Books
McGowan, R.A. & Clark, Edwin & Shuster, George N. & C., T. & Stuart, Henry Longan
639 BOOKS Mother Philippine Duchesne, by Marjory Erskine. New York: Longman's Green and Company. $4.00. Mary Aloysia Hardey: Religious of the Sacred Heart, 1S091886, by Mary Garvey. New...
...Some strange and interesting figures come in and out of the story that Mother Erskine tells so colorfully...
...When Bishop Miles was in his late fifties, he was made the first bishop of the new diocese...
...An impression exists which is seldom corrected from the right angle of defense, that Catholicism in the United States has its full citizenship still to earn—in homely language, that it is "imported goods...
...has made them act and react during a chain of centuries...
...All the repercussions of the great change were felt by the young woman who was to be the pioneer of the veiled cloister in Missouri...
...Impulsiveness, with a strong underlying basis of shrewd common sense seems to have been her characteristic from the first...
...Or perhaps, one should say rather that the mind of Paul Valery has become an object of curiosity and even of pedagogy...
...Up to the time of her departure for the American mission, in mature middle-age, the life of Mere Duchesne had not departed greatly from the lines familiar to all who study the revival of religion in post-revolutionary France...
...Charles "we dig in the garden, carry manure, lead our cow to drink, and clean out its tiny stable, the only one in the neighborhood...
...Yet he built churches, founded his own seminary, and was fortunate in the excellent assistance of his vicar-general, Father Stokes...
...McGuire's book to see that Fascism has accomplished an enormous feat...
...Bishop Miles was also one of the first group of native Americans to assume the habit of the Dominican order...
...From the first it was evident that the great obstacle in the way of planting the order in America would be differences of speech and racial temperament...
...In all the thousand miles of the Mississippi's course there was not, in 1818, one buoy or beaconlight or lantern...
...On one typical voyage, from New York to Montreal, ice blocked the course of the little paddle-steamer and the rest of the journey had to be undertaken on foot, through deep snow and over unknown country...
...640 The journey up the Mississippi, eleven years later, when the foundress of the Sacre Coeur had at last yielded to her daughter's holy importunities, is described for us by Mother Erskine in words that convey a vivid impression of the primitive conditions of the Church in America a century ago...
...In the annals of Americana this record is an absorbing and important contribution...
...SINCE his election to the Academy, Paul Valery has become the subject of general conversation...
...One of her little proteges died," reports a chaplain, "whilst regretting that he was not spared to go home and give 'the mother of all the nuns' the pleasure of hearing how many beats he could play on his drum...
...money was sent from France...
...Louis a staunch friend and benefactor is "Mr...
...Once he traversed 700 miles on horseback, over mountains and across rivers, to baptize two persons...
...McGuire rarely strays from the path...
...His life for a considerable time was that of the circuit-riding preacher, among the members of a flock which was scattered far and wide...
...His paradoxes are not colorful verbal flashes that mingle wit and reflection, but abstractions deduced from the loftiest concerns of the mind...
...If she could cut the trade deficit in two, accounts, would be equalized...
...She was forced to see the convent where her novitiate was spent turned into a prison...
...This time I have come to stay," was her greeting to the astonished sisterhood on entering the convent at Grand Coteau...
...CLUTTON-BROCK was too serious and too intelligent to forego a diligent concern with traditional literature...
...Literary creation is "the achievement of far other things entirely than an author...
...In so far as this implies a retreat from emotionalism—from profligate squandering of self toward resolute discipline of self—it has a genuine ascetic importance...
...Once sure of her vocation she wasted little time in breaking down what was perhaps a natural wish on the part of her family that a little more time should be given a beautiful girl of seventeen to make so grave a decision...
...Henry Longan Stuart...
...It may also bring to the reader a keener sense of the worthy charity he may accomplish, when next time he hears of some poor pastor in the backwoods of the South, who cannot keep a horse because he has not sufficient funds...
...The Father of the Church in Tennessee, by the Very Reverend V. F. O'Daniel, 0. P. Washington: The Dominicana...
...Science is the scope of the mind's "knowledge...
...During her days of instruction, the precept of entire obedience presented certain difficulties to her imagination, which she met by the very practical consideration that "the surest way of being able to do my own will is always to will that which my superiors will for me.'' Madame Hardey made her first profession in the midst of a terrible visitation of cholera at the convent of Saint Michael's during which, an eye-witness tells us, "she went through the plague-stricken house like an angel of mercy, cheering the invalids, consoling the dying, and preparing the dead for burial...
...At St...
...Edwin Clark...
...But one must read to the end to see its limitations...
