"Keep the young generations in hail,
And bequeath them no tumbled house."
-- Meredith.
THE study of Catholic opinion in the United States has characteristics that would not appeal to the proverbial cautious angel. One may calmly say that no words are sufficiently powerful to describe the energy, the determination and the sacrifice which have brought the Church to its present dignity and influence in the Republic; but certainly the times have been out of joint for the creation of intellectual leadership able to mould and guide Catholic opinion, nor has any large public been ready for such leadership. Emerson, speaking a kindly word for the "Romanist," classed him with the negro; and if the American Catholic has learned anything thoroughly it is the art of making apologies. He has issued libraries in refutation of the astonishing charges that his priests have cloven feet and that his churches are stocked with ammunition. He has even proved triumphantly that the Papal fleet does not contemplate swooping down upon Chicago! It is hardly surprising that such deference to environment should have precluded a satisfactory telling of his own story, or that the literature which has arisen under the shadow of the American Church should largely be the work of converts.
Linked by a thousand beautiful memories -- the vow of Columbus, the French and Spanish missions, the widespread dedication of places to the saints -- with the tradition of Christendom, we have been forced to let others preserve them. Parkman is still, very likely, the best missionary historian, and the discovery of mediaeval society has been carried farthest by Henry Adams and Ralph Adams Cram. Hand in hand with this inarticulateness of the Catholic body has gone a corresponding deafness. The long, desperate battle with poverty and social inferiority left our ancestors, splendidly sturdy though they were, little time and opportunity for other things.
But a great and significant change has taken place during the past few years. At length the leaders of the Church have seen the possible victory of the multitude they represent and have begun to talk plain, martial English which is being more and more widely listened to and understood. The opportunity for Catholic ideas grows larger, the obligation to emphasize them much more impressive. We are living in a new land that has changed its character and become old: the institutional clothes which fitted so snugly during the pliant era of development are found irksomely small, and the resultant democratic derision has almost imperiled the wearing of any such clothes whatever. Secure in her possession of immense economic power, closely combined and efficiently managed, America is mentally a wriggling mass of conflicting opinions. Nobody, for instance, seems to know what the aims of our national existence are, though many persons tell us rather frantically what they ought to be. Our variegated philosophies and religions do not merge, like colours, in clarity, but remain motley. Our citizenry, rushing here and there for some rule to go by, is the easy prey of blatant advertising and extravagant shams; in so many cases is the American's intellectual history a series of scalps that one is not surprised to hear him say honestly, in the end, that he has lost his own. Accordingly, there is some genuine cause for alarm, lest a nation whose search for ideals is so evident, so eager and so unsatisfactory, should rise in anger and break the shrines while cleansing the stables. Under such circumstances Catholic thought, no longer speechless, and released from provincialism, has a stirring opportunity to address the nation. Whatever people may say, Americans deeply respect traditions and Catholicism is the Great Tradition. For a long while, representative thought in this country has followed in the wake of what has seemed the mental policy of Europe, provided that a certain element of "progressiveness" attended it. The New England transcendentalists walked behind the early German idealists when these were already old-fashioned; today our liberals are abreast of Mr. Wells in his youth, and our aesthetes are trying to create a naturalistic literature after the fashion of France at a moment when that country has made an act of contrition. None of these matters has, however, satisfied very many people. For the great majority the prevailing idealism offers nothing substantial to build on, at least nothing that they can feel sure may not be blown suddenly into the middle of next week. And so disillusionment darkens very frequently the honest effort to escape materialism, to accomplish the primal task of hitching the wagon to a star. Eager though men may be for the freedom of a definite faith, it is not in the market-place that they will acquire the sense of eternal things, the sense of beauty, for instance. Our examination of ourselves will, therefore, be of practical value. It ought to make clear the causes which have led to the present condition of affairs, show what influence Catholics have exerted in the past, and uncover certain possibilities which can be made use of.
Now the formation of American opinion is not a neatly catalogued affair, but it may be said, roughly, to fall into three divisions. First, there is the Puritan influence, a long-continued and largely successful exercise of power by a group of hard-mouthed and close-fisted Calvinists with a determination to conduct their part of the world as they saw fit. New England at first identified beauty with hell, so that while Cotton Mather was picturesquely augmenting the terrors of the damned, the prettiest girl in Salem was hanged as a witch. There was an admirable iron in the Puritan soul, but iron is not an artistic medium. The various annealing influences which stole in from Europe softened and moulded, but did not altogether succeed in transforming it. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the disciple of Fichte and Swedenborg, sounded the first strong note of romantic rebellion, by assuming the existence in nature of a universal spirit which, because of his paradoxical individualism, he probably did not even care to prove. Moreover, one side of his mind looked to the future and he became the prophet of scientific pantheism without ever really believing in it himself.
