Part 3
There are few places better fitted as a poet’s home than Notre Dame. Beautiful scenery to fill the eye, brilliant society to spur the mind, and a spacious library freighted with the riches of the past. In comparison with the majority of the Catholic writers, the poet’s journey in life has been comparatively smooth, though far from what it should have been. He has published the following volumes:—“That Girl of Mine,” 1879; “Preludes,” 1880; “Song Sonnets,” London, 1885; “Theatre,” 1885; “Stories of Duty,” 1885; “Garden of Roses,” 1886; “Life Around Us,” 1886; “Novels and Novelists,” 1888; “Patrick Desmond,” 1893; “Poems,” 1893. To this list must be added innumerable articles in magazines and weekly journals. Judged by the signed output, it is safe to write that the English professor of Notre Dame is a very busy man. The wonder is that a mind so occupied by so many diverse things can write entertainingly of each.
The poet’s first book, a few sonnets and poems, was for “sweet charity’s sake,” and had but a limited circulation. It is safe to say that every first book of a genuine poet, despite its crudities, will show the seeker signs of things to come. Egan’s book was not without promises, but in truth these promises are only partly fulfilled in his latest volume of verse. There may be many reasons adduced for this disparity between promise and fulfilment. One of them is the haste with which poetry is published. Horace’s dictum of using the file has been long since forgotten. The rabble calls for poetry, and, like the Italian and his lentils, care little for the quality. If the poet harkens to the calls (and who among the contemporary bards has laughed it to scorn?) he exchanges perpetuity for the present, notoriety for fame. Nor will the rabble leave the poet freedom in choosing his material. He is simply a tradesman, and must use what is placed at his disposal. Things great and grand must be left unto that day when the poet, untrammelled by worldly care, shall write his heart’s dream. If the time ever comes, the poet learns in sorrow that his dreams will never float into human speech, for the hand has lost its cunning. So the days of youth and manhood pass, blowing bubbles or decorating platitudes. Death snatches the poetling, and oblivion is his coverlid. The songs he sang died with the rabble. The new generation asked for a poet that could drill into the human heart and bring forth its secrets—a listener to nature, her interpreter to man. To such a one the vocabulary of a minor bard is useless. Another reason, more applicable to our author, is that he has been unfortunate to be a pioneer in Catholic American literature. His poems, appealing, as they do, to a distinct class, and that far from being a book-buying one, will fail to attract the lynx-eyed critic who cares only for the general literary purveyor. From such a source, the poet’s chance of corrective criticism has been slight. The class to which Mr. Egan belongs has no criticism to offer its literary food givers. If an author’s book sells, his name is blazoned forth in half a hundred headless petty journals. His most glaring defects become through their glasses mystic beauty spots. He is invited to lecture on all kinds of subjects. A clique grows around him, whose duty it is to puff the master. The reasons, frankly adduced, have limited the scope and dwarfed the really fine genius of Maurice Egan. His latest volume, while containing many poems that reveal hidden powers, has much of the crudity and faults of earlier work. These poems speak of better things that will be fulfilled by the poet if he will consecrate himself wholly to his art, shutting his mind to the rabble shout and eulogious criticism. Then may he hear the rhythms and cadences of that music whose orchestra comprises all things from the shells to the stars, all beings from the worm to man, all sounds from the voice of the little bird to the voice of the great ocean. To these translations men will cling to the last, and in their clinging is the poet’s fame. In his shorter poems, and notably in his sonnets, Mr. Egan is at his best. Here his scope is broader, his touch is firmer. The mastery of musical expression, lacking in his longer poems, is here to be met with in the fulness of its beauty. As a writer of sonnets, Mr. Egan has had great success. In this line of writing he is easily at the head of the younger American school of poets. “A Night in June” is a charming piece of word painting, full of beauty and power. The reader of this exquisite sonnet will feel how deftly the poet has put in words the silent magic of such a night, when air and earth have songs to sing. In the sonnet to the old lyric master Theocritus, the poet’s graceful interpretative touch is equally felt.
Daphnis is mute, and hidden nymphs complain, And mourning mingles with their fountain’s song; Shepherds contend no more, as all day long They watch their sheep on the wide, cyprus plain: The master-voice is silent, songs are vain; Blithe Pan is dead, and tales of ancient wrong Done by the gods, when gods and men were strong, Chanted to reeded pipes, no prize can gain. O sweetest singer of the olden days, In dusty books your idyls rare seem dead; The gods are gone, but poets never die; Though men may turn their ears to newer lays, Sicilian nightingales enrapturéd Caught all your songs, and nightly thrill the sky.
