Willa Cather's The Professor's House and Death Comes for the Archbishop appear to have little in common: Godfrey St. Peter is oppressed by a family and society he perceives to be excessively materialistic, while Bishop Latour works to bring Catholicism to the Southwest. In form, too, the books appear to share little: Bishop Latour's “narrative”¹ is a “loosely episodic”² travelogue;³ St. Peter mentally escapes in an inset to the ancient Cliff City of higher values. Despite these differences in form and subject matter, the central characters of the two books are remarkably similar: both St. Peter and Bishop Latour are reserved observers of the societies around them, both seek solitude and contemplation, both are highly valued by the people surrounding them, but each has difficulty in interacting effectively, both have inner lives that are somewhat independent of their actions in their environments, both intertwine art and religion as governing principles in their lives, both value nature and the enclosed protection and order of a garden, and both eventually see the events of their lives as having little to do with their essential selves. This isolation and reserve does not make the two men unlikable, however, for both arouse our empathy and admiration. Cather had a great gift for characterization, for establishing readers' sympathy with characters, for drawing characters with complex and contradictory natures. In speaking to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant about My Ántonia, Cather

set an old Sicilian apothecary jar, … filled with orange-brown flowers of scented stock, in the middle of a bare, round, antique table.

“I [Cather] want my new heroine to be like this—like a rare object in the middle of a table, which one may examine from all sides.”⁴

Indeed, this statement—that her characters are “rare object[s] … one may examine from all sides”—valuably might be made about most of Cather's central characters. Certainly the bishop and the professor are people to whom readers are greatly drawn and for whom we have great sympathy; yet, Cather's genius for characterization allows us to see the two men from all sides, to examine their love of art as well as their difficulties in dealing with an everyday world.

Jean Marie Latour and Godfrey St. Peter are reserved, intellectual observers of the societies around them. Each is generally the central consciousness of his book; readers see events and people from the point of view of the professor and the bishop. This point of view is from outside the central societies of each work; the names of the men alone suggest aloofness (Napoleon Godfrey St. Peter) and a traveler rather than a participant (Latour). Neither is an integral part of the society he observes: St. Peter abhors the materialism he thinks marks modern life and retreats from “the ambition and greed that surround him and that threaten the values by which he has always lived,”⁵ and Latour attempts to learn about the Indian and Mexican cultures of the Southwest without generally interfering in others' customs. In addition to a detachment from their societies, each man retreats by temperament from others. Latour describes himself as “always a little cold”;⁶ omniscient statements mark him as “of a fine intelligence, … open, generous, reflective … and somewhat severe” (p. 16), and another bishop calls him “a man of severe and refined tastes, … [and] very reserved” (p. 12). St. Peter believes that “reserve about one's deepest feelings: keeps them fresh,”⁷ and his lectures and love of opera show he is intelligent and refined. Both temperament and beliefs about their roles in society keep each man somewhat aloof from his culture.

The two men also seek solitude from others and seem to need much time for contemplation. Godfrey St. Peter works in his attic study because it is “the one place in the house where he could get isolation, insulation from the engaging drama of domestic life” (p. 26); he is sure to have everything he needs upstairs, for should he “journey down through the human house he might lose his mood, his enthusiasm, even his temper” (p. 27). Bishop Latour, finding a small settlement that has saved him from death in the desert, says Mass for the residents but then, “feeling a need for solitude,” takes a walk to contemplate his mission and his deliverance (p. 29). When his Indian friend Eusabio's son dies, the bishop visits but spends three days in solitude and reflection (p. 223) about his need for Father Vaillant. Each man highly values solitude, for it gives each time to think and to make sense of the world around him.