Emerson's neighbour, Nathaniel Hawthorne, dwelt spiritually in another country. Brooding over the relation between good and evil, he preached the moral retribution which is at the centre of Shakespeare's doctrine, but removed his pulpit to a chillier region where no sun dispels a certain eerie twilight. In other words, Hawthorne awoke to beauty as Emerson to life, but neither shook off the dreamfulness of slumber. With the entry of two poets, Longfellow and Whitman, into the lists, a different struggle with Puritanism had begun. The author of "The Village Blacksmith" had an understanding of democracy, but no great vision of it; the author of "O, Pioneers" had a vision of democracy, but understood it not. And Longfellow, the most cultured of poets, was also the most plebeian; Whitman, scorning civilization, was its autocratic aristocrat. Both contributed to a sorely needed renaissance of wonder, the one with memories of a blessed past, the other with a paean to the future. To sum up the matter, it may be said that the trend of Puritan thought as expressed in letters was toward a romantic idealism and away from realism. Based originally upon a denial of the world, it drifted with the lifting of the horizon out to the paler stars.
It is a long way from the cold equality of Massachusetts to the provincial Toryism of the early South. According to all the rules, a literature should have been born to Virginia: there were both leisure and culture, a fondness for the literary traditions of England, and a certain gayety of spirit to which art is not averse. Nevertheless, it was just this culture and this leisure which diverted the energies of the best men to abstract questions and to action. The Southern colonies began to bloom during that strange eighteenth century when there was nowhere any great art, but instead a universal concern with the principles of government and the possible reconstruction of society. This was the age when the ripest minds tried to keep abreast of Rousseau and Voltaire, of Gibbon and Hobbes. Thus the guiding spirits of the Revolution were Washington and Jefferson, the one the highest type of honest business man, the other absorbed with a dream of democracy in the abstract which stamps him in many ways as the greatest genius in constructive theory that America has produced. There was something in the fiber of Virginian society which saved it from excess; it was preserved from ruin by the resiliency of another typically eighteenth century mind, Benjamin Franklin. All of this, which suffered the eclipse of the arts with lamentable tranquillity, did in the end make for the appearance of a very individual and abstract literary genius, Edgar Allan Poe. The whole point about this strange man is that he was a rationalist almost to the verge of insanity, while the New England that viewed him askance was irrational both in its Puritan repression and in its idealistic escape. Nobody but a dullard would urge against Poe's art that he had no strength of character, for surely he had as much as Villon or Verlaine, but it is very true that he made no characters, no people, to fill those haunting parallelograms that he built of horrors. The same conception of literary material appears in the verse of Sidney Lanier, a totally different man. If any American poet is authentic it is the author of the "Symphony" and "The Marshes of Glynn." Still, in these and more clearly in his poorer poems, the pressure of the abstract idea is present: concepts of a better social order, of a purer democracy, of a spiritually conducted commerce. To this day the South has not shaken off its eighteenth century characteristics.
With the migration of thousands to the West, however, the attitude of America towards its own destiny underwent a stimulating change. Straggling little villages in which the primitive communal instinct was strong, the long, lone trails to the gold mines, and the stirring venturesomeness of a life under elemental conditions produced a race of men whose chief mental trait was a sort of twinkling sadness, an ability to dispel profound melancholy with titanic laughter. It is significant to note that the two men whose instinct for realism was the sharpest descended from Virginian people -- Lincoln and Mark Twain. The superlative common sense of the great President was mixed with intense sympathy with the common man; Mark Twain was little except a common man until the end. There were dozens of Westerners in days gone by who could have told the story of "Life on the Mississippi" with gusto and understanding, and who had shared generously in boyhood the exploits of Huckleberry Finn. Unfortunately, the chief virtue of Samuel Clemens, self-reliance, is powerless against the tragic history of the ages and is no bulwark against the flood of honest thought. He learned in the end that life which he had jested with so merrily could laugh last. And he had found nothing to soften the cruelty of its smiling lips.