The sonnet “Of Flowers” gives a happy setting to a beautiful thought:
There were no roses till the first child died, No violets, no balmy-breathed heartsease,— No heliotrope, nor buds so dear to bees, The honey-hearted suckle, no gold-eyed And lowly dandelion, nor, stretching wide Clover and cowslip cups, like rival seas, Meeting and parting, as the young spring breeze Runs giddy races, playing seek and hide. For all Flowers died when Eve left Paradise, And all the world was flowerless awhile, Until a little child was laid in earth. Then, from its grave grew violets for its eyes, And from its lips rose-petals for its smile; And so all flowers from that child’s death took birth.
To those who have lovingly lingered over the pages of Maurice de Guerin, pages that breathe the old Greek world of thought, the following sonnet, that paints that modern Grecian with a few masterly strokes, will be keenly relished. It is the fine implications of these lines that is the life of our hope for the poet and the future.
MAURICE DE GUERIN.
The old wine filled him, and he saw, with eyes Anoint of Nature, fauns and dryads fair, Unseen by others; to him maiden-hair And waxen lilacs and those birds that rise A-sudden from tall reeds, at slight surprise, Brought charmed thoughts; and in earth everywhere, He, like sad Jacques, found a music, rare As that of Syrinx to old Grecians wise. A Pagan heart, a Christian soul, had he, He followed Christ, yet for dead Pan he sighed, Till earth and heaven met within his breast! As if Theocritus, in Sicily, Had come upon the Figure crucified, And lost his gods in deep, Christ-given rest.
As an essayist, Mr. Egan has touched many subjects, and always in an entertaining vein. Some of his essays are remarkable for their plain speaking. He has studied his race in their new surroundings, knows equally well their virtues and failings. If he can take an honest delight in the virtues, he is capable of writing with no uncertain sound on the failings, failings that have been so mercilessly used by the vulgarly comic school of American playwrights. His essays are corrective and should find their way into every Irish-American home. They would tend to correct many abuses and aid in the detection of those bunions so sacredly kept on the feet of the Irish race—last relic of the Penal times. A recent essay throws a series of blue lights—the color so well liked by Carlyle—on our shallow collegiate system. Will it be read by our Catholic educators? That is a question that time will answer. If they read it aright they will be apt to change their system of teaching the classics parrot-like, an empty word translation. They will transport their pupils from the bare class-room to the sunny skies of Greece and Rome, and under these skies see the religious dogmas, the philosophical systems, the fine arts, the entire civilization of those ancient thought giving nations. “What professor,” says de Guerin, “reading Virgil and Homer to his pupils, has developed the poetry of the Iliad or Æneid by the poetry of nature under the Grecian and Italian skies. Who has dreamt of showing the reciprocal relation of the poets to the philosophers, the philosophers to the poets, and these in turn to the artists—Plato to Homer, Homer to Phidias? It is a want of this that makes the classics so dull to youth, so useless to manhood.”
Mr. Egan, as a novelist, has written many books, dealing mostly with Irish-American life. These novels are filled with strong, manly feeling, and Catholic pictures beautiful enough to arrest the attention of the most fastidious. In these days of romance readers such books must serve as an antidote to the subtle poison that permeates the fictive art. They are pleasant and instructive, and that is a high tribute in these days of dulness and spiced immorality. Take him all in all, perhaps the most acceptable tribute is, that whatever may be his gifts in the various rôles he has essayed, heavy or slight, they have been ungrudgingly used for his race and religion.
JOHN B. TABB.
A friend once wrote to me: “What do you know about a poet who signs his name John B. Tabb, his poems are delicious?” My answer was, that I knew nothing of his personal history, but that his poems had found their way into my aristocratic scrap-book. Here I might pause to whisper that the adjective aristocratic, in my sense, has nothing haughty about it. When joined to the noun scrap-book, a good commentator—they are scarce—would freely translate the phrase the indwelling of good poetry. Since then my personal knowledge of the poet has grown slowly, a slight stock and no leaves. Even that, like my old coat, is second-handed. Such material, no matter how highly recommended by the keepers of the golden balls, is usually found to be a poor bargain. But here it is, keeping in mind that rags are better than no clothing, and that older proverb—half a loaf is better than no bread.
“John B. Tabb, (I quote) was born in Virginia, when or where I know not. Becoming a Catholic he studied for the priesthood and was ordained.” Here my data fails me. At present he is the professor of literature in St. Charles’ College, Maryland. It is something in his favor, this scanty biographical fare. Where the biography is long, laudatory, and in rounded periods, it is approached as one would a snake in the grass, with a kind of fear that in the end you may be bitten. “May I be skinned alive,” said that master of word-selection and phrase-juggler, Flaubert, “before I ever turn my private feelings to literary account.” And the reader, with the stench of recent keyhole biography in his nostrils, shouts “bravo.” Flaubert’s phrase might easily have hung on the pen of the retiring worshipper of the beautiful, “the Roman Catholic priest, who drudges through a daily round of pedagogical duties in St. Charles’ College.” This quoted phrase may stand. Pedagogy, at best, is a dull pursuit for a poet. It is not congenial, and I have held an odd idea that whatever was not congenial, disguise it as you may, is drudgery. And all this by way of propping the quoted sentence. The strange thing is that in the midst of this daily round of drudgery the poet finds time to produce what a recent critic well calls “verse-gems of thought.” These verse-gems, if judged by intrinsic evidence, would argue an environment other than a drudgery habitation. In truth, it is hard to desecrate them by predicating of them any environment other than a spiritual one.
