Part 4
“Netchaieff” and “For the People” are poems with a meaning. Their author is a thinker, a keen student of the social problems that convulse our every-day life. He walks the city’s streets, and sees sights and hears ominous murmuring. He uses the poet’s right to translate these scenes and sights into his own impassioned verse. This done, his duty done. The Creator must give brains to the reader. If that has been done, the poet’s lines will fall fresh and thought-provoking on his ears. It will take him from Mittens, Marjorie’s Kisses, April Maids and the school of fantastic littleness, to man’s inhumanity to man, the burning wrong of our day. An Adirondack climb, but then the point of view repays the exertion. It is generally written that the author of Songs and Satires is a comic poet. A half-way truth is expressed. If by comic is meant humor, yes; all poets who are worth looking into have in a greater or less degree that precious gift. It is a distinct gain if the author is an artist and knows how to use it, dangerous to the commonplace, who put it on with a white-wash brush. It is a nice line that divides humor from buffoonery. Our author is a humorist of that school whose genius has been used to alleviate human suffering. Its shafts are not forged by the hammer of spleen on the anvil of malice, but the workmanship of love mourning for misery. His spirit is akin to Hood’s. His touch is light, but his poniard is a Damascene blade well pointed. Cant has no foil to set it off. “A Concord Love Song” is a charming bit of satire. I can well remember the effect it had on a teacher of mine, a proud sage of that school of word-twisting and transcendental gush. He sniffed and pawed viciously, a sure sign that the poet’s dart was safely lodged in the bull’s eye. Those who have, as a sleep seducer, read some of the Concord fraternity’s vapid musings on the pensive Here and the doubtful Yonder, will deliciously relish such lines as these:
“Ah, the joyless fleeting Of our primal meeting, And the fateful greeting Of the How and Why! Ah, the Thingness flying From the Hereness, sighing For a love undying That fain would die.
“Ah, the Ifness sadd’ning, The Whichness madd’ning, And the But ungladd’ning That lie behind! When the signless token Of love is broken In the speech unspoken, Of mind to mind.”
It is to his later and serious poems that the critic must go to find the poet at his best. “At Sea” is a poem with a memory, inasmuch as it is the “embodiment of as beautiful a story of brotherly love as the world makes record.” The poet’s brother, Mr. John Roche, pay-clerk in the United States Navy, died a hero’s death in the Samoan disaster of March, 1889. Doubtless it was from this loved brother that the poet took his love for the sea, and the gallant deeds of our young navy. Here he is in his own field. “The Fight of the Armstrong Privateer” shows genuine inspiration. It has color and passion. The reader feels the swing of the graphic lines and a quickness in his own blood, while the tale of daring rapidly and gracefully unfolds itself.
James Jeffrey Roche was born at Mount Mellick, Queens county, Ireland, forty-six years ago. His father was a schoolmaster, and to him the poet is indebted for his early education. At a suitable age he entered St. Dunstan’s College, Charlottetown, Prince Edward’s Island, the family having emigrated there in the poet’s infancy. Here he finished his classics and showed his literary bent by the publishing of a college journal. Having the valedictory assigned to him, he hopelessly broke down. The present year he returned to St. Dunstan’s the orator of Commencement day, as he wittily remarked, to finish the valedictory that had overtaxed his strength as a small boy. After leaving college the poet came to Boston, entered commercial life, remaining in that hardly genial business for sixteen years. During these years his pen was busy at the real vocation of his life. He was for several years the Boston correspondent of the _Detroit Free Press_, and had been long an editorial contributor to the _Pilot_, before he took the position of assistant editor on it, in 1883. As a journalist Mr. Roche has few equals. His keen mind easily grapples the questions of the day, while his good sense in their discussion never deserts him. In a few lines he goes to the core. If his trenchant sarcasm punctures the bubble, his humor will not fail to make it ridiculous. It is not the windy editorial in our day that tortures the quacks, but the bright, pointed dart of a paragraph. It is so easy to remember, may be stored in the reader’s brain so readily, and used with deadly effect at any moment. A writer who knows him well has this to say: “As a journalist he combines two qualities not often found together, discretion and brilliancy. The former quality was well exemplified in his editorial course during the recent crisis in the history of the Irish National movement. He handles political topics ably, and in the treatment of the still broader social and economic questions, writes with the strength and spirit worthy of the associate and successor of that apostle of human liberty and human brotherhood, John Boyle O’Reilly.”