On the other hand, William Dean Howells and Bret Harte, who sponsored most successfully the delicate and idealistic qualities in the temperament of the rising West, were of Puritan ancestry. They did not rail at existence or drink it down with gulps of laughter, but accepted it tranquilly, with a geniality often close to tears. In Bret Harte's best work there is the honest sentimentality of a pioneer with a taste for Victorian fiction; in Howells the idealism of a frontier doctor who has been reading Tolstoi. All this literature of the expanse, which came out of the Civil War, resembled it in the inner conflict between Northerner and Virginian, between the older provincialism and the coming nation. It is significant that the style of every one of these authors should have been modeled on the Bible, which was the older America's literary and spiritual food; this explains both the domination of the Puritan teaching and the limitations of American culture. In such ways, with additions made from all sides, by Thoreau and Holmes in New England, by Cooper and Irving in New York, by Cable and Simms in the South, by Joaquin Miller and Artemus Ward in the West, the literary tastes of the Republic were formed.
Now it is apparent that the influence of the Catholic idea on the shaping of American literary destinies had necessarily to depend upon the conversion of able men. The early missionary efforts of Frenchmen and Spaniards had been rendered neglible by the Anglo-Saxon advance, and the hordes of Irish and German immigrants were not yet ready for self-expression. In general, literary converts were attracted to the Church by one of two things: a firm solution of intellectual difficulties or the beauty of Catholic faith and worship. They discovered in the synthesis of the Christian past either an answer to questions which had become central in their lives or strong support for viewing the world as the lovely garment of God. It was natural that in the East the Catholic writers should be those for whom philosophic inquiry guided life, and we confront at once the puzzling figure of Orestes A. Brown-son. This man of logic, adept at debate and scornful of the trivial, underwent almost every kind of religious experience open to Americans. Successively a Presbyterian, a Universalist, an associate of Robert Owen, a Unitarian minister, a Saint-Simonian pamphleteer, a religious disciple of Matthew Arnold, and a spiritist, when Brownson turned Catholic at the age of forty-one, he came armed with vast empirical knowledge to do battle with his foes. During the years when Brownson conducted his famous Review, Emerson was at the height of his renown and Emerson accordingly became the target. There can be no question about the victory of Brownson, but the Concord sage is safe from oblivion because he was a poet and because he took the trouble to write well. Brownson was probably incapable of a quatrain and his style has that aridity which is the curse of all mere pamphleteering. His best work is "The American Republic," a thorough and subtle analysis of the principles upon which this government is based and also a study of popular rule in the broader sense. Some of his philosophical discussion has the same sort of value as Jonathan Edwards' "Freedom of the Will"; the two men had much in common that is admirable: verve of intellect, devotion to spiritual causes, and relentless abnegation of self in the search for truth. Brownson lacked the amiable qualities of the artist, and though his name is held in reverence, only his staunch admirers save him from oblivion.
Great literary renown has likewise passed by the interesting figure of Father Isaac Hecker, an idealistic man of German descent, whose share in the Brook Farm experiment and other diversions of the more emancipated Puritans had been large. Upon becoming a Catholic and a priest, Hecker spurred the most promising of his friends to literary activity, being convinced that the idea of Christendom as a system of thought and belief could sway the hearts of millions in America. His personal eagerness to engage in this task left small room for writing of his own, although he is the author of at least one book that can still be read with pleasure, "The Church and the Age." One knew that Father Hecker grasped things and understood the times in which he moved; from England Newman wrote to him as to a kindred spirit, engaged in the same apostolate. Together with Brownson he typifies the response which a great many intellectual New Englanders made to Catholicism: the recognition of dogma as an escape alike from unbalanced idealism and materialistic despair. Unfortunately neither of them possessed the literary gifts which would have made their testimony irresistible.
Among the men who gave expression to the spirit of the American migration, surely none is more charming or more neglected than Charles Warren Stoddard. This most gentle of all Bohemians, who sent Stevenson off to the South Seas and was beloved of Harte, Clemens, and Miller, was so oddly and delightfully himself that the common streets of literature have never led to his domain. Where is there a more fascinating book of essays than "South Sea Idyls," which are scented with the perfume of the choicest flowers that open to a tropical sunrise? Its gossamer pages were surely written in fairyland to the music of the Hawaiian paradise. Lafcadio Hearn has no more poetry and a great deal less of other things. Then there is "The Island of Tranquil Delights," "Poems," and "A Troubled Heart" -- the lyric, moving story of Stoddard's spiritual life. More than any other Western writer, perhaps, he was responsive to the elusive voice of beauty. Without any noticeable concern with the problems of civilization, a wanderer through the misty valleys of the world, he served the melody of the heart with chivalric tenderness. Pilgrim to the West, voyager to the distant and then mysterious islands of the Pacific, and wayfarer to Europe, he was moved to delight by all. If there is tender loveliness in his memories of Wai-ki-ki, it is matched by the dream-vision in Anne Hathaway's house, of which he tells in "Exits and Entrances."
