Down at Caxton's 8

Down at Caxton's 8

“Dear face—bright, glinting hair—

Dear life, whose heart is mine—

The thought of you is prayer,

The love of you divine.

 

In starlight, or in rain;

In the sunset’s shrouded glow;

Ever, with joy or pain,

To you my quick thoughts go.”

 

And summing up, he tells us the kind of a bond that holds them. It is

the

 

“Love that lives;

Its spring-time blossoms blow

’Mid the fruit that autumn gives;

And its life outlasts the snow.”

 

In 1875 he became assistant editor of that staid and stately magazine

the _Atlantic Monthly_, thereby adding to his fame, while it brought

him into intimate relationship with the best current thought of the

time. Few American literary men have not, at some time of their career,

been closely allied with the press. Mr. Lathrop has been no exception.

For two years, from ’77 to ’79, his brilliant pen guided the destinies

of the _Boston Courier_. In 1879 he purchased Hawthorne’s old home,

“The Wayside,” in Concord, Mass., making it his home until his removal

to New York in 1883. His present residence is at New London, Conn.,

where a beautiful home, with its every nook consecrated to books and

paintings, tells of an ideal literary life and companionship. Mr.

Lathrop’s genius is many sided. This is often a sign of strength. Men,

says a recent critic, with a great and vague sense of power in them are

always doubtful whether they have reached the limits of that power, and

naturally incline to test this in the field in which they feel they

have fewer rather than more numerous auguries of success. Into many

fields this brilliant writer has gone, and with success. In some he

has sowed, in others reaped a golden harvest. He was a pioneer in that

movement which rightfully held that an author had something to do with

his brain-work. It seems strange that in this nineteenth century such

a proposition should demand a defender. Sanity, however, is not so

widespread as the optimists tell. The contention of those that denied

copyright was, “Ideas are common property.” So they are, says our

author, but granting this, don’t think you have bagged your game? How

about the form in which those ideas are presented? Is not the author’s

own work, wrought out with toil, sweat and privation—is not the labor

bestowed upon that form as worthy of proper wage as the manual skill

devoted to the making of a jumping jack? Yet no one has denied that

jumping-jacks must be paid for. This was sound reasoning and would have

had immediate effect, had Congress possessed a ha’penny worth of logic.

As it was, years were wasted agitating for a self-evident right, men’s

energies spent, and at length a half-loaf reluctantly given.

 

In another field Mr. Lathrop has been a worker almost single-handed,

that of encouraging a school of American art. A few years ago a daub

from France was valued more than a marvellous color-study of John La

Farge, or a canvas breathing the luminous idealism of Waterman. Critics

sniffed at American art, while they went into rhapsody over some

foreign little master. Our author, whose keen perception had taught him

that the men who toiled in attics, without recompense in the present,

and dreary prospects for the future, for the sake of art, were not to

be branded as daubers, but as real artists, the fathers of American

art, became their defender. He pointed out the beauties of this new

school, its strength, and above all, that whatever it might have

borrowed from foreign art, it was American in the core. Men listened

more for the sake of the writer than interest in his theme. Gradually

they became tolerant and admitted that there was such a thing as

American art.

 

It was natural that the son-in-law of America’s greatest story-teller

should try his strength in fiction. His first novels show a trace of

Hawthorne. They are romantic, while the wealth of language bewilders.

This, as a critic remarks, was an “indication of opulence and not of

poverty.” The author was feeling his way. His later works bear no

trace of Hawthorne; they are marked by his own fine spiritual sense.

The plots are ingenious, poetically conceived and worked out with

a deftness and subtlety that charms the reader. There is an air of

fineness about them totally foreign to the pyrotechnic displays of

current American fiction. The author is an acute observer, one who

looks below the surface, an ardent student of psychology. His English

is scholarly, has color and dramatic force. His novels are free from

immoral suggestions, straining after effect, overdoing the pathetic

and incongruous padding, the ordinary stock of our _fin de siècle_

novelists. The reading of them not only amuses, a primary condition of

all works of fiction, but instructs and widens the reader’s horizon

on the side of the good and true. In poetry Mr. Lathrop has attained

his greatest strength. Some of his war-poems are full of fine feeling

and manly vigor. He is no carver of cherry-stones or singer of inane

sonnets and meaningless rondeaus, but a poet who has something to say;

none of your humanity messages, but songs that are human, songs that

find root in the human heart. Of his volumes “Rose and Rooftree,”

“Dreams and Days,” a critic writes:

 

“There are poems in tenderer vein which appeal to many hearts, and

others wrought out of the joys and sorrows of the poet’s own life,

which draw hearts to him, as “May Rose” and the “Child’s Wish Granted”

and “The Flown Soul,” the last two referring to his only son, whose

death in early childhood has been the supreme grief of his life. The

same critic notes the exquisite purity and delicacy of these poems, and

that “in a day when the delusion is unfortunately widespread that these

cannot co-exist with poetic fervor and strength.”

