Patrick Augustine Sheehan

Mr. Aubrey de Vere's New Volume: A Study

Our appreciation of Mr. Aubrey de Vere's poetry depends in great measure on the mood in which we approach him. If we have been touched by the glamour that hangs around our highly decorated, introspective modern verse, probably we shall be just a little disappointed at lines that appeal more to sense than sound. But if we have passed the initial surprise and intoxication that touch sensitive minds by analysis and self-questionings conveyed in words many-jointed, and strung together from the Greek, it is very likely we shall find a repose and a harmony in Mr. de Vere's poems, that strike us as more in accordance with the canons of true poetry than all the artificialities by which younger poets strive to be original in these latter days.

In the subjects Mr. de Vere has chosen he has always preferred studies of Nature and of men to idle self-questionings. If he chooses to leave the world an autobiography, and few would be more interesting, we shall never be able to trace his mental growth  p.127 and experiences through the long series of beautiful poems he has given to the world. There is not a trace of egoism in them all. He has completely obliterated self. In this he has followed the example of his master, Wordsworth; and if so keen a critic as Matthew Arnold can say of the latter, “Wordsworth and Byron stand out by themselves. I place Wordsworth above Byron on the whole. When the year 1900 is turned, and our nation comes to recount her poetic glories in the century which has just then ended, the first names with her will be these,” we may attribute the fact to Wordsworth's love of nature; and we may add, that if Ireland has to make a similar estimate of her singers, she will have little hesitation in naming Mr. de Vere the first Catholic poet of the century, not only to our nation, but to the world.

In the little volume now before us, Mr. de Vere goes back to mediaeval times for those themes, Catholic and chivalrous, in which he takes such delight. He has done in poetry for the Middle Ages what Mrs. Jameson has done in prose. He has taken legends or historical deeds, and made a beautiful framework for them in graceful and sonorous verse. He has taken even disputed and controverted subjects; and boldly assuming the Catholic view, has made them additionally attractive to Catholic readers by presenting them in a much pleasanter form than we are accustomed to in ordinary histories. These mediaeval poems may be divided into what are purely historical or epic, one or two that may be called lyrical, and a few dramatic studies, which, with the sonnets, form the most interesting features of the volume. It was a bold attempt on the part of Mr. de Vere to try and interest modern readers in the fate and fortunes of the Cid. The old heroic romances of chivalry are hardly esteemed in our day as they were fifty years ago. The world is now not much interested in the battlefields of the past. Knights sans peur et sans reproche are too mythical to our hard century to be easily believed in; and historians of the destructive school of criticism have been so busy in demolishing all our cherished ideas of the chivalry and heroism of the Middle Ages, that it is difficult to excite and retain the attention of readers for great national legends, even though already enshrined in the epics of the world. Nevertheless, Mr. de Vere has been so judicious in his selections of the legends of the Cid, and has put them so attractively, that many will read for the first time and with pleasure of the deeds of this Spanish Bayard. ²²  p.128 And then, as we shall hereafter note more fully, Mr. de Vere has taken in many cases the Catholic, as distinct from the national, view of our hero, and thus made the central figure more generally interesting, whilst adding to the picturesqueness of the details. Here are lines that remind us of Arthur and Excalibur: —

1. Three days we rode o'er hill and dale; the fourth,
   The daylight slowly dying o'er the moor,
   A shrill voice reached us from the neighbouring fen,
   A drowning man's. Down leaped our Cid to earth;
   And, ere another's foot had left the stirrup,
   Forth from the water drew him; held him next
   On his own horse before him. “'Twas a Leper;”
   The knights stared round them! when they supped that eve.
   He placed that Leper at his side. The knights
   Forth strode. At night one bed received them both.
   Sirs, learn the marvel! As Rodrigo slept,
   Betwixt his shoulders twain that Leper blew
   Breath of strong virtue, piercing to his heart.
   A cry was heard — the Cid's — the knights rushed in
   Sworded; they searched the room; they searched the house;
   The Cid slept well; but Leper none was found.

