number of this REVIEW for October, 1868. Perhaps he will be more disposed to do so, when we inform him that an extremely small portion of it was contributed by the present writer. He will find that the facts stated in it bear very materially on his practical conclusion. And we would specially draw his attention to those in pp. 424-5; which were furnished by a very able and thoughtful convert, whose Oxford career is quite recent.

ART. VII. THE LIFE OF F. FABER.

The Life and Letters of Frederick William Faber, D.D., Priest of the Oratory of S. Philip Neri. By JOHN EDWARD BOWDEN, of the same Congregation. Richardson: Derby. 1869.

NE of many notes which mark the present Catholic revival in England as from God, not from man, is this, that He has raised up, in a way so unlikely and unexpected, instruments so remarkable and admirable to labour in it. Future times, we cannot doubt, will most strongly feel this. In the present day we cannot speak freely upon it, because, thank God, several of them are still spared to us. But from time to time the thought is specially forced upon us; and it is so at this moment, when we once more look back upon the life, labours, and death of Frederick William Faber.

He was emphatically a man-one of a very small number-with whom it was quite impossible, at any period of his life, to have personal intercourse without feeling not only that one had never before met any man like him, but that there never can have been any such. Alas! how impossible must his own task have appeared to Father Faber's biographer when he sat down, pen in hand, to draw, as well as he could, the portrait of his beloved and departed father. Few things are more remarkable in the volume before us than Father Faber's descriptions of nature. It is impossible to read them without feeling how much more was seen in mountains, forests, lakes, seas, and cities by the gifted eye of the Christian poet than would have been visible to those of us ordinary mortals. But this is not all. What we feel still more deeply is that even his almost unrivalled gift of language is powerless to convey to others more than a very small portion of what he saw and felt. And yet any natural scene is much less

complex and varied than the outward shadow of the soul of a highly-gifted man as it is reflected in his countenance. To fix and record this gleam of the soul through the features is the constant labour and disappointment of high art. The painter best able to take a likeness often gives us, as we all feel, no shadow of the real man. Of all things a photograph is wont to be the most like, and the most disappointing. The man of genius, perhaps, succeeds in catching one of the expressions, in fixing one of those momentary rays with which the soul within lightens up the material features, as the sun kindles into glory a mist in itself dim and hazy, as well as damp and cold. And at best it is but one expression that is caught, and even that imperfectly; and the greatest master of his art, when he has lavished all his genius on the conception, and all his labour on the execution of a portrait of one whom he reveres not only for his powers of imagination and thought, but for his moral culture and discipline, is tempted to turn with disgust even from his noblest work, so imperfectly does it record the idea he is conscious of having received from the countenance he has represented.

And yet what is even this difficulty compared with that of painting in human words the life and character of one who was a poet, a genius, a Christian, a priest, and an eminent servant of God? The events of his life are easily related. But who shall describe his special gifts of nature; how his intellect, imagination, and affections vibrated under the touch of the material and moral world by which he was surrounded; the sweet notes of poetical melody which rang out from them under the touch; how his natural character and faculties were developed and matured; much more than this, how under the plastic touch of supernatural grace, his soul was gradually transformed into the image of his incarnate Lord, and (what would always be a part of such a portrait if it were possible that it should be complete) the infirmities and imperfections by which the work of the Divine Author of this new creation was interrupted, delayed, and distorted? Perhaps in the unseen state a power may be given to angels and saints to paint for the glory of their Lord the inner beauties of the souls of His servants, as earthly genius has painted their visible countenances. But here, on earth, assuredly any one who considers what has to be done will pronounce, "You have convinced me that it is impossible that any man should be a biographer."

After writing thus far, we have read for the first time F. Bowden's own expression of his feelings in the last page of his volume :

No biographer can end his labours without feeling that they are incomplete. If he has been on terms of intimacy with his subject, he recalls many characteristic words and actions which he cannot permit himself to record. The very ties which bound him most closely to his friend, in which the dear memory is especially present, must be passed over in silence. Many a time,

when thinking of an incident which to him is full of eloquence, he must restrain his pen; and at last he gives his work to the public almost with dissatisfaction. Facts may be stated clearly, and the course of events accurately traced, but the most faithful biography can only be an imperfect portrait, and those to whom the orignal has been familiar will ever miss the rich colour, the soft shading, and the thousand other nameless graces by which their love was won.

It would be unreasonable to hope that in the present instance it could be otherwise. There is scanty comfort in funeral honours; a monument, ære perennius though it be, is a monument still; a remembrance, but not so much as a shadow, of the living. Words cannot reproduce the gracious presence, the musical voice, the captivating smile-cannot give back to their earthly life the charm of person or the fascination of manner, any more than the fire of genius or the nobility of soul-and cannot therefore satisfy those whose labours were cheered and sorrows comforted, whose interior lives were formed and directed to God, whose brightest, happiest hours were blessed, by the wisdom, holiness, and love of Frederick William Faber (p. 519).

