I Have Met the Archbishop

...I had taken him for a Brazilian--his Portuguese was indeed perfect, but I was almost sure he could speak French, as most educated Brazilians do...

...In this form an abundant literature survives...

...Middle Irish leaves traces on literature down to the sixteenth century...

...The cooking for all is done at a central kitchen, and each institution sends for its own share of food...

...the others are scattered along the banks of the rios, the rivulets and the lagunas...

...The school, the boys' orphanage and the Fathers' convent are grouped together...

...An eminent English literary critic contends that there is little of any consequence in English literature which came in earlier than the Conquest...

...There he has had the opportunity to give full expression to his activity...

...It is a disease which is disconcerting, disabling and pauperizing...

...He marries the young couples, baptizes the children and hears confession...

...We shall see that the overthrow of the Gaelic order at the beginning of the seventeenth century also was reflected in philology...

...Should not social and mental welfare workers search for a means of lessening the untold misery which it causes...

...The state which establishes a means whereby the victims of sleeping sickness could be cared for over a length of time sufficient to study the disease and help the patient, will take first place in the fight against a tremendous and baffling problem...

...In I9o 3, after the law was passed depriving clerical congregations of the privilege of teaching, my bishop, then Father Barrat, came to Mangos on the Amazon...

...Besides agriculture, the Fathers have developed industry as well...

...Only after a while did I notice that his straight black cassock was lined with a narrow purple braidm and I knew that he was a bishop...

...I cannot end without disciosing my bishop's one temporal wish: it is to have one flight in an airplane l For Saint Michael, the great archangel who had wings to fly with, is his patron saint, and Monsenhor would like to borrow those wings for one day...

...At sunrise all are up and they bathe in the rio-for Amazonians bathe at least twice a day...

...After dinner I introduced myself to Monsenhor Barrat...

...And one must not forget to mention the most indefatigable worker in that spot of refreshing and homelike culture: the little donkey, with one broken ear, who carries the water to sprinkle the beds...

...My bishop is still working, struggling over his problems in a region 1,5oo miles up the Amazon, which is called there the Solim~os...

...Tell6, the big town and the bishop's see, has 1,2oo souls...

...Yet they scheme-Forever crafty, eager to regain Some old abandoned garden or redeem The winding beauty of a country lane...

...He is the indispensable character at all convents, a brother beast of the one who saw the little Child born in the manger at Bethlehem, or of that other who carried the Man-God to Jerusalem...

...For him, English culture is a recent growth of continental origin...

...Year after year Monsenhor Barrat tries new species: lettuce and carrots, potatoes and green peas grow in every season, and the sisters have roses and carnations as well as the wild jasmine and orchids of the forest to decorate the altar...

...Indian houses, built of dry palm, are left open, for the natives like to have the cattle come and graze even inside the houses--it saves them the work of cleaning up...

...four miles from that village he found a tiny house-the mission--in the midst of a small clearing in the jungle where the Teff6 joins the SolimS.os...

...The girls and boys are taught lessons and given a trade...

...A considerable part of the clearing is kept in grass, for a large herd of cattle graze there...

...It is those personal gifts--the magnetism of the man blended with the consoling teachings of the Church he upholds--that gain him the respect and love of his humble flock as well as of those in power...

...Unless one happens to be a member of the family in which epidemic encephalitis has found a victim, it is not likely that his attention has been brought to the inadequacy of the means available in our public institutions for the care and study of these cases...

...Hence my bishop now has over two hundred and fifty people he must care for daily, body and soul--a real colony...

...He was born in Clermont Ferrant in Auvergne, and is a Father of the Holy Ghost...

...Many others have never been recognized, for the disease presents most variegated symptoms...

...It is bordered on the northwest by Colombia, on the southwest by Peru, and is the largest of the eight prelatures of the state of Amazonas...

...but he looks back in his literature to remote times and almost to racial origins, without interruption of vision...

...Because there is inadequate provision for study and hospitalization of such cases, and because the mental aberration is not serious enough to class them as insane, these people float about, a burden to themselves, their families and associates...

...While we take note of these linguistic periods, we must avoid the notion that any break in literary tradition is implied...

...At the present time there are in the United...

...He dresses in a plain black or white cassock, often without the purple braid or sash...

...Whether the city will greet one from the top of a cliff or from the water level depends upon whether one arrives at Teff6 in the dry or in the wet season...

...but Modern Irish, dropping the ancient pronunciation and syntax, and adopting the later vocabulary, appears as early as the fourteenth...

...The cabins opened onto the deck, and in the centre a place had been cleared of partitions and there the long dining tables were set...

...They are bold, my sisters," said the bishop...

...It was an operation that a surgeon would have hesitated to undertake...

...He journeyed to his native land for the plans, and with them he brought back cement and bricks...

...on my left was a Brazilian general, on my right a colonel and across from me was a tall, white-haired priest...