Who was this? and what was the reward for a deed which, to use the author's words, speaking of Father Damien, preaches the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Resurrection more powerfully than the most eloquent treatises?

1. Thy Brother-Man am I,
   In Heaven thy Patron, though the least in Heaven,
   Lazarus, thy brother, who unhonoured lay,
   At Dives' gate. Today thou honourest Me:
   Therefore thy Jesus this to Thee accords
   That whenso'er in time of peril or pain;
   Or dread temptations dealing with the soul;
   Again that strong breath blows upon thy heart,
   Nor Angel's breath, that Breath shall be, nor man's,
   But Breath immortal arming thy resolve,
   So long as Humbleness and Love are Thine,
   With strength as though the total Hosts of Heaven
   Leaned on Thy single sword. The work Thou workest
   That hour shall prosper. Moor and Christian, both,
   Shall for Thee and Thy death be glorified.

With such a prayer and prophecy, Rodrigo passed from victory to victory, always brave, always merciful, invincible in battle and illustrious in peace. In the four Idylls of this brave knight which our author gives us, and which certainly sustain their interest to the  p.129 end, there must be of necessity many passages which are rhetorical rather than poetic. Yet the rhetoric is always of a high and sustained character; and it breaks by rapid transitions into poetry, which remind us of many well-known passages in our author's legends of St. Patrick and of the Saxon saints. These passages are most frequent and most marked in the fourteen pages marked 'The Cid of Valencia'. Eloquent and beautiful lines abound in these pages. For instance: —

1. The moon was drowned
   In plunging storm of hail and rain and snow;
   Emerging thence it stared on wandering floods
   From sea and river, and the mountain walls
   Whose torrents, glimpsed but when the lightning flared,
   Thundered far off.

And this might have come from the Inferno: —

1. Yea, as the blind they groped about the streets,
   Or staggered on like drunkards; neither knew
   Each man the face of neighbour or of friend,
   But gazed at him and passed; at other times
   Old enemies clasped hands but spake no word;
   And some flung forth their arms like swimmer spent
   That sinks in black seas lost.

Some curious analogues in modern verse suggest themselves to our mind in reading such lines as those — resemblances that never occurred before to us in reading Mr. de Vere's poems. At one moment we think we are reading a passage from Klopstock's Messiah, then there are lines that suggest long-forgotten pages in that well-nigh forgotten poem Festus, and again we are irresistibly reminded of certain turns of thought and expression in the Bishop of Derry's beautiful poems. But the idiomatism, to use an expressive Greek word, of Mr. de Vere is unmistakable. We think we would recognise it under a French or Italian translation.

Before passing to the higher studies, there is just one little poem, modest and humble like the subject of it, but on which we dwell and linger with more pleasure than on more ambitious and eloquent themes. Perhaps it is for memory's sake; for there is a very clear recollection in our minds of having seen this little poem in leaflet form many years ago in the hands of an old Franciscan Tertiary from Limerick, and of having kept it as a treasure, and read it and re-read it until it became creased and frayed with use, and  p.130 discoloured by age. And there was just a slight thrill of pleasure in seeing this old acquaintance enshrined permanently in this volume, and in knowing that we should not lose it again. It is called St. Francis and Perfect Joy; and whoever possesses this volume and knows anything of “dear St. Francis,” will have this poem well marked when perhaps statelier verses are still in a state of virginal whiteness. The opening stanza runs thus; and whoever reads it will read it to the end: —

1. Blessed St. Francis in the winter time
   When half the Umbrian vales were white with snow,
   And all the northward vine-stems rough with rime,
   Walked from Perugia down. His steps were slow,
   Made slow by thought; yet swift at times, for love
   Showered o'er his musings, fired them from above.

