Agnes Repplier, Essayist
Kolars, Mary
13° THE COMMONWEAL December 9, 1925 AGNES REPPLIER, ESSAYIST By MARY KOLARS IT IS easier to enjoy Miss Repplier's achievements than to classify them. Her passion for books, the variety of...
...I loved her so well and so confidently, I had placed my childish faith in her so long, that no doubt of her sympathy ever crossed my mind...
...This is what the English call (I think) "not knowing where to have a writer...
...Consider the gaiety and grace of the following description of the tyranny of a pet— "I own that when Agrippina brought her first-born son and established him in my bedroom closet, the plan struck me at the start as inconvenient...
...She fixes two of her favorite heroines permanently in our imagination by remarking, of one—"She [Emma Woodhouse] is a normal creature, highly civilized and sanely artificial," and of the other—"Of Beatrix Esmond it might be said that Thackeray was the only man who never succumbed to her charms...
...We have a real school, filled with unmistakably real little girls, and taught by nuns refreshingly possessed of the authentic outlines of humanity...
...Professor Brander Matthews has ranked Miss Repplier with the late Andrew Lang...
...The contents of her...
...Nor has formal recognition been lacking...
...It was useless to appeal to my love of the Blessed Virgin...
...and the peculiar finish of phrase in which she cloaks her thrusts recalls sometimes the urbane effectiveness of her admired Augustine Birrell and sometimes the nipping neatness of her adored Jane Austen...
...Her observation and counsel have long been a valued note in the national symposium of social criticism...
...She recently characterized the spirit of Sir Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's Diaries thus—"Blunt's quarrel was with his country, his world, his fellow-creatures and his God—a broad field of dissatisfaction, which was yet too narrow to embrace himself...
...Or what a sulky critic in Blackwood's said about the amount of kissing in one of Miss Susan Warner's novels...
...But Agrippina was inflexible...
...I felt sure...
...Of that, thank Heaven...
...A separate word should be said of In our Convent Days, a book which makes one wonder why Miss Repplier did not add narrative-writing to her repertoire...
...I removed my clothing from the closet, spread a shawl upon the floor, had the door taken from its hinges, and resigned myself, for the first time in my life, to the daily and hourly companionship of an infant...
...In another essay she scores off the Cromwellian with shrewd humor—"We know that what the English Puritans especially resented in Prince Rupert was his insistence on regimental prayers...
...and smoking smuggled cigarettes with disastrous results...
...Hemans, Miss Anna Seward (the Lichfield Sawn), Mr...
...But the eighteen volumes which have emanated from her pen since she began to publish in 1888, contain abundant evidence of extra-academic proclivities...
...A paper written on feminism, in the critical year 1894, characteristically tempered her genuine enthusiasm for the new development with the following sound aspiration—"Perhaps the time may even come when women, mixing freely in political life, will abandon that injured and aggressive air which distinguishes the present advocate of female suffrage...
...Chrysostom wrote from Caesarea about his bread and his bath...
...Or what St...
...Few will dispute that she stands close to Lang in excellence, and many will see the bond between them in those leisurely historico-literary saunterings which have been the favorite pastime of each...
...and I am willing to admit that a writer, capable of producing such tonic papers as those which fill the volumes entitled Points of Friction, Americans and Others, Counter-Currents and the recently published Under Dispute, should continue to produce them as a civic duty...
...But there are other suggestions as well in Miss Repplier's pages...
...on cats, and a solitary group of narrative sketches which probably contains her best work, entitled In Our Convent Days...
...Or what those deciduous immortals of the happy halfcentury which has given its title to one of Miss Repplier's choicest books—what Miss Hannah More, Mrs...
...and the gliding humor and rightness of Miss Repplier's comments makes them even more unforgettable than her noteworthy pronouncements on major writers...
...Here we have none of the pious unreality with which writers of edifying fourth-class novels love to gild their remembrances of convent boarding-school life...
...The best way out of the difficulty is to forego any attempt at unified definition, and just say what it is one likes...
...My own mother might side with authority . . . But in every trouble of my poor little gusty life, the Blessed Mother sided with me...
...Her papers of general social comment, for instance, comprise as bulky a total as her literary essays...
...Take the following casual account of the author's inability to understand why the extinction of a particular candle on the Madonna's altar should have been esteemed a disgrace to the class to which the candle belonged— "I had not imagination enough to grasp the importance of a candle more or less upon the altar...
...It is pleasant to know that appreciation of the distinguished achievement of this Catholic essayist has been widespread...
...But I speak narrowly and selfishly...
...I had prepared another nursery for the little Claudius Nero, and I endeavored for a while to convince his mother that my arrangements were best...
...she received the Notre Dame Laetare Medal, in 1911...
