My first meeting with Father Ryan was at the Atlantic Hotel in
Norfolk, in which town he had spent the first seven years of his life,
his parents having emigrated from Limerick and found a home there a
short time before his birth. He has been claimed by a number of
cities, and the dates of his nativity, as assigned by biographers,
range from 1834 to 1840, 1839 being the one best established. He told
me that his early memories of his Norfolk home were especially
associated with figs and oysters, the oysters there being the largest
and finest he had ever seen, they and the figs seeming to "rhyme with
his appetite." Then he told me an oyster story:
"A negro boatman was rowing some people down the river, among them two
prominent politicians who were discussing an absent one. 'He has no
more backbone than an oyster,' said one. The boatman laughed, and
said, 'Skuse me, marsers, but if you-all gemmen don' know no mo' 'bout
politicians dan you does 'bout oyschers you don' know much. No mo'
backbone dan a oyscher! Why, oyschers has as much backbone as folks
has, en ef you cuts into 'em lengfwise a little way ter one side en
looks at 'em close you'll see dar backbone's jes' lak we all's
backbone is. De only diffunce is de oyscher's backbone is ter one
side, jes' whar it ought ter be, 'stead er in de middle. Dat's de
reason I t'ink de debbil mus' er tuck a han' en he'ped ter mek we
alls, en you know de Lord says, Let _us_ mek man; dat shows dat He
didn' do hit all by Hese'f; ef He had He'd a meked we all's backbone
ter de side whar de oyscher's is, ter pertect us, en put our shin
bones behime our legs, whar dey wouldn't all de time git skint, en put
our calfs in de front.'"
My impression of Father Ryan was of being in the presence of a great
power--something indefinable and indescribable, but invincibly sure.
He was of medium height, and his massive head seemed to bend by its
own weight, giving him a somewhat stooped appearance. His hair, brown,
with sunny glints touching it to gold, was brushed back from his wide,
high forehead, falling in curls around his pale face and over his
shoulders. I recall with especial distinctness the dimple in his chin,
a characteristic of many who have been very near to me, for which
reason it attracted my attention when appearing in a face new to me.
His eyes were his greatest beauty,--Irish blue, under gracefully
arched brows, and luminous with the sunshine that has sparkled in the
eyes of his race in all the generations, caught by looking skyward for
a light that dawned not upon earth. His expression was sad, and the
beautiful smile that illumined his face, radiating compassion,
kindness, gentleness and the humor of the Kelt, made me think of a
brilliant noontide sun shining across a grave.
We discussed Folk Lore, and he said that some of the best lessons were
taught in the Folk Lore of the plantation negro. One of his sermons
was on "Obstinacy," illustrated by a story told him by an old colored
man:
"Marser, does you know de reason dat de crab walks back'ards? Well,
hit's dis away: when de Lord wuz mekin' uv de fishes He meked de
diffunt parts en put 'em in piles, de legs in one pile, de fins in
anudder, en de haids in anudder. Do' de crab wan't no fish, He meked
hit at de same time. Afterwards He put 'em tergedder en breaved inter
'em de bref er life. He stuck all de fishes' haids on, but de crab wuz
obstreperous en he say, 'Gib me my haid; I gwine put hit on myse'f.'
De Lord argufied wid him but de crab wouldn' listen, en he say he
gwine put hit on. So de Lord gin him his haid en 'course he put hit on
back'ards. Den he went ter de Lord en ax' Him ter put hit straight,
but de Lord wouldn' do hit, en He tole him he mus' go back'ards all
his life fer his obstinacy. En so 'tis wid some people."
[Illustration: FATHER RYAN
From the portrait in Murphy's Hotel, Richmond, Virginia]
Father Ryan told me that one of the greatest obstacles with which he
had to contend in his dealings with people was the lack of ethic
sensitiveness which rendered them oblivious to the harm of deviations
from principle which seemed not to result in great evil. People who
would not steal articles of value did not hesitate to cheat in
car-fare, taking the view that the company got enough out of the
public without their small contribution. He said, "They are like two
very religious old ladies who, driving through a toll-gate, asked the
keeper the rate. Being newly appointed, he looked into his book and
read so much for a man and a horse. The woman who was driving whipped
up the horse, calling out, 'G'lang, Sally, we goes free. We are two
old maids and a mare.' On they went without paying."
When Abram Ryan was seven years old the family moved to St. Louis,
where the boy attended the schools of the Christian Brothers, in his
twelfth year entering St. Mary's Seminary, in Perry County, Missouri.