Stoddard was born in Rochester, New York, educated in the East and suffered to seek a literary career in San Francisco. What repelled him from the various forms of Puritan belief to which he had been introduced was simply the crudity of their spiritual appeal. A man born to culture and sensitive to the mystic voices that speak to the soul, he found his place ultimately within the ancient confines of the Church. There lay about the man an aura, intangible and elfish, which even the greatest of his contemporaries bowed to, which inspired Stevenson to unbend in loving doggerel, moved Clemens to read the book of Ruth with tears in his eyes, and enthralled the pupils -- for fifteen years he taught English literature -- who sat under him. During the last years of his life, mystical things absorbed his attention more and more; without ever abandoning a whimsical interest in life, he drew closer to the saints and sought out with care instances of superior devotion and even of communication with the world beyond. How has it happened that a man so innately a genius should be for the majority of his countrymen scarcely a memory?
To some extent the answer may be found, perhaps, in the fact that Stoddard's art was unconnected with the giving of highly moral lessons, while Americans are nothing if not ethical, spending their time prodigally in reforming the modes and methods of society. The Puritan whose hand has guided the national life still insists that man lives for the betterment of his neighbor's habits, that uplift must be accomplished somehow by "getting" religion, money, isms, or dynamite. Now Stoddard was perversely opposed to all of this -- to lugubrious psalmody and store clothes for heathenish islanders, to politicians and platforms, yes even to professional uplifters, for the rest of the world. It is to be feared that he believed the pursuit of beauty and the salvation of the soul quite similar and of individual concern. Again, he was not a novelist, a critic, or even in any important sense a writer of verse, but almost exclusively an essayist. But an essayist must rely for his success chiefly upon style, and Americans have grown quite indifferent to that in a search for mammoth ideas and epoch-making phrases. Stoddard's art is like the laughing spray that leaps from a woodland waterfall. Modeled upon the rhythmic weave of English Bible diction, the sentences of such a sketch as "The Island of Tranquil Delights" combine Oriental dreamfulness with the bright, optimistic humour of western America. Stoddard's spiritual nature shrank from the slightest taint of coarseness and his pen wandered among the savages "who came as they were created" with the jovial innocence of nature. That verbal rainbow "South Sea Idyls," is a-twinkle with points of golden laughter; within its tropic colours burn the American street lamps. In the deeper melody of "The Lepers of Molokai," with its majestic prose hymn to the melancholy surf, in the tranquil intimacies of "A Troubled Heart," there is the same delicate realization of beauty. No one in that famous brotherhood of Californian humourists had so subtle a sense of fun; his work was made for the ambrosia cells of memory, priceless for those who prize it. Stoddard accepted the Catholic tradition humbly, because it is beautiful; and since he had been a captive, he became in the end a willing and exalted soldier.
In the older South, where the beauty of ancient chivalry was followed in spite of the crime of slavery and the languour resultant from too violent a concern with pure politics, there was much to smile at but also a great deal to admire on bended knees. Warriors in whose veins ran kindness, like blessed wine; a genuine, if somewhat sentimental respect for beauty; and poets like Lanier to overhear the whispers of life: these were the best things in a pleasant civilization that found its apogee and its defeat in Robert Lee. With the appearance of a reticent priest, John Bannister Tabb, the Catholic Spirit found expression in lovable form. Father Tabb, who was a convert, had served with the Confederates and been the friend of Sidney Lanier; somehow he learned how to take care of his soul and how to write. It is scarcely necessary to describe poems that everybody knows -- tiny lyrics of six or eight lines which are more like bird-notes than songs. Yet what fulness of melody there is in the cry of the lark and what long colloquies in the quatrains of Father Tabb! He speaks from "the primal tone," making what one may call miniatures of infinity. The religious tenderness of such poems as "The Christ Child to the Christmas Lamb" and "The Old Pastor," the Franciscan sympathy with natural things so evident in "The Shell" or "The Haunted Moon," baffle analysis because they adhere to the simplicity of a very simple genius. His life was plain, too, and spent in the routine of the priesthood or in teaching boys the rules of rhetoric. Of course he had a shy, playful humour that smiled at long days and befriended the stars. Having found serenity in the faith to which he was a convert he could say, in the words of his poem,
"A life of exile long Hath taught thee song."
