Saints Peter and Paul: Poetry from Keble and Newman

Monday, June 29 is the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul (the third weekday Solemnity this June here in the USA). We'll discuss John Keble's poem on "Saint Peter's Day" and glance at a poem or two on Saint Paul written by Saint John Henry Newman on the Son Rise Morning Show.

Keble's poem is inspired by a verse from the First Reading on the Solemnity: "When Herod would have brought him forth, the same night Peter was sleeping". Acts 12:26:

Thou thrice denied, yet thrice beloved,
Watch by Thine own forgiven friend;
In sharpest perils faithful proved,
Let his soul love Thee to the end.

The prayer is heard—else why so deep (5)
His slumber on the eve of death?
And wherefore smiles he in his sleep
As one who drew celestial breath?

He loves and is beloved again—
Can his soul choose but be at rest? (10)
Sorrow hath fled away, and Pain
Dares not invade the guarded nest.

He dearly loves, and not alone:
For his winged thoughts are soaring high
Where never yet frail heart was known (15)
To breathe its vain Affection’s sigh.

He loves and weeps—but more than tears
Have sealed Thy welcome and his love—
One look lives in him, and endears
Crosses and wrongs where’er he rove: (20)

That gracious chiding look, Thy call
To win him to himself and Thee,
Sweetening the sorrow of his fall
Which else were rued too bitterly.

E’en through the veil of sheep it shines, (21)
The memory of that kindly glance;—
The Angel watching by, divines
And spares awhile his blissful trance.

Or haply to his native lake
His vision wafts him back, to talk (22)
With Jesus, ere His flight He take,
As in that solemn evening walk,

When to the bosom of His friend,
The Shepherd, He whose name is Good.
Did His dear lambs and sheep commend, (25)
Both bought and nourished with His blood:

Then laid on him th’ inverted tree,
Which firm embraced with heart and arm,
Might cast o’er hope and memory,
O’er life and death, its awful charm. (30)

With brightening heart he bears it on,
His passport through this eternal gates,
To his sweet home—so nearly won,
He seems, as by the door he waits,

The unexpressive notes to hear (35)
Of angel song and angel motion,
Rising and falling on the ear
Like waves in Joy’s unbounded ocean.—

His dream is changed—the Tyrant’s voice
Calls to that last of glorious deeds— (40)
But as he rises to rejoice,
Not Herod but an Angel leads.

He dreams he sees a lamp flash bright,
Glancing around his prison room—
But ’tis a gleam of heavenly light (45)
That fills up all the ample gloom.

The flame, that in a few short years
Deep through the chambers of the dead
Shall pierce, and dry the fount of tears,
Is waving o’er his dungeon-bed. (50)

Touched he upstarts—his chains unbind—
Through darksome vault, up massy stair,
His dizzy, doubting footsteps wind
To freedom and cool moonlight air.

Then all himself, all joy and calm, (55)
Though for a while his hand forego,
Just as it touched, the martyr’s palm,
He turns him to his task below;

The pastoral staff, the keys of Heaven,
To wield a while in grey-haired might, (60)
Then from his cross to spring forgiven,
And follow Jesus out of sight. 

At first, Keble addresses Our Lord to aid Saint Peter in Herod's jail. Then Keble depicts Saint Peter dreaming of his life with Jesus: how Jesus called him to be His disciple; his denying of Christ thrice; Jesus looking at him after the third denial; the walk near the lake after the Resurrection. Saint Peter even dreams of his own martyrdom but then "turns . . . to his task below" as pastor and holder of the keys.

If we have time on Monday, June 29, we'll look at this poem by Newman, which also recounts a dream: his dream of meeting Saint Paul in answer to a prayer. Newman wrote this poem during his fateful Mediterranean voyage:

97. St. Paul

{168} I DREAM'D that, with a passionate complaint,

I wish'd me born amid God's deeds of might;

And envied those who had the presence bright

Of gifted Prophet and strong-hearted Saint,

Whom my heart loves, and Fancy strives to paint.

I turn'd, when straight a stranger met my sight,

Came as my guest, and did awhile unite

His lot with mine, and lived without restraint.

Courteous he was, and grave,—so meek in mien,

It seem'd untrue, or told a purpose weak;

Yet, in the mood, he could with aptness speak,

Or with stern force, or show of feelings keen,

Marking deep craft, methought, or hidden pride:—

Then came a voice,—"St. Paul is at thy side."

Off Sardinia. June 20, 1833. Earlier during this Mediterranean trip, Newman had written, referring to Acts 28:3: 70. St. Paul at Melita (Malta) {128} "And when Paul had gathered a bundle of sticks, and laid them on the fire, there came a viper out of the heat."  SECURE in his prophetic strength,     The water peril o'er, The many-gifted man at length     Stepp'd on the promised shore. He trod the shore; but not to rest,     Nor wait till Angels came; Lo! humblest pains the Saint attest,     The firebrands and the flame. But, when he felt the viper's smart,     Then instant aid was given; Christian! hence learn to do thy part,     And leave the rest to Heaven. Messina. February 8, 1833.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us!

Image source (Public Domain): Saints Peter and Paul ca. 1616 by Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652)

Saint Phillip Neri and Saint John Henry Newman

This has been quite a week and a day--from Monday, May 18, when I heard, while attending my godson's promotion dinner (to high school), that Warren Farha, my friend and former boss at Eighth Day Books was seriously ill in hospital--to hearing that he had died on the eve of the Orthodox Ascension on May 20/21--to Pentecost Sunday when I attended the first Mass of Thanksgiving offered by Father Luke Meyerhoff, the first priest from Blessed Sacrament to be ordained since 1989! 

On Monday, May 25, I attended a 25th anniversary party for our pastor and this evening, on the feast of St. Philip Neri, I'm attending an evening Mass celebrating that occasion. So there's definitely been a mixture of joy and sorrow these eight days with confidence in the Resurrection!

But my topic today, the eighth day of these momentous events, is Saint Philip Neri, Saint John Henry Newman's patron as an Oratorian. Newman wrote several works about his patron: two sermons (numbers 12 and 13 in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions), a litany and a novena in Part II of his Meditations and Devotions, and five poems or verses included in his 1867 collection of Verses on Various Occasions. Of the five poems, I chose number 164, "St. Philip Neri in his Mission" (the others are 165. "St. Philip in himself", 166. St. Philip in his God", 171. "St. Philip in his School", and 172. "St. Philip in his Disciples"). 

I chose this one because it highlights his whole holy life from his time praying in the catacombs, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, his mission to Rome, and the day of his death on May 26, 1595.

164. St. Philip Neri in his Mission
{293} (A song.)

IN the far North our lot is cast,
Where faithful hearts are few;
Still are we Philip's children dear,
And Peter's soldiers true.

