Down at Caxton's 5

Down at Caxton's 5

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.”