Young people who determine to study English literature seriously sometimes find themselves discouraged by the multitude of books; consequently they get into an idle way of accepting opinions at second hand—the ready-made opinions of the text-book. In order to study English literature, it is not necessary to read many books; but it is necessary to read a few books carefully. The evident insincerity of some of the people who “go in” for literary culture has given the humorous paragrapher, often on the verge of paresis from trying to be funny every day, many a straw to grasp at. There is no doubt that some of his gibes and sneers are deserved, and that others, undeserved, serve as cheap stock in trade for people who are too idle or too stupid to take any interest in literary matters.

Literary insincerity and pretension are sufficiently bad, but they are not worse than the superficial and silly jeers at poetry and art in the line of the worn-out witticisms about the “spring poet” and the “mother-in-law.”

The young woman who thinks it the proper thing to go into ecstasies over Robert Browning without having read a line of the poet’s work, except, perhaps, “How They Carried the News from Ghent to Aix,” is foolish enough; but is the man who sneers at Browning and knows even less about him any better? The earnest student of literature makes no pretensions. He reads a few books well, and by that obtains the key to the understanding of all others. He does not pretend to admire epics he has not read. He knows, of course, that the Nibelungenlied is the great German epic; but he does not talk about it as if he had studied and weighed every line. If he finds that the Inferno of Dante is more interesting than the Paradiso, he says so without fear, and he does not express ready-made opinions without having probed them. If the perfection of good manners is simplicity, the perfection of literary culture is sincerity.

Among Catholics there sometimes crops out a kind of insincerity which almost amounts to snobbishness. It is the tendency to praise no book until it has had a non-Catholic approbation. Now that Dr. Gasquet’s remarkable volume on the suppression of the English monasteries and Father Bridgett’s “Sir Thomas More” have received the highest praise in England and swept Mr. Froude’s historical rubbish aside, there are Catholics who will not hesitate to respect them, although they did hesitate before the popular laudation was given to these two great books.

When a reader has begun to acquire the rudiments of literary taste, he ought to choose the books he likes; but he cannot be trusted to choose books for himself until he has—perhaps with some labor—gained taste. All men are born with taste very unequally developed. A man cannot, I repeat, hope to gain a correct judgment in literary matters unless he works for it.

Mr. Frederick Harrison says: “When will men understand that the reading of great books is a faculty to be acquired, not a natural gift, at least to those who are spoiled by our current education and habits of life? An insatiable appetite for new novels makes it as hard to read a masterpiece as it seems to a Parisian boulevardier to live in a quiet country. Until a man can really enjoy a draught of clear water bubbling from a mountain-side, his taste is in an unwholesome state. To understand a great national poet, such as Dante, Calderon, Corneille, or Goethe, is to know other types of human civilization in ways which a library of histories does not sufficiently teach.”

Mr. Harrison is right. It is not always easy to like good books; but it is easier to train the young to like them than to cleanse the perverted taste of the older. The chief business of the teacher of literature ought to be the cultivation of taste. At his best, he can do no more than that; at his worst, he can fill the head of the student with mere names and dates and undigested opinions.

When the student of literature begins really to enjoy Shakspere, his taste has begun to be formed. He may read the “Vicar of Wakefield” after that without a yawn, and learn to enjoy the quiet humor of Charles Lamb. He finds himself raised into pure air, above the malaria of exaggeration and sensationalism. His style in writing insensibly improves; he becomes critical of the slang and careless English of his every-day speech; and surely these things are worth all the trouble spent in gaining them. Besides, he has secured a perpetual solace for those long nights—and perhaps days—of loneliness which must come to nearly every man when he begins to grow old. After religion, there is no comfort in life, when the links of love begin to break, like a love for great literature. But this love must be genuine; pretence will not avail; nor will mere “top-dressing” be of any use.

Literature used to be considered in the light of a “polite accomplishment.” A book of “elegant extracts” skimmed through was the only means deemed necessary for the acquirement of an education in letters. It means a very different thing now, and the establishment of the reading circles has emphasized its meaning for Catholic Americans. It means, first of all, some knowledge of philology; it means a critical understanding of the value of the stones that make up the great mosaic of literature, and these stones are words.

A bit of Addison, a chunk of Gibbon, a taste of Macaulay, no longer reach the ideal of what a student of English literature should read. We first form our taste, and then read for ourselves. We do not even accept Cardinal Newman’s estimate of “The Vision of Mirza” or “Thalaba” without inquiry; nor do we throw up our hats for Browning merely because Browning has become fashionable. A healthy sign of a robuster taste is the return to Pope, the poet of common-sense, and to Walter Scott. But we accept neither of these writers on a cut-and-dried judgment made by somebody else. It is better to give two months to the reading of Pope and about Pope than to fill two months with desultory reading and take an opinion of Pope at second hand.

