MRS. CRAVEN AND HER WORK.

THERE is, it will be allowed, much discouragement among artists who claim not only to satisfy but to lead the world. The reaction towards artificial earnestness has left us wearily ready for return to the powdered and patched enlightenment of the Georgian era. But the belief in necessary progress, which is in the very air we breathe, drives imaginative persons to strange attempts at originality. Sceptical of the doings of men and women of medieval times, some of our rising artists in romance seek in pre-Christian models for the nobler expressions of human feeling. Scandinavian or Greek myths are searched for examples of faith and love, and possibly another generation may find on Babylonian cylinders or in cuneiform inscriptions those tales of heroic passion and aspiration which may cause corresponding chords of emotion to vibrate within our nineteenth-century selves. Efforts have been made to worship beauty in the objects that science, physical or social, has made interesting, but the delight in 'casuals,' the joy of Browns and Joneses, are not altogether satisfactory; the loves of the rotifers, or the wars of our arboreal ancestors, are not possible subjects for art. Yet we trust we are not inferior to those who knew how to welcome Cimabue's Madonna to the joyous suburb, or to those who formed Chaucer's world of fair ladies' and their courtiers-not inferior to the great souls whose portraits fill Dante's Divine Comedy, to the accomplished society of the Renaissance, or to the Elizabethan worthies. Surely we still recognise the majesty of passion. Notwithstanding the Philistine withies, Samson feels that he may yet be stirred by the same noble rage and lifted to the same heights of being as heretofore. The compromises of the age of reason,' the gushing reaction that followed, and the discouragement of the actual epoch have not quenched our human sympathy with human emotion. It is true that the emotional part of us has been for long less cultivated than the intellectual faculties. In the Western revolt against mediæval order, love and pity have run to seed. Heroic standards once recognised throughout Christendom have been discredited, and in the decline of religious culture there has been less systematic education of the will and the feelings. Whatever the

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increase of social decency, the tone of men and women in all that concerns passion and emotion has been lowered. Vaguely disliking certain bugbears of the past, those who appeal in literature to our instinctive admiration for heroic feeling no longer choose themes of love and faith within the Christian cycle. Fortunately the personal life of Shakespeare has been veiled, so that English men and women have drunk freely of the fountain of passion in his plays without alarm at their profound Catholicism. It would be hard to overestimate the social service done to the English nation by the large emotion of Juliet and Othello, of Macbeth and Lear. We are practically shut out from Dante's white-lighted universe and from the world of the greater mystics. We only dare to nibble nervously at the Imitation, and we altogether distrust the methods of emotional culture actually used by the great Christian Church. Without the Bible and without Shakespeare we should have no higher examples of human passion than Milton's Adam and Eve, the Roxanas of the Restoration, powdered persons of the reasonable century, bandits of the Regency, and since then fine ladies and gentlemen masquerading in antique dress or lecturing in the newest jargon on the science of the feelings. It is one of many reproaches to the sects which date from the sixteenth century that they neglect the due culture of emotion, for great religions have always taught the uses of noble passion in furthering human advance.

The periods marked by lukewarm faith and piety seem also marked in everyday life, and in the literary pictures of everyday life, by a corresponding flatness of tone in conduct. Periods of religious revival seem coincident with intense expression of all emotion. Without the ardours of the thirteenth century we should hardly have had those glimpses of love's 'rare universe' given us by Dante. Without the religious throb of which Lollardism was the reverse action, would Chaucer have struck so high a note in his descriptions of noble passion and very perfect' gentle life?

Contemporary with St. Theresa and St. Ignatius the genius of Shakespeare wrought the spirit of his time into those typical forms of human passion which more than all its other productions give English literature its place in human affairs.

The dignified heroes of Corneille and Racine, the true representation of society given by Molière, synchronise with the reasonable saintliness of Francis de Sales and Vincent de Paul. And as the religious control of conduct was, by political or by scandalous causes, weakened, whether in Catholic or in Protestant States, it seems as if the power for good of noble passion has been correspondingly lessened. Metaphysical and ethical conundrums, microscopic description, the clash of wordy wit occupy popular literature in epochs of religious ebb, and the emotions decline until they are both in fact and in portrayal but animal instincts.

And without passionate emotion of the nobler sort man would lose even the clipped wings by which he sometimes flies a length higher and further than his fellows. He would lose the sense of possible powers now rudimentary and glimpses of being beyond present limitations; and he would lose the hope of that adequate life to which we look with dim longing eyes, and which in moments of noble passion seems already ours.

All founders of great religions have recognised the large part that emotion should play in the conduct of life. The right treatment of the emotions by any Church is a mark of its authority more immediately satisfactory than any elaboration of dogma. Their due culture, not less than their due restraint, is the glory of the Christian Church. And probably it alone has dared to enfranchise the noblest of the passions and to suffer the fires of the heart to mount high as they will till they blend with the white fire of central life. The Christian Church does much towards human advance by her acknowledgment that the higher use of passion can alone prevent its

misuse.

The solemn prayer used in the central Christian devotion of the mass at the oblation of the Eucharistic elements is an example of that recognition of the dignity of human nature in all its complexity to which the whole Christian revelation bears witness, a recognition so generously inclusive that every form of human life falls within it.

