The time has come when the Catholics of this country—who possess unmutilated the seamless garment of Christ—should begin to understand the real value of the inheritance of art and literature and music which is especially theirs.

The Reformation made a gulf between art and religion; it declared that the beautiful had no place in the service of God, and that a student of Æsthetics was a student of the devil’s lore. Of late a reaction has taken place.

Fifty years ago the picture of a Madonna by Raphael or Filippo Lippi or Botticelli in a popular magazine would have occasioned a howl of condemnation from the densely ignorant average Protestant of that time. But the taste for art has grown immensely in the last twenty years, and now—I am ashamed to say it—non-Catholics have, in America, learned to know and love the great masterpieces of our inheritance more than we ourselves. It is we, English-speaking Catholics, who have suffered unexpressibly from the deadening influence of the Reformation on Æsthetics. As a taste for art and literature grows, “orthodox” protest against the Church must wane, for the essence of “orthodox” protest is misunderstanding of the Church which made possible Dante and Cervantes, Chaucer and Wolfram von Eschenbach, Fra Angelico and Murillo, Shakspere and Dryden. And no cultivated man, loving them, can hate the Church that, while guarding morality, likewise protected Æsthetics as a stretching out towards the immortal. Art and literature and music are efforts of the spirit to approach God. And, as such, Christianity cherishes them. Art and history are one; art and literature are history; and nothing is grander in the panorama of events than the spectacle of the fine arts, in Christian times, emptying their precious box of ointment on the head of Our Lord to atone for the sins of the past.

The flower of all art is Christian art; it took the perfect form of the Greeks and clothed it with luminous flesh and blood.

Miss Eliza Allen Starr has shown us some of the treasures of our inheritance of art. It is easy to find them; good photographs of the masters’ works—of the Sistine Madonna of Raphael, of the Immaculate Conception of Murillo, of the Virgin of the Kiss by HÉbert, and of the beautiful pictures of Bouguereau are cheap everywhere. Why, then, with all these lovely reflections of Catholic genius near us, should we fill our houses with bad, cheap prints?

Similarly, why should we be content with flimsy modern books? The best of all literature is ours—even Shakspere is ours.

If there is one fault to be found in Cardinal Newman’s lecture on “Literature” in that great book, “The Idea of a University,” it is that the most subtle master of English style took his view of Continental literature from Hallam. When he speaks of English literature, he speaks as a master of his subject; on the literature of the Greeks and Romans, there is no uncertainty in his utterances; but he takes his impressions of the literature of France and Spain from a non-Catholic critic, whose opinions are tinctured with prejudice. One cannot help regretting that the cardinal did not apply the same test to Montaigne that he applied to Shakspere.

Similarly, most of us have been induced, by the Puritanism in the air around us, to take our opinions of the great English classics from text-books compiled by sciolists, who have not gone deep enough to understand the course of the currents of literature. We accept Shakspere at second hand; if we took our impressions of his works from Professor Dowden or Herr Delius or men like George Saintsbury or Horace Furness, or, better than all, from himself, it would be a different thing. But we do not; if we read him at all, we read him hastily; we read “Hamlet” as we would a novel, or we are content to nibble at little chunks from his plays, which the compilers graciously present to us.

The text-book of literature has been an enemy to education, because it has been generally compiled by persons who were incapable of fair judgment. In this country, Father Jenkins’s compilation is the best we have had. It is a brave attempt to remove misapprehensions; but a text-book should be merely a guide to the works themselves. There is more intellectual gain in six months’ close study of the text and circumstances of “Hamlet” than in tripping through a dozen books of “selections.” The Germans found this out long ago, and Dr. Gotthold BÖttcher puts it into fitting words in his introduction to Wolfram von Eschenbach’s “Parcival.” The time will doubtless come when even in parochial schools the higher “Reader” will be a complete book—not a thing of shreds and patches, like the little dabs of meat and vegetables the keepers of country hotels set before us on small plates. This book will, of course, be intelligently annotated.

Some of us have a certain timidity about claiming Shakspere as our own and about reading his plays to our young people. This is because we have given in too much to the critical spirit, which finds purity in impure things, and impurity where no impurity is intended. It is time we realize the evil that the English speech has done us by unconsciously impregnating us with alien prejudices.

Surely no man will accuse Cardinal Newman of condoning sensuality or coarseness. His idea of propriety is good enough; it is broad enough and narrow enough for us. That foreign code which would keep young people within artificial barriers and then let them loose to wallow in literary filth, that hypocritical American code which leaves the obscenities of the daily newspaper open and closes Shakspere, is not ours.

Shakspere was the result of Catholic thought and training. There is no Puritanism in him. His plays are Catholic literature in the widest sense; he sees life from the Christian point of view, and, depicting it as it is, his standard is a Catholic standard. There is no doubt that there are coarse passages in Shakspere’s plays—it is easy to get rid of them. But they are few. They seem immodest because the plainness of language of the Elizabethan time and of the preceding times has happily gone out of fashion. It would be well to revise our definition of immorality, by comparing it with the more robust Catholic one, before we condemn Shakspere or the Old Testament, though the scrupulous Tom Paine, who has gone utterly out of fashion, found both immoral!

