Books
Stuart, Henry Longan & Maynard, Theodore & Sands, William Franklin & Shuster, George N.
6io THE COMMONWEAL April 7, 1926 BOOKS Stephen Gardiner and the Tudor Reaction, by James Arthur Muller. New York: The Macmillan Company. $4,00. IT would be inconceivable, were not Dr. James...
...Instead, he died the last Catholic bishop of Winchester save one, regretting with his dying breath that he could not find Peter's tears for Peter's fall...
...But now that I come to think of it, there is only one devil in such of the songs given here as were written by Catholics in order to praise God for what is, after life and love, His best gift to them...
...The American ambassador was equally helpless...
...No man riveted the English church to the state so firmly as Gardiner, and the more spiritual-minded of her children still chafe at the tie...
...A host of social ills, from which society is suffering, is its inheritance...
...His main preoccupation may well have been the fact that any army which had not taken part in modern war conditions, on the western front, would later be an army obsolete—and that in view of the minor experiences of Port Arthur, it was questionable if Japanese troops could stand conditions in the trenches, if even their superb morale could stand the shattering losses of the French and British...
...That lonely imp creeps into Leigh Hunt's translation of the great Latin song made at the close of the twelfth century by Walter Mapes, the Archdeacon of Oxford...
...I remember, too, the names of Bishop Still, Christopher North, Peacock, D'Urfey, Brome, and Burns...
...The Memoirs of an Ambassador remains a great artistic achievement...
...They spoke of "democracy," and he was a Democrat...
...occasionally it comes to life, as if the creative touch of Chekhov were there...
...It is perhaps not irrelevant to mention that his audience for this purpose was set back from the morning to the afternoon—and that it transpired that Sir George Buchanan had quite unexpectedly "recognized" at an earlier hour...
...Here Mr...
...I know but one way of quiet," he declared, in what must be regarded as a final confession of faith: "to keep and follow such laws and orders in religion as our late Sovereign Lord left with us...
...The death of a poor man, who had willed "a kettle" to one of the Cambridge churches, gave him his chance...
...The position of Gardiner and his fellow envoys was fairly definite...
...No man in 1915 could foretell except as a guess...
...least among them were the grand dukes capable of grasping the significance of events...
...To say that a man is not of the stuff of which martyrs are made is not necessarily a reflection on his courage...
...America's neutrality was resented by the imperial court and by his colleagues...
...So before we roll well have a bowl Of this good old mountain dew, Before we roll well have another bowl Of this good old mountain dew...
...The talented John Oliver Hobbes, in her posthumous novel, has defined two categories of Christians—those who are devout and disorderly, with very little respect for anything but their personal reactions to religion, and those for whom the fabric of authority and discipline, the great orders of architecture and all the outward paraphernalia, inspire a passionate loyalty April 7, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 611 that may be tinctured by only the most perfunctory piety...
...Zero" is a recent type, with a real feeling for the misery of the poor, but with very little care how far the implications of his social theories may be stretched...
...Bishop Fisher preached the sermon, and the Cardinal himself, mitred and in purple, sat 'enthronized' upon a scaffolding with his chaplains and spiritual doctors and 'six and thirty abbots, priors, and bishops.'" Seldom has a kettle boiled over so thoroughly...
...Whether or not it is valuable work depends upon one's version of the civic importance of those among the urbane who are sprung from lions of vigor and hard cash...
...But that— like much else about this young man—remains to be seen...
...But it is no less obvious that they could not have been put through without some measure of popular approval, cunningly secured by concealing the real and irreparable nature of the breach with tradition...
...Marquis go on to say that there is a feeling stirring deep within him which tells him that it is possible that eventually he will turn into a prohibitionist...
...The filthiness of drunkenness and the still greater filthiness of prohibition have no place in the inn where honest men drain their flagons of good ale...
...New York: Doubleday, Page and Company...
...illustrated by Edward A. Wilson...
...he had only perfunctory contact with social or official life...
...Let us turn from such sad thoughts...
...The charity always due to an erring sinner— but never to his sin—would oblige me to give a wide interpretation to the word in parenthesis, did not Mr...