Founder and Sire! to mighty Rome,
Beneath St. Peter's shade,
Early thy vow of loyal love
And ministry was paid.

The solemn porch, and portal high,
Of Peter was thy home;
The world's Apostle he, and thou
Apostle of his Rome.

And first in the old catacombs,
In galleries long and deep,
Where martyr Popes had ruled the flock,
And slept their glorious sleep, {294}

There didst thou pass the nights in prayer,
Until at length there came,
Down on thy breast, new lit for thee,
The Pentecostal flame;—

Then, in that heart-consuming love,
Didst walk the city wide,
And lure the noble and the young
From Babel's pomp and pride;

And, gathering them within thy cell,
Unveil the lustre bright,
And beauty of thy inner soul,
And gain them by the sight.

And thus to Rome, for Peter's faith
Far known, thou didst impart
Thy lessons of the hidden life,
And discipline of heart.

And as the Apostle, on the hill
Facing the Imperial Town,
First gazed upon his fair domain,
Then on the cross lay down, {295}

So thou, from out the streets of Rome
Didst turn thy failing eye
Unto that mount of martyrdom,
Take leave of it, and die. [Note]

The Oratory.
1850.

The note provides these details about the day of St. Philip's death:

On the day of his death, Philip, "at the beginning of his Mass, remained for some time looking fixedly at the hill of St. Onofrio, which was visible from the chapel, just as if he saw some great vision. On coming to the Gloria in Excelsis, he began to sing, which was a very unusual thing for him, and he sang the whole of it with the greatest joy and devotion," &c.—Bacci's Life.

More about Saints Philip Neri and John Henry Newman and the Oratory here.

Saint Philip Neri, pray for us!

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

BTW: If you do a search on Warren's name, you will find many, many great recollections from people around the world!

O God of spirits and of all flesh, Who hast trampled down death and overthrown the Devil, and given life to Thy world, do Thou, the same Lord, give rest to the souls of Thy departed servants in a place of brightness, a place of refreshment, a place of repose, where all sickness, sighing, and sorrow have fled away. Pardon every transgression which they have committed, whether by word or deed or thought. For Thou art a good God and lovest mankind; because there is no man who lives yet does not sin, for Thou only art without sin, Thy righteousness is to all eternity, and Thy word is truth.

For Thou are the Resurrection, the Life, and the Repose of Thy servants who have fallen asleep, O Christ our God, and unto Thee we ascribe glory, together with Thy Father, who is from everlasting, and Thine all-holy, good, and life-creating Spirit, now and ever unto ages of ages. Amen.

Eternal rest grant unto him O Lord, and may Warren's soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in peace. May Warren rest in peace. Amen.

Preview: The Composition and Publication of the "Dream of the Gerontius" in 1865

Before Edward Elgar set the text of Newman's Dream of Gerontius to music in 1900, of course, Newman had written that eloquent poem about death, judgment, Heaven, and hell in 1865, 160 years ago this year. 

So, since two weeks ago on the Son Rise Morning Show we featured the Elgar anniversary, this coming Monday, September 8, we'll look at the composition and publication of Saint (Doctor) John Henry Newman's poem itself in 1865. (The Son Rise Morning hosts were busy the week before at the EWTN Radio Conference in Washington, DC and took the Monday, September 1 Labor Day holiday off!) I'll be on the air at my usual time around 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central. Please listen live here or catch the podcast later here.

Newman's other most famous poem is "The Pillar of the Cloud", better known as "Lead, Kindly Light". He wrote that poem and many others while he was travelling with his friend Hurrell Froude in Italy and the Mediterranean. He wrote those verses in the Romantic mode as defined by William Wordsworth in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800): as ". . . the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity", reflecting on his experiences on that journey.

Newman wrote this poem, the longest we have of his, on 52 scraps of paper between January 17 and February 7, 1865. There was a sudden inspiration and an urge to write it--and a definite end to the inspiration. One of his biographers, Wilfrid Ward, describes its composition:

Now, after the abandonment of the Oxford scheme [to found an Oratory for Catholic students, who could at last attend Oxford] gave him leisure for it, he set down in dramatic form the vision of a Christian's death on which his imagination had been dwelling. The writing of it was a sudden inspiration, and his work was begun in January and completed in February 1865. "On the 17th of January last," he writes to Mr. Allies in October, "it came into my head to write it, I really can't tell how. And I wrote on till it was finished on small bits of paper, and I could no more write anything else by willing it than I could fly." To another correspondent [The Rev. John Telford, priest at Ryde] also, who was fascinated by the Dream, and longed to have the picture it gave still further filled in, he wrote:

"You do me too much honour if you think I am to see in a dream everything that is to be seen in the subject dreamed about. I have said what I saw. Various spiritual writers see various aspects of it; and under their protection and pattern I have set down the dream as it came before the sleeper. It is not my fault if the sleeper did not dream more. Perhaps something woke him. Dreams are generally fragmentary. I have nothing more to tell."

As I wrote in an earlier post about this poem, Newman was able to turn away from controversy and difficulties to contemplate eternal truths:

Perhaps after such strain of confusion, controversy, and confrontation, it was restful to contemplate the certainties of God's justice and mercy when a man dies. No more secrecy and indirection; the soul meets Jesus, knows Him, knows himself, and looks forward to being with the Holy Trinity and the saints in Heaven after his purgation. Newman explored the Church's dogmatic teachings about death and judgement, heaven and hell in a mystical, dreamy poem, harking back to his childhood love of fantasy and wonder--his sense that life was somehow a dream--while reflecting his assent to the certainties of divine revelation and his faith in the reality of God. He also includes liturgical and devotional prayers for the dying and the death, including the Litany of the Saints and the Proficiscere prayer ("Go forth, Christian Soul") in a supremely, confidently Catholic poem.

Although though it is "a supremely, confidently Catholic poem" The Dream met with ecumenical approval--even his former defamer Charles Kingsley liked it! William Gladstone and Algernon Charles Swinburne, the decadent school poet, admired the poem's verse and power. Francis Hastings Doyle, the Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, gave a lecture on The Dream of Gerontius in 1868. News that General George Gordon, "Chinese Gordon", had a copy of the poem with him at Khartoum--and that he had annotated it--when he was attacked and killed in January 1885 gave the poem even greater notoriety. As Father Ian Ker of happy memory noted in his biography of Newman, "interest in the fate of Gordon of Khartoum" was so intense that William Neville transcribed Gordon's annotations into copies of The Dream of Gerontius (p. 741).

The Dream of Gerontius was then published in the May and June issues of The Month, a periodical founded in 1864 by the convert Frances Margaret Taylor (Mother Magdalen of the Sacred Heart, Poor Servants of the Mother of God). The Jesuits in England bought The Month in 1865 and Father Henry James Coleridge, another convert (great nephew of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge), became the publisher and editor.