It is then among the most highly trained children of the Catholic Church that we should reasonably look for the fullest development of human nature as a whole, and for the best example of that balanced culture which does not neglect the emotional part of us for the greater glory of the intellect, nor deny to the passions their part in the evolution of humanity, however carefully the will be educated for their due control. And if we can but get rid of Protestant terrors we may find that poets and romancers who would stir men's hearts by tales of heroic emotion need not seek for their personages among dim shadows of pagan myths, except indeed to escape from the actual pressure of failing sects into regions where the masked Christ may walk unquestioned and be adored by other names.

Since Shakespeare and some of his lesser contemporaries dared to paint passion with a full brush, love has been denied its due place in English literature, though our best artists and poets have now and then hinted, rather than proclaimed, its nobler uses towards the true progress of our race.

At the same time the apologetic attitude and defiant conservatism almost perforce assumed by an attacked society possibly checked for a time within the Church the free development of feeling. Education of the emotions was less urgently needful than the defence of dogma and the arts of government. But Christianity cannot long be content to be merely apologetic and conservative. If the mediaval types of VOL. V.-No. 27.

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heroic action have disappeared, the Creator of them is a present and living force, and, as the hampering ties of former systems are loosed, we may expect to see revived the active forces of human emotion in their noblest forms. Again representative men may know the rapture of sacrifice, and perceive that death is an acceptable link in the chain of life. Glimpses will again be credibly reported of that supreme good which encompasses evil as the calm of space encompasses the storms of our atmosphere.

At epochs when the tide of human advance has been at the ebb, the absence of emotion, the affectation of dispassionateness have been taken as proofs of strength; but the wave returns and lifts men once again to the higher levels of the race, and the strongest, because they are the strongest, join hands with tears under stress of some generous impulse, some pain of evolution, some delight of attainment, some sense of beauty, or some just repugnance.

Most persons of advanced thought will allow that as guardian of conduct, as mistress and guide of the emotions towards nobler life, the great Christian Church could be ill spared from the world, if it is to remain a civilised world. If beauty have its use-and what biologist would deny it ?-how could we spare the goodly blossoms borne by the Roman stem? A chief element in beauty is its expression of pure passion, and when has passion found fuller expression than in the work most saturated with Catholic spirit? Thousands within the Church have made and make of their lives a 'perfumed altar flame' fed by love; and if it seem long since the authors of the Vita Nuova and the Imitation vindicated the Church's claim to be the mother of intensely passionate poetry, the exigencies of her defensive attitude must be considered.

The revolutionary outbreak of the last ninety years set hearts beating, and if the nether fires of hate and lust broke forth, there was within the Catholic Church a revival of noble emotion, while, true to her tradition, its purest examples are found where the deluge swept by most fiercely.

In a time when the value of family ties is questioned, when intellectual distinction is vulgarised to general knowledge, when the struggle for luxurious existence, and the egotism of discouragement have most obscured them, the noble outlines of conjugal union, and the record of a family in which intellectual genius polished by society gave due expression to ardent passion, are of special value. memoir in which courtship, marriage, and death are portrayed with entire nobleness, is an impressive gift to European society. We live in a pelting shower of romances, rhymes, and realism, and now and then there is in its confused noise a note of true emotion; but unless the music made be according to the divine science, it will be to Christian passion but as a passing sound to a symphony by one of the great masters of harmony.

The writer of this article is bold to say that such a symphony of noble emotion nobly presented has been, in this latter half of our century, given to those who have ears to hear.

There are in England singularly few readers of the better French literature, but those who are familiar with it can hardly have failed to meet a book published in 1864, when the second Empire was in its full development, and which had for title Le Récit d'une Sœur.

It is now in a thirty-first edition, though it appeals to no literary fashion of the day, but it expresses many thoughts and responds to many desires of modern hearts. It has the beauty which is of all time, and treats of those issues of human life which are universal. There have been published lately several books of intimate and highly toned memoirs, both of English and French growth, for a note struck by a master hand, and in harmony with the thoughts of many, sets similar chords vibrating; but Le Récit d'une Sœur has the superiority of that ideal beauty to which, if men are not habitual dullards, they instinctively do homage.

The prelude to this story of a family that knew how to live, and die, and conquer death, is joyous and bright as a morning of early summer. Earthly happiness seemed realised in May 1830 at the Palazzo Simonetti, then occupied by the French Ambassador, Comte de la Ferronnays, and his family. M. de la Ferronnays is acknowledged by those who knew him to have been a brilliant specimen of the brilliant class of Frenchmen who retained the chivalry and religious honour of the old kingdom, and added thereto the new energy of the young century. He had for many years represented France at St. Petersburg, and had gained the intimate friendship of both Alexander and Nicholas. Though one of Charles the Tenth's trusted supporters, M. de la Ferronnays had kept aloof from some personages and measures of the French court, but he was, perhaps, the more respected. In 1828 he was given the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but his health and his distaste for the ideas dominant just then made him gladly accept the Roman Embassy as a dignified retreat. He, his wife, and his family of three sons and four daughters were all together when the Récit begins, and in full possession of all that high birth, rank, and brilliant worldly position could add to the happiness of family union. Madame de la Ferronnays was a daughter of Comte de Monsoreau, and a niece of that faithful Duchesse de Tourzel who had accompanied Louis the Sixteenth and Marie-Antoinette in their flight to Varennes, and, as governess of their children, had shared their captivity in the Temple. The Comte de la Ferronnays married Mademoiselle de Monsoreau in those years of the emigration when the power of Napoleon was at its height, and when the Royalists were most discouraged. The discomforts and disenchantments of their exile were extreme, but salutary for noble