Boston is a charming city. It is the whim of the passing hour to
sneer at the modest dame. Henry James has done so. Is not the author
of “Daisy Miller” and other interminable novels a correct person to
follow? The disciples of the Mutual Admiration Society in American
Letters will vociferously answer “yes.” Old-fashioned people may have
another way. Scattered here and there possibly a few there are who
hold that Hawthorne was a better novelist than Howells is, that Holmes’
poetry is as good as Boyesen’s, and that Emerson’s criticisms are more
illuminative than James’. Be this as it may, Boston is a charming place
to all those who had the good fortune to have been welcomed by its
warm-hearted citizen, Boyle O’Reilly. To those who knew his struggles,
and the earnest striving, until his weary spirit sought its final home,
for Catholic literature in its true sense, the charm but increases.
It was owing to his kindness that I found myself one blustery, raw day,
ringing the door-bell of an ordinary well to-do brick house. Houses
now and then carry on their fronts an inkling of their occupants. A
door was opened, my card handed to a feminine hand; the aperture was
not as yet wide enough to catch a glimpse of the face. The card was a
power. “Come in,” said a woman’s voice, and the door was wide open. I
followed the guide, and was soon in a plain, well furnished room, in
presence of a motherly-looking woman. She was knitting; at least that
is part of my memory’s picture. Near her hung a mocking-bird, whose
notes now and then were peculiarly sad. Despite the graceful lines of
the Cavalier Lovelace, iron bars do a prison make for bird and man. And
the songs sung behind these bars are but bits of the crushed-out life.
I was welcomed, and during busy years have held the remembrance of
that visit with its hour of desultory chat and a mocking-bird’s broken
song. The motherly-looking woman, with her strong Celtic face freshly
furrowed by sorrow in the loss of beloved children, was a charming
talker and a good listener, things rarely found in your gentle or fiery
poetess. She had just published, under the initials M. A. B., a volume
of children’s verse, and, as is natural with an author who had finished
a piece of work, was full of it. The pretense of some authors that they
are bored to speak of their own books is a sly suggestion to praise
them for their humility. Mrs. Blake—for that is the motherly-looking
woman’s name—spoke of her work without any hiccoughing gush or false
modesty. Her eyes lit up, and the observer read in them honesty. She
was deeply interested, as all thinking women must be, in the solution
of the social problems that have arisen in our times, and will not be
downed at the biddance of capitalist or demagogue. With her clear-cut
intellect she was able to grasp a salient point, purposely hidden by
the swarm of curists with their panacea remedies, that these problems
must be solved in the light of religion. Man must return to Christ,
not the “cautious, statistical Christ” paraded in the social show, not
“The meteor blaze
That soon must fail, and leave the wanderer blind,
More dark and helpless far, than if it ne’er had shined,”
but the Christ of the Gospels, the Bringer of peace and good-will—the
Bearer of burdens, the soul-guider—Christ, loving and acting, as found
in the Catholic Church. Hecker had begun the preface of his wonderful
book with a truth, “The age is out of joint.” Problems to be solved,
and lying around them millions of broken hearts. “The age is out of
joint.” Who will bring the light and rightify the age? Mrs. Blake
has but one answer. Bring the employers and the employed nearer the
Christ of the Catholic Church. This was O’Reilly’s often expressed
and worked-for idea. It is the key-note of much of his poetry. It is
the germ of his “Bohemia.” It was impossible to live, as Mrs. Blake
did, on the most friendly terms with such a man and not be smitten
with his life-thought. In not a few published social papers Mrs. Blake
has thrown out valuable and suggestive hints as to the best means of
bringing the weary world under the sweet sway of religion. Her voice,
it is true, is but one voice in the social wilderness, but individual
efforts must not be thwarted, for is not a fresh period opening in
which the individuality, the personality, of souls acting under the
direct guidance of the Holy Ghost, will take up all that is good in
modern ideas, and the cords of our tent be strengthened and its stakes
enlarged? “What we have to dread is neither ‘historical rancor’ nor
‘philosophical atheism,’” “nor the instinct of personal freedom.” It
is, in the words of Dr. Barry, that we should set little store by that
“freedom wherewith Christ has made us free,” and that being born
into a church where we may have the grandest spiritual ideas for the
asking, we should fold our hands in slumber and be found, at length,
“disobedient to the heavenly vision.” Against such perils Hecker, the
noblest life as yet in our American church, made a life-fight. On his
side was Boyle O’Reilly, Roche, Mrs. Blake, Katherine Conway and Louise
Guiney. Nor pass such lives in vain.
Mrs. Blake was born in Dungarvan, Co. Waterford, Ireland. In childhood
she was brought to Massachusetts. In 1865 she was married to Dr. J.
G. Blake, a leading physician of Boston. She has made that city her
home, and is highly esteemed in its literary and social circles. Among
her published books may be mentioned “Poems,” Houghton, Mifflin & Co.,
1882, dedicated to her husband; “On The Wing,” a pretty volume of
Californian sketches; “Rambling Talk,” a series of papers contributed
to the Boston journals.