So the 160th anniversary of this poem is worth remembering as the work continues to have its impact artistically and theologically. It may not always be, as Francis Hastings Doyle commented, the greatest artistic success, but it has perdured through the decades through its beauty and depth.

[In 2022, throughout the month of November, Matt and Anna and I went through The Dream of Gerontius in as much detail as we could in our Monday morning segments!]

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Book Review: "The Gospel in Gerard Manley Hopkins"

Please note that I bought this book at Eighth Day Books. 

I have been reading and studying the life and poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins since I was a undergraduate English major, and before. This may be one of the very best books about him that I have ever read. I think the organization of the book facilitates its impact: Ellsberg supports her analysis of Hopkins's life and works with his poetry and prose in each part. My review comments are included in the outline of the Contents below.

From the publisher, Plough Books:

Gerard Manley Hopkins deserves his place among the greatest poets in the English language. He ranks seventh among the most frequently reprinted English-language poets, surpassed only by Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Dickinson, Yeats, and Wordsworth.

Yet when the English Jesuit priest died of typhoid fever at age forty-four, he considered his life a failure. He never would have suspected that his poems, which would not be published for another twenty-nine years, would eventually change the course of modern poetry and influence such poets as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Geoffrey Hill, and Seamus Heaney. Along with his contemporaries Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Hopkins revolutionized poetic language.

And yet we love Hopkins not only for his literary genius but for the hard-won faith that finds expression in his verse. Who else has captured the thunderous voice of God and the grandeur of his creation on the written page as Hopkins has?

Seamlessly weaving together selections from Hopkins’s poems, letters, journals, and sermons, Margaret Ellsberg lets the poet tell the story of a life-long struggle with faith that gave birth to some of the best poetry of all time. Even readers who spurn religious language will find in Hopkins a refreshing, liberating way to see God’s hand at work in the world.

Edited with commentary written by Margaret R. Ellsberg

Foreword by Dana Gioia (I was surprised that Gioia did not mention Saint Robert Southwell, SJ or Richard Crashaw as religious poets in his survey of those who preceded Hopkins, who revived the genre)

Contents:

Part I. Incompatible Excellences: An Introduction

*Three Highlights

    --Transubstantiation: when Hopkins discovered this Catholic teaching: that the words spoken during the Canon of the Mass effect the change of bread and wine into the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ, it was essential to his faith and his creativity: "never again could language prove merely decorative"

    --Creation: renewed constantly, even as it decays and dies: Hopkins's descriptions and drawings of nature: detailed and beautiful

    --Influence of Blessed Duns Scotus and haecceitas (pp. 12-13):

        " . . . Scotus's special take on the well-worn medieval debate concerning universals and particulars. . . . For Scotus, individual things always resulted from a process he called 'contraction' by which universals contracted down into haecceitas, the "thisness" of particular concrete things. . . . the concept of "selving" [for Hopkins].  . . . His idea of of selving blends with a Victorians taste for precise detail." 

*** One of the best explanations I've read of this essential concept for understanding Hopkins's creative impulses.

Part II. Christ Calls

*Highlights:

    --His conversion from Tractarian Anglicanism to Catholicism in 1866 (five other undergraduates at the time converted too)

    --His connection to Newman at the Birmingham Oratory and his communication to his father and family about his conversion

    --Error on page 19: Nicholas Wiseman was the first Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster appointed by Pope Pius IX in 1850, not Henry Manning, who would succeed him (error repeated in the chronology at the back of the book)

        Poems (1864-1868)

        Letters (1866-1874)

        Journals (1864-1875)

Part III. Reckoning with the Wreck

    --Hopkins joined the Jesuits in 1868 and stopped writing poetry; after the five German nuns died in the wreck because of the Falk Laws in the Kulterkampf, his superior asked him to write something!

    --written in the form of a Pindaric victory ode

        "The Wreck of the Deutschland"

        Letters (1877-1878)          

Part IV. What I Do Is Me

--Because Hopkins (such a brilliant scholar at Balliol) preferred Scotus over Aquinas, his academic career as a Jesuit was stymied

--He was moved around to different missions and seldom achieved measurable success

        Poems (1877-1882)

        Letters (1879-1883)

        Sermons (very Ignatian with composition of place, etc)

            Oxford (at St. Aloysius)

            Bedford Leigh

            Liverpool

        Spiritual Writings

        Retreat Notes

Part V. Wrestling with God

 --Time in Dublin in 1884-1890 at Newman's Dublin University, teaching Latin and Greek, grading exam papers from mostly disappointing students

--Deplorable housing (plumbing) conditions for the Jesuits; Hopkins ill and exhausted

        Poems (1884-1889)

        *the "Terrible Sonnets"

        *"That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection"

        Letters (1884-1890)

        Devotional Writings (1883-1889)

**Ellsberg moderates a debate between those who see a profound conflict between Hopkins's vocation as Catholic (Jesuit) priest and his talent as a poet; from the evidence of his poetry, letters, spiritual and devotional writings, and his sermons, it seems clear to me that he had found great peace with The Holy Trinity and with the faith of the Catholic Church. He never doubted; he had difficulties, as Newman says, but not doubts. His vision of God's Creation, of--to use another idea from Newman--the visible world and the invisible world and his poetic method were both secure. Hopkins would not change the latter even though Coventry Patmore nor others, even his friend Robert Bridges, could understand what he was achieving. 

I don't think that Hopkins had a "struggle with faith" (contrary to the publisher's blurb) as a theological virtue; he believed in God; he believed in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and in the Resurrection; he trusted in the beauty of Creation and God's love. That Faith was the source of his inspiration. Hopkins struggled with--as we all do--life: its disappointments and difficulties, our failures and frustrations, the misunderstandings of others. His poetry reflects how he reconciled life with Faith through his trust in God.

Back matter:

A Chronology

Endnotes

Selected Bibliography

Index of Titles and First Lines

Joseph Mary Plunkett, RIP

Joseph Mary Plunkett, son of George Noble and Josephine Plunkett, was executed by firing squad on May 4, 1916 because his involvement in the Easter Rising. He was extremely ill with tuberculosis and only 28 years old. Take a close look at his picture: he looks very frail. You may read an extensive biography here.

The day of his execution was also his wedding day as he married Grace Gifford, who had converted to Catholicism in April that year: they had planned an Easter wedding.

He was indeed related to Saint Oliver Plunkett, the martyred Archbishop of Armagh.

The main reason I post on him today, may he rest in the Peace of Christ, is because of this lovely Christ-centered poem:

I see his blood upon the rose
And in the stars the glory of his eyes,
His body gleams amid eternal snows,
His tears fall from the skies.