...regularly appearing volumes are reprinted from the leading periodicals of the day...
...The only child who might be summoned out of the long roll of letters to compete in believableness with the Agnes and Elizabeth and Tony of In Our Convent Days is Jim, the (one supposes) fictitious youngster in Initiation...
...Montagu and Sir Walter Scott, and more than any two or three other living scholars about those curiosities of literature at large—letters, chronicles and obscure diaries—this has not prevented her from going exhaustively into such subjects as feminism and police court statistics and diplomatic records and juvenile laws and educational reform...
...In contemplating the ways of that beloved beast the cat, for instance (Loti and Gautier alone have matched the exquisite things she has said about cats in her Fireside Sphinx), she relaxes into a much less disciplined mood...
...It is hard to imagine a more pouncing common sense, a more alert and incisive faculty for comment on the passing stream of events, than she has brought to bear in the last two decades of our national history...
...When I begin by confessing that Miss Repplier pleases me best in her "unsocial" work, I do not mean that I slight her service in the social field...
...Nor is Miss Repplier always making epigrams...
...These sketches render with complete convincingness and charm the quality of happy, natural, Catholic childhood...
...the hour may arrive when women, having learned a few elementary facts of physiology, will not deem it an imperative duty to embody them at once in an unwholesome novel"—an aspiration, by the way, which not even the present millennium seems perfectly to have fulfilled...
...If, as one is sometimes inclined to suspect, she knows more than any other living scholar about the age of Fanny Burney and Mrs...
...or from deciding with the greatest definiteness what she thinks of the problems in which these various facts are implicated...
...No one else can compare books for me as Miss Repplier can, for no one else reads so many...
...and with charming and irresistible flattery, she gave me to understand, in the mute language I knew so well, that she wished her baby boy to be under my immediate protection . . . After a few weak remonstrances, the futility of which I clearly understood, her persistence carried the day...
...Surely this is worth acres of the stereotyped order of sentimental religious fiction...
...and even that small and engaging barbarian is given us only in flashes, whereas the little girls of Miss Repplier's recital keep us company for a whole book—falling in love with the young seminarian who serves as acolyte, stealing the straws from under the Bambino, lightening the silence of retreat with "spiritual conversation" (who can forget how Elizabeth, after reading Agnes a description of pride, said meditatively, "I think that's Adelaide's predominant passion...
...and there are, besides, such miscellanies as a monograph on her native Philadelphia, the biography of a physician, an anthology, two volumes (delectable things...
...My own personal wish is, not so much to be braced by practical truths, however timely and watchful, however wholesomely biting and immitigably sane, as to be delighted by the vagaries of a rich and individual scholarship...
...Where else can I turn to find out what James Howell said the Spaniard said after falling down and breaking his nose...
...Miss Repplier was made a doctor of letters by the University of Pennsylvania, in 1902...
...but that he should usurp their own especial prerogative of piety was more than they could bear...
...An essay written in 1915 began by voicing with dry perfection what all readers were inarticulately feeling—"The only agreeable thing to be recorded in connection with Europe's sudden and disastrous war is the fact that people stopped talking about women and began to talk about men," and there is a lapidarian finish to this diagnosis of a modern American disease—"The artisan, with impulses and ambitions as ignoble and as unintelligent as the millionaire's, is sullenly aware that, waste as he may, the rich can waste more, and he is still dissatisfied...
...And how persuasive, against this recognizable background, are the flashes of these imps' real innocence and devoutness...
...There is more than an echo of Johnsonian common sense, to prove that her praise of that great and good man rests on a real moral affinity...
...They could pardon his raids, his breathless charges, his bewildering habit of appearing where he was least expected or desired...
...No one else, more particularly, can induct me into the strange and forgotten corners of literature, for no one else knows anything about them...
...Erasmus Darwin—wrote and thought and did...
...The pages of these essays are freighted with a thousand precious curiosities lovingly brought to light and lingered on...
...William Hay ley and Dr...
...Speaking elsewhere of the hopelessness of attempting to rehabilitate any historical character to whom a graphic, if unreliable, tradition has attached itself, she cites the case of Lucrezia Borgia and murmurs comprehensively—"The image of an attractive young woman poisoning her supper guests is one which the world will not lightly let go...
...Her passion for books, the variety of her literary information and the skilled and solid judgments which she is able to lay down, would tempt one simply to identify her with our superior academic criticism...
...and on June 17 of this year, she was given the degree of doctor of laws by Yale University—distinctions which doubtless will be followed by others...
...It was not only Andrew Lang who "keenly relished" her work...
...Perhaps, oh, joyous thought...
...The closet suited her in every respect...
Vol. 3 • December 1925 • No. 5