...Quite as naturally, they suffered in their turn, both from the extreme party who reared the Terror on their constitutional edifice and the central authority set up by Napoleon, which put France into an administrative strait-jacket that has endured to our day...
...McGuire says, are 544 the restriction of the growth of debts to foreigners, access unhampered by monopolies or national price control to foodstuffs and raw materials, the moderation of protective tariffs throughout the world, international peace, and the free migration of peoples...
...Following his ordination he was a teacher in the first Catholic college in Kentucky...
...From this fine, stimulating biography the character of its subject emerges beautiful, steadfast, zealous, patient...
...Thus a positivistic Malebranche, awed by experience rather than by Divinity, makes his appearance...
...and scarcely, if at all, in feeble accents do we enter protest...
...it is the pronunciation that staggers me...
...He was one of the first group of young men to study for the priesthood beyond the Alleghany mountains, after Congress and the Constitution had, by enactments of religious freedom, provided the enlarging activities of the Church with protection...
...One has only to compare it with another eminently modern procedure—Edmund Husserl's analysis of qualities—to discern that its abstraction has sacrificed exceedingly much in parting from reality...
...During the Civil War she took a quite special interest in the drummer boys of the Nineteenth Army Corps...
...Of course, one could have wished less staidness for him—less of what must always bear the label of the "Tory" mind...
...He harnessed the state to capitalist industry, agriculture, banking and trade, and fastened down with screws the normal subjection of the city and rural proletariat to the industrialists and landlords...
...Seventeen passengers, nuns, priests and students, were crowded together on a little vessel of 125 tons...
...A descendant, one Anthony Hardey, who was the grandfather of the subject of Mother Garvey's biography, was a boyhood companion of George Washington and could recall him later as "a type of all that is gentle and manly in youth...
...Praise is also rendered to many Protestants for their offer of their churches to the new Catholic arrivals in their early impoverished days...
...A Mother in Christ, May 27, 1925...
...As Father T. J. Campbell, S. J., reminds us in his brief preface, we have to remember that this existence of toil and travel was almost entirely without present-day alleviations, that the journeys across the ocean were made, "not on the luxurious vessels of today, but on the clumsy slow-going and often dangerous craft of fifty years ago...
...What will happen then is a matter for speculation...
...There can be no doubt that her exile in France at the call of duty, and which only death was to end, was felt as a heavy cross, but to a fellow-religious commiserating her upon it, she contented herself by pointing to the walls of her room, with the remark: "This is my America...
...In the first days of her novitiate, she cut off her long fair hair without waiting for authorization, and was rebuked, tenderly we can well believe, for her headstrong action...
...Music is heralded as "the powerful but futile intermediary between being and knowing...
...They are taxed even now as the people of no other modern country are taxed, and the still greater burden of the war debts owed to foreign governments must be shouldered in ever heavier payments...
...In accord with the spirit of the Dominican order, Bishop Miles organized schools as rapidly as possible...
...It was with great difficulty that he found assistant pastors...
...In return will come a billion and a half from services, from emigrants, tourists, shipping, etc...
...Together with that of the canonized founder of the order, Mere Sophie Barat, which has already been the theme of an article in The Commonweal,* they constitute a perfect trilogy of the great teaching order from its inception in 1802 to our own day...
...Strange though it may seem to find a poet speculating about metaphysics, science and intuition, it is precisely the value of Valery that he posits, from a point aloof from modern academia, inquiries which need to be answered because they are so much of the texture of the modern mind...
...Missions were established, and in time, the beautiful cathedral of Saint Mary's, in Nashville, was completed...
...Here is a sorry state of affairs...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...They are all simply the separate domains in which the one central function of analysis can be exercised...
...About all this much needs to be said...
...It is all the more important a study because it gives also an estimate of Fascist Italy's economic future and it outlines the economic policies that will help most her international position...
...The misconception arises partly from an ignorance of early American history and partly from the fact that the Church, being a proscribed and persecuted body in all English-speaking nations throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was forced, at the beginning to avail itself of the missionary labors of devoted priests and nuns of other than English-speaking stock...
...Her large manufacturing industries import fuel and usually also raw materials...
...3.00...
...This, about which dozens of books are written and circulated in very limited editions, is credited with a "purification" of the more transcendental elements of human personality...
...This sad phase of her life ended in the now famous meeting with sainted Mere Barat and her coming to the convent of Sainte Marie d'en Haut as mistress of novices...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...Intelligence is conceived of as apart from the welter of emotions, practical business, appetites of every-day living...
...Father O'Daniel, historiographer of the Dominican order, has written a documented, complete, and well-illustrated biography of Bishop Richard Pius Miles, the pioneering bishop of Tennessee...