In spite of the ordinary text-book of literature, the serious student discovers that Dryden is a poet and prose-writer of the first rank, that Newman is the greatest thinker and stylist of modern times, that no dramatic writer of the last two centuries has come so near Shakspere as Aubrey de Vere, and that Coventry Patmore’s prose is delightful. If all the students of literature that read “A Gentleman” have not discovered these things for themselves, let them take up any one of these writers seriously, perseveringly, and contradict me if they think I am wrong.

Matthew Arnold showed long ago that, if the basis of English literature was Saxon, its curves, its form, its symmetry, its beauty, were derived from the qualities of that other race which the Saxons drove out. Similarly, if the author of that Saxon epic, the “Beowulf,” if CÆdmon and the Venerable Bede uttered high thoughts, it was reserved for Chaucer to wed high thoughts to a form borrowed from the French and Italians. Chaucer saved the English language from remaining a collection of inadequate dialects. The Teutonic element supplied his strength; the Celtic element his lightness and elegance. Now this Chaucer was a very humble and devout Catholic. “Ah! but he pointed out abuses—he was the Lollard, enlightened by the morning-star of the Reformation,” the text-books of English literature have been saying for many years. “See what he insinuates about the levity of his pilgrims to Canterbury!” All of which has nothing to do with his firm faith in the Catholic Church.

Chaucer was inspired by the intensely Christian Dante and the exquisite Petrarch, but, unfortunately, he took too much from another master-the greatest master of Italian prose, Boccaccio. When I use the word Christian, I mean Catholic—the words are interchangeable; and Dante is the most Christian of all poets.

But Boccaccio was a Christian; he had faith; he could be serious; he loved Dante; his collection of stories, which no man is justified in reading, unless it is for their Italian style, has attracted every English poet of narrative verse, from Chaucer to Tennyson; and yet, though these stories have moments of pathos and elevation, they are full of the fetid breath of paganism. A pope suppressed them; but their style saved them—for art was a passion in Italy—and they were revived, somewhat expurgated. In his old age he lamented the effects of his early book.

The occasional coarseness in Chaucer we owe to the manners of the times; for the English, far behind the Italians, were just awakening from semi-barbarism. Dante had crystallized the Italian language long before Chaucer was born. Italy had produced the precursor of Dante, St. Francis of Assisi, and a host of other great men, whose fame that of St. Francis and Dante dimmed by comparison, long before the magnificent English language came out of chaos. The few lapses in morality in Chaucer are due both to the influence of Boccaccio and to the paganism latent in a people who were gradually becoming fully converted. But the power of Christianity protected Chaucer; the teaching of the Church was part of his very life, and nothing could be more pathetic, more honest than his plea for pardon. The Church had taught him to love chastity; if he sinned in word, he sinned against light. The Church gave him the safeguards for his genius; the dross he gathered from the earthiness around him. Of the latter, there is little enough.

Chaucer was born in 1340; Dante in 1265; and Dante helped to create the English poet. Italy was the home of the greatest and noblest men of all the world, and these men had revived pagan art in order to baptize it and make it a child of Christ. Chaucer has suffered more than any other poet at the hands of the text-book makers, who have conspired for over three hundred years against the truth. We have been made to see him through a false medium. We have been told that he was in revolt against the religion which he loved as his life. He loved the Mother of God with a childlike fervor; a modern Presbyterian would have been as much of a heretic to him as a Moslem; he was as loyal a child of the Church as ever lived, and to regard him as anything else is to stamp one as of that old and ignorant school of Philistines which all cultivated Americans have learned to detest.

The best book for the study of this poet is Cowden Clarke’s “Riches of Chaucer” (London: Crosby, Lockwood & Co.), the knowledge of which I owe to the kindness of Mr. Aubrey de Vere. And his works will repay study; Mr. Cowden Clarke arranged them so that they can be read with ease and, after a short time, with pleasure. To see Chaucer through anybody’s eyes is to see him through a darkened glass. Why should not we, so much nearer to him than any of the commentators who have assumed to explain him to us, take possession of him? He should not be an alien to us; the form of the inkhorn he held has changed; but the rosary that fell from his fingers was the same as our rosary.

English literature began with Chaucer. He loved God and he loved humanity; he could laugh like a child because he had the faith of a child. His strength lay in his faith; and, as faith weakened, English poets looked back more and more regretfully at the “merrie” meads sprinkled with the daisies he loved. He is as cheerful as Sir Thomas More; as gay, yet as sympathetic with human pleasure and pain, as the Dominican monks whom he loved. If he jibed at abuses—if he saw that luxury and avarice were beginning to creep into monasteries and palaces—he knew well that the remedy lay in greater union with Rome. Like Francis of Assisi, he was a poet, but a poet who loved even the defects of humanity, and who preferred to laugh at them rather than to reform them. Unlike Francis of Assisi, he was not a saint. He was intensely interested in the world around him; he was of it and in it; and he belongs doubly to us—the Alma Redemptoris, one of his favorite hymns, which he mentions in “Tale of the Prioress,” we hear at vespers as he heard it. The faith in which he died in 1400 is our faith to-day.

