"provoking superficiality." He too is in love with Miss Vervain, and the sense of rivalry is embittered by mistrust of the rival whom she may prefer, and whom he believes to be unworthy. He doubts even the words which tell him she is his; and when their sincerity has received the seal of death, his heart softens towards him who spoke them, but his mistrust only assumes another form. Don Ippolito was a true man, but a dreamer. He deceived others because he deceived himself. It is in this spirit that he discusses him with Florida when time and circumstances have brought them again together. If his conversion was real, his doubts had been imagined; so also in great measure was his love. His nature was too shadowy for a genuine passion; he could only "dream" that he felt it. She simply replies, " He did not die of a dream;" and He had recovered the fever;" and in her woman's wisdom we must seek the one solution of which the problem is capable. How much was fact, and how much fancy in a mind so little trained to distinguish one from the other, the author does not attempt to say. Don Ippolito may have dreamed the religious doubts which justified the rebellion of an imprisoned heart. He may have dreamed the returning faith which gave meaning to the rapture of self-renouncement and the calm of approaching death. He did not perhaps even "dream" the passions of coarser men; but this much we are intended to understand, that love whether manifested in art or in Nature, in creation or in selfeffacement, was the one reality of his life. Mr. Howells has shown in this conception of Don Ippolito how little the more trite experiences which he usually describes can be taken as the measure of his artistic power. It is one of the most touching and the most impressive of modern fiction. The Venetian priest is at once an individual and a type; a man whom we have never seen, the Italian whom we all know and love. He combines the courtesy of a gentle heart with the outward grace of a polished but entirely unaffected people; the delicacy of a virgin mind with that outward reticence which is only born of the deeper knowledge of life. The author has not feared to complete his picture by less poetic details than those of a pale spiritual countenance, dark eyes, and the bluish tinge with which constant shaving marks the cheeks of a black-haired man. He tells us that the habit of taking snuff necessitates his carrying a blue cotton pockethandkerchief as well as a white one; and that the fingers which hold open Miss Vervain's book at the earlier stage of his instruction show painfully ill-kept nails. We need hardly add that these circumstances are made to yield to the finer perception and more fastidious selfscrutiny of love; and that Don Ippolito would have been no typical Italian priest without them. He is still a poet in every word and deed, from the glowing imagery in which he describes the beauty of his love to the act of gentle worship which forms his last farewell. Florida Vervain surrenders herself to the more common love and the more commonplace man; and for a short time even these have their touch of poetry. Her mother also has died, and the happiness of the reunited pair gains larger and softer outlines through its mists of sorrowful remembrance, but "people are never equal to the romance of their youth in after life, except by fils, and Ferris especially could not keep himself at what he called the operatic pitch of their brief betrothal, and the early days of their marriage. With his help, or even his encouragement, his wife might have been able to maintain it." Even the allusions to Don Ippolito's love and death become rarer and rarer till, . . . "lapsing more and more into a mere problem as the years have passed, Don Ippolito has at last ceased to be even the memory of a man with a passionate love and a mortal sorrow." And Mr. Howells probably touches the key-note of his work in these, his concluding words— "Perhaps this final effect in the mind of him who has realised the happiness of which the poor priest vainly dreamed is not the least tragic phase of the tragedy of Don Ippolito." The sympathetic observation which has created the principal character is no less apparent in the details of "A Foregone Conclusion." They are sufficient to prove that the author is one not only of the many who have seen Venice, but of the few whom its charm has penetrated. But he leaves facts to speak for themselves; and is no more beguiled from his calmly descriptive attitude by the impressions of this natural and historical fairy-land, than by the more limited poetry of an old Canadian capital, or the rigid prose of a New England country town. The watercarrier's joke, as he edges his way through the narrow street where, perhaps, two persons can scarcely walk abreast; the flower-girl's basket scenting the summer air; the women chatting from their opposite windows; the birdcage high up against the palace wall, contrasting its desert spaces and its oasis of human life-these and endless other suggestions of out-door Italy breathe its actual presence into the reader's mind. In the majority of Mr. Howells' tales we find America drawn by herself, and in great measure for herself. They illustrate that blending of critical judgment, and national self-consciousness which marks the maturer phase of the American genius. In this truly "international" episode we are again within the range of those larger sympathies which we associate with its youth, and which we trust it will never cease to represent. Through such works as "A Chance Aquaintance" Mr. Howells will always amuse and instruct us. It is by such as " A Foregone Conclusion " that we shall best love to remember him. A. ORR. DR. LITTLEDALE'S "PLAIN REASONS AGAINST JOINING THE CHURCH OF ROME.” Plain Reasons against Joining the Church of Rome. By A DISSUASIVE from Dr. Littledale against submission to Rome would not, under ordinary circumstances, demand notice from Englishmen who have taken that step. We who are English born and bred, whether we be Anglicans or ex-Anglicans, have little in common with Irish Protestants; and a controversialist trained at Trinity College, Dublin, in the traditions of Protestant ascendency has no claim to any large share of our attention. Some burly Irish priest from the wilds. of Kerry-some Father Tom Maguire redivivus-is the natural antagonist to Dr. Littledale. Then, when the true Celtic Catholic Irishman met the man who is only an Irishman from the teeth outwards, who in fact represents the triumph of all that has blasted the happiness and impeded the civilization of the Irish people for three hundred years, we should have no fear for the result. But the case is altered when a respectable English society throws its mantle round this Irish disputant, adopts his book, and circulates it as a suitable exposition of its own sentiments. Dr. Littledale's work, being "published under the direction of the Tract Committee " of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, assumes an importance, and is armed with a sanction, to which otherwise it would have no title. The adoption of the book implies that a large body of our English countrymen are not content to be Anglicans because they were born so, and to leave Roman Catholics alone, but that they will be Anglicans as the result