If Mr. de Vere would repent of his resolution to make this volume his last, and give us such beautiful metrical renderings of the whole of the Fioretti as this, one reader at least would bless him, and placing it side by side with the May Carols would think he had two books of devotion which probably he would open much oftener than many elaborate works of high spirituality that lie upon his shelves.

Very devotional, too, and very poetical are four hymns developed from the writings of St. Gertrude. They deal with high and sacred subjects; and, perhaps, for this reason, and partly from their abstract nature, it is possible they will not be so widely read as the lines on St. Francis. But for those who love to dwell in spirit on the inaccessible heights, and who aspire after what is sublime as well as holy, these four hymns of praise will be welcome reading. One can imagine how St. Augustine would have prized them — the great saint who has written so many beautiful things of God in a kindred spirit and with equal sublimity. It is a great gift to be able to translate into rhythmic measures the prayers of the saints, and to add the graces of poetry to the loftiness of such aspirations as these: —

1. Height inaccessible of Sovran Power;
   Unfathomed depth of wisdom hid and sealed;
   Limitless breadth of all-embracing love;
   None but Thyself can yield Thee worthy praise;
   Thou alone canst know Thyself. Our Hymns
   Are as a little breeze that dies.

Or these lines to the Humanity of Christ: —

1. Jesus, Thou son of God, true God, true Man!
   A voice from earth would join the choirs that sing
   The sweet refreshment of Thy heavenly rest;
   That clear, sabbatical, and mystic clime,
   Whereby Thy deified Humanity,
   Its suffering past, is equally embraced,
   The embowering sunset of its endless peace.
   And that vivific fragrance evermore
   Breathed from that underlying Eden vast,
   The Bosom of the Eternal Trinity.

But we are of opinion that the two most interesting poems in the volume are those entitled: The Higher Purgatory and the Death of Copernicus. It is in this kind of work that our author's genius manifests itself fully. He is here in his own natural element. Dealing with mediaeval records, blank, bare facts, there is a sense of effort and labour, as of one who tries to raise an airy structure out of gross and too solid materials. But here Mr. de Vere passes into the abstract — the region of pure imagination; and it is not difficult to see that here he is quite at home, for the two elements are present that suit his genius — religion pure and simple; and high and abstract conceptions such as would have delighted a dialectician in the ages of scholastic philosophy. It is at least curious that that prince of modern dialecticians, Cardinal Newman, should have chosen Purgatory, too, as a theme for his longest poem. The subject has a singular fascination for men of high thought; whilst the mystery and vagueness of that strange world poised between heaven and hell, and inhabited by that blessed but unhappy people who have seen God, and lost Him for a while, give free place to imaginations that are speedily fascinated by whatever appertains to the interests of immortal souls. Our author reminds us that the whole gist and matter of this poem are taken from a treatise on Purgatory by St. Catherine of Genoa; and that we must not be surprised at recognising two familiar ideas that have already found place in the Dream of Gerontius. The poem is in blank verse, whose metres are not quite regular, here and there a redundant syllable being noticed; and as the form of a poem has a great deal to say to its artistic excellence, we are glad to find the long lines relieved and broken by pauses and questions that make the whole much easier and pleasanter reading.  p.132

1. What land is that —
   That land, majestic, mystic, wondrous, blest,
   Yet heart-subduing too, and soul o'er-awing.
   Where passion riots not, where love earth-soiled
   Divinely blighted, withering to the root,
   Leaves room for heavenly love?

1. What clime is that
   Still as the Church's Holy Saturday?

1. Deepest that rest
   Man knows on earth: yet deeper theirs the souls
   That breathe that cleansing clime. They sinned on earth;
   They sin no more. In them that buried sin
   Severed from circumstance of time and place
   Sleeps like a sheathed sword. Their will with God's
   At last — now first — is one. Such unity
   Alone could breed such rest.