...in fact, to those who knew him it was not likely that his sources were as good as Buchanan's, for he was very much a man of the court...
...Felix venter quem intrabis...
...except on matters unrelated to the war (and these were few...
...The story has a fine texture and a large design...
...No need to emphasize the utter darkness of all classes of Russians as to the exact nature and trend of the colossal forces loosed on the world by war and revolution...
...Yet beside the folly of the churchmen who permitted themselves to be manoeuvred into such a ridiculous position, the extravagance of Barnes seems almost wisdom...
...In consequence, he hailed the Liberal parliamentary group, after the beginnings of revolution as something he could understand...
...The moralizing note chills all jovial warmth...
...No, I see M. Paleologue as an artist, as a clever journalist, as a courtier by predilection (desoeuvre perhaps, now that courts are scarcer) as an elegant and charming man of fashion, as a dilettante diplomat tinged with that delicate cynicism which does come to elderly diplomats, wearing it gracefully as some few possess the art to wear it, but I do not see him in the role of prophet in the world war...
...That is the achievement of an artist, of a master writer...
...Muller's work is a splendid monument to American scholarship...
...Let me thank Mr...
...And I must confess that I, who may claim to be a connoisseur of conviviality, never expected to find a tinge of sadness in my mind while reading a collection of drinking-songs...
...The book is a masterpiece...
...It is conceivable that from the point of view of this objective, revolution became confused with patriotism, while to the clearer eye and mind of a French author unsympathetic to popular movements and not giyen to enthusiasm, revolution still meant revolution, a complication, never an amelioration of a trying situation...
...On this vexed point Dr...
...they have all proved and stood the test of subsequent events...
...What the king wanted was a commission from Pope Clement VII empowering Wolsey, or some other favorably minded prelate, to pronounce invalid the dispensation of a previous Pope, Julius II, sanctioning Henry's marriage with Catherine—his deceased brother's wife—a marriage forbidden by the law of the Old Testament...
...And I think the answer might well be—that life is fundamentally uncomfortable and challenging, owing to the insuperable still voice...
...The perusal of Full and By, like the reviewing of it, has been to me a somewhat melancholy pleasure...
...New York: Charles Scribners Sons...
...He hated the new Bible—but largely, one feels, because the universities had no hand in its translation...
...This is a story with a marked crescendo of emotional contrasts, leaving a resonance that can be enjoyed after the book has been put down...
...And I do not hesitate to accuse of abominable heresy some of the poets whom Mr...
...Muller, the mere volume of whose research is conclusive, has no great trouble in proving that he was the son, honestly begotten, of one John Gardiner, a prosperous clothier of Bury St...
...It should play an important part in familiarizing that new view of the Reformation as anything rather than a popular movement whose beginning may almost be dated from Cobbett's strange history, written ninety years ago...
...Had he survived into Elizabeth's reign there can be little doubt we should have seen another avatar...
...George N. Shuster...
...7-50...
...A small but fierce volcano vexes him sore inside, And his throat and mouth are furred with a fur that seemeth a buffalo hide...
...Rogers's collection is that he includes several songs that are concerned not with the glow in the heart of the night before but the fire in the head of the morning after...
...O Hodgson, Guinness, Allsopp, Bass...
...They are beautiful and brilliant and full of humor and gusto...
...And his treatment of Anson Hunter, the solid scion of good parents and a massive checkingaccount, is dealt with ironically, truthfully, deliriously...
...Retro Sathanas...
...Their detriment to the mass of the people, in any land, is obvious...
...Muller is commendably impartial, though of his many appendices one, at least, might have been devoted to the remarkable statement that Clement "had, it seems, little moral objection to Henry's repudiation of Catherine...
...Traditionally he had specialized in Russian matters...
...Behind the bar are four stalwart, grave, slightly bald, mustachioed bartenders, and at the bar are two merry souls who have come in to begin the day well with a morning daisy...
...There is no evidence that Gardiner's enthusiasm went beyond the two laws of which he was a doctor...
...7.50...
...Against the supremacy of Rome he could find the plausible argument that "Peter's claim to supremacy consisted in a more plenteous endowment of grace," and yet assert that "the king, though he be an infidel, representeth, as it were, the image of God upon earth...
