Part 6

“Are you not afraid, Miss Conway,” said I, “to receive such warning notes?” “It is from the best girl in America,” was the frank reply; “read it.” A perusal of the few dashing lines was enough, and my generous host, reading my eyes, gave me the coveted notelet. That notelet begot an interest in the writer; an interest fully repaid by the strong, careful work put forth under her name. Louise Imogen Guiney, poet, essayist, dramatist, was born in Boston, that city of “sweetness and light,” in January, 1862. Her parents were Irish. Her father, Patrick Guiney, came from the hamlet of Parkstown, County Tipperary, at an early age. He was a man of the most blameless and noble character. During the civil war, as Col. Guiney of the Irish Ninth Massachusetts Volunteers, his heroism on behalf of his adopted country won him the grateful admiration of all lovers of freedom. This admiration at the close of the war was substantially shown by his election as Judge of Probate. Constant suffering from an old wound, received at the battle of the Wilderness, gave the old soldier but few years to enjoy honors from his fellow-citizens. His death was mourned by all who loved virtue and honor. Of him a Boston poet sang:

“Large heart and brave! Tried soul and true! How thickly in thy life’s short span, All strong sweet virtues throve and grew, As friend, as hero, and as man. Unmoved by thought of blame or praise, Unbought by gifts of power and pride, Thy feet still trod Time’s devious ways With Duty as thy law and guide.”

Good blood, you will say, from whence our poet came, and blood counts even in poetry. I have no anecdotes to relate of Miss Guiney’s early years. I am not sure that there were any. Anecdotes are usually manufactured in later life, if the subject happens to become famous. Her education was carefully planned, and intelligently carried out. She was not held in the dull routine of the school-room, but was allowed to emancipate herself in the works of the poets. What joy must have been her’s, scampering home after the study of _de omni scibili_, the ordinary curriculum of any American school, to a quiet nook and the dream of her poets. Amid these dreams came the siren whisperings of the muse, telling her of the poet within struggling for life and expression. These struggles begot a tiny little volume happily named “Songs at the Start.” The great American reviewer, who, ordinarily,

“Bolts every book that comes out of the press, Without the least question of larger or less,”

on this occasion, by some untoward event, stumbled on a truth when he informed us, with the air of one who rarely touches earth, that the book bore signs of promise. The people, by all means a better critic, were more apt in their judgment of the young singer. A few years later they asked her to write the memorial poem for the services in commemoration of General Grant. Thus honored by her native city, in an easy way she was led to climb the ladder of fame. In 1885 appeared her first volume of essays, “Goose Quill Papers;” in 1887 a volume of poems bearing the fanciful name of “White-Sail;” in 1888 a pretty book for children; in 1892 “Monsieur Henri, a Foot-note to French History.” It us something to be noted in regard to a “Foot-note to French history,” that the novelist Stevenson, in his far-off home in Samoa, was publishing at the same time a work which bore a decided likeness to her title. Stevenson’s book was published as “A Foot-Note to History.” In 1893 appeared her latest volume of verse, being a selection of poems previously published in American magazines. This selection (the poet has a genuine knack for tacking taking names to her volumes) is quaintly named “A Wayside Harp,” and dedicated to a brace of Irish poets, the Sigerson sisters. The graceful dedication as well as many of its strongest and most artistic poems, were the outcome of a trip to Great Britain and Ireland. The author travelled with open eyes, and brought back many a dainty picture of the scenes she had so lovingly witnessed. This volume fulfils the early promise, and what is more, gives indubitable signs that the poet possesses a reserve force. Not a few women poets write themselves out in their first volume. Not so with Miss Guiney, every additional volume shows greater strength and more complete mastery of technique. After the surfeit of twaddle passing current as poetry, such a book as “A Wayside Harp” should find a waiting audience, Miss Guiney has the essentials of a poet, which I take to be color, music, perfume and passion. In their use she is an artist. In her first book an excess of these everywhere prevailed; it was from this excess, however, that the prudent critic would have hazarded a doubt as to her fitness to join the company of the bards. Since then she has been an ardent student. This study has not only taught her limitations, a thing that saves so much after pruning, but that other lesson, forgotten by so many bardlets, that the greatest poetic effects are the result of the masterful mixing of a few simple colors. It is well that she has learned these lessons at the outset of her career. Let not the fads and fancies of this _fin de siècle_ and the senseless worship of those poetasters who scorn sense while they hug sound lead her from the true road of song. No amount of meaningless words airily strung together, no amount of gymnastic rhyming feats can produce a poet. They are the badges of those wondrous little dunces that pass nature with a frown, alleging in the language of the witty Bangs that “Nature is not art.” Guiney’s friend and faithful mentor, O’Reilly, had taught her to abhor all those who spent their waking hours chiselling cherry stones. To him it was a poet’s duty to aim high, attune his lyre, not to the petty, but the manly and hopeful; never to debase the lyre by an utterance of selfishness, but to consecrate it with the strains of liberty and humanity. If Guiney follows the teachings of her early friend—teachings which are substantially sound, she will yet produce poems that the world will not willingly let die. That Rosetti fad of hiding a mystic meaning in a poem, now occupying the brains of our teeming songsters, is now and then to be met with in our poet. It is a trade-trick. Poetry is sense—common-sense at that, and you cannot rim common-sense things with mystical hues. Abjuring these trade-tricks, and shaking off the trammels of her curious and extensive reading and evolving from herself solely, she has, says Douglas Sladen, a great promise before her. As an instance of this promise let us quote that fine poem, “The Wild Ride,” which is full of genuine inspiration, and which may be the means of introducing to some the most thoroughly gifted Catholic woman writer of our country.