of reasoning, and reject the teaching of the Church after having deliberately examined it. In other words, they choose to be in a state of separation from the Church on the grounds, not of English, but of Irish Protestantism; and this is a very serious matter. We English, as a nation, never intended to break away from the Catholic Church; our forefathers were tricked and juggled out of their Catholicism; they did not knowingly and voluntarily surrender it. They did not "go to Canterbury," any more than Bismarck will "go to Canossa," of their own free will; the stress and strain of events carried them there, just as it is carrying him to Canossa. Regarded in the mass, they had nothing of the heretical temperament about them; and their descendants have not now. Shakspeare would never have described a man deprived of the last Christian rites as one "unhouselled . unaneled," had he had so much as a thought of rejecting the "housel" or sacred Host in which his father and mother believed, and the "aneling," or Extreme Unction, with which all English Christians had been fortified on the bed of death so many hundred years. His audience, too, had they thought heretically about these Catholic sacraments, as Tyndale, Cranmer, and Parker thought, could not have endured the allusion. In the early years of Elizabeth the great majority of Englishmen must have looked upon the re-establishment of the English service as merely a passing change; they must have thought that mass would surely come back again, as it came after the death of Edward VI. Even the clergy, though their behaviour contrasts ill with the heroic stand which the French clergy made at the Revolution, and the German clergy are now making against the May Laws, were not quite so cowardly and compliant as they have been usually represented. All the bishops but two refused the oath binding them to the absurd doctrine of the Royal supremacy. Nearly four hundred of the higher clergy resigned their benefices on the same account, not all at once, but in the course of the reign. It is, however, the peculiar disgrace of the English clergy of that age, that the Sovereign never had any difficulty in finding men of university education and decent character to fill whatever posts might be vacant, though schism and heresy went along with the preferment. Had Bismarck found as many servile souls among the Catholic clergy of Germany, he would have had a fair prospect of the like success with Burghley in establishing a national schism, and separating his countrymen from Rome. As it is, he will have to "go to Canossa." Yet, after all, the taint of baseness, though it infected the upper ranks of the clergy very seriously, did not perhaps extend far among the general body. No post of honour or profit, no office in a cathedral chapter or at either university, could, it is true, be held without taking the oath of supremacy. But there is no reason to think that the parochial clergy in general were forced to take the oath. It is clear from occasional notices occurring in writings of the period, that in the last twenty years of the century there was a considerable class among the clergy known as "old priests," whom the Government allowed to do pretty much as they pleased. They might say mass, hear confessions, and reconcile persons to Rome, while the same acts, if done by a seminary priest or a Jesuit, would have brought him to prison or the scaffold. E.g., in the "Autobiography of Father Gerard." * * The reason of the difference of course was, that the Government did not care to press hardly on a class of men which would quickly die out in the course of Nature; but they were determined, if persecution would do it, that the "old priests "should have no successors. All things considered, we are not bound to believe that the clergy as a body ever accepted heresy. As for the laity, years would pass before they would practically realize that England was a limb severed from the unity of Christendom. Temporary severances there had been before, but the rent had been repaired; how could they choose but think it would be so again? Still, when Elizabeth had been twenty years on the throne, the eyes of all the more honest and clear-sighted among them must have been gradually opened to discern the real state of things. But then it was too late. For the wells of Christian doctrine had by that time been poisoned. The heretics had come back from exile at the accession of Elizabeth,* and had swooped like unclean vultures on the universities, the public schools, and all endowed institutions; the Government was with them, and the honest Catholic Englishmen had to go. The Allens, Parsons', Stapletons, Hardings, Sanders', had to surrender their posts as teachers to the Poynets, Jewels, Grindals, Coxes, and the rest. About 1580, many an old English country gentleman was looking out for a priest, that he might die in the Church of his fathers; but his sons, coming from Oxford or Cambridge to the family home, must have evinced a temper, either of complete religious indifference, or of hostility to Catholicism as pronounced as if the country had been in heresy for a hundred years. It was not their fault; it was the consequence of the poisoning of the wells. Who can tell what agonies of shame and grief pierced the soul of many an English gentleman in those years, when he felt the approach of death, and beheld in his children, educated in schism, the full-grown fruits of the system of weak compliance with tyrannously imposed falsehood, which he and his class had practised twenty years before? But the work was done; and from that time Anglicans have held their religion tradi on fact * Dr. Littledale can hardly object to this description of the English Reformers, whose misdeeds he has himself denounced, even, perhaps, with some exaggeration. In a lecture "Innovations" (1868), he says (p. 17), Documents, hidden from the public eye for centuries, are now rapidly being printed, and every fresh find establishes more clearly the utter scoundrelism of the Reformers.' Of Cranmer he says (ib.) that he was "arrested in his wicked career by divine vengeance." Again (p. 20), "As a plain historical the lea ling Reformers were bad men.' He will not allow that they merely erred in minor matters, but "motives, actions, language, were all alike rotten and bad.” He says (p. 51), that they were "false to their God, to their Sovereign, and to the liberties of their country." In another lecture, on "The Two Religions" (1870), he describes the Thirty-nine Articles as "a piece of deliberately ambiguous compromise. What is this but to call them heretical, according to the ideas of that "undivided Church" with which his party professes to be in sympathy? By the "Two Religions," Dr. Littledale means Catholicism and Protestantism within the Church of England; the first he paints all in light, the second in the darkest colours. We should like to ask him, which of the " Two Religions" he conceives himself to be propagating now, when he writes a book against Rome for an ultra-Protestant society to circulate by help of all the wealth and influence at its command. There is much sound and solid thinking in both these Lectures, and it is lamentable that one who has grasped so much of the Catholic theory should so fail to realize Catholicism in practice. |