...The lives of these two saintly women, of whom the Frenchwoman died in America, the American in France, do something more than throw fresh light upon the missionary and pioneering work of the Church during the great westward migration...
...There were constant alerts from prairie fires...
...The "cathedral" at St...
...One can, however, know the phenomena of physical nature, with the help of mathematical representations...
...The desire to be sent upon the American mission is the theme of letter after...
...The present little book, which is charmingly outfitted, gathers together a number of his most significant papers...
...Her reply when promoted superioress of the decimated house four years later deserves textual quotation: "As a true American I promise to do my best...
...Next there is a transcendental discussion of Poe's Eureka, in which Valery's own metaphysical convictions are set forth—in the form of a rather cryptic methodology— and brought to this conclusion: "Just as the universe escapes our intuition, in the same way it is transcendent to our logic...
...A respect for the form of the Catholic religion and a "mysticism without God" are strange complements which this strenuous disciplinarian of the intelligence anneals in his "mind...
...Nicholas Hardey was a companion of Leonard Calvert, and landed with the Catholic pioneers of Maryland on Lady Day, 1634...
...poetry is the domain of its "mysticism...
...Yet all of these, including, in part, even the first, depend upon the action of other countries...
...The Duchesnes were a wealthy family of manufacturers, merchants, and lawyers, the "haute bourgeoisie," in a word, out of which nearly everything that is stable and commands respect in republican France has issued...
...For Paul Valery began life by accumulating a contempt for systematic metaphysics, in which he saw neither "permanence of viewpoint nor purity of method...
...Is a state-imposed and state-nurtured capitalism and a particularly gross form of nationalism the correct answer of Italy to the capitalist nationalism of her competitors and creditors...
...Under the economic system that has obtained, the country is crowded...
...Slowly aid came to him...
...The chief economic needs of Italy, Dr...
...Variety, by Paul Valery...
...There is, however, a less metaphysical aspect of the man which ought to convey an...
...At Kaskaskia, the children of the early French settlers "go to schools in which they hear not a word of religion, nor are they taught to read French...
...It is a deserving tribute to a great Dominican who quietly pursued his pioneering achievement in the face of all but insurmountable obstacles...
...THE development of almost any human project has, in its beginning at least, a dominant interest...
...They are, it appears, a forced growth and have depended upon the subsidy of a high tariff...
...He assumes that the reader knows that Italy's large industries are capitalistically owned and that much of the agricultural land is held by large landlords...
...Moreover, it is likely that business depression will follow the stabilization of the coinage...
...Cowley's careful translation of Variety is therefore likely to seem a little baffling...
...Her interest in America, amounting to an obsession, dated far back in the life of Mere Duchesne...
...Indeed the study leads to one question: What will happen to this agriculturally poor country, this artificially industrialized country, this tax-ridden country, when it begins to feel five years hence the greatly increased and ever-growing burden of the war debts, unrelieved then by current foreign borrowings...
...The very word "variety" is a symbol of that intense but disciplined discontent with which the mind must be satisfied as its "true trade...
...Certainly, this painstaking, thorough recital of the extensive progress of the Church in the wilderness of Tennessee, a recital which combines a popular style with fidelity to the historical method, is a worthy answer to Brother Azarias's complaint...
...Why...
...Indeed, except for the first, which may have another origin, the opposites of these policies are a normal consequence of the theories of extreme nationalism which Italy is now following...
...But there is more meat in his discussion of Blake, Shelley, and Wordsworth...
...Each year Italy imports foodstuffs...
...Italy is surrounded by selfish sovereign states...
...Practically the whole of her long life subsequently was spent in executive position, founding new houses or visiting those already established...
...George N. Shuster...
...we permit its deeds to be misrepresented, its honor to be stained, its glory to be tarnished...
...It is rather an account, not wholly comforting, of the voyage of an eminently modern European poet toward a satisfactory intellectual purpose...
...But this is a doubtful possibility...
...T. C...
...Clutton-Brock was perceptive and sound enough to come through that ordeal transfigured...
...There is Father De la Croix, a "strong character" who "passes rivers all but impassable by making his horse swim the flood," and the first native postulant, Mary Mullen who "understands only English and I despair of speaking to her...
...Here at Saint Thomas College there is an interesting episode in the arrival, for a two-years' residence, of Jefferson Davis, later President of the Confederacy...
...It will be a poor reader who fails to find The Father of the Church in Tennessee an engaging study...
...3.00...
...It is curious to observe that in spite of the vast number of good remarks Englishmen have made concerning these lyric masters, other good discussion is continuously appearing...