It is, however, but justice to say, that the work which it would have been impossible for any man to do perfectly, could hardly have been done more admirably than by Father Faber's biographer. The endeavour, of course, has been to make him, as much as possible, describe himself. This has been effected by giving large extracts from a journal kept during a tour on the Continent in 1841, and the whole or part of one hundred and thirty-eight letters. The journal gives a beautiful picture of his mind just when life was smiling upon him more than at any other period; the letters probably are the best picture we could have of his gradual change from the age of twenty, when they begin, to just before his departure at forty-nine. As becomes a Christian, they shine ever more and more with a light from Heaven, and those towards the end of the volume, while as full as ever of his own most captivating natural qualities, as childlike, as brilliant, as affectionate, as thoughtful as ever, are in addition to all this, so manifestly pregnant with a supernatural wisdom and charity, that it is impossible not to feel that if any more of that class exist and could without breach of confidence have been given us, they would have been cheaply purchased even by the omission of any other part of this beautiful volume, sorry as we should have been to lose any of it. Our space will make it impossible that we should give any extracts from them, except such short quotations as may be necessary to illustrate different points upon which we have occasion to touch. But this we do not regret, for we cannot doubt that the volume itself will, without delay, be studied by all those, who, while Father Faber was yet spared to us, felt it to be a rare privilege given them by the Giver of all good gifts to have the opportunity of reading his books, perhaps now and then of hearing

him preach, and possibly once or twice of having a moment of conversation with him. And this we believe includes all English Catholics and even many Protestants, to say nothing of very many in foreign lands.

These letters seem to be the only materials which throw any light upon Father Faber's interior life. No doubt his sons and brothers in the Oratory are restrained from telling all that they could by the feeling of delicacy referred to in the passage we have already quoted; and if any religious journals exist, they are either too private to be published, or the time has not arrived when it could properly be done. We suspect, however (especially remembering a passage in his book on "The Blessed Sacrament"),* that nothing of the kind exists.

It could not be otherwise than it is, but the letters sometimes fail us just when we most desire farther information. For instance, it would have been most interesting to have known more details of the mental stages through which he passed in his undergraduate days. He seems first to have heartily accepted the movement of 1833; then to have had a strong feeling against it, under which he wrote to one of his earliest friends,-"I have been thinking a great deal on the merits and tendency of Newmanism, and I have become more and more convinced of its falsehood-observe, I believe [Newman himself] to be an eminently pious, humble-minded Christian, but I think he has sat at the feet of the early contemplative philosophers with an unscriptural humility—that he has imbibed their notions and that his followers are likely to become a sort of Christian Essenes." Lastly, about a year later he was one of its most earnest and convinced pupils, and so continued until it led him into the Catholic Church.

In most instances such a change in a man of one-and-twenty would be too natural to be very important or interesting. In his case it would be otherwise, because all that remains of his writing in those years is marked with a very unusual degree of power and thoughtfulness. It is, however, only to be expected that our information with regard to the younger years of a man who, like Father Faber, has been called by the grace of God, to "come out from among his own people and his fathers' house into a land which it showed to him, will always be fragmentary. The friends

"Never keep a spiritual journal, a record of pious thoughts, or any vestige of a religious autobiography. I do not mean to say that saints have not done so. But you must not do it. You will live in a land of dreams and conceits if you do; though perhaps you do not believe it now, you will actually come at last to say and do follies in order to write them down afterwards. If you would know how the infatuation of keeping a journal is entangled with every root and fibre of self-love, throw your journal into the

by whose affectionate reverence he was surrounded at the London Oratory during the years in which he was best known to the world had, with a single exception, made his acquaintance after he became a Catholic. One knew him only just before his change. The only Catholic friend who knew him in early days seems to have been the Rev. J. B. Morris. The letters addressed to him form a very valuable portion of the whole work. Those to another early friend, whose name is not given, but who is stated during the later years of his life to have been separated from him "by increasing divergence of religious opinions,"-to whom therefore we are so much the more obliged for what he has givenfurnish most valuable materials which probably no one else could have supplied. But he seems to stand alone. Probably Father Faber's earlier correspondence is either lost, or in the hands of men who looked upon his becoming a Catholic as a defection, and have no wish to produce it. Be this as it may, the earliest scrap of a letter given in the volume before us was written when he was twenty.

The events of Father Faber's life were few; and perhaps the only thing worth special notice, except in connection with his character and works, is his almost constant suffering from ill health. His family were, as their name suggests, French Huguenot refugees. We have often been struck to observe how many of the English converts within the last five-and-twenty years have sprung from that stock. Probably every reader will be able at once to number several among his personal acquaintance. To mention no others, the list includes Father Faber by the father's side, and Father Newman by the mother's. We believe that no other class of English society equally limited has afforded anything at all approaching to the number.

He was born at the home of his grandfather, then Vicar of Calverley, in Yorkshire, June 28, 1814. When only fifteen he lost his mother, of whose memory his heart was ever full to the last day of his life, as having loved him with more than a double measure of a mother's tenderness. The references to his early loss of her, in his poems, are numerous and very touching. Four years later he lost his father. Till then his home had been at Bishop Auckland, his father being secretary to Dr. Barrington, the Protestant holder of the princely see of Durham. Afterwards his elder brother, a solicitor at Stockton-on-Tees, supplied the place of a parent. He was placed in the Lake country, in the house of a tutor who seems to have given him almost absolute freedom to wander where and as long as he

fire, and you will find out. Forget yourself and what you have gone through. God remembers. Surely that is enough."-(" Blessed Sacrament," book ii., page 244, first ed.) VOL. XIII.—NO. xxv.

[New Series.]

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