“Next room to that of Roche’s,” said the dear O’Reilly, showing me his
nest of poets, “is a gentle poetess.”
The door was wide open. It is a question with my mind if the room ever
knew a door. Be this as it may, there sat, with her chair close drawn
to her desk, a frail, delicate-looking woman. The ordinary eye might
see nothing in a face that was winsome, if not handsome; yet, let the
dainty mouth curve in speech, and at once a subtle attraction, lit up
by lustrous eyes, permeated the face. One characteristic that made
itself felt, in the most sparse conversation with this woman, was her
humility, a rare virtue among American literary women. I have known
not a few among that irritable class who, no sooner had they sipped the
most meagre draught of fame, than they became intoxicated with their
own importance, and for the balance of life wooed that meretricious
goddess, Notoriety. In fiery prose and tuneful song they told of the
dire misfortunes that had been heaped upon their sex by that obstinate
vulgar biped, man. Their literature—for that is the name given to
the crudest offspring of the press in these days—is noisy, and, says
a witty writer, a noisy author is as bad as a barrel organ,—a quiet
one is as refreshing as a long pause in a foolish sermon. Clergymen,
who have listened to a brother divine on grace, will be the first to
see the point. Our authoress—(a female filled with the vanity that
troubled Solomon says I should write female author)—is a quiet and
unobtrusive writer. Of the tricks that catch and the ways that are
crooked in literature, she knows nothing, and what is better, no amount
of tawdry fame could induce her to swerve a jot from the hard stony
road that leads to enduring success, the only goal worth striving for
in the domain of letters. I am well aware that in the popular list of
women-writers mouthed by the growing herd of flippant readers that have
no other use for a book than as a time-killer,—a herd to whom ideas
are as unpalatable as disestablishment to an English parson—you will
fail to find the name of Katherine Conway. The reason is simple. She
has no fads to air in ungrammatical English, no fallacies to adduce
in halting metre. It was a Boston critic who echoed the dictum of
the French critic—that grammar has no place in the world of letters.
Only have ideas, that is, write meaningless platitudes, grandiose
nothings, something that neither man, the angels above nor the demons
down under the sea, may decipher, and this illusive verbiage will
make you famous. A school of critics will herald your work with such
adjectives as “noble, lofty, absorbing, soul-inspiring;” nay, more,
a pious missionary friend may be found to to translate the verbiage
into Syriac, as a present for converts. Borne on the tide of such
criticism, not a few women writers have mistaken the plaudits of
notoriety, that passing show, for fame. It was a saying of De Musset’s
that fame was a tardy plant, a lover of the soil. Be this as it may,
it is safe to assert that its coming is not proclaimed by far-fetched
similes, frantic metaphors, sensuous images, ranting style, ignorance
of metre, want of grammar; the dishes are not of the voluptuous, morbid
or the monstrous kind. Its thirst is not slaked at sewers of dulness
spiced with immorality. These symptoms savor of one disease known
to all pathologists as notoriety. In an age of this dreaded disease
it is surely refreshing to meet with works that breathe gentleness
and repose,—a beautiful trust in religion, and a warm, natural heart
for humanity. These traits will the reader find in abundance in the
pages of Katherine Conway. “What kills a poet,” says Aldrich, “is
self-conceit.” Of all the forms self-conceit may assume none is more
foolish or detrimental, especially to a woman-poet, than the pluming
of oneself as the harbinger of some renovating gospel, some panacea
for human infirmities. What is the burden of your message? says the
critic to the young poet. Straightway the poet evolves a message,
and as messages of this kind ought to be mysterious, the poet wraps
them in a jargon as unintelligible as Garner’s monkey dialect. Thus
in America has risen a school of woman poetry, deluded by false
criticism, calling itself a message to humanity, dubbed rightly the
school of passion, and one might add, of pain. This school may ask, “Am
I to be debarred from treating of the passions on the score of sex.”
By no means; the passions are legitimate subjects. Love, one of them,
is your most attractive theme, but as Lilly has it, love is not to you
what it is to the physiologist, a mere animal impulse which man has
in common with moths and molluscs. Your task is to extract from human
life, even in its commonest aspects, its most vulgar realities, what it
contains of secret beauty; to lift it the level of art, not to degrade
art to its level. Few American writers more fully realized these
great artistic truths than the master under whose fatherly tuition
Miss Conway had long been placed. Boyle O’Reilly was a Grecian in his
love for nature. As such it was his aim to seek the beautiful in its
commonest aspects, its most vulgar realities. No amount of claptrap or
fine writing could make him mistake a daub for a Turner. In the bottom
of his soul he detested the little bardlings who had passed nature by,
without knowing her, who wove into the warp and woof of their dulness
the putridity of Zola and morbidity of Marie Bashkirtseff. Under such
a guide, the poetic ideal set before Miss Conway has been of the
highest, and the highest is only worth working for. This ideal must
be held unswervingly, even if one sees that books that are originally
vicious are “placarded in the booksellers’ windows; sold on the street
corners; hawked through the railroad trains; yea, given away, with
packages of tea or toilet soap, in place of the chromo, mercifully
put on the superannuated list.” These books are but foam upon the
current of time, flecking its surface for a moment, and passing away
into oblivion, while what Miss Conway happily calls the literature of
moral loveliness, or what might as aptly be called the literature of
all time, remains our contribution to posterity. Its foundations, to
follow the thought of Azarias, are deeply laid in human nature, and
its structure withstands the storms of adversity and the eddies of
events. For such a literature O’Reilly made a life struggle; his pupil
has closely followed his footsteps in the charming, simple, melodious
volume that lies before me, “A Dream of Lilies.” Rarely has a Catholic
book had a more artistic setting, and one might add, rarely has a
volume of Catholic verse deserved it more. Here the poetess touches
her highest point, and proves that years of silence have been years of
study and conscientious workmanship. In her poem “Success” may be found
the key to this volume;
“Ah! know what true success is; young hearts dream,
Dream nobly and plan loftily, nor deem
That length of years is length of living. See
A whole life’s labor in an hour is done;
Not by world-tests the heavenly crown is won,
To God the man is what he means to be.”