I see his face in every flower;
The thunder and the singing of the birds
Are but his voice-and carven by his power
Rocks are his written words.

All pathways by his feet are worn,
His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,
His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,
His cross is every tree.

Amen.

You may find more of his poetry here.

"Newman's Epic Journey in the Mediterranean" and "Christmas Without Christ"

On the Fourth Sunday of Advent, a full week before Christmas Day so that we celebrate a whole fourth week of Advent this year (in 2023, December 24--aka Christmas Eve--is also the Fourth Sunday of Advent, and Monday is Christmas Day!), our Lovers of Newman group met at the IHM Convent in Colwich, Kansas. We read a Parochial and Plain Sermon, "The Mystery of Godliness" and enjoyed a vibrant discussion, both spiritual and theological. Our hostess, one of the IHM Sisters, also offered us a Christmas verse by Saint John Henry Newman, written while he was on his great Mediterranean voyage/pilgrimage with Richard Hurrell Froude and Froude's father, Robert Froude, the Archdeacon of Totnes.

The poem is number 49 in Newman's Verses on Various Occasions, composed on Christmas Day, December 25, 1832, while Newman was in Malta:

Christmas Without Christ

HOW can I keep my Christmas feast

In its due festive show,

Reft of the sight of the High Priest

From whom its glories flow?

I hear the tuneful bells around,

The blessèd towers I see;

A stranger on a foreign ground,

They peal a fast for me.

O Britons! now so brave and high,

How will ye weep the day

When Christ in judgment passes by,

And calls the Bride away! {99}

Your Christmas then will lose its mirth,

Your Easter lose its bloom:

Abroad, a scene of strife and dearth;

Within, a cheerless home!

In December of 2020, Father Juan Velez provided some context to the poem on the Saint John Henry Newman website:

St. John Henry Newman reminds us of the emptiness of Christmas without Christ. He titled some verses with these words on December 25, 1832, when he found himself quarantined in Malta, unable to attend the Christmas service.

Newman was quarantined and had a bad cold--and was on a very Catholic island. As The Malta Independent explains, he wouldn't have any Protestant, English church in which to pray or preach on Christmas Day, even if he could have left his hotel:

He caught a bad cold there and was forced to convalesce in the Beverly Hotel in West Street, Valletta. Because of his illness he was only able to visit Valletta and St Paul’s Bay before departing for Messina, in Italy, on 7 February. He was impressed by the kindness of the Maltese, the ringing of the church bells, the many images of saints – especially those of the Madonna – adorning our streets and, of course, the magnificence of St John’s Church – now Cathedral. He remonstrated with the Protestant authorities here why such a magnificent church was not turned into a Protestant church as the Protestants had nowhere appropriate in which to pray. . . .

Reading the poem again later, I was reminded of Mary Katherine Tillman's essay on ""Realizing" the Classical Authors: Newman's Epic Journey in the Mediterranean" originally published in the Newman Studies Journal, 3:2 (Fall, 2006) but included in her 2015 volume of articles and essays, John Henry Newman: Man of Letters. I've been dipping in to this volume as I read Lead Kindly Light, the festschrift for the recently deceased Father Ian Ker.

She explains how Newman, as a reader of the Greek and Latin classics, had prepared for this great journey by bringing Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War, Homer, and Virgil--no guide books written for tourists--but books whose historical and literary highlights Newman experienced not just as a reader of the classics, but as a visitor to their sites, in a way never before. Tillman notes that Newman's letters were filled with poetic descriptions of these locations, Patras, Ithaca, Gibraltar, Mount Vesuvius, Virgil's tomb in Naples, Corfu, etc. He wrote 31 poems during the days of his journey, which were published as the "Lyra Apostolica" in the British Magazine. Tillman uses this greater appreciation of the classics as an example of how Newman uses the imagination to move from a notional apprehension of a subject to a real knowledge of it.

Even in the midst of that appreciation of the classics of ancient Greece and Rome, however, Newman was still thinking of religious matters, and thus his poems about Saint Paul, Moses, David and Jonathan, the Greek Fathers, and indeed, troubles in the Christian world, including in the Church of England.

In these last two days of Advent, I wish you a very Merry Christmas season. 

Saint Philip Howard and His Dog

Faithful old dog, do you recall
The days of frolic and fun?
When walls were trees,
Stone floors were earth and
Low ceilings sky and sun?
When you and my other hounds
Sighted the deer and coursed?

But captive now, your eyes follow me
As I pace and pray, and wait
And wait in this cell for death.

If you so dumb, can be so true,
And trusted to carry words
To him whom my dearest love doth know—

If you, so strong can be so meek,
What else can I do—?
But bear affliction in this world for
Glory with Christ in the next

—but Oh!—

How I long to see you course
And run as you once did run,
Chasing the deer and finding him in the glorious sun! (c) Stephanie A. Mann, 2017

Five years ago (!), the National Catholic Register posted my blog story about St. Philip Howard and his greyhound. Way down in the story was the bit of verse I wrote about the young nobleman and his hound. Please read the rest of the post here, including information about the artists who created the image of Howard in the Tower of London with his dog.

[I'm reading a book right now titled The Dog by Kerstin Ekman, trans. from the Swedish by Linda Schenck and Rochelle Wright. It's about a puppy lost in the wild and the man who brings him into domestication.]

I knew that a poem about the ruins of Walsingham has been attributed to Saint Philip Howard, but recently I noticed this poem about the saints has also been attributed to him:

No eye hath seen what joys the saints obtain,
no ear hath heard what comforts are possessed,
no heart can think in what delight they reign,
nor pen express their happy port of rest,
where pleasure flows and grief is never seen,
where good abounds and ill is banished clean.

Those sacred saints remain in perfect peace
which Christ confessed, and walked in his ways;
they shine in bliss, which now shall never cease,
and to his Name do sing eternal praise.
Before his throne in white they ever stand,
and carry palms of triumph in their hand.

O worthy place, where such a Lord is chief,
O glorious Lord, who princely servants keeps,
O happy Saints, which never taste of grief,
O blessed state when malice ever sleeps.
No-one is here of base or mean degree,
but all are known the Sons of God to be.

Here's a suggested tune for the poem as a hymn. Since our Lovers of Newman just read and discussed a Newman sermon about saints' feast days, and since All Saints Day is fast approaching, it seemed appropriate to end this post with it!

Our Lady of Walsingham, pray for us!

Saint Philip Howard, pray for us!