We have said that Father Tabb's verse, being minimum in minima, mocks at dissection; and yet one cannot help trying. This poet always retained so much of the boy that no matter how many years of reflection he might give to the turgid flood of information supplied by experience and learning, the song that resulted finally was certain to select only those things which are everlastingly human. A decade passed sometimes before the lyric he wished to make had hardened, cameo-like, under the impress of his spirit, but it was sure in the end to seem perfectly spontaneous. Take for instance that most arresting poem, "Evolution." People had been talking very much about Evolution -- talking so freely, in fact, that man's relation to the theory was quite forgotten or hectically misstated. Now Father Tabb succeeded in condensing the human interest of the scientific hypothesis into four little lines, each one of which is, however, of almost mountainous spiritual hugeness.
"Out of the dusk a shadow, Then a spark";
What an image of light creeping out of chaos and standing suddenly, feebly, over the void! Then
"Out of the cloud a silence, Then a lark."
Life, with all its beauty, activeness, aspiration is expressed by a single word; and the marvelous characteristic of these verses is the fact that "lark" and "spark," in each of which there is a cosmic image, seem accidental, almost comic, rhymes. The next four lines complete the cycle by applying "Evolution" to the earthly and then to the eternal life of man:
"Out of the heart a rapture, Then a pain"
A rapture and a pain -- these indeed are as good a summing-up of our existence as any sentence from Pascal. Finally,
"Out of the dead, cold ashes, Life again!"
Note the positive thrill of those two lines. Men cannot in the end fail to surrender to such poetry, and the fame of Father Tabb has, as a matter of fact, risen by such leaps and bounds that we need say nothing more about it. His art smiles, a little satirically perhaps, at the gush of free and easy versifiers.
Quite different in character are the poems of Father Abram Ryan, whose identification with the Southern cause gave some of his best stanzas a martial rhythm and a rugged pathos. "The Conquered Banner" is one of the truest of American patriotic songs, even though it was written for a broken cause. One turns, however, with greater eagerness to the plain but resonant stanzas of "The Song of the Mystic," a hymn that praises contemplation with no touch of merely literary ecstasy. Nor could anyone excepting a poet originate the haunting figure of Uncle Remus. Although none of Joel Chandler Harris' work is distinctly Catholic, it developed from that genuine charity and kindly faith which he crowned with his conversion.
Thus, in diverse ways and in the face of stern popular opposition to "Romanish perversion," these representative Americans came to accept the Catholic idea and to give it a place in letters. While their isolation from any large and appreciative audience and their limited understanding of tradition deprived their work of much influence, it will remain significant as the powerful and unsolicited testimony of native Americans to a view of life which was then thought foreign and absurd. Soon, however, the power of a vast immigrant population would make itself felt; while the Germans remained silent, guarding their customs and language, the Church came to be represented largely by Irishmen whose literary work is something like an interlude between older and modern days. In John Boyle O'Reilly an ancient and oppressed people spoke. Exiled to Australia as a Fenian, O'Reilly escaped to America and began a successful journalistic career with the development of the Boston Pilot to a great and representative Catholic newspaper. He was a man of verve and mental resiliency, with a strong undercurrent of poetic feeling. This found expression in four books of verse, among which "Songs of the Southern Seas" is the best. There is melody and experience in his lyrics, but their glaring imperfection of form forestalls any generous appraisal of their value. Vastly better, it may be thought, is the novel "Moondyne," forgotten now, but well-done and invaluable as an account of strange life in Australia.