Hear Cardinal Newman (“Idea of a University,” page 319) speaking of Shakspere: “Whatever passages may be gleaned from his dramas disrespectful to ecclesiastical authority, still these are but passages; on the other hand, there is in Shakspere neither contempt of religion nor scepticism, and he upholds the broad laws of moral and divine truths with the consistency and severity of an Æschylus, Sophocles, and Pindar. There is no mistaking in his works on which side lies the right; Satan is not made a hero, nor Cain a victim, but pride is pride, and vice is vice, and, whatever indulgence he may allow himself in light thoughts or unseemly words, yet his admiration is reserved for sanctity and truth;... but often as he may offend against modesty, he is clear of a worse charge, sensuality, and hardly a passage can be instanced in all that he has written to seduce the imagination or to excite the passions.”

In arranging a course of reading for young people, it seems to me that those books which define principles should be put first. When a reader has a good grasp of definitions, he is in a mathematical state of mind and ready to assimilate truth and reject error. Books of literature should not be recommended to him until he is sure of his principles; for, unhappily, the tendency of American youth is to imagine that what he cannot refute is irrefutable. If the young reader be thoroughly grounded in the doctrines of his faith and armed with a few clear definitions of the meaning of things, even Milton cannot persuade him that Satan is a more admirable figure than Our Lord, or Byron seduce him into the opinion that Cain was wronged, or Goethe that sin is merely a more or less pleasing experience.

It is remarkable that the Puritanism which lauds Milton as a household god turns its face from Shakspere; and yet Milton’s great epic is not only the deification of intellectual pride, but it contemns Christianity. There are very few men who can to-day say that they have read “Paradise Lost” line after line with pleasure. There are long stretches of aridity in it; and those who pretend to admire it as a whole are no doubt tinctured with literary insincerity. But there are glorious passages in the “Paradise Lost,” unexcelled in any literature; and therefore the epic should be read in parts, and one cannot be blamed if he “skip” many other parts. The great parts of “Paradise Lost,” ought to be read and re-read. The comparative weakness of the “Paradise Regained” shows that Milton had not that sympathy with the Redemption which he had with the revolt of Satan. And yet, in some pious households, where puritanized opinion reigns, Shakspere is locked up, while “Paradise Lost” is put beside the family Bible!

It is not necessary that one should read all of Shakspere’s writings; the early poems had better be omitted; but it is necessary for purposes of culture that one should read what one does read with intelligence. Before beginning “Hamlet”—which a thoughtful Catholic can appreciate better than any other man—one should clear the ground by studying Professor Dowden’s little “Primer” on Shakspere (Macmillan & Co.), and Mr. Furnivall’s preface to the Leopold edition of Shakspere, and George H. Miles’s study of “Hamlet.” Then, and not until then, will one be in a position to get real benefit from his reading. To read “Hamlet” without some preparation is like the inane practice of “going to Europe to complete an education never begun at home.” I repeat that a Catholic can better appreciate the marvels of Shakspere’s greatest play, because, even if he know only the Little Catechism, he has the key to the play and to Shakspere’s mind.

The philosophy of “Hamlet” is that sin cankers and burns and ruins and corrupts even in this world, and that the effects do not end in this world. Shakspere, enlightened by the teaching of centuries since St. Austin converted his forefathers, teaches a higher philosophy than that of Æschylus or Euripides or Sophocles—he substitutes will for fate. It is not fate that forces the keen Claudius to murder his brother; it is not fate that obliges him to turn away from the reproaches of an instructed mind and conscience: he chooses; it is his own will that makes the crime; he does not confuse good with evil. The sin of the Queen is not so great; she is ignorant of her husband’s crime; in fact, from the usual modern point of view, she has committed no sin at all. And, as the Danish method of choosing monarchs permitted the nobles to name Claudius king, while her son was mooning at the Saxon university, she had done him no material wrong. But as there is no mention of a dispensation from Rome, and as Shakspere makes the Danes Catholic, the people of Denmark must have looked on the alliance with doubt. The demand made to Horatio to exorcise the spirit, as he was a scholar; the expression, “I’ll cross it,” which Fechter, the actor, rightly interpreted as meaning the sign of the cross; a hundred touches, in fact, show that “Hamlet” can and ought to be studied with special profit by Catholics.

Suppose that one begins with “Hamlet,” having cleared the ground, and then takes the greatest of the tragi-comedies, “The Merchant of Venice.” Here opens a new field. Before beginning this play, it would be well to read Mgr. Seton’s paper on the Jews in Europe, in his excellent “Essays, Chiefly Roman.” It will give one an excellent idea of the attitude of the Church towards Shylock’s countrymen, and do away with the impression that Antonio was acting in accordance with that attitude when he treated Shylock as less than a human being. Portia not only offers a valuable contrast to the weakness of Ophelia and the criminal weakness of Gertrude, but she is a type of the ideal noblewoman of her time, whose only weakness is love for a man of lesser nobility than herself, but who holds his honor as greater than life or love.

Shakspere’s “Julius CÆsar,” for comparison with “Hamlet,” might come next, and after that the most lyrical and poetical of all the comedies, “As You Like It,” or perhaps “The Tempest,” with Prospero’s simple but strong assertion of belief in immortality.

Having studied these four great works, with as much of the literature they suggest as practicable, a distinct advance in cultivation will have been made. The best college in the country can give one no more. But they must be studied, not read. He who does not know these plays misses part of his heritage; for the plays of Shakspere belong more to the Catholic than to the non-Catholic. Shakspere was the fine flower of culture nurtured under Catholic influences.