THE WILD RIDE.

I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses, All day, the commotion of sinewy mane-tossing horses; All night from their cells the importunate tramping and neighing, Cowards and laggards fall back but alert to the saddle, Straight, grim, and abreast, vault our weather-worn galloping legion, With a stirrup cup each to the one gracious woman that loves him. The road is thro’ dolour and dread, over crags and morasses! There are shapes by the way, there are things that appall or entice us! What odds! We are knights, and our souls are but bent on the riding! I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses, All day, the commotion of sinewy, mane-tossing horses; All night from their cells the importunate tramping and neighing, We spur to a land of no name, outracing the storm wind; We leap to the infinite dark, like the sparks from the anvil, Thou leadest! O God! All’s well with thy troopers that follow.

It was only natural that the daughter of an Irish patriot should sing of her father’s land, and that in a style racy of that land. It was a hazardous experiment, as many an Irish American singer has learned in sorrow. That Miss Guiney has come out of the trying ordeal successfully, may be seen in the following little snatch, full of the aroma of green Erin:

AN IRISH PEASANT SONG.

I try to knead and spin, but my life is low the while; Oh, I long to be alone, and walk abroad a mile; Yet when I walk alone, and think of naught at all, Why from me that’s young should the wild tears fall?

The shower-stricken earth, the earth-colored streams, They breathe on me awake, and moan to me in dreams; And yonder ivy fondling the broken castle wall, It pulls my heart, till the wild tears fall.

The cabin-door looks down a furze-lighted hill, And far as Leighlin cross the fields are green and still; But once I hear a blackbird in Leighlin hedges call, The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall!

Miss Guiney possesses a charming personality. Her manner is “unaffected, girlish and modest.” There is about her none of the curtness and prudishness of the blue-stocking. Success has not turned her head, literary homage has not made her forget that they who will build for time must need work long and patiently, using only the best material. By so doing may it be written of her work, as she has written of Brother Bartholomew’s:

“Wonderful verses! fair and fine, Rich in the old Greek loveliness; The seer-like vision, half divine; Pathos and merriment in excess, And every perfect stanza told, Of love and of labor manifold.”

MRS. BLAKE.

Boston is a charming city. It is the whim of the passing hour to sneer at the modest dame. Henry James has done so. Is not the author of “Daisy Miller” and other interminable novels a correct person to follow? The disciples of the Mutual Admiration Society in American Letters will vociferously answer “yes.” Old-fashioned people may have another way. Scattered here and there possibly a few there are who hold that Hawthorne was a better novelist than Howells is, that Holmes’ poetry is as good as Boyesen’s, and that Emerson’s criticisms are more illuminative than James’. Be this as it may, Boston is a charming place to all those who had the good fortune to have been welcomed by its warm-hearted citizen, Boyle O’Reilly. To those who knew his struggles, and the earnest striving, until his weary spirit sought its final home, for Catholic literature in its true sense, the charm but increases.