Her sketches are the agreeable jottings of a highly cultivated woman;
seeing nature in the light of poetry rather than science, she has made
a series of charming pictures out of her wanderings. They are not free
from sentiment,—illusions if you will, but that is their greatest
charm. “The world of reality is a poor affair.” So many books of travel
are annually appearing,—books that have no excuse for being other than
to prove how widespread dulness and incapacity is, that a trip with a
guide like Mrs. Blake has but one failing,—its shortness. Neither in
her travels nor in her literary articles does Mrs. Blake body forth her
best prose utterance. These must be found in her earnest social papers,
where her woman’s heart, saddened by the miseries of its fellows, pours
out its streams of consolation and preaches (all earnest souls must be
preachers now-a-days) the only and all sufficient cure—the Church.
An extract from one of these papers will best show her power. She is
portraying the Church manifesting itself in the individual as well
as the family life, pleading for the central idea of her system.
“Jesus Christ is the complement of man,”—the restorer of the race. The
Catholic Church is the manifestation of Jesus Christ.
“There are, alas! too many weaknesses into which thoughtlessness and
opportunity lead one class as well as the other. But still there is
to be seen almost without exception, among practical Catholics, young
wives, content and happy, welcoming from the very outset of married
life the blessed company of the little ones who are to guard them
as do their angels in heaven; proud like Cornelia of their jewels;
gladly accepting comparative poverty and endless care; while their
sisters outside the Church buy the right to idleness and personal
adorning at the expense of the childless homes which are a disgrace and
menace to the nation. There is the honor and purity of the fireside
respected; the overpowering sweetness and strength of family ties
acknowledged; the reverential love that awaits upon the father and
mother shown. There are sensitive and refined women bearing sorrow
with resignation and hardship without rebellion; combating pain with
patience and fulfilling harsh duty without complaint. In a tremendous
over-proportion to those who attempt to live outside its helpfulness,
and in exact ratio to their practical devotion to the observances
of the Church, they find power of resisting temptation in spite of
poverty, and overcoming impulse by principle. Can the world afford to
ignore an agency by which so much is accomplished?
“So much for the practical side, which is the moral that particularly
needs pointing at this moment. Of the spiritual amplitude and
sustaining which the Church gives there is little need to speak. Only a
woman can know what Faith means in the existence of women. The uplift
which she needs in moments of great trial; the sustaining power to
bear the constant harassment of petty worries; the outlet for emotions
which otherwise choke the springs, the tonic of prayer and belief; the
assurance of a force sufficiently divine and eternal to satisfy the
cravings of human longing—what but this is to make life worth living
for her? And where else, in these days of scepticism, is she to find
such immortal dower? It is a commentary upon worldly wisdom, that
it has attempted to ignore this necessity, and left woman under the
increased pressure of her new obligations, to rely solely upon such
frail reeds as human respect and conventional morality. She needs the
inspiration of profound conviction and practical piety a hundredfold
more than ever before. The woman of the old time, secluded within
the limits of the household, surrounded by the material safeguard of
custom, might lead an untroubled existence even if devotion and faith
were not vital principles with her. The woman of to-day, harassed,
beset, tempted, driven by necessity, drawn this way and that by bad
advice and worse example, is attempting a hopeless task when she tries
the same experiment.”
The poetry of Mrs. Blake is rational and wholesome. She knows her gifts
and is content to use them at their best, giving us songs in a minor
key, that if they add little to human thought, yet make the world
better from their coming. In the poems of childhood she is particularly
happy. She knows children, their joys and sorrows, has caught their
ways. Her’s is a heart that has danced in the joy of motherhood and
been stricken when the “dead do not waken.” She is our only intelligent
writer of children’s poems. The assertion may be controverted. A
hundred Catholic poets for children may be cited writers “of genius
profound,” of “exquisite fancy,” “whose works should grace every parish
library.” I quote a stereotyped criticism, a constant expression with
Catholic reviewers. I laugh, in my hermitage, and blandly suggest, to
all whom it may concern, that insanity in jingles is not relished by
sane children. I speak from experience, having perpetrated a selection
from the one hundred on a class of bright boys and girls. Peaceful
sleep, and, let us hope, pleasant dreams, came to their aid. Shall I
ever, Comus, forget their faces in the transition moment from dulness
to delight? Let us cease cant and rapturous criticism. Catholic
literature, to survive the time that gave it birth, must be built on
other foundations. Hasty and unconscious productions must be branded
as such. We must have, as the French so well put it, a horror of
“pacotille” and “camelotte.” “If my works are good,” said the sculptor
Rude, “they will endure; if not, all the laudation in the world would
not save them from oblivion.” The same may well be written of Catholic
literature. Whether for children or grown-up men or women, as a
Catholic critic, whose only aim has been to gain an audience for my
fellow Catholic writers whose works can bear a favorable comparison
with the best contemporary thought, I ask that the best shall be
given, and that given, it shall be joyfully received; that trash shall
not fill the book-cases, lie on the parlor-tables, be puffed in our
weeklies, and genius and sacrifice be forgotten. I ask that the works
of Stoddard, Johnston, Egan, Roche, Azarias, Lathrop, Tabb, Miss
Repplier, Guiney, Katherine Conway, Mrs. Blake, find a welcome in each
Catholic household, and that the Catholic press make their delightful
personalities known to our rising generation. Of their best they have
given. Shall they die before we acknowledge it?