FATHER THOMAS BURKE.*
THis appears to be a book which, for every sort of reason, had far better have been left unwritten. The testimony of all who heard the famous Dominican preach is that he was one of the very greatest of all the pulpit orators of our time ; and amongst those who knew him he left behind him also the reputation of a most amusing and pleasant companion, a great teller of stories and coiner of jokes, appropriate to a small circle of intimates, and in that sense a humourist of the first order. But on this side of his life Mr. Fitz-Patrick dwells with such persistency, recurring to it again and again, that we are unwillingly driven to think of him more in the character of a jester manqué than of the famous priest be was. Mr. Fitz-Patrick obviously considers that he is paying his hero a great compliment when he says that, had he chosen, he might have emulated the fame of a Liston or a Wright or a Toole ; but to us there is something painfully anomalous in any description of the • The Life of the Very Rev. Thomas N. Burke, V.P. By W. S. Fitz-Patrick, FA A. Loudon: Regan PduL 1E9i. kind. Desipere in loco is as much the privilege of a priest as of any man,—in one sense, we had almost said, more. The unbending of the bow is a necessity in so strict and conse- crated a life ; and Father Burke's Irish gifts of fun and frolic could not but find their outlet somewhere. But far too many of these facetim of his are recorded, and too many of them, at least as told, bear the character of those practical jokes which are so dangerous an amusement to indulge in. We do not care much to hear how he persuaded his countryman, Father Mullooley, the Prior of San Clemente, that his good but homely features so closely resembled an Adonis that had been exca- vated in his little dominion; and to carry his joke out, induced a French savant to fall in with it beforehand, and to say, " Tenez, c'est votts," when the Adonis was produced, to the great gratification of the good Prior. If there was no especial harm in this, there was certainly no especial charity. In like manner, when he was warned that he was too ill to preach, he allowed his feelings to get the better of him, and when he saw his substitute going into the pulpit, rushed past him in his robes, and ascended the stairs first. This suggests to us nothing but a rather unseemly scene ; but if it really occurred, it has been suggested to us that a truer explanation is to be found in Father Burke's known kindness of heart, and that, seeing his proposed substitute overcome with nervousness, he disregarded the warning and came to the rescue. Many a true tale may be perverted in this way ; and it is more than doubtful if Father Burke's Irish love of fun can ever have led him to forget himself as mach and often as he seems to have done from these pages. He was before all things, after his calling, an Irishman ; but we fail to see why, when a lady to whom he was acting as cicerone in Rome, addressed him civilly enough as being Irish, he should have turned upon her and supposed she was a Protestant. On being told that she was, he thanked Heaven that he was an Irishman, otherwise he, too, might have been of that benighted faith, and rated her so soundly that she turned away abashed. Considering the father's gift of eloquence, we rather sympathised with the poor lady than not, as we did at another time with a brother priest who was noted for his strong temperance principles. Father Burke brought a small flask of brandy in his pocket to a clerical meeting, having been ordered it for his health, and accidentally let it fall. "Poor Father —! " he exclaimed, "he will never forgive me for having broken his flask ! " This is rather sad jesting, it seems to us. But we know of few better witticisms of a truer kind than this. Some wealthy tanners of the name of Waters had gone bankrupt in Dublin, and on their goods being seized, it was found that they had absconded, and that little was available but a large stock of bark. " Ah ! I see," said Father Burke, " t'ne bark was still there, but the Waters were gone." When, on the other hand, he wrote to a friend that no law forbade good people to be amusing, and that they might be Sankeymonious without being Moody, the pun scarcely seems to us to rise to quotation-level. In his schoolboy days, after the pattern of his countryman, Goldsmith, he seems to have acquired rather a reputation for backwardness than not, and was wont to quote his old school- master's saying that "but for him, he'd be the biggest donkey in the Claddagh ; " but his peculiar sense of fan at all events must have had an early development. The master was of the flogging order of Dominie ; and on one occasion, when young Burke was hoisted, after the old fashion, for the purpose of punishment, he stuck a long pin between his teeth, and on receiving his first stroke, dug it well into the nape of the neck of the " hoister," who dropped him with a howl and ran away, followed by the master, Burke meanwhile making his escape into the town and leaving the situation rather complicated. In after days, he was wont to delight novices and brother- priests with exhibitions of acting or mimicry, sometimes acting the characters of Dickens, of whom he was very fond; sometimes posing in exact imitation of the Laocoon or the Belvedere ; sometimes mimicking his fellow-priests or superiors ; and not unfrequently incurring rather severe reprimand from those who, to Mr. Fitz-Patrick's disgust, failed always to realise the humour of it.