In truth, the one thing most essentially felt in this writer, whether in prose or poetry, is his sanity. There is no buncombe in the former, no mawkishness nor pedantic prettiness in the latter. His genius has no pose. So much the better for his fame and future. Mr. Roche’s prose works are: “The Story of the Filibusters,” a subject dear to a poet’s heart, and the “Life of John Boyle O’Reilly,” his chief and friend. This volume was the work of ten weeks, and that in the hours free from his editorial charge. It was a feat that few men could so successfully achieve. It had to be done. No sacrifice was too great for Roche to make for his dead friend. That his health did not give way after the sleeplessness, work and worry of those ten weeks, is the wonder of those who stood near to him. Despite the limited time allowed to Mr. Roche, his biography shows few signs of haste. It is well and interestingly written, a lasting memorial and a deep tribute of affection to one of the most lovable characters of the century. O’Reilly rises from this book as he was. Friendship, while giving what was his due, restrains all affections that might mar the truth of the portrait. His stature was felt to be large enough, without any additions that crumble to time.
There are those of us who hope that the poet, with greater leisure, will give to O’Reilly’s race a monograph to be treasured and read by each household, a monograph where the best in O’Reilly’s character shall be emphasized, and so lovingly set that those who read shall take heed and learn, while blessing him who gave the setting. The book as it is costs too much and is hardly compact enough for those who need the strong lessons of such a life as O’Reilly’s. In a smaller compass and at less cost, done in that delightful way so thoroughly shown in his art of paragraphing, the little book would be a guide-post to many a struggling lad and lass. And to the young of our race must we look and to the exiled part for the full flowering. As the poet, so is the man, cheery, unaffected, kindly and man-loving. He has no airs, lacks the melodramatic of the airy-fairy school. He does not pretend that the gift of prophecy is his, nor hint that it sleeps amid verbal ingenuities. He has a song to sing, a tale to tell, and he does it with all the craft that is in him. In person Mr. Roche is of the medium height, well-built, rather dark complexioned, with abundant jet-black hair and brilliant hazel eyes.
In concluding this sketch of a genuine man and true poet, I am tempted to quote the little poem he so graciously wrote in the fly-leaf of his “Songs and Satires:”
“They chained her fair young body to the cold and cruel stone; The beast begot of sea and slime had marked her for his own; The callous world beheld the wrong, and left her there alone, Base caitiffs who belied her, false kinsmen who denied her, Ye left her there alone!
“My Beautiful, they left thee in thy peril and thy pain; The night that hath no morrow was brooding on the main; But lo! a light is breaking, of hope for thee again; ’Tis Perseus’ sword a-flaming, thy dawn of day proclaiming, Across the Western main. O Ireland! O my country! he comes to break thy chain.”
GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP.
In the footsore journey through Mexico, when dinner gladdened our vision, poor Read would solemnly remark, “dinners are reverent things.” Society accepted this definition. I use society in the sense that Emerson would. “When one meets his mate,” writes the Concord sage, “society begins.” Read was mine, and to-day his quaint remark haunts me with melancholy force. Thoughts of a dinner with the subject of this sketch, George Parsons Lathrop, and one whose fair and forceful life has been quenched, flit through my mind. It was but yesterday that I bade the gentle scholar farewell, unconsciously a long farewell, for Azarias has fled from the haunts of mortality.
