Christian de Neuvillette

“ It was Newman's staunch belief in what is intuitive and instinctive that made him accept the wisdom of the race as more trustworthy than the reason of the individual. Consequently he believed that Christian truth is preserved not by the reasoning of the individual but by the diversified powers, insight, and feeling which are found in a long-continuing society. For Newman, therefore, the Catholic Church was the articulate voice of the body of Christian believers in the past—"the concrete representative of things invisible." ”

“ Newman says that he owed more to Whately than to any one else in the way of mental improvement, and that he derived from him ‘the idea of the Christian Church as a Divine appointment, and as a substantive body, independent of the State, and endowed with rights, prerogatives, and powers of its own.’ He had a large share in the composition of Whately's ‘Logic,’ as is testified in the preface to that work. ”

“ Such deposit Newman and the Tractarian movement certainly did make. They offered a rationale of the reaction. They gave to the Catholic revival a standing in the world of ideas, not merely in the world of action. Whether their reasoning has weight to-day, is a question upon which opinion is divided. Yet Newman and his compeers, by their character and standing, by their distinctively English qualities and by the road of reason which they took in the defence of Catholic principles, made Catholicism English again, in a sense in which it had not been English for three hundred years. ”

“ One day he made an oration against them in the senate-house; he wanted to send them to the rack. But the secret came out; the good man was on the rack himself about his daughter, who persisted in calling herself a Christian, and refused to paint her face or go to the amphitheatre. To be sure, a most trying affair this for the old gentleman. The venerable Pater Patratus, too, what suppers he gave! a fine specimen of the Lucullus type; yet he was always advocating the lictor and the commentariensis in the instance of the Christian. No wonder ”

“ ROXANE (leaning over the balcony) :
Well said!
—But why so faltering? Has mental palsy
Seized on your faculty imaginative?
CYRANO (drawing Christian under the balcony, and slipping into his place) :
Give place! This waxes critical!. . .
ROXANE:
To-day. . .
Your words are hesitating.
CYRANO (imitating Christian—in a whisper) :
Night has come. . .
In the dusk they grope their way to find your ear.
ROXANE:
But my words find no such impediment.
CYRANO:
They find their way at once? Small wonder that!
For ’tis within my heart they find their home ”

“ CHRISTIAN (to Cyrano, pulling him by his cloak) :
Why?
CYRANO:
Silence, Christian! Hush!
ROXANE (leaning over) :
What whisper you?
CYRANO:
I chid myself for my too bold advances;
Said, ‘Silence, Christian!’
(The lutes begin to play) :
Hark! Wait awhile,. . .
Steps come!
(Roxane shuts the window. Cyrano listens to the lutes, one of which plays a merry, the other a melancholy, tune) :
Why, they play sad—then gay—then sad! What? Neither man nor woman?—oh!
a monk!
(Enter a capuchin friar, with a lantern. He goes from house to house, looking at every door.) ”

“ ROXANE (startled) :
What! the Guards?
DE GUICHE:
Ay, where serves your cousin, the swaggering boaster. I will find a way to
revenge myself on him at Arras.
ROXANE (choking) :
What mean you? The Guards go to Arras?
DE GUICHE (laughing) :
Bethink you, is it not my own regiment?
ROXANE (falling seated on the bench—aside) :
Christian!
DE GUICHE:
What ails you?
ROXANE (moved deeply) :
Oh—I am in despair! The man one loves!—at the war!
DE GUICHE (surprised and delighted) :
You say such sweet words to me! ’Tis the first time!—and just when I must
quit you! ”

“ CHRISTIAN:
Oh! I take them back!
CYRANO:
Roxane expects a letter.
CHRISTIAN:
Woe the day!
CYRANO:
How?
CHRISTIAN:
I am lost if I but ope my lips!
CYRANO:
Why so?
CHRISTIAN:
I am a fool—could die for shame!
CYRANO:
None is a fool who knows himself a fool.
And you did not attack me like a fool.
CHRISTIAN:
Bah! One finds battle-cry to lead th’ assault!
I have a certain military wit,
But, before women, can but hold my tongue.
Their eyes! True, when I pass, their eyes are kind. . .
CYRANO:
And, when you stay, their hearts, methinks, are kinder? ”