In no age have been the written masterpieces of genius within such easy reach of all readers. But it is true that older people, living at a time when books were dearer and libraries fewer than they are now, read better books; not more books, but better books. Probably in those days people amused themselves less outside their own homes. Some tell us that the tone of thought was more solid and serious. At any rate, the English classics had more influence on the American reader fifty years ago than they have to-day. The time had its drawbacks, to be sure. An old gentleman often told me of a visit to a Pennsylvania farm in the thirties, when the man of the house gave him, as a precious thing, a copy of The Catholic Herald two years old! Now the paper of yesterday seems almost a century old; then the paper of last year was new.

Unhappily, the book of last year suffers the same fate as the paper of yesterday. The best way to counteract this unhappy condition of affairs is to clasp a good book to one with “hoops of steel” when such a book is found.

In considering the subject of literature, there is one great book which is seldom mentioned. This is Denis Florence MacCarthy’s translations from Calderon.

Calderon ought not to be a stranger to us. He approaches very near to Dante in deep religious feeling, and he is not far behind him in genius. If no good translation of some of his most representative works existed, there might be an excuse for the general neglect of this great author by English-speaking readers. And MacCarthy has done justice to those sublime, sacred dramas, called “autos,” in which all the resources of faith and genius are laid at the feet of God. It is to be hoped that in a few years both MacCarthy and Mangan may be recognized. Those who know the former only by his “Waiting for the May” will broaden their field of literary knowledge and gain a higher respect for him through his translations of Calderon. The names of Calderon, the greatest of the Spanish poets, and of MacCarthy, his chief translator, suggest that of another author too little known to the general reader. This is Kenelm Henry Digby, whose “Mores Catholici” is a magazine of ammunition for the Christian reader.

There is an amusing scene in one of Thackeray’s novels, where a journalist acknowledges that he finds all the classical quotations which garnish his articles in Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy;” and, indeed, many other things besides bits of Latin have been appropriated from Burton and Montaigne, in our time, by ready writers. Many a sparkling thought put into the crisp English of the nineteenth century may be traced back to Boethius. And who shall condemn this? Has not Shakspere set us an example of how gold, half buried in ore, may be polished until it is an inestimable jewel? Kenelm Digby’s “Mores Catholici” is a great magazine from which a thousand facts may be gathered, each fact pregnant with suggestion and stimulus. Sharp-pointed arrows against calumny are here: all they need is a light shaft and feather and a strong hand to send them home. Is an illustration for a sermon wanted? Is a fact on which to found an essay demanded? One has only to open the “Mores.” It is not a book which one reads with intense interest; one cannot gallop through the three large volumes—one must walk, laboriously stowing away every treasure. It is, in fact, a book through which one saunters, picking something at long intervals, perhaps. You may dip into it, as a boy dives for a cent, and come up with a pearl-oyster in your hand. It is a book to be kept on the lowest shelf, within reach at all times; at any rate, to be one of the books to which you go when you are in search of a fact or an illustration.

One of the few sonnets written by Denis Florence MacCarthy was addressed to Digby. Digby had painted a picture of Calderon and sent it to the Irish poet; hence the sonnet—

And so the names of Calderon and MacCarthy and Digby come naturally together; and they are the names of men each great in his way. They are not found in the newspapers; they are seldom seen in the great magazines; those societies of the cultivated which are—thank Heaven!—multiplying everywhere for the better understanding of books know very little about them. Let us hope that Miss Imogene Guiney, who wrote so well of Mangan in one of the numbers of the Atlantic Monthly, will do a similar kind office for MacCarthy.

As to Calderon, he can be read but in parts. Like Milton, he travelled over many a barren stretch of prose thinking it poetry; and so we will be wise to follow MacCarthy’s lead in choosing from his dramas. He is so little known among us for the reason that we have permitted the English taste—which became Protestantized—to separate us from him. It is to the German Goethe that we owe the revival of the taste for Dante. Before Goethe rediscovered him, the English-speaking people of the world held that there were only two great poets—Shakspere and Milton.

To reclaim our heritage, we must know something of Calderon. There is no reason why our horizon should be limited to that which English Protestantism has uncovered for us. Calderon represents the literature of Catholic Spain at its highest point; and even the most narrow-minded man, having read a fair number of the pages of Calderon, can deny neither his ardent devotion to the Church nor his high genius, nor can he disprove that they existed together, free and untrammelled. We have been told that the outbreak of literary genius in the reign of Elizabeth was but the outcome of the liberty of the Reformation. How did it happen that Spain, in which there was no Reformation, produced Columbus, Calderon, Cervantes, and Italy illustrious names by the legion? Knowledge, after all, is the only antidote to the miasma of ignorance and arrogance which has clouded the judgment of so many writers on literature and art.