...With all the vigor of which an honest Englishman is capable, they gave what was in them to their mission, but it could only be a blind effort...
...Henry Longan Stuart...
...like his colleagues of the Indian army drawn to the assistance of Russia, he had never before looked upon "the Bear" as a friend or as a possible ally...
...Dulce linguae vinculum...
...New York: George H. Doran Company...
...With the best of good will, with all their admirable training, they could not understand what was happening...
...but they are surely foreign to the Autocrat...
...By crystallizing his loyalties around the person of the monarch he managed to pass from orthodoxy to schism and back again, without the glory that surrounds More and Fisher, yet somehow, without the taint of ignominy that invests Cranmer's memory...
...A sermon by the friar in which the hierarchy and temporalities of the Church were lashed unsparingly was the immediate result...
...I have kept the faith...
...X7 _ o William Franklin Sands...
...Or rather let me feel proud that the artist could catch no glimpse of an evil spirit sitting upon the ale-house bench with me...
...translated by F. A. Holt...
...I do not hesitate to say that the French ambassador was not more prescient...
...I can feel a complete sympathy with Don Marquis's almost unbearably pathetic ballad on The Old Brass Railing: "My feet still seek a railing, When a railing isn't there—" But I can understand, after reading the American songs in Full and By, why it is we have prohibition...
...The most interesting narrative in the Collection is, however, The Rich Boy...
...but very few of them are free of a touch of diabolism...
...Briefly, they were to secure the gratification of the king's passion for Anne Boleyn, with Rome's approval, if possible, and if not, then without it...
...THE New York Times's Book Review of January 31 very truly says: "Readers have swallowed an absolutely indigestible dose of memoirs, novels, magazine articles, etc., dealing with the last days of Russia under the czarist regime and should be generously spared further information oh Rasputin, the Czarina, occult gatherings and other such things...
...O quam fragrans in odore...
...Once he had entered Wolsey's service, his rise was rapid and continuous...
...Wilson is always hilarious, but wlien he can elude the present with its mingling of pussyfooters and souse-parties and get into the kindlier America of thirty or forty years ago, he becomes happy as well...
...One, indeed, I did write soon after coming to this country, five and a half years ago...
...Even so, Mr...
...But this is a dark saying, and I have no time to explain...
...it is, unless I am very badly mistaken, afraid...
...All the Allies were sincere in their efforts to help the emperor's gigantic war effort, not least the British...
...to put into a seven and a half dollar book...
...Read this story to any simple, unsophisticated person and he would ask: "What does Mr...
...This was intended as my valediction...
...Why either is needed I fail to see—a drinking-song should concern itself solely with praise...
...What the Japanese ambassador saw is a mystery...
...His origin has long been considered dubious and many biographers assign him an illegitimate birth...
...The melancholy young fellows with whom the book deals are grouped—as most American readers of fiction know by this time—round the prurient youngster in Absolution...
...Needing all the pieces that could be concentrated on their own iront, the British sacrificed them to their ally, and one of the tragedies of the sacrifice lay in the fact that, despite their •efforts, a too large proportion of these great guns never got into action after reaching Russia...
...The next year we find him at his first contact with the new heresies as one of the judges at the trial of "Friar Barnes...
...In the summer of 1525 his skilful drafting of the treaty between France and England won him the notice of the king...
...Generally the American convivial poet has "a horrid rhythm in his forehead torrid" while he sings...
...With skill, his ordinary guesses could be effaced from the record...
...2.00...
...Felix os quod tu lavabis...
...But these are among the few exceptions...
...Theodore Maynard...
...Gardiner's nearness to the king and repute as a legist (he was a doctor of civil and ecclesiastical law) inevitably involved him in the negotiations for divorce that were the proximate cause of the break with Rome...
...I remember that the finest single line in the whole body of English poetry is Calverley's "O Beer...
...Fitzgerald believe...
...Did no one of them, we wonder, not even saintly Fisher, realize the volume of the conflagration which the faggot, carried by the unruly friar over his shoulder as part of his penance, was destined to kindle...
...Muller, "the individual case of injustice was an incident, magnified out of all importance by Barnes...
