he assumed the tone and swelled to the dignity of a real bishop, he neither acknowledged his error unequivocally, nor avowed the truth in its fulness. For a moment he appeared in a grand attitude, and spoke as one having authority, rebuking with becoming severity the presbyters who had sat in judgment on their prelate :-"I am a bishop. Who are you who usurp the judgment seat? I have retracted nothing: I shall never retract any thing." But the grandeur of that scene soon passed away, the high tone of authority subsided; and now with faltering accents he qualifies and modifies his assertions, in order to silence the murmurs of his clerical subordinates. Men look in vain for the spirit of an Ambrose and a Basil in the shadowy representatives of the episcopate.

The history of the confessional cannot be written by the pen of man it is the narrative of the secrets of Divine mercy. The angels who rejoice at the conversion of a sinner constantly hover around this tribunal, blotting out the sins as they are uttered, wiping away the tears that trickle down the cheek of the penitent, knocking off the chains which hold the sinner a bondman of Satan, and whispering peace. Who that has opened his mouth in humble confession, with a contrite and afflicted spirit, has not felt, at the moment when the priest pronounced absolution, an inward and mysterious change, the token, if not evidence, of pardon? The consolation which confession imparts, the hope which it inspires, the strength which it communicates, show it to be a heaven-born institution, a boon of Divine goodness. Let those calumniate it who are strangers to its healing virtue; but the wretched whom it has comforted, the lost whom it has reclaimed, the dead whom it has restored to life, will bear witness that it is a work of Divine power unto salvation. We shall close with the simple statement of a fact. An aged Lutheran minister, whose convictions and affections tended strongly to Catholicity, once avowed to us his deep sense of the necessity of such an institution. "I know," said he, "that I have sinned; and I dread going forth to meet my Judge, without any previous assurance that my repentance has been such as he demands. I would fain hear from the lips of his ministers, The Lord hath taken away thy sin.'" As he was dying, the priest was called in, barely in time to bid him go in peace.

NEW SERIES. VOL. IV. NO. IV.

59

ART. III.Poems and Prose Writings. By RICHARD H. DANA. New York: Baker & Scribner. 1850. 2 vols. 12mo. pp. 443, 440.

MR. DANA is one of the patriarchs of American literature, and we are not called upon to treat him as an author making his first appearance before the public. The contents of his

volumes were written many years ago, and have long been familiar to the grown-up generation of the author's countrymen. They have already passed the ordeal of the critics, and their author's reputation is too well established to be much affected one way or the other by the comments of reviewers. All that need be done on the appearance of any new edition of them is simply to announce it. Nevertheless, we are unwilling to let this new edition pass without making it the occasion of paying the tribute of our respect to the author, and of throwing out some suggestions which may not be wholly unprofitable to our younger aspirants to artistic excellence and literary glory.

We are reviewers by profession, but reviewers of the subjects, doctrines, principles, or tendencies of books, rather than of books themselves, as mere literary productions. We prize literature and art only as they subserve Christian doctrine and morals. Apart from their relation to these, they have little value in our eyes; for so considered they cease to be genuinely artistic, and have at best merely the form, without the substance, of art. We esteem no literature which treats of matters and things in their generality, without touching any thing in its speciality, for the general without the special is mere possibility; and we belong to that class of moralists who hold that every human action is either moral or immoral, either good or bad, and that no human action is ever morally indifferent. To us the end is no less important than the principle, and the philosophy that denies the final cause is as atheistic and absurd as that which denies the first cause. Our theology determines our ethics, and our ethics determines our æsthetics. Theology is the queen of the sciences, and they have no rights or reason of existence but to be employed in her service. Art in its most general sense is simply the application of science to practical life. Hence we are always obliged, whether we are reviewing a work of science or of art, to review it under its relation to Catholicity, and to judge it by its bearing on Catholic doctrine and morals.

This is not a fashionable mode of reviewing, we admit, and is generally regarded as narrow, illiberal, and bigoted; for it is in our days thought to be a mark of wisdom to deny the unity and universality both of the first and of the final cause of the universe, to separate philosophy from theology, truth from revelation, Christianity from the Church, morality from religion, and art, or, as it is improperly called, asthetics, from morality. But this is a fact not precisely to the credit of the age. Catholicity, in the order of ideas or principles, is the truth and the whole truth, whether the truth evident to natural reason, or the truth revealed and affirmed to us by supernatural authority. It therefore necessarily extends to every department of human thought, feeling, and action. Nothing, then, in any order, or under any relation, is really separable from it, exempted from its law, or commendable save as inspired by it and as it conforms to it. Falsehood either as to the principle or as to the end is never commendable, and moral deformity is no less repugnant to the beautiful than physical deformity. The Wahlverwandtschaften, or Elective Affinities, of Goethe is as offensive to good taste as shocking to the moral sense.

