Loyola College - Review Yearbook (Montreal, Quebec Canada)

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24. LOYOLA COLLEGE REVIEW and arguing rashly, asevents havesince proved, from. the body to the mind, he prophesied for them a commercial success which has never even reached the embryonic stage. With his New Zealanders he had more facts to back him: for in 1838 their country had already had twenty-four years' experience as a progressive British colony. Hence the tone of his prophecy is more hopeful. Two years more and he was ready for that perfect picture which, with its almost poetic cadence, sings its way into our memories. [Read again the italicized words at the end, emphasizing the marked iambic accents.] Note, by the way, how much shorter this finished product is than the two preceding attempts. The first contained 127 words; the second, 53; the third 60; the fourth and best, only 39; but not one of these 39 words can be altered with- out marring the effect. Then consider what an appropriate and sonorous ending it provides for a long passage written in the full maturity of his unrivalled talent for broad historical contrasts. To be sure, the underlying prin- ciple, enunciated at the outset in these words, “There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving ofexamination as the Roman Catholic Church,” is ridiculously wrong and absurdly illogical. The undeniable facts which he marshals in such a brilliantarray ought to have made Mac- aulay suspect that the Catholic Church is not “а work of human policy, but a marvel of Divine Providence. Nevertheless, the art of the picture, crowned with its unforgettable conclusion, irradiates the souls of all those who, having received the true faith, know that it must be lived to be understood. Well and good, I hear some learned liter- ary critic object, ‘‘but what if this famous New Zealander was not an original idea? What if Macaulay copied from Shelley? This is a serious objection. Let us examine it. The con- cluding paragraph of Shelley's dedication of Peter Bell the Third, to Thomas Brown, Esq., is as follows: “Hoping that the immortality which you have given to the Fudges, you will receive from them; and in the firm expecta- tion that, when London shall be an habitation | of bitterns; when St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some transatlantic com- mentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism, the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges, and their historians, I remain, dear Tom, yours sincerely, MICHING MALLECHO.” At first sight, I admit, there is here in Shelley, as well as in Macaulay, the desolate aspect of London; some of the words even—St. Paul's, a London bridge, ruins, and broken arches—are exactly the same in both. Granting, for the nonce, that one of the two writers has pla- giarized the other, the culprit cannot be Shel- ley and must therefore be Macaulay. Not Shelley, because he died in 1822, two years before Macaulay wrote his first forecast of England made desolate. In order to find out whether or not Macaulay could have seen the Shelley passage before writing his own finished picture we must compare dates. Shelley’s widow wrote a ‘‘Postscript in the Second Edi- tion, 1839,” of her late husband’s works and announced therein the first publication of Peter Bell the Third. Her postscript is dated No- vember 6, 1839. This, therefore, is also the approximate date of the first publication of Shelley's humorous Dedication to Thomas Brown, the conclusion of which has just been read. Now, remembering that Macaulay’s perfected New Zealander appeared in October, 1840, we see that he had ample time—at least eight or nine months—to read Shelley's fore- cast and to take from it a lesson in startling imagery. Very likely, then, he did borrow from it six words, St. Paul's, bridge, ruins and broken arch. The whole thing may be summed up in this way. Shelley's Peter Bell the Third is dated by Shelley himself December 1, 1819, five years before Macaulay wrote of a ruined civilization; but Shelley's work was not printed till the end ot 1839, twenty years after it was written. Then Macaulay saw that four expressions, contain- ing six words, in Shelley's rather long and unpolished effusion—it contains over one hun- dred words—would suit his own definite, clear- cut picture. So he borrowed them, and, in borrowing them, lifted them into impassioned prose and made them immortal.