...Marquis, and the spittoons make up a paradise still innocent of the destined snake...
...and it appears in Full and By, though without my name attached...
...The true spirit ot all convivial verse is expressed in Henry Aldrich's Reasons for Drinking, with which I embellish the close of this review: "If all be true that I do think, There are five reasons we should drink: Good wine—a friend—or being dry— Or lest we should be by-and-by— Or any other reason why...
...Wilson's devils had not succeeded in provoking a fratricidal strife between delirium tremens and the Anti-Saloon League at the time when the earlier American 6l2 THE COMMONWEAL April 7, 1926 songs given in Full and By were composed...
...By way of balance to this I quote the Friar's Song that Longfellow (the author of Catawba Wine and a few minor works) included in his Golden Legend...
...Therein lay, however, the very thing which nullified their usefulness...
...Felix guttur quod rigabis...
...That Gardiner thoroughly understood his instructions is clear...
...In a word, the divorce from Catherine was to be secured, either by papal pronouncement, or by a handy evocation of Moses and the prophets, as the case might demand...
...The cloven hoofs, the barbed tail, and the infernal trident might appropriately accompany Don Marquis's The Battle of the Keyholes, or Henley's Let Us Be Drunk...
...The parochial authorities seem to have acted harshly and to have summoned the executors to make good the bequest, with the result that one of them was cast into prison...
...I have not read it in the English version nor would I wish to read it in another language than his sparkling French...
...That revolution was not imminent but actual might have been seen by anyone with adequate knowledge of history and experience in world tendencies not fully occupied with the struggle to survive...
...A master he is, and not least a master of construction, for he has chosen as his medium the diary, most difficult of forms, and he has published years after the event, when men have died, state documents have been given to the public, and the great forces clarified, in some degree, which April 7, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 613 brought the empire to its fall, all this without detracting from his prophecies, with place and date...
...Moreover, as a writer of drinkingsongs, I know exactly how such things should be done...
...and equally truly concludes: "No book on the Russian upheaval accumulates the most variegated heavy and unyielding material into so light, graceful and elegant an edifice with masterfully stressed main lines arising out of a wealth of sparkling details...
...To say nothing of the blazing effrontery of breaking his journey en route to the continent at the house of the king's "own sweetheart," his attitude, face to face with the Pontiff at Orvieto shows that allegiance had by now become a mere mask for disloyalty...
...James Arthur Muller of Cambridge, Massachusetts, our authority for the statement, that no biography, adequate or otherwise, of Bishop Stephen Gardiner, has yet appeared, and that historians of the Reformation in England have agreed to neglect one who was, perhaps, its most significant protagonist...
...IF there be a Scott Fitzgerald problem, it is not likely that anything resembling a solution can be dug out of the present rather desultory collection of short stories, in which there is neither more nor less of grace and actuality than one may find in the usual repetition generale of an author's latest magazine copy...
...Wilson's illustrations...
...I have also a complaint to make of Mr...
...O quam sapidus in ore...
...All his compliances, unworthy as they seem today, stopped short on the side of authority...
...And The Still beyond the Hills, a fine native American song, one as mellow as the drink it celebrates, is also to be recommended without any qualification: "This good moonshine is made of grains And mixed with water pure, And the alcohol that it contains Will all your troubles cure...
...I say "destined" because only barmaids, certainly not bartenders, could have ever effectually guarded the portal to Eden...
...Fitzgerald has wrestled bravely with a mystery, not stripping it of the haunting psychological shadows which give it life, but, nevertheless, forcing it to surrender something far too firm for irony and futile playfulness...
...confirming his prophecies, even though no man then living could see clearly or foretell the next step...
...The most wonderful of all his drawings is that which was used as the end-paper in the limited edition of this work, but which was considered too precious (as it is...
...Like Wolsey, Cromwell, and the new lords who rode down national liberties, in Chestertonian phrase, with "the Bible in their boots," Gardiner came from the middle class...
...Not because there is nothing to drink in America (as a matter of fact I have drunk at least twice as much as in the same period of time in England), but because the furtive and hectic drinking induced by the Volstead Act is destructive of the easy geniality that inspires song...