Both St. Peter and Bishop Latour are inclined to be intellectual rather than emotional in their dealings with others; each is somewhat obtuse in human interactions. When Lillian St. Peter confronts her husband about his withdrawal from her, her question is phrased rhetorically (“Just when did it begin, Godfrey, in the history of manners—that convention that if a man were pleased with his wife or his house or his success, he shouldn't say so, frankly?”), yet he gives her a historical account of the beginnings of such practices.⁸ St. Peter is imperceptive about others' feelings, and he is frequently amazed⁹ by them; he is “amazed” Augusta wanted to be more than a sewing woman (p. 23), surprised that Rosie is frightened of him when he is sarcastic (p. 60), amazed (p. 135) by Mrs. Crane's desire for money, and astonished and amazed (p. 94) that Lillian would like to have defied the changes of time. Latour, also, is occasionally obtuse in dealing with others' emotional needs. Father Vaillant has laboriously set up an ancient bell to delight the bishop; the priest has brought the bell up from a basement, erected scaffolding, and taught a Mexican boy to ring it properly for Latour. Vaillant waits eagerly for the bishop's response; the superior muses about the history of bells (pp. 44-45) rather than thank his friend. Vaillant “sniff[s] … complain[s]” and asks questions “impatiently” (p. 45); clearly, he has been hurt by Latour's intellectualism. The bishop is equally abstract at Christmas dinner; Vaillant has labored over the meal “all afternoon” (p. 36), but when Latour tastes the soup, he proceeds to wonder about the traditions and history involved in making the soup rather than commenting to his now-frowning friend (p. 38).¹⁰ Neither the bishop nor the professor is likely to win a prize for sensitivity to others in these instances.

Each man sets a value on his inner life that prevents him from acting at times when action is appropriate or demanded. “The aesthetic impulse must be subordinated to and work within a moral framework” (Randall, p. 274), yet this subordination sometimes does not take place for the two men; their actions do not match their philosophies. St. Peter believes the Cranes should get money for aiding Tom Outland but has not actively sought help for them, believes that Augusta should have a financial loss made up to her but does not aid her, believes his family does not get along but withdraws from them. Latour, while frequently forceful, sometimes retreats to inaction. For him, confrontation is seen as inexpedient (pp. 157-58, 216), yet he usually eventually acts—to remove errant priests, to watch over Magdalena, to go to a sick Father Vaillant. A puzzling scene highlighting the quality of his own inner life and the lack of need for action, in his value system, in maintaining this contemplative state occurs in his interaction with Sada. On a bleak December night, the bishop is extremely depressed and withdrawn; he is in a “[period] of coldness and doubt which … occasionally settled down upon his spirit and made him feel an alien” (p. 211). He goes to the church at midnight and there finds a very old Mexican woman, Sada, who is a slave in an American family. Sada's wonder and zeal renew the bishop; “never … had it been permitted him to behold such deep experience of the holy joy of religion” (p. 218). Latour might have brought about Sada's release: her “owners” “had no legal title to her” (p. 215), and public opinion is much against her slavery. She is “owned” by lower-class Americans, part of a “small group” of Protestants who are already performing mildly mischievous acts against the Catholics. Although the “owners” are Protestants and Latour is eager to avoid trouble, some pressure undoubtedly could have been exerted against the family since they actually do not own Sada. The scene with Sada is especially ironic since the previous one showed Magdalena, a former captive of sorts, radiantly moving about the bishop's garden. One would have hoped that Latour would desire the same happiness for Sada, who has unknowingly given him so much; however, he does nothing for her but experiences for himself one of the most deeply moving religious moments of his life. For both Latour and St. Peter, the quality of their inner lives seems independent of the actions they have performed. Each is certainly aware of the outer world and can be fed or discouraged by it, but neither seems to feel a continuing need to act; their esthetic lives are not necessarily dependent on their actions in the everyday world.

Art and religion are of paramount importance to each of the men in his maturity; each seeks order and beauty as representative of the best in life. Professor St. Peter tells us this directly as he lectures to his students:

As long as every man and woman who crowded into the cathedrals on Easter Sunday was a principal in a gorgeous drama with God, glittering angels on one side and the shadows of evil coming and going on the other, life was a rich thing. … Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.