1. What grief is that
   Which, teaching man his primal greatness, shames
   His joy foregone in pleasures wed to dust?

1. Life veils from us love's greatness:
   Life veils not less the greatness of high grief:
   We are but trivial lovers all our life —
   We are but trivial mourners. Thanks to God
   Who grants us at life's close one Sovereign love.
   One grief, the cure for all.

Our author here has an interlude — a pause to consider the analogy between the soul's first glimpse of the Beatific Vision at its birth, and its fuller, though still momentary glance at the face of God, at the moment of death. The effect of the first is, that eternal craving after God of which St. Augustine spoke, et cor nostrum inquietum est donec requiescat in te. Thence also come “those  p.133 winged ideas which are creation's essence;" ideas of the Good, the True, the Fair, the Just, the Pure, the Infinite,” that form man's panoply of armour against the evils and temptations of life, and bring him scatheless and victorious before the face of God. We fear that Mr. de Vere here rather closely approaches that system of philosophy which originated with Malebranche, and which, adopted and developed by Gioberti, became known as Ontologism. Or, perhaps, we should rather say that this beautiful conception belongs to that milder system, which was favoured by Fénelon, Bossuet and Gerdil, and which traces the origin of universal ideas back to our first ideas of God. We merely allude to this matter, not to introduce a metaphysical discussion into these pages, but rather to point out an error which has been frequently made, even by those to whom Catholic literature might be supposed to have been familiar. Quite lately, in one of the many laudatory reviews which have appeared about a certain rising poet, the remark was made, that he was seeking subjects in the as yet untried fields of Catholic philosophy. Now, every reader knows, or ought to know, that for forty years the poet whom we are now reviewing has been taking subject after subject, not only from Catholic philosophy, but from Catholic theology; that his mind appears to be saturated with the lofty ideas that belong to these kindred sciences, that he has achieved his greatest successes exactly in these great departments of human knowledge, and that, unlike the fabled Antaeus, he has never lost strength but when he touched the earth — that is, worldly and ephemeral subjects. In his Legends he opens up a mine of theological subjects; in his May Carols he is perpetually in the society of the first Catholic thinkers and scientists; and even in his shorter poems he not only affects spiritual subjects, but enshrines the driest maxims of scholastic philosophy in lines that form musical apophthegms of themselves. How wise he has been in these selections we may hereafter see; but it is either a curious ignorance of contemporary poetry, or a still more curious forgetfulness, that attributes to a new poet, the attribute of pioneering all future Catholic singers into the fruitful regions of the purely Catholic sciences.

To return. Mr. de Vere, after discussing this delicate question of the origin of ideas, next turns to a still more complex and debatable problem, the Mystery of Pain, not with a view of reconciling the existence of sorrow with the existence of One,  p.134 supremely good; but with a view of showing how great joy is consistent with great suffering — in a word, the meaning of the Beatitude: “Blessed are the mourners.” He puts it pithily: —

1. The discipline of earthly pain suffices
   To unfilm pure eyes to mysteries of grace
   Withheld from worldly sight. Austerer pain
   Unfilms them to the mysteries of glory:
   Not servile pain, not selfish; greater pain
   Born of a greater love.

Then follows a description of what we might call the purification and elevation of a soul to a higher level of sanctity: and the education of all its faculties and their fullest development until they become proportioned to that spiritual universe which is man's destined heritage. Finally, the extinction of self-love — the complete divestment of the soul of all its selfish instincts, and the absolute subordination of all its faculties to the supreme will to which it is driven by irresistible impulse. Then these folds which sin and self-love have wound around the slumbering soul during life having dropped aside, and only its pure ethereal essence remaining, the final moment comes when it is admitted to the Beatific Vision. “Man's eyes are opened: man beholds his God.”