Saint John Henry Newman and the Archangel Michael

Our Lovers of Newman group met in September to read a Parochial and Plain Sermon delivered by John Henry Newman on the feast of St. Michael the Archangel (Michaelmas) in 1831, "The Powers of Nature" with the introductory verse of "Who maketh His Angels spirits, his ministers a flaming fire." Psalm 104:4:

ON today's Festival it well becomes us to direct our minds to the thought of those Blessed Servants of God, who have never tasted of sin; who are among us, though unseen, ever serving God joyfully on earth as well as in heaven; who minister, through their Maker's condescending will, to the redeemed in Christ, the heirs of salvation.

There have been ages of the world, in which men have thought too much of Angels, and paid them excessive honour; honoured them so perversely as to forget the supreme worship due to Almighty God. This is the sin of a dark age. But the sin of what is called an educated age, such as our own, is just the reverse: to account slightly of them, or not at all; to ascribe all we see around us, not to their agency, but to certain assumed laws of nature. This, I say, is likely to be our {359} sin, in proportion as we are initiated into the learning of this world;—and this is the danger of many (so called) philosophical pursuits, now in fashion, and recommended zealously to the notice of large portions of the community, hitherto strangers to them,—chemistry, geology, and the like; the danger, that is, of resting in things seen, and forgetting unseen things, and our ignorance about them. . . .

Please read the rest there, if you like.

Reading this sermon led us to consider how much devotion Newman had to the Angels and Archangels throughout his life and this devotion is expressed in his works. 

The Dream of Gerontius is filled with Angels: the Soul's Guardian Angel, the five Angelical Choirs, Angels of the Sacred Stair, the Angel of the Agony, even the Fallen Angels (Demons).

Newman wrote poetry about the Angels, including "Angelic Guidance". 

"The Pillar of the Cloud" ("Lead, Kindly Light") ends with the poignant lines:

And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.

And this 1853 verse addressed to his Guardian Angel.

But, most appropriate for today, he wrote this poem about St. Michael the Archangel as a hymn at the Oratory in 1862:

THOU champion high  

Of Heaven's imperial Bride, 

For ever waiting on her eye, 

Before her onward path, and at her side,

In war her guard secure, by night her ready guide!

To thee was given,  

When those false angels rose 

Against the Majesty of Heaven, 

To hurl them down the steep, and on them close

The prison where they roam in hopeless unrepose.

Thee, Michael, thee, 

When sight and breathing fail, 

The disembodied soul shall see; 

The pardon'd soul with solemn joy shall hail,

When holiest rites are spent, and tears no more avail.{322}

And thou, at last, 

When Time itself must die, 

Shalt sound that dread and piercing blast, 

To wake the dead, and rend the vaulted sky,

And summon all to meet the Omniscient Judge on high.

Image Credit (Public Domain): Le Grand Saint Michel, 1518, by Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), Archangel Michael defeating evil.

Sacred Music: St. John Henry Newman's Words and Music

I purchased and have listened to Harry Christophers and The Sixteen's new CD of various settings of St. John Henry Newman's poetry and famous meditation adapted for commissioned works:

God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.

He has not created me for naught. I shall do good; I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it if I do but keep His commandments.

Therefore, I will trust Him, whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, He knows what He is about.

Harry Christophers went to a Church of England minister for a "translation" of Newman's Meditation more suited to be set to music and Christophers is most pleased that Robert Willis, the Dean of Canterbury, eliminated the use of the third person singular masculine pronoun when referring to God. So listening to the CD, one hears five different variations on the theme of Newman's Meditation, with different texts. They are all meditative, virtuosic, and inward looking. 

But Harry Christophers has programmed more traditional settings of Newman's works: Sir William Henry Harris's version of "Lead, Kindly Light", Richard Runciman Terry's of "Praise to the Holiest in the Height, and "Firmly I Believe and Truly" with a hymn tune by William Boyce (Halton Holgate). So these are works for congregations to sing, and the Sixteen sing them gloriously. 

The adapted works for Meditation mostly just glided by as I listened to them, while the three quoted hymns stand out as praise to God, declarations of faith, and thanksgiving for providence.

I've also listened twice to the recent performance of Sir Edward Elgar's setting of Newman's poem, The Dream of Gerontius at the Proms. Critical reception of this work, almost always from a secular publication, is always mixed: admiring Elgar's achievement, but descrying Newman's religion (what Harry Christophers refers to as his "ideology" in the Meditation CD liner notes). For example, The Guardian review has to remind us:

First performed in Birmingham town hall, Gerontius has always provoked extreme reactions, initially to its Roman Catholicism in a mostly Anglican country, now because its religiosity, with all the resonance of that word, is too much for some.

I don't think that Newman should be even indirectly accused of religiosity, with its implications of falsity and hypocrisy of excessive piety. And certainly not Elgar, who as this article from The Newman Review notes, had a very common-man view of the title character:

I imagined Gerontius to be a man like us, not a Priest or a Saint, but a sinner, a repentant one of course but still no end of a worldly man in his life, & now brought to book. Therefore I’ve not filled his part with Church tunes & rubbish but a good, healthy full-blooded romantic, remembered worldliness, so to speak. It is, I imagine, much more difficult to tear one’s self away from a well to do world than from a cloister.[3]

Perhaps Elgar went a little far in his judgment of the title character, but he sees Gerontius, even in this Dream, as a real human being. I rather think Gerontius was not as worldly as Elgar thinks, as he proclaims:

Rouse thee, my fainting soul, and play the man;
and through such waning span
Of life and thought as still has to be trod,
Prepare to meet thy God.
And while the storm of that bewilderment
Is for a season spent
And, ere afresh the ruin on me fall,
Use well the interval.

Gerontius is more aware of his condition than someone who has been "no end of a worldly man in his life"; he's been well-instructed in the Faith and believes it, even as he faces the crisis of his death.

Nevertheless, every time I listen to live or recorded performance, I appreciate how Elgar created a dramatic, almost operatic musical narrative. The deathbed sequence in the first part is filled with Gerontius' expressions of both faith and fear, as he tries to rouse himself even before he dies to declare his faith and trust in his Saviour. Elgar sets Newman's quotations from the traditional prayers for the dying with clarity, while Gerontius' fears are also sensitively set as he fades away from life. The Priest confidently send Gerontius on his way:

Proficiscere, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo!
Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul!
Go from this world! Go, in the Name of God
The Omnipotent Father, Who created thee!

And the second part, as the Soul adjusts to eternal life "temporarily" without a body, is imaginative and inspires awe. The dialog between the Soul and Angel transports the listener to the Soul's particular judgment, and the long interlude of the Choirs of Angelicals prepares us for the denouement of the promised-to-be-brief parting of the Angel from the Soul, with the final intrusion of the Soul's deathbed on earth, even as the Souls in Purgatory join him in the hopes to "see Him in the truth of everlasting day." And the Angel's loving farewell! Glorious!