“ ROXANE (throwing a folded tablecloth at Cyrano’s head) :
Unfold me that napkin!—Come, come! be nimble!
RAGUENEAU (waving a lantern) :
Each of the carriage-lamps is a little larder!
CYRANO (in a low voice to Christian, as they arrange the cloth together) :
I must speak with you ere you speak to her.
RAGUENEAU:
My whip-handle is an Arles sausage!
ROXANE (pouring out wine, helping) :
Since we are to die, let the rest of the army shift for itself. All for the
Gascons! And mark! if De Guiche comes, let no one invite him! ”

“ CHRISTIAN:
To Monsieur de Valvert!
LIGNIÈRE:
Have a care! It is he who will kill you
(showing him Roxane by a look) :
Stay where you are—she is looking at you.
CHRISTIAN:
It is true!
(He stands looking at her. The group of pickpockets seeing him thus, head in air and open-mouthed, draw near to him.)
LIGNIÈRE:
’Tis I who am going. I am athirst! And they expect me—in the taverns!
(He goes out, reeling.)
LE BRET (who has been all round the hall, coming back to Ragueneau reassured) :
No sign of Cyrano.
RAGUENEAU (incredulously) :
All the same. . . ”

“ RAGUENEAU:
Oh, yes, indeed, Monsieur,
The famous one, ‘Que Diable allait-il faire?’
LE BRET:
Moliere has stolen that?
CYRANO:
Tut! He did well!. . .
(to Ragueneau) :
How went the scene? It told—I think it told?
RAGUENEAU (sobbing) :
Ah! how they laughed!
CYRANO:
Look you, it was my life
To be the prompter every one forgets!
(To Roxane) :
That night when ’neath your window Christian spoke
—Under your balcony, you remember? Well!
There was the allegory of my whole life:
I, in the shadow, at the ladder’s foot,
While others lightly mount to Love and Fame!
Just! very just! ”

“ CHRISTIAN (trying to detain her) :
Oh! tell me why you came?
ROXANE:
Wait; my first duty is to these poor fellows.—Hush! In a few minutes. . .
LE BRET (who had gone up to pass a loaf on the end of a lance to the sentry on the rampart) :
De Guiche!
CYRANO:
Quick! hide flasks, plates, pie-dishes, game-baskets! Hurry!—Let us all look unconscious!
(To Ragueneau) :
Up on your seat!—Is everything covered up?
(In an instant all has been pushed into the tents, or hidden under doublets, cloaks, and beavers. De Guiche enters hurriedly—stops suddenly, sniffing the air. Silence.) ”

“ CYRANO.
We'll hold to the death!
(In a voice of anguish, looking toward Roxane, whom Guiche and Ragueneau are carrying away senseless) .
Farewell, Roxane!
(Tumult. Cries. Wounded Cadets reappear and fall within the embankment. Cyrano, rushing to the fray, is stopped on the crest of the embankment by Carbon of Haughty-Hall, covered with blood.)
CARBON.
We are wavering! I have received two gun shots.
CYRANO (shouting to the Gascons) .
Steady there! Hold fast, you rascals!
(to Carbon, holding him up) .
Have no fear! I have two deaths to avenge: Christian's and that of my happiness! ”

“ When the animals entered the Ark in pairs, one may imagine that allied species made much private remark on each other, and were tempted to think that so many forms feeding on the same store of fodder were eminently superfluous, as tending to diminish the rations. (I fear the part played by the vultures on that occasion would be too painful for art to represent, those birds being disadvantageously naked about the gullet, and apparently without rites and ceremonies.)
The same sort of temptation befell the Christian Carnivora who formed Peter Featherstone’s funeral procession; ”

“ Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentlemen, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life;—these are the [pg 121] connatural qualities of a large knowledge; ”

“ CHRISTIAN.
Yes, a tear!
CYRANO.
Oh!.... Yes!.... we poets are caught in our own trap, through the swing of our art. You understand.... this letter,—was heart-rending; I drew tears from my own eyes as I was writing it. ”