With the theologians came the cathedral-builders; the sculptors and glassworkers and painters. They might, without sacrilege, have changed the prayer a little and said, Thy will be done in art, as it is in heaven. (pp. 68-9)

To have art and religion is to experience “life … [as] a rich thing,” to find a measure of happiness otherwise elusive. This happiness the professor attempts to achieve in his relationship with Tom Outland, a student and friend who “became St. Peter's surrogate, a person whose life formed a living ideal that restored to the professor a corresponding sense of uniqueness and value.”¹¹ Through Tom, the professor comes to see the Blue Mesa and Cliff City as representative of beauty and order; they become for St. Peter a symbol of esthetic worth in much the same way that Latour comes to value his cathedral. In admiring the future site of the cathedral, then a magnificent yellow hill of stone “something like the colonnade of St. Peter's” (p. 242), the bishop sighs contentedly at the prospect of the “first Romanesque church in the New World” (p. 243); although “everything about … [Latour and Vaillant] is so poor” (p. 244), Latour tellingly says that he “would rather have found that hill of yellow rock than have come into a fortune to spend in charity” (p. 245). The art of the future cathedral blends for him into a fitting tribute to God; for him, as for Godfrey St. Peter, art and religion are very much the same.

The professor and the bishop also share a love of nature, the physical landscape, and gardens. Each man greatly values his garden and carefully cultivates it as an enclosed space that blooms under his direction; for St. Peter, his “walled-in garden had been the comfort of his life” (p. 14), while it is the bishop's “only recreation” (p. 200). Each values the landscape dearly; the love of nature brings about major life decisions for each man. For St. Peter, it determined his choice of professorship; Hamilton was not the best college to offer him a job, but he chose it because “it seemed to him that any place near the lake was a place where one could live” (p. 31). He associates the lake with beauty and freedom, and it determines “a part of consciousness itself” (p. 30). Nature becomes so important to him that he is “only interested in earth and woods and water”; he sees nature as “Desire under all desires, Truth under all truths” (p. 265). Early in his life, nature had been St. Peter's source of inspiration; while observing beautiful peaks and golden sunsets off the coast of Spain, “the design of his book unfolded in the air above him” (p. 106). He felt that the “design was sound. He had accepted it as inevitable, had never meddled with it, and it had seen him through” (p. 106). Nature is clearly an inspiring and determining force in St. Peter's life; it plays an equally strong role in Latour's. The archbishop returns from the Old World to retire in the New because he misses the air of New Mexico so much. The wind renews him and makes him a “boy again”; Latour

did not know just when it had become so necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning! (p. 277)

The French archbishop has indeed come to love the land and, like Godfrey St. Peter, sees in it youth and beauty and freedom.

St. Peter and the archbishop alter their perspectives on life at the ends of their books; each sees the events of his life as being of lessening or no importance. The dying archbishop sees life as “an experience of the Ego, in no sense the Ego itself” (p. 292); he comes to view the mistakes of his life as “unimportant,” and “calendared time … had already ceased to count for him” (p. 293). A reminiscing Godfrey St. Peter views his life as a Kansas boy as “the realest of his lives,” and believes all the years between had been “accidental and ordered from the outside” (p. 264). He sees his marriage, daughters, and career as “not his life at all, but a chain of events which had happened to him” and “had nothing to do with the person he was in the beginning” (p. 264). He becomes a “primitive,” a lover of nature only; he recalls his old grandfather, outwardly oblivious to the world, but—St. Peter now thinks—actually “lost in profound, continuous meditation” about his early life (pp. 266-67). The dying archbishop, too, resembles the old Napoleon Godfrey, and he appears to have a failing mind when actually “it was only extraordinarily active in some other part of the great picture of his life” (p. 293). Such disengagement from life seems to be what Cather addresses in “Light on Adobe Walls”: she hypothesizes that artists sometimes outgrow their art and turn instead to a sensual love for the countryside or to “wrangling with abstractions and creeds”; they give up a “game of make-believe, of reproduction.”¹² For Cather, such detachment seems natural, and her archbishop and professor eventually see their acts as having little to do with their essential selves.

