Down at Caxton's 6

Down at Caxton's 6

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.