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LOYOLA COLLEGE REVIEW 23. x. naked fishermen may divide with owls and foxes, the ruins of the greatest European cities—may wash their nets amidst the relics of her gigantic docks, and build their huts out of the capitals of her stately cathedrals? И the principles of Mr. Mill be sound, we say, without hesitation, that the form of government which he recommends will assuredly produce all this.” The third expression of this dream of relapse into barbarism, occurs in Macaulay’s Journal, quoted in Trevelyan’s famous biography of his celebrated uncle. In that personal record, under date of November 22, 1838, we read this. А propos of а. relicof antiquity, then recently unearthed in the city of Rome, and called The Baker’s Tomb,” and of the learned discussions thereanent, whether ‘ap- paret’ is a shortened form of ‘apparitoris,’ Macaulay writes: “To indulge in a sort of reflection which I often fall into here, the day may come when London, then dwindled to the dimensions of the parish of St: Martin's, and supported in its decay by the expenditure: of wealthy Patagonians and New Zealanders, may have no more important questions to decide than the arrangement of ‘A fflictions sore, Long time I bore’ on the gravestone of the wife of some baker in Houndsditch. Here we have the confession that this general idea of ruined splendor was familiar to him, for he says it is а sort of re- flection which I often fall into here. We have, moreover, the actual New Zealander support- ing London in its decay. The fact that. New Zealanders -are bunched with Patagonians must be rather galling to the former, who now are among the most advanced legislators in the world, whereas Patagonians, 82 years after Macaulay’s forecast, are still in a semi-savage state, and of the original race not more than one hundred are left. Bearing in mind that the first effort was written by Macaulay in 1824, the second. in 1829, and the third in 1838, we now come to the completed hypothetical prophecy. It occurs, as everyone knows, at the beginning of Macaulay’s Essay on Von Ranke’s History of the Popes. That essay was first published in the Edinburgh Review of October, 1840. After describing the unrivalled antiquity and unparalled success, growth and permanency of the Catholic Church, Macaulay says in his ріс- turesque way :—''She was great and respected. before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, be-: fore the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished in Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And shé may still exist in undimin- ished vigor when some traveller from New Zea- land shall, in the midst of a vast solitude táke his sténd on a bréken arch of London Bridge to: skétch the ruins of St. Paul's. Observe how the gradual development: of one idea was affected. by the circumstances surrounding each date. The idea first took shape from the political aspect of England... Macaulay was always an echo of his day, what : we should now call an up-to-date man. Writing . in November, 1824, he could not help fore- seeing the financial crash that came the next. year, 1825, and spread desolation and anxiety over England after the ten years of prosperity which followed the victory of Waterloo. The year 1829 was full of prognostications of а Reform Bill near at hand, which actually be- came the law three years later іп 1832, and added 500,000 to the voters' list, abolishing at the same time the aristocratic privilege of one nobleman controlling an entire constituency. Whig and Liberal though Macaulay was, he foresaw: with alarm- this inundation of: the democratic and at that time illiterate element. Hence it із по wonder that, writing-against Mill whose utilitarianism he successfully. re- futed, he should -have :envisaged as possible the complete ruin of the civilized: world; and so we Вауе а picture of semi-savagery covering the entire world, that is to say, the hopeless wiping out of civilization, unrelieved by: any. transoceanic prosperity. But,-in the nine years between 1829 and 1838 the world had moved and Macaulay with it. In 1833, the steamship Royal William, built at Quebec, was reported to have crossed the Atlantic in 21 days. In 1837, Captain Ericsson’s screw steamer Francis Bogden had made ten miles an hour. So, in that same year 1837, Macaulay, writing in the July Edinburgh, Review, represents Bacon describing the future triumphs of science and speaking of ships which run ten knots an houragainst the wind. Thus Macaulay, foreseeing the development of steam navigation, is quite ready to intro- duce into his third sketch the Patagonians, who at that time figured in several romances ` as the tallest and strongest race in the world;

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LOYOLA COLLEGE REVIEW 25 Context of Macaulay's perfected New Zea- lander, in his essay on Ranke’s History of the Popes, tarag. 3. There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work.of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilization. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when cam- eleopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphi- theatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yester- day, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned -Napoleon in the 19th century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the 8th; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight. of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when coinpared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigor. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisi- tions in the New World have more than compensated her for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendancy extends over the vast countries which. lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which, a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than. a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all the other Christian sects united amount to 120 millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dom- inion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical estab- lishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian. eloquence still flourished in Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's. Macaulay, who read and remembered every- ‚ thing and who never pretended to be original, must have been familiar with other anticipa- tions of his famous sentence. He must have known Mrs. Barbauld's Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, a poem in which she writes of a youth from the Blue Mountains or Ontario's Lake’’ who views the ruins of London. Particularly must he have remembered the blank verse of Henry Kirke White (1785-1806) on Britain a Thousand Years Hence,” in which occur these lines :— O’er her marts, Her crowded ports, broods silence; and the cry Of the low curlew, and the pensive dash Of distant billows, breaks alone the void. Even as the savage sits upon the stone That marks where stood her capitols, and hears The bittern booming in the weeds, he shrinks From the dismaying solitude. As all the poets copy one another, Shelley stole Kirke White’s bitterns, while Macaulay passed them by as having no prose value. He harked farther back to Wilcocks in his Roman Conversations (1792-94), wherein he read of “foreigners 2000 years hence sailing up the Thames in search of antiquities,” passing through some arches of the broken bridge,” and viewing ‘‘with admiration the still remain- ing portico of St. Paul's. One year earlier, in 1791--Масаціау would remember—Volney, in the second chapter of Les Ruines, dreams that some day оп the banks of the Seine, the Thames, ог the Zuider Zee”, a traveller may seat himself on silent ruins and bemoan in solitude the ashes of nations and the memory of their greatness. And Mac's unfailing mem- ory will remind. him that in 1774, seventeen years before Volney's book appeared, Horace Walpole warned Sir Horace Mann that аї last some curious traveller would ‘‘visit Eng- land and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul's. Lewis DRUMMOND, S.J.