“ She, a perfect stranger to you, is the means of bringing you and your old friend together. At the same table sat Mr Nevill, whom you meet here accidentally, and you sit at the same table with him.' 'By the way,' said Marie, 'don't you think we have treated Mr Nevill very badly? I never thought of him till now.' 'After all,' said George, following his thought, 'to those who move about much the great world is no larger than a parish is to those who do not move about at all.' 'Don't you think we have treated Mr Nevill very badly?' she repeated. ”

“ Mr Gladstone's chief opponent in theological controversy, Cardinal Newman, has profoundly influenced his religious views. "In my opinion," wrote Mr Gladstone many years after Newman had become a Roman Catholic, "his secession from the Church of England has never yet been estimated among us at anything like the full amount of its calamitous importance. It has been said that the world does not know its greatest men ”

“ A village-dweller in Nevilton might, if he were philosophically disposed, be just as much a percipient of this cosmic struggle, as if he stood between the Palatine and St. Peter’s.
Let him linger among the cranes and pulleys of this heathen promontory, and look westward to the shrine of the Holy Grail, or eastward to where rested the Holy Rood, and it would be strange if he did not become conscious of the presence of eternal spiritual antagonists, wrestling for the mastery.
He would at any rate be made aware of the fatal force of Inanimate Objects over human destiny. ”

“ One of the nicest men among the many hundreds who have been willing subjects is Lord Newlands. I was struck with his considerate and charming manner to all he came in contact with, even to an old charwoman. It was interesting to hear him talk of his old friend, Dr. Jowett, Master of Balliol College, whose memory he regarded with the deepest respect. My early caricature of him seemed to have pleased him so much that he not only gave a good sum for it at the sale of Vanity Fair cartoons [328] at Christie's, but also commissioned me to make a copy of it. ”

“ NEUVILLE, ALPHONSE MARIE DE (1836-1885) , French painter, was born, the son of wealthy parents, at Saint-Omer, France, on the 31st of May 1836. From school he went to college, where he took his degree of bachelier ès lettres. In spite of the opposition of his family he entered the naval school at Lorient, and it was here, in 1856, that his artistic instincts first declared themselves. After being discouraged by several painters of repute, he was admitted to work in Picot's studio. ”

“ Even the method of evolution appears to have operated on Newman's mind in the doctrine of development that finally led him to Rome. And that absorbing interest of Newman in dogmatic theology was but a foreshadowing of what has befallen most of England's higher minds during the past half-century, even when it has led them to agnosticism. England is the only European country that cares for theology, say continental observers, and its passionate interest in theology begins in this century with the movement with which Newman's name will for ever be connected. ”

“ Vast unfathomable tides of cosmic conflict drive us all backwards and forwards; and if under the ascendance of Sirius in the track of the Sun, the master of Nevilton found himself devoting more energy to the humiliation of his daughter’s companion than to his election to the British Parliament, one can only remember that both of them—the strong and the weak—were merely puppets and pawns of elemental forces, compared with which he, as well as she, was as the chaff before the wind. ”

“ Consider how many persons you are unsettling; what a triumph you are giving to the enemies of all religion; what encouragement to the notion that there is no such thing as truth; how you are weakening our Church. Well, all I say is, that you should have very strong convictions to set against all this."
"Well," said Charles, "I grant, I maintain, that the only motive which is sufficient to justify such an act, is the conviction that one's salvation depends on it. Now, I speak sincerely, my dear Carlton, in saying that I don't think I shall be saved if I remain in the English Church." ”

“ Neuville is a common French name, and it is not clear whether all the Nevills who occur in the 12th and 13th centuries were of the same stock as the lords of Raby. The baronial line of Nevill of “Essex” was founded by the marriage, temp. Richard I., of a Hugh de Nevill to the heiress of Henry de Cornhill, a wealthy Londoner. ”

“ NEVILLE, Sir THOMAS (d. 1542) , speaker of the House of Commons, born about 1480, was fifth son of George, second baron Bergavenny, and brother of George, third baron Bergavenny [q. v.] , and of Sir Edward Neville (d. 1538) [q. v.] He early entered the royal service under Henry VII, was frequently in the commission of the peace for Kent, Middlesex, Sussex, Surrey, and Worcestershire, and in 1510 and 1515 was sheriff of Staffordshire. He was a member of Henry VIII's household, and became a privy councillor. He sat in parliament as member for the county of Kent, and in 1514 became speaker. ”