...The rest of the population is made up of small Indian tribes, usually of from thirty to fifty members, who wander from place to place amid the mato...

...For many years he was assistant director at the college of Beauvais...

...They serve dinner of fish and farinha on the wooden platform in front of the house, amid gnats and mosquitoes...

...They would grow The way they did a thousand years ago...

...All day long they go sheltered by the small roof of dry palm that covers the centre of the native canoe...

...When, in I9Io, Monsenhor Barrat was made bishop of Teff6, he found a small village on the Rio Teff6, which forms there a wide and beautiful lake...

...Possession The fields resent intrusion...

...The kitchen garden, close to the town, has almost every plant and flower of Europe...

...On the contrary, the whole Modern period is the direct descendant and heir of the Middle and the Old...

...The little colony is made up of ex-pupils of the Fathers' school at Teff6...

...To many victims it is, in truth, a "living death...

...Then he celebrates mass amid the mato, his holy stone set on a crude plank or table, and everyone receives Holy Communion--which they have, perhaps, not done for a year or more...

...Old Irish has a considerable vocabulary, inflections, infixed pronouns, and a neuter gender, now obsolete...

...The fields resent intrusion...

...Much of the time Monsenhor Barrat travels...

...The prelature apostolic of Teff6--for in mission countries a bishopric is called a prelature--contains 172,5oo acres and is entirely covered by mato--the Brazilian jungle--and rivers...

...Because these residual effects are of such long duration, the number of individuals incapacitated by the disease increases each year...

...The final revolution, however, has implied no greater changes than have occurred in the writing of English since the days of Milton...

...I saw one make an emergency operation and save the man's life...

...Butm"We get very little income from our dairy," said the bishop, "for we give much milk to the children and the sick, and very few of our clients are rich enough to pay us anything for it...

...Many adults likewise suffer prolonged disability and peculiarities in behavior following an attack...

...At night they stop at a small dry palm hut, built on spikes planted in the mud along the river bank...

...This is a transitional form of the language...

...hardly anyone Would think a meadow restless...

...The ceremony ends with the confirmation of those who are prepared to receive the sacrament...

...These are written in what we call Old Irish: a form of the language only intelligible today to the erudite...

...They are, too often, without sympathetic understanding, have no hope for the future, and end in despair and sometimes suicide...

...If some state gives adequate attention to the disease, other states will surely follow...

...They radiate a peace, a serenity, the spell of which one cannot cast aside once one has absorbed it...

...Here conditions are anything but conducive to improvement...

...The old house built by the first missionaries, with just one room set apart as a chapel, is still there and in it live at all times two or three Fathers...

...They operate a sawmill and carpentry shop, and they even have a printing press where the monthly bulletin of the prelature is printed...

...They weave A tapestry of vines and throw it over The fences that are near...

...I left Para on a broad river boat, that old-fashioned mode of traveling which retains all the romance and charm of a country as wild and immense as the Amazon...

...Last year he spent ten months visiting just one of his six parishes...

...But turtles are not so abundant now, and the present menu consists mostly of fish which is plentiful in the rio, of cereals grown on the plantations, of eggs, milk and poultry...

...They work the fields and plantations: they care for the cattle of the Fathers, and they are paid good wages...

...It extends along both banks of the Solim~os, and includes the territories of the rios Jurua, Japura and Purus and their million tributaries...

...The mission also keeps a chicken and guinea-hen farm...

...He also exploits rubber and castanhas in the forest...

...He said to me with his quiet, sweet smile: "But 422 THE COMMONWEAL August 28, i929 am French...

...But it is not so...

...He travels by motor launch up the rios, and when they are too shallow--or when he encounters waterfalls, which are frequent in his territory--he makes use of native August 28, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 423 canoes paddled by Indians...

...This disease, perhaps better known as sleeping sickness, has a high death rate, is probably contagious and carries serious after-effects...

...Monsenhor Barrat has imported and experimented with every cereal, textile and fruit on his plantations...

...The turtles were caught in season, 500 at a time, and stored in pits, to be taken out when needed...

...But the small clearing has grown to many acres, fenced off with barbed wire from the jungle...

...The church of Tell6 is old and small, but--again just like Miss Cather's character--my bishop is building his cathedral...

...These sleeping sickness cases in the past have involved only a small portion of the population, and many were not recognized until they had already become chronic...

...I do not think a different sort of man could have accomplished the things that Monsenhor Barrat has accomplished...

...Jean Marie Latour, bishop of Santa F6, appeared to me as Michel Alfred Barrat, bishop of Tell6...

...Both were Auvergnats, both were missionaries...

...Only the corroding work of time upon language obliges him to surrender to specialists his older literary possessions...

...With the social changes attendant on the overthrow of the Danes, Middle Irish arises...

...Whether he be right or wrong in this, it is obvious that England has been nationally articulate in literature only since the renaissance...