...As applied to this collection of drinking songs, says its editor, the expression is "at once a boast and an admonition...
...With luck, his guess might be right...
...In its general accuracy, impartiality, and documentation, Dr...
...All the Sad Young Men, by F. Scott Fitzgerald...
...but constant aesthetic niceties, of diction or pose, meddle with its reality...
...Don Marquis actually admits, without evident shame, that he is now "a teetotaler (practically...
...and, after looking at the pictured devils, how hopeless it is ever to expect to escape from the foul grip of the fanatic...
...An amazing conjuncture indeed, of which even Dr...
...Fitzgerald is still miles away from the new prairie frontier where Father Schwartz is deranged by the emptiness— or the hugeness—of life...
...It is when such a difficult task has to be done that men like Gardiner, energetic and sophistical, who mask their pliancy toward the usurping power with an outward reverence for established law, and who have a peculiar skill in finding what look like fair means for attaining foul ends, find work to their hand for which they are peculiarly fitted, and are discovered seated at the side of kings...
...as a matter of fact he was well informed, for among those whom he had drawn to him for this purpose were officers of the Indian army who had specialized on Russia, who spoke Russian...
...A devil squats, for all the world as though he belonged there, on the base of the punch-bowl that illustrates Oliver Wendell Holmes's admirable song...
...He hated the new and extreme doctrines of the two Protectors—but mainly because these came to England from Germany, and he feared the social unsettlement that they had wrought abroad...
...Muller does not seem to recognize the inwardness...
...To Gardiner," says Dr...
...His trial and sentence were conducted on an imposing scale...
...Et beata labia...
...That the great religious shift was due to a deal of social and political confusion, quite apart from any popular dissatisfaction with dogma, has long been familiar to serious students...
...Wilson for at least keeping his pet devils out of his drawings for my own drinking songs...
...In our efforts to understand Gardiner, and, with Gardiner, a whole side of the English Reformation, we shall be helped if we exclude from our consciousness the accident that made him a churchman ("wily Winchester" in the picturesque language of his contemporaries) and consider him first and foremost as a statesman—one of the greatest of the chancellors...
...Men die for what they believe in...
...Sir George Buchanan (his British colleague) alone might have been well informed but for a curious psychological cross current...
...The excellent Nothing like Grog, which was published in New York in 1806, is unaware of the horrors that were to come: " 'Tother day as the chaplain was preaching, Behind him I curiously slunk, And while he our duty was teaching, As how we should never get drunk, I shewed him the stuff and he twigged it, And it soon set his reverence agog, And he swigged, and Nick swigged, And Ben swigged, and Dick swigged, And I swigged, and all of us swigged it, And swore there was nothing like grog...
...Edmunds, who died when his son was a boy, leaving a will that is sufficient proof how firmly attached to the old Faith was the generation that immediately preceded the Reformation...
...Gardiner, it is plain, for good or ill, belonged to the second class...
...He threw himself, burning with ardor, into recognition of the new regime, and waited, first of the diplomatic corps, upon the new government to convey the congratulations of our President upon the new era of liberty...
...He was brave in championing the rights of Convocation, yet when Convocation as a body approved the royal supremacy, he was among the first to sign his assent...
...One of the British officers most active and valuable to Sir George had occupied on the Indian frontier the same post as his father and grandfather...
...Even in so brief an article as this must be, the case of Barnes deserves a passing reference, typical as it is of tne mixed motives that lurked behind the religious change, and which were so skilfully used by the royal managers to promote the break with Rome...
...With this background of wealthy New York Mr...
...It is also not irrelevant to recall that all cables passed through London...
...That this was not emphasized (if it was not) in communications to the allied chancelleries may well have lain in the impatience of some of M. Paleologue's colleagues with the dilatoriness and inefficiency of the imperial government: their objective was the winning of the war, not a study of Russia...
...Wine and not bromoseltzer should be before the poet as he sings...
...But I no longer write drinking-songs...
...The enormous gaudy gilt mirrors, the chandeliers draped with netting, the companion paintings of nudes reclining in voluptuous (and impossible) curves—one of these goddesses is languidly looking at the arrow which a flying Cupid is about to shoot into her bosom—these and the gas lamps, the bottles, the brass rail dirged by Mr...