“Dream nobly and plan loftily” has been the guiding spirit of this
volume. It is a book of religious verse in the true sense, not in the
general acceptance of modern religious verse, which is generally dull
twaddle, egotism, mawkishness, blind gropings and haunting fears. The
gentle spirit of Christ breathes through it, making an atmosphere of
peace and repose. There is no bigotry to jar, no narrowness to chafe
us, but the broad upland of Christian charity and truth. Nor has our
author forgotten that even truth if cast in awkward mould may be passed
over. To her poems she has given a dainty setting without sacrificing
a jot of their strength. After reading such a book a judicious bit of
Miss Conway’s prose comes to my mind. “And as that Catholic light, the
only true vision, brightens about us, we realize more and more that
literary genius, take it all and all, has done more to attract men
to good than to seduce men to evil; that the best literature is also
the most fascinating, and even by its very abundance is more than a
match for the bad; that time is its best ally; that it is hard, if
not impossible, to corrupt the once formed pure literary taste; and,
finally, that as makers of literature or critics or disseminators
of it, it is our duty to believe in the best, hope in the best, and
steadfastly appeal to the best in human nature; for we needs must love
the highest when we see it.”
Katherine Eleanor Conway was born of Irish parents, in Rochester, on
the 6th of Sept., 1853. Her early studies were made in the convent
schools of her native city. From an early age she had whisperings of
the muse. These whisperings at the age of fifteen convinced her that
her true sphere of action was literature. In 1875 she commenced the
publication of a modest little Catholic monthly, contributing poems and
moral tales, under the _nom-de-plume_ of “Mercedes,” to other Catholic
journals, in the spare hours left from editing her little venture and
teaching in the convent. In 1878 she became attached to the Buffalo
_Union and Times_. To this journal she contributed the most of the
poems to be found in her maiden volume,—“On the Sunrise Slope,”—a
volume whose rich promise has been amply fulfilled in the “Dream of
Lilies.” Her health failing, she sought a needful rest in Boston. Her
fame had preceded her, and the gifted editor of the _Pilot_, ever on
the lookout for a hopeful literary aspirant of his race, held out a
willing hand to the shy stranger. “Come to us,” he said, in a voice
that knew no guile, “and help us in the good fight.” That fight—the
crowning glory of O’Reilly’s noble life—was to gain an adequate
position for his race and religion from the puritanism of New England.
How that race and religion were held before his coming, may be best
told in the language of Miss Conway, taken from a heart-sketch of her
dead master and minstrel:—
“Notwithstanding Matignon and Cheverus, and the Protestant Governor
Sullivan, Catholic and Irish were, from the outset, simply
interchangeable terms—and terms of odium both—in the popular New
England mind; in vain the bond of a common language, in vain the
Irishman’s prompt and affectionate acceptance of the duties of American
citizenship. To but slight softening of prejudice even his sacrifice of
blood and life on every battle-field in the Civil War, in proof of the
sincerity of his political profession of faith. He and his were still
hounded as a class inferior and apart. They were almost unknown in the
social and literary life of New England. Their pathetic sacrifices
for their kin beyond the sea, their interest in the political
fortunes of the old land, were jests and by-words. Their religion was
the superstition of the ignorant, vulgar and pusillanimous; or, at
best, motive for jealous suspicion of divided political allegiance
and threatened “foreign” domination. Their children suffered petty
persecutions in the public schools. The stage and the press faithfully
reflected the ruling popular sentiment in their caricatures of the
Catholic Irishman.”
She accepted O’Reilly’s call and stood by his side with Roche, Guiney,
Blake, until the hard fought battle against the prejudice to Irishism
and Catholicism, planted in New England by the bigoted literature of
Old England, was abated, if not destroyed; until its shadows, if cast
now, are cast by the lower rather than the higher orders in the world
of intellect and refinement. “And the shortening of the shadow is proof
that the sun is rising,” proof that her work has been far from vain.
And when from the grey dawn of prejudice will come forth the white
morrow of charity and truth, the singer and her songs will not be
forgotten.