 

In March of 1891 Mr. Lathrop, after weary years of aimless wandering

in the barren fields of sectarianism found, as Newman and Brownson had

found, that peace which a warring world cannot give, in the bosom of

the Catholic Church. Where Emerson halted, shackled by Puritanism and

its traditional prejudice towards Catholicism, Lathrop, as Brownson,

in quest of new worlds of thought, critically examined the old church

and her teachings, finding therein the truth that makes men free. This

step of Lathrop’s, inexplicable to many of his friends, is explained

in his own way, in the manly letter that concludes this sketch. Such a

letter must, by its truthfulness, have held his friends. “May we not,”

says Kegan Paul, “carry with us loving and tender memories of men from

whom we learn much, even while we differ and criticise?”

 

“Humanly speaking, I entered into Catholicity as a result of long

thought and meditation upon religion, continuing through a number of

years. But there must have been a deeper force at work, that of the

Holy Spirit, by means of what we call grace, for a longer time than

I suspected. Certainly I was not attracted by ‘the fascinations of

Rome,’ that are so glibly talked about, but which no one has ever been

able to define to me. Perhaps those that use the phrase refer to the

outward symbols of ritual, that are simply the expressive adornment of

the inner meaning—the flower of it. I, at any rate, never went to Mass

but once with any comprehension of it, before my conversion, and had

seldom even witnessed Catholic services anywhere; although now, with

knowledge and experience, I recognize the Mass—which even that arch,

unorthodox author, Thomas Carlyle, called ‘the only genuine thing of

our times’—as the greatest action in the world. Many Catholics had been

known to me, of varying merit; and some of them were valued friends.

But none of these ever urged or advised or even hinted that I should

come into the Church. The best of them had (as large numbers of my

fellow-Catholics have to-day) that same modesty and reverence toward

the sacred mysteries that caused the early Christians also to be slow

in leading catechumens—or those not yet fully prepared for belief—into

the great truths of faith. My observations of life, however,

increasingly convinced me that a vital, central, unchanging principle

in religion was necessary, together with one great association of

Christians in place of endless divisions—if the promise made to men

was to be fulfilled, or really had been fulfilled. When I began to ask

questions, I found Catholics quite ready to answer everything with

entire straightforwardness, gentle good-will, yet firmness. Neither

they nor the Church evaded anything. They presented and defended the

teaching of Christ in its entirety, unexaggerated and undiminished;

the complete faith, without haggling or qualification or that queer,

loose assent to every sort of individual exception and denial that is

allowed in other organizations. I may say here, too, that the Church,

instead of being narrow or pitiless toward those not of her communion,

as she is often mistakenly said to be, is the most comprehensive of

all in her interpretation of God’s mercy as well as of his justice.

And, instead of slighting the Bible, she uses it more incessantly than

any of the Protestant bodies; at the same time shedding upon it a

clear, deep light that is the only one that ever enabled me to see its

full meaning and coherence. The fact is, those outside of the Church

nowadays are engaged in talking so noisily and at such a rate, on

their own hook, that they seldom pause to hear what the Church really

says, or to understand what she is. Once convinced of the true faith,

intellectually and spiritually, I could not let anything stand in the

way of affirming my loyalty to it.”

 

 

 

 

REV. BROTHER AZARIAS.

 

 

It is delicious in this age of hurried bookmaking, to run across a

thinker. It gives one the same kind of sensation that comes to the

sportsman, when a monarch of the glen crosses his path. Bookmakers

are as many as leaves of the Adirondacks after the hasty gallop of a

mountain storm; thinkers are scarce. When, then, amid the leafy mass,

one discovers the rare bird hiding from vulgar gaze, an irresistible

desire to find his lurking place seizes the observer. This lurking

place may be old to many; it was only the other day that I discovered

it,—when a friend placed in my hands “Phases of Thought and Criticism,”

by Brother Azarias. This book, the sale of which has been greater

in England than on this side of the water, is one of suggestive

criticism—a criticism founded on faith. The author holds with another

thinker, that “Religion is man’s first and deepest concern. To be

indifferent is to be dull or depraved, and doubt is disease.” Each

chapter of his book expresses a distinct social and intellectual force.

Each embodies a verifying ideal; for, continues the author, “the

criticism that busies itself with the literary form is superficial, for food it gives husks.”