Down at Caxton's

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.