The Press. — London, England, 1858-04-24 00:00:00

THE PRESS, APRIL 24,1858. tary bands, that reaches the ears only as noise, while the trumpet is yet speaking to the cannoneer, and he to heaven, the vision has vanished: the observed of all obser vers seems to have melted from before the eye, which finds itself gazing once more on vacancy. The father is gone, but has dropped his blessing on bis loving children. We think it was from the banks of the Avon, and not of the Tiber, that the Cardinal derived the above inspiration. Is it not the King in Hamlet who says, Give me the cnps, And let the kettle to the trumpet speak, The trumpet to the cannoneer without, The cannons to the heavens? We fancy, likewise, though the sentiment comes from a woman's lips, it was no St. Ursula, or St. Agnes, but a certain stage heroine, called Ophelia, who spoke of The glass of fashion, and the mould of form, The observed of all observers . When we combine the dramatic language with the dramatic ideas above quoted—the bells and drums, and crash of bands, the balcony, and the flabellte or fans of state — we must confess that the Cardinal transports us in imagination to a playhouse rather than to a church ; and we have before our mind's eye a procession at Drury Lane, or a " revival " at the Princess's Theatre; or Mr. Elliston, as George IV., in the ever•memorable piece wherein the coronation was dramatised, and his mock-majesty blessed the people over the footlights. It is not as if Cardinal Wiseman had been endeavouring to paint up this one scene in order to make a point; but his whole book is a mosaic of tho same curious combinations of word-effects. The following passages are taken at random : The swelling chorus of the hymns and psalms before him evidently did nos reach his ear; the smoke of frag rant incense just under him did not soothe his nostrils ; the waves of a multitude, swayed to and fro with the mur mur of a sea, traced not its image on his eyeballs : he was himself abstracted from all that sense could convey, and was centred in one thought, in one act of mind, soul, and heart, in ono duty of his sublime office, one privilege of his supreme commission. He felt, and was, and you knew him to be, what Moses was on the mountain, face to face. • • • That central pile, with its canopy of bronze as lofty as the Farnese palace, with its deep-diving stairs leading to a court walled and paved with precious stones, that yet seems only a vestibule to same cavern of a catacomb, with its simple altar that disdains ornament in the presence of what is beyond the reach of human price —that, which in truth forms the heart of the great body, placed just where the heart should be—is only on such occasions animated, and surrounded on every side, by living and moving setup tuousness. The immense cupola above it, ceases to be a dome over a sepulchre, and becomes a canopy above an altar; the quiet tomb beneath is changed into the shrine of relics below the place of sacrifice—the saints under the altar ;—the quiet spot at which a few ;4evout worshippers at most times may be found, bowing under the 100 lamps, is crowded by rising groups, beginning from the lowest step, increasing in dignity and in richness of sacred robes, till, at the summit and in the centre, stands supreme the Pontiff himself, on the very spot which becomes him, the one living link in a chain, of which the very first ring is riveted to the shrine of the apostles below. • • • There is one word introduced in this latter paragraph that hits the blot—" sumptuous ness "; and as sumptuous material, unless made up with refined taste, inevitably results in an appearance of gaudiness and vulgarity, so sumptuous expressions, neither harmo nized nor blended, produce a similar result. It might, perhaps, be objected that we have no right to take so much exception to the " manner" of a Cardinal, and that the matter of his book is that to which we ought to ad dress ourselves. But Cardinal Wiseman's matter is the "colouring matter" of which the manner is the result. They are so close of kin that, like the Siamese twins, it would be cruelty to cut them asunder. There is a song in Bombastes Furioso which speaks of " a tub thrown to a whale to make " the fish a fool." We take it this has been the object of the work before us There is a shoal of people afloat in society who either have recently embraced the Romish faith, or are inclined to be " reconciled." The one class, enamoured of the " dramatics" of religion, are hungry to have something thrown to them ; the other needs to be baited. They have got the Cardinal's tub, which is an un usually ornate piece of literary cooperage, but it is full of emptiness. In language and material it seems to us to depend upon tinsel. The stage-foil glitters upon the words and the ideas. No doubt there are people who like elongated sentences, and redundant phrase ology. What we consider vicious, they would esteem " sumptuous;" moreover they would, perhaps, tell us that " sacred robes," and " canopies," and " altars," and " catacombs," and " waving multitudes," and " fragrant in cense," and "soothed nostrils," and the before mentioned trumpets, drums, and cannons cannot be described, except in glowing language. This would seem to us very like asserting that the description must be theatrical in phraseology, because the thing described is theatrical in its cha racter. IVe shall not argue the point; for, even if it be tine, a critic is by no means bound to consider what are the causes of a faulty style. His business is only with what is put before him ; and, looking through these pages, we must confess it is very disappointing to find a man of acknowledged power and considerable familiarity both with science, and art, and letters, condescending to string together whole pages of letterpress that narrowly escape being no better than verbiage ; and even when the ideas they are intended to convey (which are the thinnest possible veneers extended over a vast unseasoned sur face of words) are collected together, they convey—to us, at least—but one feeling, viz , that Cardinal Wiseman has been endeavouring to enamour the small-fry of England, among whom he is angling, with a fancy for the Romish ritual, by describing the gaudy ex ternals of his religion in what he considers an attractive and fascinating manner. Ever and ever we have the pomp of popes thrust upon us, and the pomp of kings sneered at. Take the following as a speci men : Could any sovereign periodically become, again and again, the centre of anything so magnificent, morally as well as materially? Could he bring together thousands of strangers and of subjects, ambassadors, kings, and even emperors, with multitudes of poor, who would make pilgrimage from distant regions on foot, and collect them in a grand square, that they might look up to him