarterly Review, XIX (189*)* MS* "University life*. American Catholic Quar­ terly Review. XVIII (1893), 123. ___ •feet* s Alculn and the M s © of Christian Schools*, Educational Review. ? (1893), 499.

341

4Addresses and Letters read at the memorial meeting in honor of Brother Azarins* , St. John* s College* Washington, 0. 0., 1894. 11Books and Heading®, reviewed, Cathollo World, L (Bee., 1889), 480. •Brother Azsrias*. Catholic Heading Circle Eeview. II (i89i^l)7WT^ —

!sam sS

a f t e r

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Chrysostom, Brother, ^Brother Agartas®, Oathollo Encyclo­ pedia.. II, 188# "Beath of frother Azartae* Oajlialta Ill (1093-93), 78?.

Circle B$2lSE.

*'Development of English Literature! The Old English Period®, h i isr*

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Driscoll. J* T*. ®Catholic Summer Schools®. Catholic m 9 - * -- ^ • #**? Cu8i ‘ 35SS ni"| Edward, Brother, "Brother Aaarla.", H s l teffia si jflttUgM I, 454. >Sesay Contributing to a Philosophy of Literature®, Sad. •***•• * M ^ < a » eathollo aasrterlr RS2il2, II (1877), 187. *Bseay Contributing to a Philosophy of Literature®, 8th edit., edit., reviewed reviewed, ^werlcan Qathollg Quarterly Heview, x? (1890) ®Bssay Contributing to a Philosophy of Literature®, BrownftM|^teyIy Hewtew, II - last eertee (Oct., *Essays Muoatlona|j fsa&ys Philosophicalj Essays Miscel­ laneous®, reviewed. American Oathollo quarterly aT XX (X89T) , 313 ♦ "leeays Educational**, reviewed, Cathollo World. LXXV (Nov., 1896), 884.

242

"Sseaye Philosophical”» reviewed, Catholic is m , (Veto., 1897), 897.

m r

Hardy, George S., "Brother Aaariaa*, Educational Review. VI (1893), 478. Henry,H. T., *Brother Atarlae - Threnody*, American Oathoilfi 2BS£SS5iI ISXiSE, SI* (189*5 . 39. "Phases of Thought and Criticise*. reviewed. Atlantic Monthly. U t m i (Jan., 1893), 138. " •Phases of Thought and Criticism*, reviewed, Oathollo World, tv (Sept., 1893), 930. Smith, J. T., Brother Mil*,ft? Jfefi M | S itfflEZ M SB MSSlecu Monk. Wffle Ha Tounsr mad Co., Hew fork, 1897. % m n m m m m

m m

Sgan* Maurice Francis. ”About Christian 8eM*» A n Maria. m i l (1898), 65* \%

H, l>. Kilner and

Co., PhlladelpSia^ ....

Aaella |g Francs* H* 1. Kilner

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.. *American and European Point of View'1. dwttwv. u m (March, 1913), MS. *American Family i*ife in Fiction”. Catholic World. OX (Dee., 1919), 389. Belinda, a. L. Milner and Co., ,,-isgfr

Oatho“fork , The Boye lw"fort, l89f:

thg. Hlocic. Bensiger Bros.,

343

*0elderen d© Is Barca# t T'o^xmtSJuly, 1881) , 474. _ «0aiaeos«, & t I&ZlgU ***** (1899), 17, Intermittently through toil {1900/, 403* #Canon Sheehan of Boaemile*, OXXII (Sept., 1918), 388* , r. ,.. “Cardinal Gibbons, American and Oftttiblte11. O&tholle tterld. a m ( 3 m . , 1923), 467. £11nor

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J'Ohata AboutSe* Books*. SaMiSliS

Igrld, 11*111 (April, 1888), p. 134 through to S n (March, 1883), 833* - #0hat« with Good listeners* t Are intermittently th*oagl» XXXI (1890), m T ? (1893), XXXT (1893).