This brings us to write of Fr. Tabb’s poetry that it is elusive, from a critical point of view. When you bring your preconceived literary canons to bear upon it, they are found wanting—too clumsy to test the delicacy, fineness of touch, and the permeated spiritualism embodied in the verse-gem. It is well summarized in the saying that “it possesses to the full a white estate of virginal prayerful art.” One might define it by negatives, such as the contrary of passion poetry. The point of view most likely to give the clearest conception would be found in the sentence: an evocation from within by a highly spiritualized intelligence. The poet has caught the higher music, the music of a soul in which dwell order and method. In other words, he has assiduously cultivated to its fullest development both the spiritual sense and the moral sense.
It is easy to trace in Fr. Tabb’s poetry the influence of Sidney Lanier. It has been asserted, and with much truth, that Lanier’s influence has strangely fascinated the younger school of Southern poets. Sladen, in his book on Younger American Poets, tells us that “Lanier differs from the other dead poets included in his book, in that he was not only a poet but the founder of a school of poetry.” To his school belongs Fr. Tabb, a school following the founder whose aim is to depict
“All gracious curves of slender wings, Bark mottlings, fibre spiralings, Fern wavings and leaf flickerings.
Yea, all fair forms and sounds and lights, And warmths and mysteries and mights, Of Nature’s utmost depths and heights.”
The defects of this school are best seen in the founder. He was a musician before a poet, and helplessly strove to catch shades by words that can only be rendered by music. Fr. Tabb has learned this limitation of his school. For the glowing semi-pantheism of Lanier he has substituted the true and no less beautiful doctrine of Christianity. All his verse-gems are redolent of his faith. They are religious in the sense that they are begotten by faith and breathe the air of the sanctuary. To read them is to leave the hum and pain of life behind, and enter the cloister where all is silent and peaceful, where dwelleth the spirit of God. Of them it is safe to assert that their white estate of virginal, prayerful art shall constitute their immortality. Fr. Tabb has not, as yet, thought fit to give them a more permanent form than they have in the current magazines. Catholic literature, and especially poetry, is so meagre that when a true singer touches the lyre it is not to be wondered at that those of his household should desire to possess his songs in a more worthy dwelling than that of an ephemeral magazine. In the absence of the coming charming volume I quote from my scrap-book a few of the verse-gems, thereby trusting to widen the poet’s audience and in an humble way gain lovers for his long-promised volume.
What could illustrate the peculiar genius of our poet better than the delicious gem that he has called
“THE WHITE JESSAMINE.”
I knew she lay above me, Where the casement all the night Shone, softened with a phosphor glow Of sympathetic light, And that her fledgling spirit pure Was pluming fast for flight.
Each tendril throbbed and quickened As I nightly climbed apace, And could scarce restrain the blossoms When, anear the destined place, Her gentle whisper thrilled me Ere I gazed upon her face.
I waited, darkling, till the dawn Should touch me into bloom, While all my being panted To outpour its first perfume, When, lo! a paler flower than mine Had blossomed in the gloom!
“Content” is another gem of exquisite thought and workmanship.
CONTENT.
Were all the heavens an overladen bough Of ripened benediction lowered above me, What could I crave, soul-satisfied as now, That thou dost love me?
The door is shut. To each unsheltered blessing Henceforth I say, “Depart! What wouldst thou of me?” Beggared I am of want, this boon possessing, That thou dost love me.
“Photographed” may well make the trio in the more fully illustrating his genius:—
PHOTOGRAPHED.
For years, an ever-shifting shade The sunshine of thy visage made; Then, spider-like, the captive caught In meshes of immortal thought.
E’en so, with half-averted eye, Day after day I passed thee by, Till, suddenly, a subtler art Enshrined thee in my heart of heart.
“Not even the infinite surfeit of Columbus literature of the last six months can deprive Fr. Tabb’s tribute in Lippincott’s of its sweetness and light,” says the _Review of Reviews_:
With faith unshadowed by the night, Undazzled by the day, With hope that plumed thee for the flight And courage to assay, God sent thee from the crowded ark, Christ bearer, like the dove, To find, o’er sundering waters dark, New lands for conquering love.