It is possible to find even more parallels between St. Peter and Latour, and it is possible to so structure a discussion that some of the parallels lessen. One might, for example, argue that while both men value nature, the professor sees it simply (pp. 265-66) while the bishop, particularly in the cruciform-tree episode that opens the first book, tends to intellectualize about it. While the two garden, St. Peter does so to work “off his discontent” (p. 15) while Latour does it for recreation. Both are gourmets, both could be seen as celibate (St. Peter has his own room), both love youth. One might argue that both have a love of order or have difficulties in dealing with women, yet examples abound that make such parallels uneasy ones. While both men generally seek order (Latour is “distressed” at the “incongruous American building[s]” [p. 271] that come to surround his cathedral, and is marked as “a man to whom order is necessary” [p. 7]), St. Peter sometimes shows little concern about it, as when his manuscripts and Augusta's patterns interpenetrate (p. 22). While both men seem to have some difficulties in interacting with women (St. Peter is amazed by them); Latour, although “annoyed … exceedingly” at finding some women's hair in a guest room (p. 150)¹³ and dismissing “with a shrug” a story of a pure girl debauched by Father Martinez (p. 158), nevertheless shows a high degree of kindness to Magdalena. Each man does have an exceedingly dear friendship with a male, yet Bishop Latour's Father Vaillant is a very active man while Godfrey St. Peter's Tom Outland has his “happiness unalloyed” (p. 251) only when he is alone.

This desire to be alone, to live an engaging life of the mind, most unites Bishop Latour and Professor St. Peter. Aspects of the character of each move readers; the perceptions of the two men about art and religion, about their physical and intellectual worlds, about their desire to reach the ideal mark them as engaging and sympathetic characters. Yet, in the complex and contradictory nature of this apothecary-jar portrait, Cather allows us to see St. Peter's and Latour's limitations: the scene with Sada is true, as is the bishop's loyalty to Eusabio; the beauty of the cathedral is real, as is Latour's preference of the “hill of yellow rock … [over] a fortune to spend in charity” (p. 245); St. Peter's awe of Tom's Cliff City is true, as is his unintended cruelty to Lillian at the opera; his zeal for youth is real, as is his detachment from “the human house” (p. 27). Intensity in one aspect of life costs in another; while “commitment to the moral life … very frequently does necessitate the sacrifice of beauty” (Randall, p. 274), commitment to beauty also very frequently does necessitate the sacrifice of a moral life. A detachment from others, a “lack of passion, bordering on coldness,”¹⁴ an “aesthetic impulse … [unsubordinated to] a moral framework” (Randall, p. 274) are some of the almost inevitable consequences of the struggle for an inner life of high intellectual and esthetic quality.

Notes

1. The book was called a “narrative” by Cather in “On ‘Death Comes for the Archbishop,’” in Willa Cather On Writing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), p. 12.

2. James Woodress, Willa Cather: Her Life and Art (New York: Pegasus, 1970), p. 222.

3. David Stouck, “Cather's Archbishop and Travel Writing,” Western American Literature, 17 (May 1982), 3-12.

4. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Willa Cather: A Memoir (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1953), p. 139.

5. David Stouck, Willa Cather's Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), p. 100.

6. Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), p. 264.

7. Willa Cather, The Professor's House (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925), p. 48.

8. For a discussion of St. Peter's view of women, see Margaret Doane, “In Defense of Lillian St. Peter: Men's Perceptions of Women in The Professor's House,” Western American Literature, 18 (February 1984), 299-302.

9. Susan Rosowski, “The Pattern of Willa Cather's Novels,” Western American Literature, 15 (February 1981), 258.

10. John H. Randall III, in The Landscape and the Looking Glass: Willa Cather's Search for Value (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1960), p. 268, comments that these passages can be used to show Latour's interest in the esthetic significance of the soup and the bell.

11. Patrick J. Sullivan, “Willa Cather's Southwest,” Western American Literature, 7 (1972), 32.

12. In Willa Cather On Writing, pp. 125-26.

13. Cather's priests do not seem fond of finding women's hair; Augusta's priest spoke against wigs, saying “it was getting to be a scandal in the Church, and a priest couldn't go to see a pious woman any more without finding switches and rats and transformations lying about her room, and it was disgusting” (p. 24).

14. John J. Murphy, “Willa Cather's Archbishop: A Western and Classical Perspective,” Western American Literature, 13 (1978), 149.