DoubleaS'“3o:;nieSf fotf/isss; #A Coarereatlon on a Sind of Books#, a, XLXX (1898), 398* #00»w©rsatioaa at the Club#, Are !, intermittently through XI*IV (1897)* .x....._._ ... #0©rd«lim and Queen Xaffeerine#, |^|holln Reading Olrole Review. II (1891-93), ____ The Corona Headers. by Maurice Fran©is Igan, Brother fceo, and James H. Fsesett, Gian and 0o., Sew Tork, 19— *

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overaaettelser til dansk af Viggo Julius von Holstein B&thlon. X^benharn, Bet Seh&abergske torlag. (I* Bierberg og M. H* Jensen), 1917.

244

*Definition of Lltexa^re^i^Caj^Sr H e I h M n i t r Stiltiil. n i l (1902) m

n w sr % . * * * * “

“•“ ••■111 *“ *•

T J M PialQKtieg o£ Plato agd the Poll ties "of Aristotle. wltf*Introduction and translation by B* Jowett ana a special introduc­ tion fey «* ?* Egan, pp. tii-lx, The Colonial Pres®, It* Tori, XfOQ* —

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Wwtog*. M m .

W L * 1 S t e m la translated and arranged fro® the French by M* ?. Egan, w»* If. iadlier, Hew York* 1889, •Flies in the Diplomatic Amber®, Politer.. 1X7 (Jan. 17, 1930), 9. The Flower of the Floole and T»sfi of Belmont, Beniiger Bros*, Hew York* 1895.

•(I5ec* ra * 7x*«/y2JSlgB polnt of fie**« SSBSSSSE. CV 1923) * 308» . #Francis of Aesi#if Saint and Poet®, hoiio^ea^ln& Circle Review. Ill (1892-93), _

«?ra Angelico® * Aye Maria. XVI (1880),

345

Freeman* s Journal, files - 1881w m 2 ,.. .... r *Friday lights with Friends*, Are I&riaL intermittently through LII (1901)* -,-.Tl... „..,„.

f.rom the ILand of g|, Lawrence, 1898. 11Futility of Sermons*, Century. Oil

A of Roses, f* 8*. $oonan and Companyt Boston, 1887. Beasiger Bros* , lew Y03flt| XS1S*5* ... r-rr-,rr,l f- *fh« Chost in Hamlet41, 0 l&l*weliy iuAlqtte, VII (1901), 393.

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Olrl of Mine, f. 8* Peterson 1*77. ed*f I M l & M M a f l t e & t e — P $ U Irohiteoture. and History . • . by emi­ nent Catkol^ , D* ST folrtde and Co.. Chicago, 1895. T ______ "Oreatnes®ofSanto14.Outlook. C1XIX To^tV i3, 1931), 185. SSBL ifhev Their Zi. Marked -iiira.eric, ;_Way, ia:r r i@93. «and sssisg 8ess*.ger B roUT s., —Z see , *Bew to Form a Style8, Catholic Bm m S m !tifcgal* gOTie*. IV (1893-94), 338.

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A b s o o ., ed., Irish Literature. 10 vols., I. 0. Morris and Co., Philadelphia, 1904.

*!**«* *0»el8«, S s i ^ l a 1 (1SB4), $09. IM

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247

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*4 M m Departure in Catholic College Q.th0ll. *»ld. 1. 1R90), 809.

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*The Stances# of Patriot Beyond*, MarlEe gotare Dame, Indiana* 1883* •Sunday Higlits with Friends8, Aye i d . t i i V l l l (1894) Intermittently through !!f (1896). near the Isaa*Years *ia. . p. 18*. h u d .. pp. 190-91. *Ibld.. p. 303.

383

# U His "general law of thought* was ©ert&inly opposed to any fora of subjectivism*

It was, moreover, his de­

sire to stress the complete objectivity of troth, ©r rather, its complete Independence of man, which led him to states

*the poser is his Cam* si to discover, develop,

and apply it [troth]; but he cannot create it.1*1

*At

all times and in all places • • • the same truths are evolved, and the same thoughts appear in different garbs.*2 And again:

"Men may invent a new mechanical power, but

they cannot create an idee.*3 low did this sum of knowledge come to man?