Altogether this poem is a very fine piece of spiritual writing. The subject was difficult in itself, and difficult of treatment, because it had already passed through the hands of Dante and Cardinal Newman, not to speak of lesser lights. And our author leaves the subject to future Catholic poets, its interest increased rather than diminished, and its importance very much enhanced by the light his pen has thrown upon the complex subjects that are connected with this Catholic dogma. In the Death of Copernicus our author grapples with a much more serious and difficult question. The great astronomer is debating on his death-bed whether he shall give to the world, or withhold, the work that, out of respect for the faith of the weak, he had hidden for thirty-six years. In the minds of the ignorant and the unthinking, then as now, science was supposed to be in conflict with faith, and their revelations to be mutually contradictory. The dying scientist soliloquizes that both revelations, proceeding from the same source, must of necessity be in agreement; but men's minds, warped by pride, and exalting their own poor discoveries, must perchance place in direct conflict teachings that  p.135 come from the same Divine source. But he remembers how patient and lowly were his own thoughts during the progress of his discoveries; and he recalls his nightly vigils, from the Minster Tower at Warnia — vigils which so numbed his feet that he could scarcely ascend the altar steps in the morning, and his hands that he could hardly hold the chalice at the Mass. Yet he prayed: —

1. If, my God,
   Thou seest my pride subdue my faculties,
   Place me a witless one among those witless
   That beg beneath church porches.

1. Mankind will learn
   This sphere is not God's ocean, but one drop
   Showered from its spray. Came God from heaven for that?
   Speak no more words!

1. This earth too small,
   For Love Divine! Is God not Infinite?
   If so, His Love is infinite. Too small!
   One famished babe meets pity more from man
   Oft than an army slain! Too small for Love!
   Was earth too small to be by God created?
   Why then too small to be redeemed?
2. The sense
   Sees greatness only in the sensuous greatness;
   Science in that sees little; Faith sees nought;
   The small, the vast, are tricks of earthly vision
   To God, that Omnipresent All-in-Each;
   Nothing is small, is far.

1. A zealot barbed with jibe and scoff still launched
   At priests and kings and holy womanhood.

1. A God, a God incarnate but for man,
   That reasoning beast — and all yon glittering orbs
   In cold obstruction left!

Amongst our lengthened quotations, this the reply must be the last; but we cannot omit it: —

1. They that know not of a God
   How know they that the stars have habitants?
   'Tis Faith and Hope that spread delighted hands
   To such belief! no formal proof attests it.
   Concede them peopled; can the sophist prove
   Their habitants are fallen? That too admitted,
   Who told him that redeeming foot divine
   Ne'er trod those spheres? That flesh assumption granted,
   What then? Is not the universe a whole?
   Doth not the sunbeam, herald from the sun,
   Gladden the violet's bosom? Moons uplift
   The tides; remotest stars lead home the lost;
   Judaea was one country, one alone;
   Not less Who died there died for all. The Cross
   Brought help to buried nations; time opposed
   No bar to love; why then should space oppose one?
   We know not what time is nor what is space;
   Why dream that bonds like theirs can bind the unbounded!
   If earth be small, likelier it seems that love
   Compassionate most and condescending most
   To sorrow's nadir depths, should choose that earth
   For love's chief triumph, missioning thence her gift
   Even to the utmost Zenith!