...To the man in the street to whom the contemporary—perhaps natural is more accurate—idiosyncrasies of Tennessee have become something of a commonplace, this biography will be a revelation of what the Church has accomplished in spite of the barriers which these idiosyncrasies interpose...
...The reason must be that an Englishman can live himself into his great literature, and thus realize whatever of magnitude abides within himself...
...When a communist revolution failed, a dictator came to power riding the waves of reaction...
...A little farther on, one finds a note on Pascal, written for La Revue Hebdomadaire on the occasion of the Pascal centenary and fated now (as then) to shock the reader...
...Here are sage letters, written originally for the London Athenaeum on the subject of the contemporary intellectual crisis...
...So I am allowed to indulge my longing," she writes in 1806...
...to spend her energies, which were quite as unconquerable as those of her stubborn forefathers, in succouring fugitive priests and procuring the consolations of religion for the dying, and generally in grappling with the moral debris which revolution never fails to leave in its wake...
...It has educated and stimulated millions of minds...
...John Mullanphy...
...From that point he proceeds to plumb Italy's manufacturies, agriculture, banking trade, and foreign debts chiefly under the aspect of their relations to the outside world...
...we let its sacred memory be enveloped in a growth of rank weeds that hide or efface its noble records...
...At Florissant "a single room serves for parlor, portry, classroom, dormitory, refectory, pupils' infirmary, and we have nine small children with us...
...Louis was "a log cabin, falling into ruins...
...Years ago, Brother Azarias, commenting on the inadequate manner in which Catholic history was treated, said: "The past is ours, but we treat it shamefully...
...New York: Longman's Green and Company...
...What he is studying is the effect of the new regime upon Italy's international economic position...
...Her efforts to revive her own order of Visitandines, though it was supported by the interest of an uncle, the great banker and minister, Casimir Perier, were brought to nothing by misunderstandings, material hardships, and even slander...
...Perhaps, for us, the most instructive incidents in Madame Hardey's life are those in which national characteristics of this saintly American nun were most manifest...
...It gives a definitive outline to much that had previously been left to legends, brief accounts, and memory...
...Yet the people are walled in by our immigration law and by straitened opportunities elsewhere...
...Finally, Valery has coined the term "pure poetry," and proved his mastery of verse-forms in which the element of beauty is respected for its own sake, regardless of content or didactic drift...
...This new epicureanism of the intelligence is, therefore, compact with peculiar equalizations...
...On his arrival he found that he was a prelate without a church, a rectory, or a priest...
...R A McGowan...
...The long overland journeys that this work entailed were punctuated with voyages overseas, to Rome, to Cuba and Chile, to the mother-house in Paris, together with conferences, debates, momentous decisions, and even law-suits as the order struggled through difficulties and opposition, at times from quarters where the loyalty of its daughters had not looked for it...
...immediately satisfactory impression to the American reader...
...Obviously, however, it is narrowed in range by too great an attention to quantitative analysis...
...Our perfection,' she used to say, 'is to be found in the observance of the Rule and not outside of it.1 " Her faculty for grappling with Tegal detail earned the remark from a famous lawyer that "if Madame Hardey were a partner in my firm I should be a rich man...
...and flickering, smoky, pitch-dropping torchbaskets, noisy shouts, and the blast of a bugle or the clanging of a bell were the only warnings at night that they were in danger of collision...
...Father O'Daniel, in his chronicle of this building up of the Church, gives credit to the loyal families who came to their first prelate's assistance...
...The Hardeys were of English stock...
...If they shape the minds of a few readers, it is not merely for their own use...
...The following years were a trial which sorely tested the character of the Bishop, but from which he emerged in the end with his courage and devoutness rewarded...
...His comment, in the London Times and elsewhere, was therefore distinguished by a round fulness of view which often proved valuably larger than the hasty conclusions of his slapdash contemporaries...
...The records of pioneers are robust...
...From the historical point of view, the two latter books, now noticed, are a contribution of inestimable value, if only because the phase of our national life they cover is one none too familiar to American Catholics and is only coming into full light as interest in Americana of the pioneer period becomes general...
...Perhaps no two lives taken in a single religious order and during a consecutive period could better epitomize than theirs the one outstanding fact that makes so puzzling a paradox for a generation that has lost hold of the 64i very notion of universality—namely, the existence, side by side, of a spiritual communion that takes no heed of nationality, and of national loyalties that need only make their claims apparent to have them honored...
...So, too, is much of the early history of this country, which to a considerable extent is associated with the early history of the Church...
...Essays on Literature and Life, by A. Clutton-Brock...