...the sick and the crippled receive treatment and care...

...These waterways are indeed the only means of transportation...

...And thereafter I sat many hours on deck by his side, while in front of us passed fantastic expanses of water, or jungle so thick it seemed an actual wall of green...

...The seminary is built right on the cliff and is the most imposing structure of the town...

...It is confined to no country and has spread over the world like the biblical plagues...

...For Teff6 has a splendid poultry farm, in addition to the poultry at the mission, and Teff6 lake holds many ducks, partly tamed by the care of an old crippled Father of whom they are the pride...

...Because no special facilities have been provided for the care of these unfortunates, many of them are confined in reform schools...

...With the last rays of sunlight, all hang their hammocks under the roof--the bishop's among his hosts...

...But it was an emergency case, for the Brazilian law does not allow doctors graduated in other countries to practise in Brazil mand we have no doctor in Teff6...

...The same phenomenon has been repeated in our own days, when Canon Peter O'Leary led our contemporary writers in a fresh resort to the speech of the people as the source of literary renaissance...

...The entire Indian family greets their prelate with respect and love--native Amazonians are pious...

...By the time the bishop has put on his vestments, the neighbors of the forest have gathered...

...The post-mortem table, however, should not be the best diagnostic table...

...Many may think that one of refined tastes, of culture, of aristocratic bearing, as is the bishop of Teff6, is wasting his gifts among the Indians...

...It takes my bishop six years to visit his entire prelature...

...We pass over that archaic dialect traceable in the Ogham inscriptions, and find the beginnings of our surviving literature in texts that come down from the eighth and ninth centuries...

...GERTRUDE RYDER BENNETT...

...They spin their own cotton...

...In I924, eight Franciscan Sisters of Mary came, and they have added a girls' school, an orphanage for girls, sewing and weaving ateliers and a hospital...

...It contains seventytwo native houses...

...Miss Cather's bishop did his work some eighty years ago, and died...

...for early Modern yielded place to late Modern Irish in days when, with the overthrow of the Gaelic schools, academic diction was abandoned, and the speech of the people adopted as the literary language...

...He is now praying each day that I may sometime come back to the Amazon in a large seaplane, and land on Teff6 lake to give him his wish...

...It will be a great monument to the glory of God and to Tell6, which is now a citymalmost...

...As far back as I885, the archbishop of Man~ios had asked the Holy Ghost Fathers to come and establish a mission up the SolimS.os, and in 1897 a few of them came and formed a mission for the Indians of the Japura...

...The mato is as eternal--it seems--as are his faith, his hope and his charity...

...I HAVE MET THE ARCHBISHOP By J. DESBRIERE IRWIN HAT sympathetic character of Willa Cather's charming book, Bishop Jean Marie Latour, is still alive: I have met him on the Amazon...

...motherless little ones from far away in the mato find there a mother's love in the good sisters...

...WHEN SLEEP IS SICKNESS By ADRIAN SCOLTEN N THE state of Wisconsin there are, at the present time, over eight hundred cases of epidemic encephalitis...

...When you leave A wagon rut they fill it full of clover And buttercups and Queen Anne's lace...

...I sat at the captain's table...

...both had built a diocese out of a wilderness...

...It is otherwise with the Gael...

...The same can be said to be true of most of the other great modern nations...

...Twenty years ago the main food was turtle meat...

...Both, I am sure, had Monsenhor Barrat's kind, almost youthful, smile, his straightforward blue eyes, his white hair, his aristocratic countenance, his utter simplicity--for he aever wears his gold chain or cross except in the performance of religious duties, and even his episcopal amethyst ring he keeps in his pocket, taking it out only when he believes it necessary...

...He now successfully grows corn, rice, macaxera (yucca), bananas, coffee, sugar-cane, caj.~, cocoa and cotton...

...The cows are milked and cheese and butter are made...

...As the Danish overthrow brought in literary Middle Irish, so the resurgence of the nation against the Anglo-Normans brought in literary Modern Irish...

...August 28, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 421 growth of the Irish language and literature...

...This vast area is populated by i2o,ooo people...

...A meadow looks So lazy as it stretches in the sun, So peaceful with its grazing cows, its brooks, Its languid willows...

...It comes through nobody's fault, as insidiously as a cold or the influenza and doubtless by the same portal of entry...

...They make their own sugar out of their own sugar-cane...

...The church is to be called SS.ota Teresa, and the first stone is to be laid this summer...

...In an investigation made in Germany by Hess, it was found that every patient examined from one to two years after the initial attack still had serious physical and nervous disorders...

...Many of the behavior disorders which have amazed and shocked the public mind in children of good mentality and apparently good home training, can be traced to attacks of acute epidemic encephalitis...

...Great as is this accomplishment, it is, nevertheless, little in comparison with what my bishop has done at Teff6 proper, where twenty years ago there was nothing...