Elgar's music is transcendent and Newman's drama is based on doctrine and devotion. Perhaps Elgar's work--not an oratorio, as he would not allow that term--is something only a Catholic may fully appreciate. 

Nevertheless, the announcers on the BBC mentioned the audience's rapt silence during the performance in Albert Hall, and the ovation was enthusiastic at the end. Such a confident, promising conclusion, as the orchestra, choirs, and Angel serenade the Soul demonstrates more than the audience may have dreamed as true--even as that final Amen and timpani roll presage a warning for the rest of us.

Devotion to St. Anne in Pre-Reformation England

In the Catholic Church, today is the Feast of St. Anne and St. Joachim, the maternal grandparents of Jesus Christ (Mary's parents) as named in the Protoevangelicum of St. James. On the 1970 Roman Calendar, they are honored together; on the 1962 Roman Calendar, they are honored separately--St. Anne today and St. Joachim on August 16. In the Church of England, Sts. Anne and Joachim are also commemorated today. In some Eastern Orthodox Churches, St. Anne is honored on September 9th in connection to the birth of the Theotokos (devotion to St. Anne began earlier in the East than in the West).

England developed devotion to St. Anne in the early Middle Ages as this study demonstrates:

By 1300 at least five important English monastic foundations were also claiming to have relics of Anne, and dozens of additional shrines, altars, and chapels had been dedicated to her, both in England and on the Continent.

Liturgical commemorations of Anne in the West seem to have followed a similar course of development, except that monastic houses in England played a more central role. The story of Joachim and Anne received at least passing mention in the liturgy for one of the oldest annual feasts of Mary, the Nativity of the Virgin (September 8 in Western calendars), which was included in the Sacramentary of Gelasius (c. 700) and firmly established in Anglo-Saxon England by the ninth or tenth century. Anne's role tended to take on more importance when an annual feast was added to celebrate the Conception of the Virgin (observed exactly nine months earlier - i.e., December 8). There is good evidence that the Conception was being commemorated at Winchester, Exeter, and Canterbury before the Norman Conquest, and this feast day was revived in the twelfth century through the efforts of Benedictine writers like Eadmer of Canterbury and Anselm of Bury, although it became generally established in England only after 1328 (when it was made obligatory for the whole Province of Canterbury) and was not clearly mandated for the Church as a whole until 1476 (when Pope Sixtus IV confirmed the Council of Basel's ruling on the matter). England also preceded most of the Continent in instituting a separate feast day for Anne herself (July 26). The date traditionally associated with the adoption of this feast is 1382, the year in which Pope Urban VI authorized its celebration throughout England, but it was already being celebrated in the twelfth century in some of the great English monastic churches, most notably those at Worcester and Evesham.

The great flowering of Anne's cult among the laity occurred between about 1300 and the Council of Trent in the mid sixteenth century. By 1540 there were at least 40 medieval churches and chapels under her patronage in England, the majority of which had been dedicated or rededicated to her during the previous two centuries. She also had major shrines at Buxton (Derbyshire) and Wood-Plumpton (Lancashire), and was frequently chosen by prosperous laymen and women as patron saint of their guilds and recipient of special bequests and offerings. As Gail Gibson has shown, such devotion to her seems to have been unusually strong in East Anglia. . . .

Please read the rest there. You may find information about the shrine at Buxton in Derbyshire here.

According to Peter Stiles in the Encylopedia of the Bible and Its Reception vol. 2 published by Walter de Gruyter in Berlin/New York 2009, which I accessed on Academia.edu:

John Lydgate (ca. 1370–1451) wrote two poems in honour of St. Anne. A Praise of St. Anne and An Invocation to Seynte Anne are significant contributions to the range of English poems on Anne between the 13th and the early 16th centuries, as are poems by Lydgate’s contemporaries, John Audelay and Osbern Bokenham. Bokenham’s Life of St. Anne is an extensive treatment of her life, one of thirteen the Augustinian friar wrote about female saints. Anne appears in several medieval plays, including the N-Town cycle and the Digby manuscript play of Candelmas Day and the killing of the children of Israel, which is set within the communal celebration of Saint Anne’s Day.

Saint Anne, pray for us!

Saint Joachim, pray for us!

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us!

And of course, I can't forget Saint Anne Line! Pray for us!

Image credit (public domain): Icon of St. Anne and the Theotokos (15th Century)

This Friday: December 18: Andrew Nash on Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

My Newman friend, Edward Short, interviewed Andrew Nash for the Catholic World Report about his new film on the poet and convert, Father Gerard Manley Hopkins:

A new EWTN film about the Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) seeks to introduce the unique nineteenth-century Victorian-era writer to a wider audience. The film was made by Dr. Andrew Nash, who studied English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was Head of English and a Housemaster at the Oratory School (founded by St. John Henry Newman). Nash, who is the first doctoral graduate of the Maryvale Institute, Birmingham, has lectured on Newman and his critical edition of Newman’s Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England was published by Gracewing in 2000.

Now retired from his former position as Headmaster of St. Edward’s School, Cheltenham, he spoke recently with CWR about the film Gerald Manley Hopkins: Priest-Poet, which will debut in the United Kingdom and Ireland on December 9th (12:00 pm London Time) and in the United States and Canada on December 18th (8:00 pm EST) on EWTN. . . .

Please read the rest there. I am looking forward to watching this program Friday night on EWTN! I have read and appreciated Hopkins' poetry since I was an undergraduate English major!! It is most appropriate that Nash will focus on The Wreck of the Deutschland, the poem Hopkins wrote "To the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns, exiles by the Falk Laws, drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th, 1875"!!

This Morning: Saint John Rigby and Saint Anne Line

Just a reminder that I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at about 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central to continue our series on the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales. Matt Swaim and I will discuss Saint John Rigby and Saint Anne Line.

Please listen live here on the Sacred Heart Radio website; the podcast will be archived here; the segment will be repeated on Friday next week during the EWTN hour of the Son Rise Morning Show (from 6:00 to 7:00 a.m. Eastern/5:00 to 6:00 a.m. Central).

Saints Rigby and Line are the last two martyrs from the reign of Elizabeth I among the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales. Her reign ended in 1603.

Saint John Rigby was martyred, not at Tyburn, but at St. Thomas Waterings or St. Thomas-a-Watering on the Old Kent Road. The St. Thomas in the name is St. Thomas a Becket, and the Old Kent Road was on the way to Canterbury and St. Thomas a Becket's shrine. Chaucer's pilgrims stop at the spring. As this website explains:

Set on a former route for pilgrims visiting Canterbury, St Thomas-a-Watering on Old Kent Road gets its name from a spring that emerges at this spot dedicated to St Thomas a Becket.

St Thomas-a-Watering became a well-known site for the execution of Catholics and dissenters during the reformation.