...Russia interested them only as man power, as pressure on Germany's eastern flank, to relieve the more important operations on the west...
...That the change was the work of a resolute minority, and was aristocratic rather than popular in its contexture is no less clear today...
...Those who went through that period with him, who knew his sources and the handicaps under which Russians and foreigners labored alike to understand, those who shared the darkness of that time can only offer the tribute of unbounded admiration...
...Was it for this pious labor that the saintly friar was beatified ? But I would not willingly be unfair to the many Protestants who were good fellows and who have hymned Bacchus...
...With the advent of "democracy" in the Russian meaning, our ambassador, as was natural, was more completely at sea than ever...
...Rogers sponsors...
...The subjection of the poor, super-nationalism with its attendant train of wars for territory and colonies, enclosures and the loss of communal property, the ruin of the guilds, the conception of the state as supreme and the loss of a court of appeal recognized by all Christian Europe, all date from the middle of the sixteenth century...
...and even the gay defiance that characterizes modern conviviality—though it can, perhaps, be hardly avoided—is unfortunate...
...The drinker should be equally oblivious of delirium tremens and Andrew Volstead...
...But I cannot forget that drunkenness, like prohibition, must ultimately be traced back to the Protestant assault upon Catholic culture...
...This makes me feel like Athanasius contra (novum) mundum...
...Memoirs of an Ambassador, Volume III {August igf 1916 to May 17, 1917) by Maurice Paleologue...
...It was written by Blessed James de Voragine, a thirteenth-century Dominican: "Ave, color vini clari Dulcis potus, non amari, Tua nos inebriari, Digneris potential O quam placens in colore...
...He could not be...
...Full and By, edited by Cameron Rogers, with prefaces by Don Marquis and Christopher Morley...
...He came new to diplomacy at a peculiarly critical moment, and came as an outsider...
...Barnes's teaching, he felt, would knock the bottom out of organized society...
...Here we have the old-fashioned saloon...
...AND BY," it is explained for the benefit of landlubbers, "is the situation of a ship with regard to the wind, when she is close hauled, and sailing in such a manner as neither to steer too nigh the direction of the wind, nor deviate to leeward...
...Fitzgerald, in a mood of cynical social criticism, is supplying a document of abiding value...
...He had no better sources of information than the rest...
...It is a fact that appalling British losses on the western iront were due to the diversion of heavy artillery to Russia...
...Possibly Mr...
...Fitzgerald is at his ease...
...Perhaps it would be incorrect to say that Mr...
...There is also another barrier...
...No one may challenge his vaticinations...
...I positively deny that Eugene Field's The Clink of the Ice, or Bob Cameron's After the Club Dinner are drinking-songs at all...
...For Absolution is not bravely blasphemous or sturdily futile...
...All that it is, but not prophecy...
...Barnes, described by Foxe as "a preacher to the prisoners and comfortless" and "a great doer in Cambridge," was one of these sentimental and unstable reformers of whom "Mr...
...And the reason may be that Mapes wrote as a satirist...
...but one feels that between him and that life there walk the obese shadows of Princeton dilettanteism, of house parties in Great Neck...
...his social relations were almost exclusively court relations, the very last milieu in which to seek for clarity in revolution...
...He was treated with civility but with civility of the most frigid kind...
...The one fault that I find with Mr...
...Gardiner was one of the most brilliant scholars of Trinity Hall, and a lecturer upon canon law...
...On the Friday before Palm Sunday the discussion 'waxed hot,' and at the end of it Gardiner desired them 'to note and ponder such words he should say of duty and obedience toward the See Apostolic' " "To my words thus spoken" he reports "no man answered a word...
...Russia, France, and England were allies...
...I can still recall the delight it was to ransack Elizabethan and Caroline chapbooks in the British Museum at the time I was compiling an anthology of my own...
...one subscribes willingly to the publisher's comment on it as "one of the most valuable historical and human documents" produced by the Russian upheaval...
...it is my belief that he may have seen more clearly than most, for his vision was unclouded by the struggle for existence...
Vol. 3 • April 1926 • No. 22