In one

place Asarlas stated, *truth, then, M s been communicated to man, perhaps directly, probably indirectly, through the medium of laws to which the Creator both of man and truth subjected the human intellect.**

For support of

this statement he referred to Aquinas; St. Thomas, how­ ever, never held that Cod created truth.

Actually As&rtas

seems to have been in sympathy with a modified form of

*R>ld.. p. 158. 2tbld.. p. 160.

8n>td..p. 377. * I M d .. p. 150.

ass

Traditionalism.*

Brother Asari&e very clearly did not

Bold It In any of It® strict or condtsmned forme, tout ho dose appear to hare been In sympathy with some of Its aspects*

Though this statement is not traditionalism, he

did at least hold that *the knowledge that men boast of today is, In its totality, hut a broken fragment of that grand whole possessed, in g e m and principle, toy the pri­ meval man.*2 411 this may throw some light on his attitude toward *schools of philosophy*, and his criticism that they gave only *certain imperfect aspects of things*.

Though in

much of his thinking he was a Platon1st, some of his thought shows more than a traee of the thought of men as far apart as Aristotle, F. Schlegel, Oioberti, Aquinas, and Hegel*

Asarl&s was inclined towards eclecticism and

while he praised philosophy he was strong in his dispraise of systems.

Brownson's remark about the Philosophy of

literature, *We have been struck with the depth and just­ ness of the Author1s philosophical principles, whioh could,

*According to this doctrine, though it was variously explained, man's certitude and knowledge was obtained through tradition which was ultimately based on a primitive revela­ tion. Of. *Traditionally*, Catholic Kncyolopedla. XV, pp. 13-14. As a philosophical system which makes tradition the supreme criterion of certitude it was condemned toy Rome. of literature, p. 877.

384

a®

laaderetaiid them, be borrowed from no school of phi­

losophy generally accepted by Catholice or by non-C&thoX lies,* wag regarded by Azmrlas as high ©ommeadatioa. He used the quotation to Introduce hie own statement (ibid*}5 “Every earnest thinker mast begin by breaking through the shackles of schools and systems*

Philosophy is above

schools and systems.*® # 13 The *spiritual sense” was, as Asarias conceived it, one of the fourfold activities of the soul, though, it should be said, he did not regard these activities as cor­ responding to any four special faculties.

They were rather

four distinct fields in which all the human faculties op­ erate.®

Thus the soul as it analyzed and compared he

tensed “reason” or the “illative sense*;*

in its decisions

concerning bad or good acts It was the “moral sense”; as subject of the emotions in art It was the “aesthetic sense”; finally, in the process of recollection and communion with

Quoted in the preface to the book - Ibid., p. vii. 2Cf. also Books and Reading, p. 63; Essays MlscellaneQue. P* s5 Phases of Thought and Critic lam, pp. 107-10. ^Phases of Thought and Criticism. p. 4. % e remarks that he is borrowing the term from Newman.

285

•elf and with 0ed, it was tit# "spiritual sense®.*

Further,

he saw natural truth a© the object of “reason®, natural goodness the object of the “aural sense*, natural beauty as the object of the “aesthetic sense®.

And the object of

the “spiritual sense® was all the truth, goodness, and beauty, both in the natural sad the supernatural order, hut as these are seen by faith.®

thus he seemed to mate

the “spiritual sense® & supernatural activity of the soul (i.e. the soul under the influence of grace) which has for its object both the natural and the supernatural; or, to put it another way, it was the soul operating in both the natural and the supernatural orders, but operating from a supernatural principle end toward a supernatural goal. Sons of hie ether remarks way help a little in clari­ fying hie concept.

He wrote of the “spiritual sense® as

being “fostered by the spirit of piety sad devotion*® but asserted that it m e not at all the ease thing as the 4 •spiritual life* which aseetioal authors describe. fur­ thermore, he held that *the sentiment of piety and sensible

xSMay. BUcllaaeema. p. XI*. 2Xbia.. p. 1X6.

8iSSfi*» P* 118* *Phaaee

Thowftt a£& Crltlolsn, p. 80.