In 1539, Griffith Clerke, Vicar of Wandsworth, along with three others, thought to be Catholic friars, were hanged and quartered on this site. Wales’s most famous Protestant martyr, John Penry was also executed at St Thomas-a-Watering in 1593, for doing little more than ‘issuing strong words of warning’ against the then Queen Elizabeth and her bishops.

Many more executions of common criminals took place right up until 1740, when a father and son were hanged for murder.

Note that the website leaves out St. John Jones, Rigby's confessor, Rigby, and Blessed John Pibush, also martyred at St. Thomas-a Waterings. Because of the site's location on the old route to the former shrine of a great Catholic saint, it must have seemed an appropriate place for executing Catholics.

Here's the mention of St. Thomas-a-Watering at the end of the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales:

Amorwe, whan that day gan for to sprynge,
Up roos oure Hoost and was oure aller cok,
And gadrede us togidre alle in a flok;
And forth we riden, a litel moore than paas,
Unto the wateryng of Seint Thomas;
And there oure Hoost bigan his hors areste,
And seyde, "Lordynges, herkneth, if yow leste:
Ye woot youre foreward and I it yow recorde. . . .

Saint Anne Line is also thought to have a literary connection: to William Shakespeare's poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle"(dove). Several critics have thought that Saint Anne Line and her husband Roger are being commemorated in the funeral for the lovers in that poem:

Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead;
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.

So they lov'd, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.

Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen
'Twixt the turtle and his queen;
But in them it were a wonder.

So between them love did shine,
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix' sight:
Either was the other's mine.

If Shakespeare remembered a Catholic martyr and her exiled Catholic husband in a poem, it lends credence to those who suggest that the Bard of Avon was, if not a practicing Recusant Catholic, at least a Church Papist, outwardly conforming while secretly remaining a Catholic.

Saint John Rigby, pray for us!

Saint Anne Line, pray for us!

Book Review: Chesterton on "The Victorian Age of Literature"

According to Joseph Pearce in his biography of G.K. Chesterton, Wisdom and Innocence, the editors of The Home University Library of Modern Knowledge, The Rt. Hon. H. A. L. (Herbert Albert Laurens) Fisher, M.A., F.B.A., Prof. Gilbert Murray, Litt.D., LL.D., F.B.A. (Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford), Prof. Sir J. Arthur Thomson, M.A., and Prof. William T. Brewster, M.A., asked Chesterton to write a survey of the Victorian Age in Literature. His book was published in 1913 as no. 61 in the library; the editors thought it best to warn their readers:

The Editors wish to explain that this book is not put forward as an authoritative history of Victorian literature. It is a free and personal statement of views and impressions about the significance of Victorian literature made by Mr. Chesterton at the Editors' express invitation.

Chesterton was an author, he was a Victorian (his dates: 1841-1922) , and he had obviously read the Victorians and their works, so I read the book as his authoritative history of Victorian Literature. He approaches the composition of a survey of an age in literature in the only way that Chesterton could: a systematically unsystematical way. He can't do it chronologically any more than he can do it alphabetically, so he traces themes and genres throughout the queen's long reign (her dates: 1837-1901), highlighting along the way a few of his favorites: Cobbett, Dickens, and Shaw. And he does it all in an introduction and four chapters:

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Victorian Compromise and its Enemies

Chapter 2. The Great Victorian Novelists

Chapter 3. The Great Victorian Poets

Chapter 4. The Break-up of the Compromise

Bibliographical Note (added by the editors?)

The page numbers below are based on the Dodo Press edition pictured above.

He actually begins his overview before Queen Victoria's reign begins with the French Revolution: "the most important event in English history [that] happened in France". Moreover, he asserts "that the most important event in English history was the event that never happened at all—the English Revolution on the lines of the French Revolution." The Romantic poets were the radicals: unlike the first of his favorites, William Cobbett, who really knew how the rural and urban poor suffered and had suggestions for correcting these injustices, there was no revolution. Or as Chesterton states, there was a counter-revolution: "an aristocratic revolution, a victory of the rich over the poor. It was about this time that the common lands were finally enclosed; that the more cruel game laws were first established; that England became finally a land of landlords instead of common land-owners." While that was being implemented, "English Romantics, English Liberals, were not public men making a republic, but poets, each seeing a vision." . . .  "Ideals exhausted themselves in the void; Victorian England, very unwisely, would have no more to do with idealists in politics." (p. 3)

Thus the Victorian Compromise: implement reform and progress in England without great social unrest. Chesterton identifies Thomas Babington Macaulay as an exponent of this compromise: "its praise of Puritan politics and abandonment of Puritan theology; its belief in a cautious but perpetual patching up of the Constitution; its admiration for industrial wealth." (pp. 7-8) 

You'll have to read the book for yourself to appreciate how Chesterton characterizes and criticizes the strengths and weaknesses of the authors he discusses. It is a very quotable book and believe it or not, I have restrained myself in quoting it in this review. As an example, 

"There were two Macaulays, a rational Macaulay who was generally wrong, and a romantic Macaulay who was almost invariably right. All that was small in him derives from the dull parliamentarism of men like Sir James Mackintosh; but all that was great in him has much more kinship with the festive antiquarianism of Sir Walter Scott." (p. 8)

Macaulay could be Homeric, he could praise both the England that defeated the Armada and the Jacobite who died in exile after fighting to restore the Catholic Stuarts:

TO my true king I offered, free from stain,
Courage and faith; vain faith, and courage vain.
For him I threw lands, honours, wealth, away,
And one dear hope, that was more prized than they.
For him I languished in a foreign clime,
Grey-haired with sorrow in my manhood’s prime;
Heard on Lavernia Scargill’s whispering trees,
And pined by Arno for my lovelier Tees;
Beheld each night my home in fevered sleep,
Each morning started from the dream to weep;
Till God, who saw me tried too sorely, gave
The resting-place I asked, an early grave. . . . (my example, not his)

Chesterton thus praises Macaulay's greatness: "His noble enduring quality in our literature is this: that he truly had an abstract passion for history; a warm, poetic and sincere enthusiasm for great things as such; an ardour and appetite for great books, great battles, great cities, great men." (pp. 8-9)

He also cites John Stuart Mill and his utilitarian and libertarian philosophy but without much analysis of Mill as a writer.

If Macaulay is an emblem of the Victorian Compromise, with its rationalism and utilitarianism, Newman and the Oxford Movement is an example of one of its enemies: The Oxford Movement "was an appeal to reason: reason said that if a Christian had a feast day he must have a fast day too. Otherwise, all days ought to be alike; and this was that very Utilitarianism against which their Oxford Movement was the first and most rational assault. This idea, even by reason of its reason, narrowed into a sort of sharp spear, of which the spear blade was Newman." (p. 13)

(I've already quoted most of Chesterton's comments about Newman here.)