We should hardly have given such extensive quotations, but to remark that here our author seems to have abandoned a very fascinating theory of a certain school of theologians, that sin was not the sole cause of the Incarnation, but that this great event in the history of the world would have taken place, if man had never sinned, in order that God might unite Himself thus more perfectly to His Creation. That this had been a favourite idea of Mr. de Vere's is quite evident from that splendid preface to the May Carols, which we commend to our readers, theological and otherwise, as an example of how beautifully Catholic philosophy and theology can be rendered by a poet. We shall not do our author the injustice of quoting it fragmentarily here, but merely refer our readers to it, and give the following sentences from an advocate of that sublime conception, the Oratorian, Malebranche, to elucidate  p.137 our meaning. “Though man had never sinned,” he says, “a Divine Person would not have failed to unite Himself to the universe, to sanctify it, to draw it from its profane condition, to render it divine, to give it an infinite dignity, so that God, who can only act for His own glory, should receive a glory perfectly correspondent to His action. Could not the Word unite Himself to the work of God, without becoming incarnate? He was made man; could He not have made Himself of Angelic nature? It is true that, in making Himself man, He unites Himself at the same time to two substances, and that by this union He sanctifies all nature. For this reason, I know not if sin has been the sole cause of the Incarnation of the Son of God.” ²³ To this sublime speculation, which Mr. de Vere embodied so beautifully in the prose of his preface, and in that exquisite carol, Caro factum est, he now, in the verses we have quoted above, adds the almost equally sublime speculation of another and later school of French theologians. This may be expressed by Fr. Gratry's theory that the words of our Divine Lord: — “I have other sheep who are not of this fold; these, too, I must bring into My fold, and there shall be one sheepfold and one Shepherd,” may be possibly applied to the inhabited worlds of the universe.

It seems impossible to write about poetry of this high class without being tempted into a disquisition on theology. We have left ourselves, therefore, barely space to say that this sublime poem branches at once into a splendid forecast of the future of the Church, especially the conflict and reconciliation between Religion and Science. If these fine ideas had been put into eloquent prose, of which our author is quite the master, probably they would reach a larger number of readers. But for the many who will read them in this form, they will have the additional advantage of communicating knowledge in its most attractive guise.

Of the other poems, the pages devoted to “Joan of Arc” and her marvellous history will take additional interest from the fact of her coming beatification. The volume closes with sonnets unvaried in form, but touching quite a variety of subjects and persons. Probably the purely poetic reader will turn to them first; and if he be a student of this most difficult, but most artistic form of poetry, he will be able to make a satisfactory comparison  p.138 between Mr. de Vere and all the many masters of the sonnet that have written in our century. Those on Catholic art and its masterpieces have had the greatest attraction for ourselves.

And this suggests a reflection with which we will close this paper. The two great Italian artists who seem to have a special fascination for even Protestant tourists are Giotto and Fra Angelico of Fiesole. ²⁴ Yet they are the two artists who painted exclusively Christian and Catholic subjects. The crucifixions of the latter with all their boundless variety of imagery and detail are never-failing subjects of interest for exalted minds. And if ever the question should arise, has Mr. de Vere lost or gained by his exclusive devotion to religion? I think we might find the answer here. It is quite true that it is easier to write on secular than on religious subjects. It is much easier to compose a sonnet on the "Venus Anadyomene" than on the Madonna. And such writing would unquestionably be more popular in our days. Yet we make bold to say that if Mr. de Vere's works are now too high, too severe, too ascetic, or too exalted for the multitude, they will owe their permanent place in English literature (for such a place we can promise them) to this very fact, that they are Christian poetry and transcendently religious. For if ever (and many believe the delay will not be long) a revolution shall take place in public opinion, especially Irish public opinion, and that the educated classes in Ireland, rising far above the conventional ideas they have borrowed from English imitations and English intercourse, shall reject the Neo-Paganism of this century with all its tawdry finery and affected art, and a new taste be born for science that shall be Christian and art that shall be supersensual and moral, then we may be assured that in Mr. de Vere's work will be recognised in their fulness the true constituents of legitimate poetry, the pleasure of art and the profit of instruction; and in Mr. de Vere himself a rare combination of the qualities of teacher and singer to his age and race.

P.A. SHEEHAN

@article{E890000-023,
  editor 	 = {},
  title 	 = {Mr. Aubrey de Vere's New Volume: A Study},
  journal 	 = {The Irish Monthly: A Magazine of General Literature},
  editor 	 = {Matthew Russell SJ},
  address 	 = {Dublin },
  publisher 	 = {Irish Jesuit Province},
  date 	 = {March 1894},
  volume 	 = {22 },
  number 	 = {249},
  pages 	 = {126–138}
}
 E890000-023.bib