O'Reilly, like Meagher and other Celtic revolutionaries, showed a buoyant readiness to adopt American views, but a much more striking grasp of national conditions was displayed by John Ireland, Archbishop of Saint Paul, and counterpart of Manning. Educated in France and given spiritual charge of the great Northwest, Ireland understood that a rapidly changing world presented opportunities that must be seized vigorously. Viewed as the response of a great constructive mind to the problems created by an expanding civilization, "The Church and Society" is a remarkable book. It takes rank beside Webster's "Orations" and Roosevelt's "Americanism" as an appeal to the American spirit, and to Catholics it gives, in spite of a tendency to chauvinism, a needed tonic. A more purely literary blend of the Celtic spirit with the American background is seen in the work of Maurice Francis Egan, poet, essayist, and novelist. The sonnets of his earlier career are not altogether unworthy of comparison with those he translated so gracefully from the French, and his essays, while uneven, have a charm of style that compensates for a general superficiality of thought. Egan's besetting sin has been complacency with his gracefulness; gifted with the rarest qualities, he has shirked the mental discipline which alone can give writing its sea legs.
While these Irish writers represent the period of mental adjustment, it must be remembered that peculiar conditions -- the indifference of the general public and the absence of strong, cultivated Catholic opinion -- continue to enforce modesty upon the majority of our authors. Miss Guiney retreated to England and Crawford became a cosmopolite. Nevertheless, there remains a group of writers to be regarded with pride. In the essay Agnes Repplier rules supreme; conservative but decidedly not old-fashioned, she applies to the romantic effusions of popular thinkers the acid test of intelligence. In her hands the essay becomes a weapon quite like a corrosive chemical. It has wit, boundless learning, a calm common sense, and perfect form; it dispels shams as some caustic insect powder drives away gnats, and takes up a position not likely to be molested. Miss Repplier is the ghost of Jane Austen wedded to the spirit of Montaigne. An entirely different standard was adopted by James Gibbons Huneker who, while not a consistent Catholic, did interpret for Americans some of the finest religious writers of Europe. He was a Bohemian with an ultra-impressionistic mind that worked like a furiously active motion-picture camera. Without the solid grasp of principles which lifts the philosophic critic above the fashions of the hour, he proved an admirable reflector and brought to the attention of many critics tendencies which they would otherwise have overlooked. Huneker was Pateresque, but more human and less humanistic. Catholic fiction has suffered from the same ailments that have afflicted the American novel in general. Obsessed by abstract ideas, schemes of reform, and a theory that art is designed for our weaker-minded sisters, we have given, at best, only a mediocre version of American life, a version that has satisfied so well the tastes of the great majority of readers that nothing else is likely to be commercially successful. The great bulk of American Catholic fiction is unintelligent and unreadable. There are, however, a few redeeming names which may give us counsel and hope for the future. In "Robert Kimberly," by Frank Spearman, one finds a study of a moral issue in modern life that is done with finesse and dramatic power. It has the feel of reality and a rounded organic structure that connotes mastery in story-telling. The earlier works of Richard Aumerle Maher, especially "The Shepherd of the North," are strong, colourful, and appealingly Catholic. The novels of John Talbot Smith have many faults, but also virtues like plot and crisp brevity of narrative. Such a story as "The Art of Disappearing," probably Father Smith's best, fails by an inch of being great; there is too much straining for effect, too little real charm of diction, and an overdose of the bizarre. Christian Reid has endeared herself to thousands by such stories as "A Light of Vision" and "The Coin of Sacrifice," tales of spiritual struggle that miss being effective by becoming too spirituelle. The reader is likely to compare her books with those virtuous but underfed virgins who preside over charity bazaars. These authors have, however, done much to present the Catholic idea, and others have been kind enough to second their efforts. What book, for instance, could be more Catholic in tone than Mrs. Jackson's moving story of "Ramona," surely one of the few great romances in American literature? There is now a real opportunity for genuinely conceived fiction. A vigorous resolve to spurn, as unworthy of a great artistic tradition, the trivial and technically abominable books now so prevalent, and a patient deference to the masters of the art in other lands, will do much towards giving the Catholic novel in this country an honourable reputation.
What we may honestly be proud of, however, is the poetry that has been written in our name. At a time when verse making, too, has turned into tractarian or naturalistic channels, the Catholic singers have insisted on song. Not in murmuring melodies from nowhere, but in finding their voices in the turmoil of today, have they grown beautiful and reputable. They have come together, Heaven knows how, like a band of troubadours. Joyce Kilmer, Thomas Walsh, and Thomas A. Daly have stood abreast in an unusual conspiracy of song. Kilmer was probably not a great poet, but he was great enough to be thoroughly alive. Writing and living with the intensity of a chevalier, he put to music the simple things around him so that they were no longer simple: trees became instinct with the soul's tenderness and the delicatessen store was almost the ante-room of Paradise. Kilmer the humble succeeds always, but Kilmer the ambitious occasionally fails. "The White Ships and the Red" -- which is Chestertonian in theme -- seems a little too lurid for life, while "A Blue Valentine" -- which is Patmorean -- is almost too good to be true. Of his final service in a cause which he visioned clearly, everyone will speak with reverent sadness, thinking of the many songs that went with him to death.