Then Chesterton goes on to analyze Carlyle, Froude, Ruskin, Kingsley, and Arnold, all with the same balance of praise and blame. He cites them all as "roughly representative of the long series of protests against the cold commercial rationalism which held Parliament and the schools through the earlier Victorian time, in so far as those protests were made in the name of neglected intellect, insulted art, forgotten heroism and desecrated religion. But already the Utilitarian citadel had been more heavily bombarded on the other side by one lonely and unlettered man of genius."  (p.25)

And that genius is, of course, Charles Dickens, who Chesterton includes both among "the fighters" in this chapter and the novelists in the next. 

In that chapter Chesterton begins by highlighting the great achievement of female novelists, from Austen to the Brontës , but especially George Eliot. He certainly admires Jane Austen:

Her [George Eliot's] originals and even her contemporaries had shown the feminine power in fiction as  well or better than she. Charlotte Brontë, understood along her own instincts, was as great; Jane Austen was greater. The latter comes into our present consideration only as that most exasperating thing, an ideal unachieved. It is like leaving an unconquered fortress in the rear. No woman later has captured the complete common sense of Jane Austen. She could keep her head, while all the after women went about looking for their brains. She could describe a man coolly; which neither George Eliot nor Charlotte Brontë could do. She knew what she knew, like a sound dogmatist: she did not know what she did not know—like a sound agnostic. But she belongs to a vanished world before the great progressive age of which I write. (p. 35)

He later says of her in comparison to Eliot and the Brontës :

Jane Austen was born before those bonds which (we are told) protected woman from truth, were burst by the Brontës or elaborately untied by George Eliot. Yet the fact remains that Jane Austen knew much more about men than either of them. Jane Austen may have been protected from truth: but it was precious little of truth that was protected from her. When Darcy, in finally confessing his faults, says, "I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice though not in theory," he gets nearer to a complete confession of the intelligent male than ever was even hinted by the Byronic lapses of the Brontës' heroes or the elaborate exculpations of George Eliot's. Jane Austen, of course, covered an infinitely smaller field than any of her later rivals; but I have always believed in the victory of small nationalities. (p. 37)

Then he goes on to the men: Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins, Reade, Kingsley, Bulwer Lytton, Meredith, and Hardy. He concludes chapter 2 with a discussion of children's literature and "literature meant merely for fun": Macdonald, Lear, Carroll, and W.S. Gilbert (and Sullivan?), ending with a joke about the librettist's last name and his own first name: "the word "Gilbertian" will probably last longer than the name Gilbert."! (p. 83)

Among the poets in chapter three he reviews Tennyson, and Browning, with this comment on Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

With all his Italian sympathies and Italian residence, he was not the man to get Victorian England out of its provincial rut: on many things Kingsley himself was not so narrow. His celebrated wife was wider and wiser than he in this sense; for she was, however one-sidedly, involved in the emotions of central European politics. She defended Louis Napoleon and Victor Emmanuel; and intelligently, as one con scious of the case against them both. . . . She is by far the most European of all the English poets of that age; all of them, even her own much greater husband, look local beside her. Tennyson and the rest are nowhere. (pp. 61-62)

Then he goes on to Swinburne, Rossetti, Fitzgerald, Morrison, Thompson, and Patmore.

Chesterton summarizes the end of the Victorian Age and the break-up of the Victorian Compromise thus:

There came a time, roughly somewhere about 1880, when the two great positive enthusiasms of Western Europe had for the time exhausted each other—Christianity and the French Revolution. About that time there used to be a sad and not unsympathetic jest going about to the effect that Queen Victoria* might very well live longer than the Prince of Wales. Somewhat in the same way, though the republican impulse was hardly a hundred years old and the religious impulse nearly two thousand, yet as far as England was concerned, the old wave and the new seemed to be spent at the same time. [*Today we could substitute the name "Queen Elizabeth II"!] . . .

Liberalism (in Newman's sense) really did strike Christianity through headpiece and through head; that is, it did daze and stun the ignorant and ill-prepared intellect of the English Christian. And Christianity did smite Liberalism through breastplate and through breast; that is, it did succeed, through arms and all sorts of awful accidents, in piercing more or less to the heart of the  Utilitarian—and finding that he had none. Victorian Protestantism had not head enough for the business; Victorian Radicalism had not heart enough for the business. Down fell they dead together, exactly as Macaulay's Lay says, and still stood all who saw them fall almost until the hour at which I write. (pp. 75-76)

In this chapter he examines the Æsthetes and the Decadents: Wilde, Beardsley, and even Maeterlinck(?). He did not include Dowson ("days of wine and roses"; "gone with the wind")! Among novelists, he critiques Henry James, opining that The Turn of the Screw is such a great achievement as a ghost story because the characters in the rest of James's novels are like ghosts! Again, he brings in one of his best literary friends (and designated heretic), G.B. Shaw, and another heretic H.G. Wells for his commendation and criticism.

Then he closes with the Imperialist phase: Stevenson, Henley, and Kipling. His appreciation of Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is astute:

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a double triumph; it has the outside excitement that belongs to Conan Doyle with the inside excitement that belongs to Henry James. Alas, it is equally characteristic of the Victorian time that while nearly every Englishman has enjoyed the anecdote, hardly one Englishman has seen the joke—I mean  the point. You will find twenty allusions to Jekyll and Hyde in a day's newspaper reading. You will also find that all such allusions suppose the two personalities to be equal, neither caring for the other. Or more roughly, they think the book means that man can be cloven into two creatures, good and evil. The whole stab of the story is that man can't: because while evil does not care for good, good must care for evil. Or, in other words, man cannot escape from God, because good is the God in man; and insists on omniscience. This point, which is good psychology and also good theology and also good art, has missed its main intention merely because it was also good story-telling. (p. 87)

The main caveat to be made about this book is that you have to know Victorian literature--you have to know it just to know who Chesterton is talking about sometimes for he does not always include first names (unless like Henry James the author has two first names as his name) or the title of the novel or book he is describing. You have to know the novels and the poems and the characters and the plots. I pulled out the second volume of the Norton Anthology of English Literature just to double-check some things. 

Sadly, the only author not included in this survey is G.K. himself (which would have been a conflict of interest anyway)--but it's interesting to think about the contributions he made to literature before Queen Victoria died and his attacks on the Victorian compromise on the side of reason and faith, against utilitarianism, industrialism, and jingoism, and how he continued the fight long after the queen died. 

An enjoyable and enlightening read. Notice how the discussion of the English reaction to the French Revolution dovetailed with my recent reading of Robert R. Reilly's book. Notice how Chesterton would have been particularly pleased with the alliteration of my penultimate sentence.