We do not say that the beautiful is not, in some sense, distinguishable from truth of doctrine and soundness of morals, but we do maintain that it is never separable from them. All art

or æsthetics must be addressed to man under one or all of three relations, 1. The intellect, or understanding; 2. The will; 3. The imagination. The proper object of the understanding is truth; of the will, moral good; of the imagination, if you please, the beautiful. All literature, or any other species of art, in order to meet the demands of intellect and will, must be true and morally good, therefore must be grounded in Catholic doctrine and morals; for aside from these, in the intellectual and volitive orders, all is false and immoral, neither true nor good. The imagination is commonly regarded as a mixed faculty, partaking both of the rational nature and of the irrational, and in some sense as a union of the two, so to speak, of the soul and body. But it is primarily and essentially rational, or intellectual, and moves as intellect before moving as sensibility; or, in other words, it is intellectual apprehension before it is sensitive affection, as the life and activity of the body are from the soul, not the life and activity of the soul from the body. The beautiful, then, as the proper object of the imagination, must be really objective and intelligible, and therefore belong to the order of the true and the good, and be at bottom identical with

truth and goodness; for the true is, in reality, identical with the good. Consequently imagination, therefore æsthetics, demands truth and goodness for the basis of its operations, as much as does Christian theology or Christian ethics.

This is undeniable, if imagination is considered on its intellectual or rational side, and it is not less so if we consider it on its sensitive or irrational side. Undoubtedly, we may be and often are delighted, charmed, with what is neither true nor good, pleased with a literature or an art which Christian doctrine and morals do and must repugn; but this is by virtue of the irrational and sensitive side of our nature, which, in consequence of original sin, is in an abnormal state. The understanding by the Fall has been obscured and the will enfeebled, but the lower nature, concupiscence, the flesh, has been turned wholly away from God, so that in it dwells no good thing. Physically, it has not, indeed, been essentially changed; but it has morally escaped from its original subjection to reason and the law of God, in which it was, prior to the Fall, held by grace; and it now follows its natural tendencies, all of which are towards the creature instead of the Creator. If we follow these natural tendencies, or seek their natural gratification, we convert intellect and will into slaves of appetite and passion, and are brought into bondage to sin and death. These tendencies are not destroyed, or changed, by the infusion of sanctifying grace. The flesh remains after baptism, continues to lust against the spirit, and as long as he lives the Christian must combat it unceasingly, and labor by self-denial, mortification, and prayer to overcome or subdue it, as revelation teaches us, and as all experience proves.

There are two modes in which art may affect us on this side of our nature, one by exciting corrupt appetites and gratifying perverse tendencies, the other by allaying or tranquillizing the passions, and so diverting us from the sensitive affections as to prevent them from obscuring the understanding, or enslaving the will. The art that operates in the first-mentioned mode is not unknown, nay, is quite common. It is the fashionable art of our age, especially if we speak of literature. Under its category we must place the principal part of the poetry of Byron, Moore, and Shelley, all the fashionable novels from Sir Walter Scott down to George Sand, and the light, with no small part of the grave, literature of the day, and which the young man or the young woman can no more read without being corrupted than one can touch pitch and not be defiled. But art of this

sort is a counterfeit or false art; because just in proportion as we follow the sensitive nature, we run away from God, "the first good and the first fair," the supreme and absolute truth, the supreme and absolute good, and the supreme and absolute beauty, and tend towards the creature as final cause, or ultimate end, therefore towards supreme and absolute falsehood, and consequently towards supreme and absolute nullity, since the creature separated from God is a nullity, and absolute nullity must needs be as far removed from the beautiful as it is from the true and the good.

The beautiful is not a human creation; men do not make it ; it is real, and independent of the genius that discovers it or seeks to embody it in works of art, in poetry, eloquence, music, painting, sculpture, or architecture. It then, like all reality, has its origin in God, and even as created beauty must be, though distinguishable, yet inseparable from God, and like every creature in its degree an image of God. God creates all things after the ideas or archetypes in his own Divine mind, or infinite intelligence. These ideas or archetypes in his intellect are indistinguishable from his essence; for, as St. Thomas, after St. Augustine, teaches, "idea in Deo nihil est aliud quam essentia Dei." It is precisely in this image of God in which all things in their degree and according to their nature are created, that reside the truth, goodness, and beauty of things. Whatever obscures this image, or leads us away from it, or substitutes for it the image of the creature, obscures the beautiful, and leads us away from it, into the deformed and the inane, which is evidently the case with the art that takes for its object the pleasure or satisfaction of the inferior soul, or the corrupt appetites and passions of our nature. Whence it follows that only the art that operates in the second mode we have defined, that is, to allay concupiscence, to tranquillize the passions, and enfeeble their force, can be true and genuine art, or the art that really and truly embodies the beautiful. This it can do only by elevating us into a region above the sphere of the sensitive soul, above the merely sensible world, into the intelligible world, by exciting in us noble thoughts, lofty aspirations, and so charming the rational soul, the intellect and will, with spiritual truth and goodness, that the sensitive soul, so to speak, is for the time. being overpowered and rendered unable to disturb us. This is what the Church has always aimed at in her sacred art, whether manifested in her noble hymns, her grand cathedrals, her splendid ritual, or her solemn chants and soul-subduing music ; not,