Cardinal Logue: Another View

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVI, Issue 23, 11 June 1908, Page 9

Cardinal Logue: Another View

Cardinal Newman says of a rather numerous class of travellers that ' they find themselves now in Europe, now in Asia ; they are in the marts of commerce, or amid the islands of the South ; they gaze on Pompey's Pillar or on the Andes ; and nothing . which meets them carries them forward or backward to any idea beyond itself. Nothing has a . drift or relation ; nothing has a history or a promise '. To this class belonged the American dame who remembered Brussels only 'a.s ' the place where we Had those perfectly lovely sausages, \ One meets so often with this class of re-, turned globetrotter. Their pell-mell rush through distant lands leaves only a blurred impression upon the mind, and their lessons of ' sight-seeing ' are crystallised in odd and undigested scraps of guide-book talk and in ' disjointed photographs of * places where we have been '. The rush, and the hurry, and_ v the prejudice, and the unreflective spirit, and the. lack of the faculty \ of observation, prevent their either noting, so to sp£ak, the text of travel or putting a mental commentary to it. So they bring their bucket (to wit, their mind) to the great springing well, and "they come back with it as empty as it was before. , * It is a pleasure to revert-from these c returned empties ' to such a keen and observant writer as the 1 New ' Zealand Journalist ' who is confiding to the .

' Otago Daily Times ' . his experiences of travel in the G-reen Isle. At present we are concerned with only one observation of his, which has a special interest at the present moment. ' Looking ', says he in the third of •his articles, ' at . the desperate condition of the country and its people, one is constrained to ask himself whether it is at all so very singular . that even a man like Cardinal Logue, in moments of pardonable despair. and exasperation, feels himself impelled to say foolish and unmeaning things, just because they accord with his reasonable anger and represent the measure of his indignation against a system of -government which has converted his country into" a- ruin. Does it suggest itself to no onejihat the spirit which the contemplation of those wrongs has evoked would, -under better and more favorable national conditions, have easily and gracefully attuned itself to speech of another kind, in^ which gratitude and loyalty to England and glory and pride in the Empire would" have been the Jburden ? It should suggest such thoughts. But perhaps " it doesn't, not to many, at least, among the world-wide British audience at whom the Irish Cardinal, in no complaisant mood, flung his defiance and his anathema.' The writer assumes (perhaps for the sake of argument) that CanftnaT Logue used the words attributed to him by the American interviewer. It is, nevertheless, a very big assumption. Zola Official French atheism has just been dancing and singing around its latest golden caif— Emile Zola. The remains of the defunct pornographer— of the apostle of the-^-stye and of literary filth unspeakable— now lie beneath Tissot's beautiful dome, in the crypt of the desecrated church of St. Genevieve, Paris/ Beside. if lies the mouldering dust of Rousseau and Voltaire— par nobile fratrum, the former of whom sent his illegitimate offspring to the Foundling Asylum, and the latter of whom was sentenced for a grievous crime against morality. Such be the gods of the new French Israel. The crypt of one desecrated church, the bells of another, have been dishonored by association with the dead purveyor who has given the name of Zolaesque to all that is most coarse and foetid in literature. The London ' Evening Telegraph ' tells as follows the story of the bells :— IWe have grown accustomed to the campaign against religion in France and its various manifestations. We have seen the Chamber of Deputies remove the motto " Dieu protege la France"' (God protect France !•) ' from the rim of the' twenty-franc pieces. Law courts Tiave been stripped of their religious emblems. The Archbishop's' palace in Paris has been turned into the Ministry of Labor, presided over by a gentleman with a profound contempt for the Church. What were once seminaries are now cavalry barracks. All this is deplorable, and it is not far-fetched to imagine that the spring cleaning v which has been found necessary in certain of the places of amusement in Paris would have been avoided if the nation had , remained true to its old reverence for the Church. It has remained for Suresnes to commit the finaj. culminating act of. desecration, when the parish church was demolished, and the bells were melted down and transmogrified into a bust of Zola, of all people. When- the bust was unveiled the speakers'" alluded with satisfaction " to the use that had been 'made 'of the ancient religious symbols. so the process goes on. We shall shortly have & reproduction of the Joan of - Arc fetes with the religious element, which played so vital a part in her wpnderful career, carefully excluded. Our recent friendship with the country increases the pang with which such things are witnessed.' We lay two little withered blooms upon the dead pornographer^s grave ; they may serve as Twain's small j bottle of eau-de-cologne did in the glue factory — not to cure the stench, but in a very- small way to moderate it. In his young and unspoiled days Zola wrote at least "one novel that might have been read as a textbook in a convent boarding-school. That was before he slithered down the slippery slope of Avernus. May

that far-off good be. imputed to him unto justice. The other withered bud that we lay among the wreaths of deadly nightshade is culled from his later life— of some ten years ago. A Joolishly impulsive young German girl, who was being ' finished off ' before l coming out ', wrote to Zola, Hauptmann, Ibsen, and a few other authors of. note or notoriety, asking each of them the selfsame question : ' Which of your works are suitable for young ladies to read ? ' All of them but one snubbed the precipitate young Teuton by not deigning to reply. The exception was Zola. ' Young, ladies ', he wrote, ' ought to read only what their parents allow them to read. An author has no right to specify to .them' which of his books they should or should not be. permitted to peruse '. Going to Zola for moral counsel reminds one of the Western Celtic proverb about going to the goat's house for wool. But the advice was good, even though it came from a very queer and unexpected quarter. According to Chesterfield, there is scarcely anybody who is absolutely good for nothing. And in a similar way, there is, among human beings, probably nobody who is, like a demon, without some streak or patch of good in his composition—not even the latest demigod of French atheistic worship.