It was owing to his kindness that I found myself one blustery, raw day, ringing the door-bell of an ordinary well to-do brick house. Houses now and then carry on their fronts an inkling of their occupants. A door was opened, my card handed to a feminine hand; the aperture was not as yet wide enough to catch a glimpse of the face. The card was a power. “Come in,” said a woman’s voice, and the door was wide open. I followed the guide, and was soon in a plain, well furnished room, in presence of a motherly-looking woman. She was knitting; at least that is part of my memory’s picture. Near her hung a mocking-bird, whose notes now and then were peculiarly sad. Despite the graceful lines of the Cavalier Lovelace, iron bars do a prison make for bird and man. And the songs sung behind these bars are but bits of the crushed-out life. I was welcomed, and during busy years have held the remembrance of that visit with its hour of desultory chat and a mocking-bird’s broken song. The motherly-looking woman, with her strong Celtic face freshly furrowed by sorrow in the loss of beloved children, was a charming talker and a good listener, things rarely found in your gentle or fiery poetess. She had just published, under the initials M. A. B., a volume of children’s verse, and, as is natural with an author who had finished a piece of work, was full of it. The pretense of some authors that they are bored to speak of their own books is a sly suggestion to praise them for their humility. Mrs. Blake—for that is the motherly-looking woman’s name—spoke of her work without any hiccoughing gush or false modesty. Her eyes lit up, and the observer read in them honesty. She was deeply interested, as all thinking women must be, in the solution of the social problems that have arisen in our times, and will not be downed at the biddance of capitalist or demagogue. With her clear-cut intellect she was able to grasp a salient point, purposely hidden by the swarm of curists with their panacea remedies, that these problems must be solved in the light of religion. Man must return to Christ, not the “cautious, statistical Christ” paraded in the social show, not

“The meteor blaze That soon must fail, and leave the wanderer blind, More dark and helpless far, than if it ne’er had shined,”

but the Christ of the Gospels, the Bringer of peace and good-will—the Bearer of burdens, the soul-guider—Christ, loving and acting, as found in the Catholic Church. Hecker had begun the preface of his wonderful book with a truth, “The age is out of joint.” Problems to be solved, and lying around them millions of broken hearts. “The age is out of joint.” Who will bring the light and rightify the age? Mrs. Blake has but one answer. Bring the employers and the employed nearer the Christ of the Catholic Church. This was O’Reilly’s often expressed and worked-for idea. It is the key-note of much of his poetry. It is the germ of his “Bohemia.” It was impossible to live, as Mrs. Blake did, on the most friendly terms with such a man and not be smitten with his life-thought. In not a few published social papers Mrs. Blake has thrown out valuable and suggestive hints as to the best means of bringing the weary world under the sweet sway of religion. Her voice, it is true, is but one voice in the social wilderness, but individual efforts must not be thwarted, for is not a fresh period opening in which the individuality, the personality, of souls acting under the direct guidance of the Holy Ghost, will take up all that is good in modern ideas, and the cords of our tent be strengthened and its stakes enlarged? “What we have to dread is neither ‘historical rancor’ nor ‘philosophical atheism,’” “nor the instinct of personal freedom.” It is, in the words of Dr. Barry, that we should set little store by that “freedom wherewith Christ has made us free,” and that being born into a church where we may have the grandest spiritual ideas for the asking, we should fold our hands in slumber and be found, at length, “disobedient to the heavenly vision.” Against such perils Hecker, the noblest life as yet in our American church, made a life-fight. On his side was Boyle O’Reilly, Roche, Mrs. Blake, Katherine Conway and Louise Guiney. Nor pass such lives in vain.

Mrs. Blake was born in Dungarvan, Co. Waterford, Ireland. In childhood she was brought to Massachusetts. In 1865 she was married to Dr. J. G. Blake, a leading physician of Boston. She has made that city her home, and is highly esteemed in its literary and social circles. Among her published books may be mentioned “Poems,” Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1882, dedicated to her husband; “On The Wing,” a pretty volume of Californian sketches; “Rambling Talk,” a series of papers contributed to the Boston journals.

Her sketches are the agreeable jottings of a highly cultivated woman; seeing nature in the light of poetry rather than science, she has made a series of charming pictures out of her wanderings. They are not free from sentiment,—illusions if you will, but that is their greatest charm. “The world of reality is a poor affair.” So many books of travel are annually appearing,—books that have no excuse for being other than to prove how widespread dulness and incapacity is, that a trip with a guide like Mrs. Blake has but one failing,—its shortness. Neither in her travels nor in her literary articles does Mrs. Blake body forth her best prose utterance. These must be found in her earnest social papers, where her woman’s heart, saddened by the miseries of its fellows, pours out its streams of consolation and preaches (all earnest souls must be preachers now-a-days) the only and all sufficient cure—the Church.