For Walsh, however, the commonplace is not an inspiration; he finds the source of melody in Spanish gardens and the courts of kings. No other American poet writes blank verse so full and melodious, so charged with brooding and beauty. He has visioned the minarets of the Faith and sung of splendid memories that are American because they came with Columbus and the missionaries of Spain. The verse of T.A. Daly, delicate and whimsical, is quite different in character; couched in dialect, or written in smooth English, it hides under the simple pathos of an Irish or Italian lyric cry the perfection of technique. Then there are others: Father O'Donnell, whose poems reflect the mystic delight of Thompson; J. Corson Miller, calm and classic in manner; Father Earls, who voices the quiet of a tranquil mind in noble stanzas; Aline Kilmer, who sings of the joy and pathos of domestic life; and last, John Bunker, who burns incense to the nature with whose moods he is lovingly familiar. For these all may God be thanked; through them whisper the hymns of faithful ages that wrought miracles of song, and the praise of virtues that have almost been forgotten.
Our survey of American Catholic literature has revealed no list of giant names, no magic success in the wresting of beauty from daily life, but it has brought to light noble effort and artistic discernment. What gauge these are for the future no one can tell. It is quite generally admitted that the close of the war opened a new page in the history of America. The total collapse of Puritanism as a force able to guide popular thought, and the discovery of materialistic murk at the basis of our civilization, has set the immense national caldron of unassimilated minds to seething ominously. With a thousand problems to solve, Americans are confronted with ten thousand answers. The smug complacency of the money-lenders, the glare of foul advertising, and the decay of religious standards were commonplace matters before the war, but now are extraordinary. In the face of the call to death, men discovered how little there was to die for. There will be no peace until the philosophy which is to dominate America has been settled upon to the satisfaction of the multitude. Captains may dicker with their subjects, and generals give orders; but surely none of these dare hope to deceive, in the end, the Intense scrutiny of the mob.
Catholic social action has come forward, speaking an earnest word and rousing to united action a mighty army that has slept. For the first time in the history of America, the tread of the Church has been heard in the market-place. What we have to say is neither new nor bizarre: it is simply our determination that the primal beliefs of America are not to be bartered away, that the spiritualization of democracy is feasible, and that there is such a thing as the right to daily bread. We have remembered our heritage from the society of Christendom. It is a splendid protest, splendidly spoken, but we know that it is not enough. Somehow the instincts of the soul are instincts of beauty, and the things that men love are useful but also topped with glory. During the long past of Christendom the sun has fallen on towers that are like cataracts of stone, on cities radiant with the splendour of our idea of heaven; always and everywhere the Catholic artist has labored to image the majesty of the kingdom of God in the simple things which surrounded him. Our task is to do the same here: not to rear occult and extravagant edifices or to write books of subtle and dangerous colour, but to transfigure the life around us, ugly though it may seem and weak though we may be, into an existence which is worthy of man. Our place is not merely in the politics of the world, but also in its spiritual abundance; ours are the spires of Notre-Dame and the tables of the Lord.
BOOK NOTE
The following general works may be found useful: "The Cambridge History of American Literature"; "American Literature," by W. P. Trent; "American Literature since 1870," by F. L. Pattee. For the special point of view offered in this chapter, see "Father Tabb," by Jennie M. Tabb; "The Life of Orestes A. Brownson," by Henry F. Brownson, and "The Convert," by O.A. Brownson; "The Life of Father Hecker," by W. Elliott; and "Steeplejack," by J.G. Huneker. For information about Joyce Kilmer, see the introductions to the three volumes of his "Works," by R.C. Holliday; about Stoddard, see "Apostrophe to a Skylark," by G.W. James; "A Troubled Heart" -- Stoddard's religious autobiography -- and the Ave Maria for June, 1909; about Archbishop Ireland, see an article by J. Talbot Smith in the Dublin Review, January, 1921. The "Catholic Encyclopedia" may frequently be consulted with profit.