336

relish for Oivine things may b© very weak In a nature which Is spiritually strong,#* and that the converse as well might he true*

Finally, he maintained that, since the ex­

ercise of *reason* alone makes mas a mere geometrician, the exclusive exercise of the #aesthetic sense# tends to create a sentimentalist, and since the exclusive cult of pietism fosters bigotry end dogmatism, it was only in fos­ tering all of the activities of the soul that a harmonious and integrated personality could be developed, & The very term #spiritual sense* has Its ambiguities; for *spiritual* in its ordinary philosophical meaning sig­ nifies that which is is its essence and formal operations intrinsically Independent of matter, while *sense# implies a faculty which is in both essence and operation intrinsi­ cally dependent on matter*

Fhat As&rias probably meant to

signify by this phrase was a quaei-intuitional operation of the soul in regard to supernatural truth, goodness, and beauty* In a footnote2 be declared that hie #spiritual sense* corresponded with the platis of Clement of Alexandria

*XM d ,» p* SO* ^ i w w Hl809lXan«cM8. p. 115. 3lbid.. p. 114.

287

rather than the sowerintel lierenza of (Jioberti.

Such and

explanation seemed to indicate that he was endeavoring to describe a supernatural function of the aoul, which func­ tion concerned itself with the ordering of both natural and supernatural goodness* truth, beauty towards a super­ natural end.

thus it would in seas ways (but only Is some

ways) correspond to what Catholic theologians term the infused virtue of faith* Furthermore, although a writer has a right to his own terminology, still there is some confusion in his use of the terns “sense111 “supernatural*, aspiritual*; and it Is difficult to ascertain when he was using thee loosely and when precisely, when he was giving thee a special, meaning isd when he was giving them their ordinary signification. Finally, Ocean9s "entla non stmt multiplicands* is a principle which appears to have critical application here in regard to the “spiritual sense** # IS It was in keeping with his own character and with the work it self that this critic should study The Imitation principally as a book of spiritual counsel and consolation* Asarise quoted with the approval the well-known passage

IbB

froa Thfi

on

a a M i 1 for him

palliation m e not

oaly *literature of power* bat ta a real sense "literature ©f knowledge*.

*Xt ta,* he wrote, *a philosophy of light

aad a philosophy of life.*3

A*Ie»pia did not attempt to

separate the two bat soared "into the regions in which meet both poetry and philosophy.*3

Though Brother Asariae

would approach this study with his usual scholarly back­ grounds, noting the religious and cultural environments of the time, the various works which had Influenced the author of T^ap Saltation,* it was not with these but with hie philosophy of the *ideal* that Asarias was concerned, for this book was m m

than a system of aetaphysios.

"Like

2-*It was written down by a hand that waited for the heart*® prompting; it 1® the chronicle of a solitary, hid­ den anguish, struggle, trust, and triumph, not written on velvet cushions to teach endurance to thoee who are tread­ ing with bleeding feet on the stones. And so it remains to mil time a lasting record of human needs and human ©on12a' — 3Phaeee of Thought and CriticIsa, p. 107. 5Ibtd.. p. 113. 4Thue Asarlas noted that this author was acquainted with, at least In quotation, Gregory the (Swat, St. Ber­ nard, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thoaas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, Ovid, Seneca, Aristotle, and perhaps Dante. (Phases o£ Thought and Crltlclea. PP- 93-99.)

389

Pascal and St. Augustine, A*Xempis soars above system, and ta the mystical language so well known and understood ia tils day he reduces all philosophy to title principle of seeing tilings in the light emanating froa the Word.

'From

one Word are all things, and all things utter one Word, * . Wo nan without that Word understand©th or judgeth rightly.1*1 Here was the prinolple that appealed to Brother Asarlas, for he saw it account Ing for all that m s true aid beauti­ ful and good In art and is life.

Beeauee the author of

Tfee Imitation had firmly grasped this prinolple *hie ex­ pression is so full sad adequate,* and in *every sentence” that lie wrote he was able to condense *the experience of the ages.*8 # U The Oathelie Summer School of America was the outcome of the Catholic Heading Circle Movement.3

Its first ses­

sion m s held at Hew London, Connecticut, 1893$ the follow­ ing seeslone