...The very name of 'Indian' sent a thrill through Josephine...
...The child who was born on December 8, 1809, grew to girlhood amid the easy, patriarchal life of the well-to-do planter...
...2.00...
...To anyone interested in the difficulties attendant on the missionary work of the Church in the South today, this account of the life and times of Bishop Miles will be compellingly informative...
...courageous priests volunteered...
...The strong probability is, therefore, that Italy's deficit will continue, and, it is presumed, will show first in the failure to pay the heavy future instalments on the war debts—precisely those instalments which are due the United States...
...Charles if Missouri on entering the Union would choose that town for its seat of government...
...We have already quoted her answer on assuming her first office...
...He offers it not so much as a doctrine...
...643 Italy's International Economic Position, by Constantine E. McGuire...
...Bitterly hostile to autocracy of any sort, this social category took up the fight for local rights after the provincial nobility had been crushed or seduced, and were found, quite naturally, in the forefront of the Tiers Etat in 1789...
...To reach Nashville, he had to travel overland on horseback...
...The balance of foreign trade has been against Italy continuously...
...At St...
...Nevertheless, seen from Valery's point of view, these seeming divergencies are really unified...
...Toward none of them, except possibly the first, and that without great hope, is the Fascist policy tending...
...3.50...
...The stories of a missionary from Louisiana who visited Grenoble during the American Revolution made a lasting impression upon her budding mind...
...He talks of a few abstract themes, like Pure Literature...
...Because if modern romantic, democratic civilization continues to weaken the power of the European intellectual instrument for the sake of stuffing the average person with easily digestible recipes, the great minds of the past "will no longer be understood" and western civilization, which is "defined only by the desires and the amplitude of homo europaeus's will," must surrender to larger mass energies existing outside...
...Valery suggests a discipline which will create an intellectual instrument conscious of its supreme value, content to exist for its own sake, indifferent to the material world, which it transcends, scientific, 542 mathematical, poetic, mystical even, but not philosophical...
...McGuire discusses...
...New York: Harcourt Brace and Company...
...We neglect it...
...Finally, there is a highly remarkable "introduction" to the method of Leonardo da Vinci, which raises so many questions that a book would not suffice to elaborate and discuss them...
...She was "very guarded in countenancing singular and extraordinary practices of devotion...
...The book, in addition, is a mine of carefully authenticated facts...
...In its uniqueness, his life suggests that slight exaggeration of fact that furnishes the high spots of fiction...
...It must be confessed, however, that he was sorely tried in the administration of his diocese, for other prelates in more affluent districts were not above taking priests from his mere handful...
...she is pursued by insistent and capable private and governmental creditors...
...The woman who, under God's providence, was to solve them and to carry on Mother Duchesne's work was American by birth, ancestry, and character...
...Nevertheless, the assumptions upon which Christianity is based are untenable because the mind is incapable of knowing being, and because the Act of Faith can never be more than an intuition and, therefore, matter of a moment...
...There are also ample accounts of the great tact that was exercised by Bishop Miles in the face of the opposition furnished by the Know-nothing element of Nashville...
...McGuire has done an extraordinarily able piece of work...
...Of Christianity he says that it "proposes the subtlest, the most important, and even the most fertile problems to the mind...
...You do not deprive me of the hope that my wishes may one day be fulfilled...
...But it is not this that Dr...
...an Irish gentleman who had seen service in the French army and then had come to America...
...THE lives of Mother Philippine Duchesne and Mother Aloysia Mary Hardey, religious of the Sacred Heart, are something more than conventional hagiography...
...Valery's rarified positivism has the charm, sobriety and value, though also the aridity, of the finest strain in modern French idealism...
...The first Bishop of Tennessee provides an extraordinary subject for study...
...letter that passes between the eager enthusiast and the saint who was now her superior in religion...
...Valery is an intellectual whose effectiveness does not depend upon a display of cleverness...
...In the bishop's "palace" one small room served as "dormitory, refectory and study" for five invalid priests...
...Italy will owe the world two billion gold lire a year for interest charges and for the deficit in foreign trade...
...translated by Malcolm Cowley...
...He had helped to win the battle of New Orleans" and had offered the federal authorities to build a capitol at St...
...she meets the competition of the industrialized and commercialized countries whom she has imitated...
...One need not read far in Dr...
...The Hardey family emigrated to Louisiana soon after its purchase...
...We must be thankful," he says, "for the difficult authors of our time...
...IF YOU wish to know Italy's present economic position in relation to the rest of the world, you may read it here, analyzed and charted and amply documented...
Vol. 5 • April 1927 • No. 23