“This is the burden of the heart, The burden that it always bore; We live to love, we meet to part, And part to meet on earth no more.”
Colonel Johnson had read one of his charming essays. Brother Azarias and George Parsons Lathrop had listened with rapt attention to the most loveable writer of the New South. After the lecture I was asked to join them, for, as the author of Lucille asks, “where is the man that can live without dining?” That dinner, now that one lies dead, enters my memory as reverent and makes of Read’s remark a truth. Men may or may not appear best at dinner. Circumstances lord over most dinners. As it was the only opportunity I had to snap my kodak, you must accept my picture or seek a better artist. Kodak-pictures, when taken by amateurs, are generally blurred. And now to mine.
A man of medium height, strongly built, broad shouldered, the whole frame betokening agility; face somewhat rounded giving it a pleasant plumpness, with eyes quick, nervous and snappy, lighting up a more than ordinary dark complexion—such is Parsons Lathrop, as caught by my camera. His voice was soft, clear as a bell-note, and, when heard in a lecture hall, charming; a slight hesitancy but adds to the pleasure of the listener. In reading he affects none of the dramatic poses and Delsarte movements that makes unconscious comedians of our tragic-readers. It is pleasant to listen to such a man, having no fear that in some moving passage, carried away by some quasi-involuntary elocutionary movement, he might find himself a wreck among the audience. The lines of Wordsworth are an apt description of him:
“Yet he was a man Whom no one could have passed without remark, Active and nervous was his gait; his limbs, And his whole figure, breathed intelligence.”
Mr. Lathrop was born in Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands, August 25, 1851. It was a fit place for a poet’s birthplace, “those gardens in perfect bloom, girded about with creaming waves.” He came of Puritan stock, the founder of his family being the Rev. John Lathrop, a Separatist minister, who came to Massachusetts in 1634. Some of his kinsmen have borne a noble part in the creation of an American literature, notably the historian of the Dutch and the genial autocrat, Wendell Holmes. His primary education was had in the public schools of New York; from thence he went to Dresden, Germany, returning in 1870 to study law at Columbia College. Law was little to his liking. The dry and musty tomes, wherein is written some truth and not a little error, sanctioned by one generation of wiseacres to be whittled past recognition by another generation of the same species, could hardly hope to hold in thraldom a mind that had from boyhood browsed in the royal demesne of literature. Law and literature, despite the smart sayings of a few will not run in the same rut. In abandoning law for literature, he but followed the law of his being. What law lost literature gained. On a trip abroad a year later he met Rose Hawthorne, the second daughter of the great Nathaniel, wooed, and won her. This marriage was by far the happiest event in his life, the crowning glory of his manhood, a fountain of bliss to sustain his after life. Years later, in a little poem entitled, “Love that Lives,” referring to the woman that was his all, he addresses her in words that needed no coaxing by the muses, but had long been distilled by his heart, ready for his pen to give them a setting and larger life.
“Dear face—bright, glinting hair— Dear life, whose heart is mine— The thought of you is prayer, The love of you divine.
In starlight, or in rain; In the sunset’s shrouded glow; Ever, with joy or pain, To you my quick thoughts go.”
And summing up, he tells us the kind of a bond that holds them. It is the
“Love that lives; Its spring-time blossoms blow ’Mid the fruit that autumn gives; And its life outlasts the snow.”