With such a disproportionate amount of matter devoted to this side of the great Dominican's character, we confess to being, on the other hand, disappointed with the quotations from his sermons and addresses that are given tons, and dissatisfied with the picture of his spiritual life which the book presents. A great deal of the last, to our thinking, is too sacred to be dealt with as it is in the book before us.
Nor do we think it well to be admitted into the privacy of the inner cell of an eminent ascetic at Rome, whose name and qualities are fully given us, where the walls are deeply stained with blood from his repeated sconrgings, adminis- tered to himself every morning when he rises from the coffin which serves him for couch. Is it very wrong that we cannot help thinking of the two dethroned monarchs in The Rose and the Ring ? We feel sure that the comparison must have occurred to "the other Father Burke," though he was devoted to Dickens, and did not much care for Thackeray, but that he never would have wished such things to be published in detail.
We must take the Father's eloquence a good deal on trust from his present historian. He gives us more of the effects produced than of the eloquence which produced them. The Superior of the Christian Brothers at Cork gives the following testimony :—
"In the pulpit as a preacher, and on the platform as a lecturer, Thomas Burke was always grand and overpowering. He was greater, I think, as a lecturer, though in both he was a master. In the pulpit whatever he touched he adorned. The theme in his hands had always a new aspect. His division of the subject, treatment of the points, beauty of language, and his intense earnestness made all seem new. Nor did it matter what kind of audience he addressed. He was as much at home with children as with mature intellects. I heard him give a retreat to thou- sands of boys and girls, and all was death-like silence for the hour he spoke. He completely captivated the youngest and most vola- tile of his hearers. I could never lose the impression his sermons made upon me,' &c.
It is, of course, impossible to reproduce the effects of an orator in this way, but there is a medium between that and
the phonograph. Careful and genuine reports of speeches bring them home to us far more than description, and that is what we miss.
It was in America that Father Burke seems to have created the greatest effect as a speaker and preacher ; and in a land of oratory that is a great distinction. Of course he had there the great advantage of giving the freest rein to the passionate patriotism which was only second to, if not as much as, his attachment to his faith—of which indeed it seems to have formed part and parcel—the great characteristic of his life.
The Irishman spoke in every word; and his intense quickness to take offence, on which Mr. Fitz-Patrick dwells as a lofty kind of merit, seems to have been doubled when he suspected —usually, as it appears to us from the instances given, without the slightest ground- that any reflection on his nationality was intended. When an unlucky Papal guard incarred the suspicion, he was overwhelmed with such a terrific torrent of rebuke in choice ItLlian, that he shrank abashed into his giant boots. An Irish orator vituperating in Italian certainly sounds rather terrible. In America he dwelt in fervent periods upon his favourite subject; and it was here that he followed, and once we believe met, the late Mr. Fronde upon the platform, to counteract and traverse the historian's allegations upon the Irish theme :—
" Cromwell retreated from Ireland, having glutted himself with the blood of the people He collected 6,000 Irish boys — fair, beautiful, stripling youths — and sent them to Banbadoes ; there to languish and die before they had come to the fullness of manhood. 0 great God ! is this the man who has an apologist in the learned and generous historian who comes in oily words to tell the American people that Cromwell was one of the bravest men that ever lived, and one of the best friends Ireland had ?"
Whether Father Burke annihilated Fronde so utterly in American esteem as Mr. Fitz-Patrick says he did, we are not called upon to decide, a vague wish that there was a Statute of Limitations somewhere about Oliver Cromwell taking the place of other convictions in that respect. But what we are
called upon to decide, and do decide, is that the book before us presents us with what we hope and fully believe to be a dis- torted picture of a great orator and a fine character. A spoiled low-comedian, and a rather unscrupulous practical joker, is not what we desire to have left upon our minds of one of the finest preachers, if not the finest, of our day. Some of the examples of his preaching would have been none the worse for omission either. The terrible pictures of Dantesque Infernos with which at times he convulsed and agonised his hearers may possibly have been excusable under the circum- stances when they were given, but without explanation or context, and as specimens of oratory, they merely repel.
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