the market price of midnight oil

Irish Jesuit Province

The Market Price of Midnight OilAuthor(s): John HannonSource: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 38, No. 445 (Jul., 1910), pp. 404-408Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20502847 .

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[ 404 i

THE MARKET PRICE OF MIDNIGHT OIL

By JOHN HANNON

S OME years ago, a literary critic, dealing in the columns of the Saturday Review, with a still lucrative novel called The Master Christian, began by remarking (with equal

nonchalance and truth) that its abundance of incorrect foreign dialogue showed nothing to be much worse than the French of Marie, except perhaps the Italian of Corelli. He then gave a brief contemptuous digest of the six-shilling sacrilege before

him, in which the figure of our Blessed Lord, re-incarnate as an infant in the nineteenth century, is made the pivot of much offensively romantic religiosity. The reviewer concluded by saying that he had spoken of the book to an aged French Cure at Dinard. " Ah, mon ami," the old man had said with a sigh, " there are more ways than one of selling Christ in the market place."

We live in times when, as Mr. Barry Pain is fond of putting it, one cannot throw a pebble down a crowded street anywhere

without hitting somebody who has written, is writing, or wants to write a novel. The pitifully low prices paid for midnight oil and daily bread to Catholic writers, as indicated by so charming and justly popular an author as Father Joseph Guinan in the June IRISH MONTHLY, have therefore at any rate one compen sation to the Church at large in all countries where the English language is spoken. They effectually make the crime the Cure so vividly described, a game not worth the candle-or the oil.

There is, there can be, no literary simony in our midst. In the now rarer " No Popery " purlieus of Fleet Street, many rather amusing rascals are said to thrive by certain forms of it. I certainly knew one man myself who simultaneously wrote extremely clever, quite inoffensive songs for the music-hall stage, and manuscript sermons " to order " for Anglican clergy

men! Another acquaintance, at one and the same time, was editing an illustrated paper which Messrs. W. H. Smith & Sons had to boycott at their book-stalls on the score of impropriety, and an Evangelical religious weekly. Worse cases might be cited, but these will suffice. The present poverty of the Catholic press is more than a disinfectant. It is an insecticide.

To employ a better figure, the extreme severity of the Catholic



THE MARKET PRICE OF MIDNIGHT OIL 405

literary novitiate weeds out all postulants persuaded that regular means of livelihood await experienced use of the Catholic pen in Catholic prose fiction.

It is well to write out these words in full: " Catholic prose fiction." It was really around all they signify, and little more, that the recent American " Catholic Authorship " war was

waged. To plain people in the States, as to plain people fre

;quenting the Carnegie Libraries now dotting these realms, the novel is literature, and Literature is the Novel. There, as here, however, studies from real life enjoy much of the popularity of romance, when presented in dramatic and pictorial guise, with plenty of dialogue and action. So completely did most of the Transatlantic combatants take literature to be synonymous with fiction, that a highly important, if obvious, point was entirely ignored by both parties, including of course the one in sorest need of its aid. It may readily be condensed into a short paragraph, as follows:

English-speaking authors who can lend the charm of literary skill to Catholic biographies, histories, books of travel, philo sophical, scientific, and theological manuals, devotional treatises7 lives of the saints, and especially prayer-books, as a general rule have no cause whatever to complain of an indifferent public, or unremunerating publishers. In every walk of life, there are whole strata of the pious faithful who want such books, and are wvilling to pay full prices for them. Our people have been educated to want them. They have not been educated to want that invaluable thing, bright Catholic fiction; most miserably of all, they have not been educated to need the Catholic news paper, magazine, or review.

There we have in a nutshell the present-day smfasse of

Catholic editors and authors. Immense injustice is being done to both. The best, indeed the only comfort, is that their poverty keeps humbugs out of the ranks of the Church's literary zouaves up and down the British Empire and America. The regiment has not rations enough to attract, unenthusiastic rogues-mere camp followers like the French scamp who drewv thousands of francs fifteen years ago in Paris, for his cock-and-bull stories of a

Masonic and diabolically possessed Mrs. Diana Vaughan Harris, of the Isle of Ceylon, where the tea comes from, but where Diana was proved by Missionary Fathers on the spot not to exist, and never to have existed. Her inventor, seeing the game was up, promptly deserted to his friends the enemy, and wrote cynical articles in anti-clerical journals on the gullibility of Catholic



406 THE IRISH MONTHLY

France. The unhappy man had long rendered seemingly good service to the Catholic cause with his pen, before his dominant

motive was rudely laid bare. Hence the credence at first given

by many to the " Diana Vaughan " fabrications. The spoliation of the French Church will produce saints.