In 1875 he became assistant editor of that staid and stately magazine the _Atlantic Monthly_, thereby adding to his fame, while it brought him into intimate relationship with the best current thought of the time. Few American literary men have not, at some time of their career, been closely allied with the press. Mr. Lathrop has been no exception. For two years, from ’77 to ’79, his brilliant pen guided the destinies of the _Boston Courier_. In 1879 he purchased Hawthorne’s old home, “The Wayside,” in Concord, Mass., making it his home until his removal to New York in 1883. His present residence is at New London, Conn., where a beautiful home, with its every nook consecrated to books and paintings, tells of an ideal literary life and companionship. Mr. Lathrop’s genius is many sided. This is often a sign of strength. Men, says a recent critic, with a great and vague sense of power in them are always doubtful whether they have reached the limits of that power, and naturally incline to test this in the field in which they feel they have fewer rather than more numerous auguries of success. Into many fields this brilliant writer has gone, and with success. In some he has sowed, in others reaped a golden harvest. He was a pioneer in that movement which rightfully held that an author had something to do with his brain-work. It seems strange that in this nineteenth century such a proposition should demand a defender. Sanity, however, is not so widespread as the optimists tell. The contention of those that denied copyright was, “Ideas are common property.” So they are, says our author, but granting this, don’t think you have bagged your game? How about the form in which those ideas are presented? Is not the author’s own work, wrought out with toil, sweat and privation—is not the labor bestowed upon that form as worthy of proper wage as the manual skill devoted to the making of a jumping jack? Yet no one has denied that jumping-jacks must be paid for. This was sound reasoning and would have had immediate effect, had Congress possessed a ha’penny worth of logic. As it was, years were wasted agitating for a self-evident right, men’s energies spent, and at length a half-loaf reluctantly given.
In another field Mr. Lathrop has been a worker almost single-handed, that of encouraging a school of American art. A few years ago a daub from France was valued more than a marvellous color-study of John La Farge, or a canvas breathing the luminous idealism of Waterman. Critics sniffed at American art, while they went into rhapsody over some foreign little master. Our author, whose keen perception had taught him that the men who toiled in attics, without recompense in the present, and dreary prospects for the future, for the sake of art, were not to be branded as daubers, but as real artists, the fathers of American art, became their defender. He pointed out the beauties of this new school, its strength, and above all, that whatever it might have borrowed from foreign art, it was American in the core. Men listened more for the sake of the writer than interest in his theme. Gradually they became tolerant and admitted that there was such a thing as American art.
It was natural that the son-in-law of America’s greatest story-teller should try his strength in fiction. His first novels show a trace of Hawthorne. They are romantic, while the wealth of language bewilders. This, as a critic remarks, was an “indication of opulence and not of poverty.” The author was feeling his way. His later works bear no trace of Hawthorne; they are marked by his own fine spiritual sense. The plots are ingenious, poetically conceived and worked out with a deftness and subtlety that charms the reader. There is an air of fineness about them totally foreign to the pyrotechnic displays of current American fiction. The author is an acute observer, one who looks below the surface, an ardent student of psychology. His English is scholarly, has color and dramatic force. His novels are free from immoral suggestions, straining after effect, overdoing the pathetic and incongruous padding, the ordinary stock of our _fin de siècle_ novelists. The reading of them not only amuses, a primary condition of all works of fiction, but instructs and widens the reader’s horizon on the side of the good and true. In poetry Mr. Lathrop has attained his greatest strength. Some of his war-poems are full of fine feeling and manly vigor. He is no carver of cherry-stones or singer of inane sonnets and meaningless rondeaus, but a poet who has something to say; none of your humanity messages, but songs that are human, songs that find root in the human heart. Of his volumes “Rose and Rooftree,” “Dreams and Days,” a critic writes:
“There are poems in tenderer vein which appeal to many hearts, and others wrought out of the joys and sorrows of the poet’s own life, which draw hearts to him, as “May Rose” and the “Child’s Wish Granted” and “The Flown Soul,” the last two referring to his only son, whose death in early childhood has been the supreme grief of his life. The same critic notes the exquisite purity and delicacy of these poems, and that “in a day when the delusion is unfortunately widespread that these cannot co-exist with poetic fervor and strength.”
