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.
“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.”