The Truce of God | Page 5

half-molded civilization the ramparts of the City of God. "The Truce of God" is true to the requirements of the historical romance. It summons before us a forgotten past, and makes it live. We forget in the vitality and artistic grouping of the picture, in the nobility of the author's purpose and the lasting moral effect of the story, the occasional stiffness of the style. It is the style of the refined scholar, perhaps also of the bookman and the too conscious critic. Occasionally it lacks spontaneity, directness and naturalness. It might unbend more and forget ceremony. But it is picturesque, forcible, clear, and bears us along with its swing and dramatic movement.
American Catholics must not forget the excellent work done by George Henry Miles for the cause of Catholic literature, the more so as his name is not infrequently omitted from many popular histories of American literature. Yet the author of "The Truce of God" had mastered the story teller's and the dramatist's art. "If there was ever a born _littérateur_," writes Eugene L. Didier, in The Catholic World for May, 1881, "that man was George Henry Miles. His taste was pure, exquisite and refined, his imagination was rich, vivid, and almost oriental in its warmth." Moreover, he consecrated his life and his talents to the cause of Catholic education, identifying himself for many years with Mount St. Mary's College, Emmitsburg, Maryland, with whose annals so much of the early history of the Catholic Church in the United States, is closely linked.
The author of "The Truce of God" was born in Baltimore, July 31, 1824; he died at Emmitsburg, July 23, 1872. In his twelfth year the lad entered Mount St. Mary's College. Here he became a Catholic and had afterwards the happiness of seeing his family follow him into the Church. The studies at the "Mountain" in those days were still under the magic and salutary spell of the venerable founder, Bishop Dubois, and his followers. They were old fashioned, but they were solid, with the classics of Greece and Rome, mathematics, philosophy and religion as their foundation. They were eminently calculated to mold thinkers, scholars and cultured Catholic gentlemen. They left a deep impression on the young Marylander. After his graduation at the end of the scholastic year, 1843, the law for a short while lured him away, to its digests, its quiddits and quillets, abstracts and briefs. But it was putting Pegasus in pound. Miles at a lawyer's task was as much out of place as Edgar Allan Poe was when mounting guard as a cadet at West Point, or Charles Lamb with a quill behind his ear balancing his ledger in India House. The Mountain and the Muses lured him back to Emmitsburg, where a short distance from the college gate, in the quiet retreat of Thornbrook, he settled to his books and a professor's tasks at the Mount. Close by were the lovely haunts of La Salette, Hillside, Loretto, Tanglewood, Andorra, Mt. Carmel, every little cottage and garden, eloquent, it has been said, of the faith and piety of the builders of the Mount, who breathed the spirit that thus baptized them ("The Story of the Mountain. Mount St. Mary's College and Seminary, Emmitsburg, Maryland." By the Rev. E. McSweeny. Vol. II, p. 102). For its historic associations, its panorama of hills, wooded slopes and fields, the spot could scarcely be matched within the wide amphitheater of the hills of Maryland.
To Emmitsburg, to his "boys", the young professor of English literature gave his enthusiasm, his idealism, his love of all that was fair in art and the world of books. His enthusiasm inspired them with a love of artistic excellence, which, neither in his own work, nor in that of his pupils would tolerate anything commonplace. Before coming to Thornbrook, he had written "The Truce of God," first published as a serial in the _United States Catholic Magazine_, established by John Murphy of Baltimore, and which under the editorship of Bishop Martin John Spalding and the Rev. Charles I. White achieved a national reputation. Two other tales, "Loretto," and the "Governess," had also been published and were extremely popular. Like "The Truce of God," they were of the purest moral tone, elegant in diction, the work of a thorough literary craftsman. In 1850, the American actor, Edwin Forrest, offered a prize of $1,000.00 for the best drama written by an American. Miles easily carried off the reward with his play "Mohammed." Rich with all the colors of the East, glowing with the warmth and poetry of Arabian romance and story, "Mohammed" was rather the work of a thinker and a poet than of a master dramatist. It was never acted, Forrest himself judging that it had not that ebb and flow of passion, nor