Down at Caxton's 7

Down at Caxton's 7

“Ye have shorn and bound the Samson, and robbed him of learning’s

light;

But his sluggish brain is moving, his sinews have all their might,

Look well to your gates of Gaza, your privilege, pride and caste!

The Giant is blind and thinking, and his locks are growing fast.”

 

“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.