As a final selection, we may well conclude these brief notes on a poet with staying powers by quoting a poem, contributed to the _Cosmopolitan_, called “Silence;” a poem permeated with his fine spiritual sense:
Temple of God, from all eternity Alone like Him without beginning found; Of time, and space, and solitude the bound, Yet in thyself of all communion free. Is, then, the temple holier than he That dwells therein? Must reverence surround With barriers the portal, lest a sound Profane it? Nay; behold a mystery!
What was, remains; what is, has ever been: The lowliest the loftiest sustains. A silence, by no breath of utterance stirred— Virginity in motherhood—remains, Clear, midst a cloud of all-pervading sin, The voice of Love’s unutterable word.
JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE.
In this age of rondeaus and other feats in rhyme, it is pleasant to meet with a little book that abhors all verse tricks of the fin-de-siècle poets, and judiciously follows the old masters. Such a little book peeps at me from a corner in my library, marked in capitals, “Poems Worth Reading.” It was given to me years ago by its author, and as a remembrance, a few lines from the poem that appealed most to my intellect in those days, was written on its fly-leaf. It was its author’s first book, and was put forth with that shrinking modesty that has heralded all meritorious work. Of preface, that relic of egotism, there was none.
It was dedicated to one who was close to his heart, to
“JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY,
My very dear friend, and an honorable gentleman.”
It had O’Reilly’s warm word to speed and gain it a hearing, a word that would have remained unwritten were it not that the little volume, of its own worth, demanded that the word but expressed its merit. Since those days, it has travelled and found a ready home. Its gentle humor has made it quotable in the fashionable salons, its quaintness tickled the lonely scholar, stinging notes against wrong and its brilliant biting to the very core of silk-dressed sham, bespoke a hearty welcome in the haunts of the poor and oppressed.
The volume was one of promise and large hope. Of it O’Reilly wrote: “Not for years has such a first book as this appeared in America.” This recognition was but a truth. The author is a true poet, not a rhyme trickster or a cherry-stone filer, that brood so thoroughly detested by O’Reilly. He has something to say, a genuine, poetical impression to give in each poem. His genius, as that of most poets of Celtic blood, is essentially dramatic. This may best be seen in that fine, man-loving poem, “Netchaieff.” Netchaieff, a Russian Nihilist, was condemned to prison for life. Deprived of writing materials, he allowed his fingernail to grow until he fashioned it into a pen. With this he wrote, in his blood, on the margin of a book, the story of his sufferings. Almost his last entry was a note that his jailer had just boarded up the solitary pane which admitted a little light into his cell. The “letter written in blood” was smuggled out of prison and published, and Netchaieff died very soon after. The poet’s opening lines, relating to the Czar, Netchaieff’s death in prison, show that the human interest of this poet swallows up all other interests. The human alone can heat his blood and rouse in impassioned verse his indignation. How finely conceived is the satire in these lines:
“Netchaieff is dead, your Majesty. You knew him not. He was a common hind, Who lived ten years in hell, and then he died— To seek another hell, as we must think, Since he was rebel to your Majesty.”
There are many startling lines in this poem, lines that would give our fairy-airy school of poets material for a dozen sonnets. “For the People” is another poem that shows the ink was not watered. It is full of truth, unpleasant to the ears of the well-fed and easy living, but truth nevertheless, painted with a bold and masterly hand. It is the critic’s way to call poems of this kind passionate unreasonableness, while an irregular ode to a cat or a ballade of the shepherdess is filled with passionate reasonableness. All which proves that these amusing gentlemen are unconsciously sitting by the volcano’s side. They have eyes and they see not; they have ears and they hear not. The prophetic voice of the poets who will sing from their inner seeing, caring not whether the age listens or hurries on, is lost on these so-called literary interpreters. The tocsin blast dies on the breeze, or speaks to a few lonely thinkers who catch its notes for future warning; the reed’s soft sensuous music is hugged and repeated by the critics and the commonplace. When the lava tumbles forth, then the singer whose songs were a part of him, passionate, conceived in the white heat of truth, may have the diviner’s crown. The critics and commonplace, in their suffering, remember the warning in these burning lines:
“There’s a serf whose chains are of paper; there’s a king with a parchment crown, There are robber knights and brigands in factory, field and town; But the vassal pays his tribute to a lord of wage rent; And the baron’s toll is Shylock’s, with a flesh and blood per cent.
“The seamstress bends to her labor all night in a narrow room, The child, defrauded of childhood, tiptoes all day at the loom, The soul must starve, for the body can barely on husks be fed; And the loaded dice of a gambler settle the price of bread.
“Ye have shorn and bound the Samson, and robbed him of learning’s light; But his sluggish brain is moving, his sinews have all their might, Look well to your gates of Gaza, your privilege, pride and caste! The Giant is blind and thinking, and his locks are growing fast.”