The meagre profits on Catholic midnight oil will soon leave only apostles to write in English for our press. These unintended consummations are consoling: not so their martyrising causes. The Briand confiscation was, and is, the third of the four sins which await not judgment, but cry to Heaven for vengeance. The Catholic editor, one hastens to add, is not formally guilty of the crime next in order whenever he pays a plumber's weekly

wages for ten days' literary work. The sin will not be laid to the poor man's door unless he maintains the present oil-tariff

when the eighty per cent. of reading Catholics who nowadays never subscribe to Catholic periodicals, begin to do so, collec tively and with regularity. Even on their heads, it is hard to

see how any malison may roost. They know not what they do. They are not consciously defrauding labourers of their wages. Nor is perhaps even one of them aware that he is defrauding his ,own soul: starving his memory of Catholic ammunition, his intellect and will of food and medicine.

The vast literary and even financial possibilities of Catholic

periodical publications in the British Empire and America have never failed to impress Protestant men of letters enormously. Take the words put by Browning into the mouth of " his Bishop Blougram." WVe need not halt here to denounce that ignorant caricature of Cardinal Wiseman as such. The speech of the puppet-prelate to the other puppet, Mr. Gigadibs the " inter viewer," shows clearly at any rate what the poet thought the Catholic selling-price of studious oil to be, so long ago as the restoration of the English Hierarchy in I850. He evidently considered Catholic editors to have the long purse to which they

were even then entitled, counting Catholic noses at home and abroad-a fiscal condition as unknown in I85o as in i910, the Diamond Jubilee year of the Province of Wpstminster:

You, Gigadibs, who, thirty years of age, Write statedly for Blackwood's Magazine, Believe you see two poilits in Hamlet's soul Unseized by the Germans yet-which view you'll print Meantime the best you have to show being still That lively lightsome article we took Almost for the true Dickens-what's the name ? " The Slum and Cellar-or Whitechapel life

Limn'd after dark ! " It made me laugh, I know, And pleased a month, and brought you in ten pcunds.



THE MARKET PRICE OF MIDNIGHT OIL 407

-Success I recognise and compliment, And therefore give you, if you please, three words

(The card and pencil-scratch is quite enough) Which whether here, in Dublin, or New York, Will get you, prompt as- at my eyebrow's wink,

Such terms as never you aspired to get In all our own reviews and some not ours.

Go write your lively sketches-be the first

"Blougram, or the Eccentric Confidence

Over his wine so smiled and talked his hour Sylvester Blougram, styled in partibus Episcopus, necnon-(the deuce knows what It's changed to by our novel hierarchy)

With Gigadibs the literary man. Who played with spoons, explored his plate's design, And ranged the olive stones about its edge

While the great bishop rolled him out his mind.

The last eight lines do not, perhaps, bear very directly on our subject. To me, however, they seem to show that in sixty years Protestant disdain of our hierarchy and respect for our press have interchanged places. To-day the candid and edu cated Protestant Englishman pays some tribute of attention and honour to the Catholic English Hierarchy. He denies it to the Catholic English Press, as a whole. Richard Holt Hutton a friendly soul, whom Newman called " always my friend as a journalist," used to marvel why English Catholics had no organ

worthy of the name, when, if they chose, they could produce one of the ablest weekly journals in the Empire, merely by staffing it with the Catholics he personally knew, who were leading contributors to the secular Press.

Leaving strict journalism aside for the moment, and also its cousin-german, successful serial fiction, what Trollope said

of literature proper as a calling remains true for all writers, of any or no religion. It is a " good walking-stick, but a bad crutch." The pursuit of Catholic literature should be made a

much better walking-stick than it is, in English-speaking countries. It is now a serviceable one in Germany, in Austro-Hungary, and (with reservations) in France. Let us try to imitate the timely measures of Catholics in the two strong central Empires, and not copy the tactics of those in the dying Republic, who have bought their fighting writing-men good blackthorns excellent blackthorns for defence, attack, and support-when ? The day after the fair.

If an unprepossessing lamb, incurably addicted to literary pursuits, yet fully conscious of the lowliness of his woolly estate



408 THE IRISH MONTHLY

in the flock of Peter, may be suffered to bleat one suggestion, here it is: Might not solicitous shepherds hold council con cerning the advisability of inserting, in all future impressions of approved Catechisms, a short eliciting question, with its answer, stating in clearest terms the duty now incumbent on all paper buying Catholics, of supporting the Catholic press ? The

medicine, at least, could do no possible harm.

THE VOICE OF THE PLANE

(AT NAZARETH)

To and fro, to and fro, I move with the tireless Hand,

Marvelling that it should be so, Lord of the sea and land !

Many a traveller passes by With look of proud disdain

For-God knows the reason why The house is small and plain;

Atnd they wrto pause to look within See only workers three,

WVhere busily the wheel doth spin, The wood curl merrily.

Content with small and simple things Are they who labour here;

The rest that quiet evening brings, The mother's song of cheer.

Oh, down, down, through the centuries, I would the scene might go,

To those who, seeking wealth and ease, Will crush their brothers so;

To those who toil; I dream they call, In curses deep and dread,

Unto the Lord, the Lord of all, Who, too, has earned His bread.

EMILY LOGUE.



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