for a few moments, ay, and fall on their knees daring them, as he showed himself at a window of his palace? The ides of au attempt to do such a thing is so mon• strously preposterous, that it excites laughter. To us the " idea" is preposterous, and excites our laughter, though we have not the smallest doubt that there have been spectacles in which sovereigns have been engaged quite as im posing as the one in which the Cardinal's mind revels. There have been scenes de scribed in history in which kings and their people have stood face to face both " morally " and materially" as grand as the scene here alluded to, which we have witnessed as well as the Cardinal, and can therefore speak of with equal authority. Nay, we believe we might even affirm that on a recent occasion, had it been known that the Queen of this country would from the balcony of her palace have presented her married child to the people on her wedding•day, the many . thousands who accidentally witnessed that todchiug spectacle would have been multiplied into a congrega tion of loyal subjects infinitely more vast than we beheld in front of St. Peter's. But it is needless to discuss such points : the animus throughout the whole book is so evident that we can safely leave the dignity of Protestant kings to take care of itself when put in contrast with the magnificence of Papal Pontiffs. Here is another touch after the same style —Protestant-" plastered" London in antithesis to Papal-marbled Rome : Were London ever again to become a ruin, a few frag ments of plaster might disclose the whereabouts of a dis senting chapel, and a queer old tablet might tell of some humble almshouses, founded by an eminent merchant. The remaining inscriptions would be the debris of shop fronts and facies (whatever that means), with a few brass plates bearing the names of a dentist or a drawing-master, or, what Lord Macaulay's sketchy New Zealander might consider a leave for admission to some congenial fumy sports of cudgel or fist, " Knock and Ring." Rome ! home of Pontiffs; London ! home of dentists "Dens' Theology," we believe, is a favourite text-book with the Cardinal. We presume in that work the catechist must ask, " Who lives in Rome? Answer : The Pope. " Who lives in London? Answer: The Den " tist." The Cardinal is merry at our expense ; despite we have the dome of St. Paul's, not very inferior to St. Peter's in size, and quite as beautiful in construction, and as lasting in are unimportant when compared to the objec tion w hich, in our judgment, lies against this huge mass of subtle speculation us a whole. It is almost entirely conjectural, and the re sults to which it conducts us have neither such irresistible plausibility about them as might supply the lack of positive evidence, nor such value as should make us care greatly whether they are true or not. We have only one more remark to make. Mr. Gladstone throughout these volumes assumes the unity and individuality of Homer to be established. We will not quarrel with him on this head, but we cannot follow him in treating the poet's mysterious personality with such familiarity as appears in the fol lowing sentences : It seems to be the poet's intention that we should assume all Greek manners, institu ions, and races to have sprung out of the very soil. . . . The process by which Elel• lens mastered Pelasgians is nowhere professedly related by Homer—whose purpose it was to unite more closely the elements of the nation, and not to record that they had once been separate. We, for our parts, cannot think that the old poet had any such profound design. Recollections of the Last Four Popes. By his Eminence Cardinal Wiseman. London : Hurst and Blackett. MALIGNITY has been the spirit of a great deal of recent criticism. Dean Swift denominated the critic " a discoverer and collector of faults." For the honour of literature, we wish that the assertion could be said to refer to the reign of Queen Anne only, and not of Queen Victoria. But it is not so. At the present moment we have a Review, which, to serve the purposes of half a dozen indi viduals, makes a holocaust of victims, and seems to consider its Saturday business that of rendering every man who dares take pen in hand as uncomfortable as possible, unless he revolves within the circumference of certain prejudices, whose centre is in South ampton-stree:. A kindred spirit is found in other, and we are sorry to say it, higher quar ters—where, even with reference to the work of Cardinal Wiseman now before us, per sonality has stood for criticism ; and sarcastic reference to individual peculiarities of the body, fora review of the products of the mind This fashion has its opposite ; and in too many cases public criticism is but the expression of private favouritism. Praise is not seldom measured out by the influence which can be brought to bear upon the critic. It is, perhaps, unneces sary for us to say that this is not criticism ; and we point to these ills, because we would wish to deserve respect by its being understood that the praise or blame of these columns shall have reference only to what is public property, and shall be kept independent of private soli citation. We object to the work before us, but, in doing so, our objections may, we hope, be fairly and at the same time cautiously expressed. Every book will naturally be judged by its manner and matter. The first question the reader asks is, " What is its object ?" and then, " How is it expressed ?" With regard to com position in this history of the Popes, we lose sight of the author of many popular lectures and essays, and see only a pompous parade of words very similar in style to those dated a few years back by the same author from the Flaminian-gate. Cardinal Wiseman has yet to learn that in language, as well as in Catholic art,simplicity is twin-sister to sublimity. IVe are constantly reminded of Mr. Bunn's pro grammes of operas as brought out a few years since at Drury Lane, when language flew into an hysteria of adjectives, and magniloquence fell into fits of expletive, whilst describing the magnificence of Stage processions, banners, trumpets, drums, &c. In the following extract we think every one will smell the oil of the footlights, and per ceive that the Cardinal has gone to the theatre both for his ideas and expressions ; few heads a vision of a mo men t. Af ter l ong expec t a ti on , a are just seen, but hardly recognizable, above the balustrade of the balcony, then the flabellm or fans of state, and lan, lifted high, the mitred pontiff. A few words are tp ken, winch are undistinguishable below. The Pope sea, raises his eyes to heaven, opens wide and closes his anus, sad pours out from a full heart, and often with a clear sonorous voice, a blessing on all below. Amidst the ell ag of bells, the clatte r of drums, and the crash of mili• 1