An extract from one of these papers will best show her power. She is portraying the Church manifesting itself in the individual as well as the family life, pleading for the central idea of her system. “Jesus Christ is the complement of man,”—the restorer of the race. The Catholic Church is the manifestation of Jesus Christ.

“There are, alas! too many weaknesses into which thoughtlessness and opportunity lead one class as well as the other. But still there is to be seen almost without exception, among practical Catholics, young wives, content and happy, welcoming from the very outset of married life the blessed company of the little ones who are to guard them as do their angels in heaven; proud like Cornelia of their jewels; gladly accepting comparative poverty and endless care; while their sisters outside the Church buy the right to idleness and personal adorning at the expense of the childless homes which are a disgrace and menace to the nation. There is the honor and purity of the fireside respected; the overpowering sweetness and strength of family ties acknowledged; the reverential love that awaits upon the father and mother shown. There are sensitive and refined women bearing sorrow with resignation and hardship without rebellion; combating pain with patience and fulfilling harsh duty without complaint. In a tremendous over-proportion to those who attempt to live outside its helpfulness, and in exact ratio to their practical devotion to the observances of the Church, they find power of resisting temptation in spite of poverty, and overcoming impulse by principle. Can the world afford to ignore an agency by which so much is accomplished?

“So much for the practical side, which is the moral that particularly needs pointing at this moment. Of the spiritual amplitude and sustaining which the Church gives there is little need to speak. Only a woman can know what Faith means in the existence of women. The uplift which she needs in moments of great trial; the sustaining power to bear the constant harassment of petty worries; the outlet for emotions which otherwise choke the springs, the tonic of prayer and belief; the assurance of a force sufficiently divine and eternal to satisfy the cravings of human longing—what but this is to make life worth living for her? And where else, in these days of scepticism, is she to find such immortal dower? It is a commentary upon worldly wisdom, that it has attempted to ignore this necessity, and left woman under the increased pressure of her new obligations, to rely solely upon such frail reeds as human respect and conventional morality. She needs the inspiration of profound conviction and practical piety a hundredfold more than ever before. The woman of the old time, secluded within the limits of the household, surrounded by the material safeguard of custom, might lead an untroubled existence even if devotion and faith were not vital principles with her. The woman of to-day, harassed, beset, tempted, driven by necessity, drawn this way and that by bad advice and worse example, is attempting a hopeless task when she tries the same experiment.”

The poetry of Mrs. Blake is rational and wholesome. She knows her gifts and is content to use them at their best, giving us songs in a minor key, that if they add little to human thought, yet make the world better from their coming. In the poems of childhood she is particularly happy. She knows children, their joys and sorrows, has caught their ways. Her’s is a heart that has danced in the joy of motherhood and been stricken when the “dead do not waken.” She is our only intelligent writer of children’s poems. The assertion may be controverted. A hundred Catholic poets for children may be cited writers “of genius profound,” of “exquisite fancy,” “whose works should grace every parish library.” I quote a stereotyped criticism, a constant expression with Catholic reviewers. I laugh, in my hermitage, and blandly suggest, to all whom it may concern, that insanity in jingles is not relished by sane children. I speak from experience, having perpetrated a selection from the one hundred on a class of bright boys and girls. Peaceful sleep, and, let us hope, pleasant dreams, came to their aid. Shall I ever, Comus, forget their faces in the transition moment from dulness to delight? Let us cease cant and rapturous criticism. Catholic literature, to survive the time that gave it birth, must be built on other foundations. Hasty and unconscious productions must be branded as such. We must have, as the French so well put it, a horror of “pacotille” and “camelotte.” “If my works are good,” said the sculptor Rude, “they will endure; if not, all the laudation in the world would not save them from oblivion.” The same may well be written of Catholic literature. Whether for children or grown-up men or women, as a Catholic critic, whose only aim has been to gain an audience for my fellow Catholic writers whose works can bear a favorable comparison with the best contemporary thought, I ask that the best shall be given, and that given, it shall be joyfully received; that trash shall not fill the book-cases, lie on the parlor-tables, be puffed in our weeklies, and genius and sacrifice be forgotten. I ask that the works of Stoddard, Johnston, Egan, Roche, Azarias, Lathrop, Tabb, Miss Repplier, Guiney, Katherine Conway, Mrs. Blake, find a welcome in each Catholic household, and that the Catholic press make their delightful personalities known to our rising generation. Of their best they have given. Shall they die before we acknowledge it?

AGNES REPPLIER.