In March of 1891 Mr. Lathrop, after weary years of aimless wandering in the barren fields of sectarianism found, as Newman and Brownson had found, that peace which a warring world cannot give, in the bosom of the Catholic Church. Where Emerson halted, shackled by Puritanism and its traditional prejudice towards Catholicism, Lathrop, as Brownson, in quest of new worlds of thought, critically examined the old church and her teachings, finding therein the truth that makes men free. This step of Lathrop’s, inexplicable to many of his friends, is explained in his own way, in the manly letter that concludes this sketch. Such a letter must, by its truthfulness, have held his friends. “May we not,” says Kegan Paul, “carry with us loving and tender memories of men from whom we learn much, even while we differ and criticise?”
“Humanly speaking, I entered into Catholicity as a result of long thought and meditation upon religion, continuing through a number of years. But there must have been a deeper force at work, that of the Holy Spirit, by means of what we call grace, for a longer time than I suspected. Certainly I was not attracted by ‘the fascinations of Rome,’ that are so glibly talked about, but which no one has ever been able to define to me. Perhaps those that use the phrase refer to the outward symbols of ritual, that are simply the expressive adornment of the inner meaning—the flower of it. I, at any rate, never went to Mass but once with any comprehension of it, before my conversion, and had seldom even witnessed Catholic services anywhere; although now, with knowledge and experience, I recognize the Mass—which even that arch, unorthodox author, Thomas Carlyle, called ‘the only genuine thing of our times’—as the greatest action in the world. Many Catholics had been known to me, of varying merit; and some of them were valued friends. But none of these ever urged or advised or even hinted that I should come into the Church. The best of them had (as large numbers of my fellow-Catholics have to-day) that same modesty and reverence toward the sacred mysteries that caused the early Christians also to be slow in leading catechumens—or those not yet fully prepared for belief—into the great truths of faith. My observations of life, however, increasingly convinced me that a vital, central, unchanging principle in religion was necessary, together with one great association of Christians in place of endless divisions—if the promise made to men was to be fulfilled, or really had been fulfilled. When I began to ask questions, I found Catholics quite ready to answer everything with entire straightforwardness, gentle good-will, yet firmness. Neither they nor the Church evaded anything. They presented and defended the teaching of Christ in its entirety, unexaggerated and undiminished; the complete faith, without haggling or qualification or that queer, loose assent to every sort of individual exception and denial that is allowed in other organizations. I may say here, too, that the Church, instead of being narrow or pitiless toward those not of her communion, as she is often mistakenly said to be, is the most comprehensive of all in her interpretation of God’s mercy as well as of his justice. And, instead of slighting the Bible, she uses it more incessantly than any of the Protestant bodies; at the same time shedding upon it a clear, deep light that is the only one that ever enabled me to see its full meaning and coherence. The fact is, those outside of the Church nowadays are engaged in talking so noisily and at such a rate, on their own hook, that they seldom pause to hear what the Church really says, or to understand what she is. Once convinced of the true faith, intellectually and spiritually, I could not let anything stand in the way of affirming my loyalty to it.”
REV. BROTHER AZARIAS.
It is delicious in this age of hurried bookmaking, to run across a thinker. It gives one the same kind of sensation that comes to the sportsman, when a monarch of the glen crosses his path. Bookmakers are as many as leaves of the Adirondacks after the hasty gallop of a mountain storm; thinkers are scarce. When, then, amid the leafy mass, one discovers the rare bird hiding from vulgar gaze, an irresistible desire to find his lurking place seizes the observer. This lurking place may be old to many; it was only the other day that I discovered it,—when a friend placed in my hands “Phases of Thought and Criticism,” by Brother Azarias. This book, the sale of which has been greater in England than on this side of the water, is one of suggestive criticism—a criticism founded on faith. The author holds with another thinker, that “Religion is man’s first and deepest concern. To be indifferent is to be dull or depraved, and doubt is disease.” Each chapter of his book expresses a distinct social and intellectual force. Each embodies a verifying ideal; for, continues the author, “the criticism that busies itself with the literary form is superficial, for food it gives husks.”