He completed his preparation for the work to which his life was
dedicated, in the Ecclesiastical Seminary at Niagara, New York. Upon
ordination he was placed in charge of a parish in Missouri.
On a boat going down the canal from Lynchburg to Lexington, where he
was a fellow-passenger with us, he met his old friend, John Wise, and
entered into conversation with him, in the course of which he made the
statement that he came from Missouri. "All the way from Pike?" quoted
Mr. Wise. "No," replied Father Ryan, "my name is _not_ Joe Bowers, I
have _no_ brother Ike," whereupon he sang the old song, "Joe Bowers,"
in a voice that would have lifted any song into the highest realms of
music.
He recited his poem, "In Memoriam," written for his brother David, who
was killed in battle, one stanza of which impressed me deeply because
of the longing love in his voice when he spoke the lines:
Thou art sleeping, brother, sleeping
In thy lonely battle grave;
Shadows o'er the past are creeping,
Death, the reaper, still is reaping,
Years have swept and years are sweeping
Many a memory from my keeping,
But I'm waiting still and weeping
For my beautiful and brave.
The readers of his poetry are touched by its pathetic beauty, but only
they who have heard his verses in the tones of his deep, musical voice
can know of the wondrous melody of his lines.
When I said to him that I wished he would write a poem on Pickett's
charge at Gettysburg, he replied:
"It has been put into poetry. Every flower that blooms on that field
is a poem far greater than I could write. There are some things too
great for me to attempt. Pickett's charge at Gettysburg is one of
them."
A lady who chanced to be on the boat with us repeated Owen Meredith's
poem of "The Portrait." At its close he said with sad earnestness, "I
am sorry to hear you recite that. Please never do it again. It is a
libel on womanhood."
It may be that he was thinking of "Ethel," the maiden whom, it is
said, he loved in his youth, from whom he parted because Heaven had
chosen them both for its own work, and his memories deepened the
sacredness with which all women were enshrined in his thought. She was
to be a nun and he a priest, and thus he tells of their parting:
One night in mid of May their faces met
As pure as all the stars that gazed on them.
They met to part from themselves and the world;
Their hearts just touched to separate and bleed;
Their eyes were linked in look, while saddest tears
Fell down, like rain, upon the cheeks of each:
They were to meet no more.
The "great brown, wond'ring eyes" of the girl went with him on his way
through life, shadowed like the lights of a dim cathedral, but
luminous with love and sacrifice. How much of the story he tells in
pathetic verse was his very own perhaps no one may ever know, but the
reader feels that it was Father Ryan himself who, after "years and
years and weary years," walked alone in a place of graves and found
"in a lone corner of that resting-place" a solitary grave with its
veil of "long, sad grass" and, parting the mass of white roses that
hid the stone, beheld the name he had given the girl from whom he had
parted on that mid-May night.
"ULLAINEE."
Those who were nearest him thought that the vein of sadness winding
through his life and his poetry was in memory of the girl who loved
and sacrificed and died. When they marvelled over the mournful minor
tones in his melodious verse he made answer:
Go stand on the beach of the blue boundless deep,
When the night stars are gleaming on high,
And hear how the billows are moaning in sleep,
On the low-lying strand by the surge-beaten steep,
They're moaning forever wherever they sweep.
Ask them what ails them: they never reply;
They moan on, so sadly, but will not tell you why!
Why does your poetry sound like a sigh?
The waves will not answer you; neither shall I.
At the beginning of the war Father Ryan was appointed a chaplain in
the Army of Northern Virginia, but often served as a soldier. He was
in New Orleans in 1862 when an epidemic broke out, and devoted himself
to the care of the victims. Having been accused of refusing to bury a
Federal he was escorted by a file of soldiers into the presence of
General Butler, who accosted him with great sternness:
"I am told that you refused to bury a dead soldier because he was a
Yankee."
"Why," answered Father Ryan in surprise, facing the hated general
without a tremor, "I was never asked to bury him and never refused.
The fact is, General, it would give me great pleasure to bury the
whole lot of you."
Butler lay back in his arm-chair and roared with laughter. "You've got
ahead of me, Father," he said. "You may go. Good morning, Father."
One of the incidents of which Father Ryan told me occurred when
smallpox was raging in a State prison. The official chaplain had fled
and no one could be found to take his place. One day a prisoner asked
for a minister to pray for him, and Father Ryan, whose parish was not
far away, was sent for. He was in the prison before the messenger had
returned and, having been exposed to contagion, was not permitted to
leave. He remained in the prison ministering to the sick until the
epidemic had passed.
Immediately after the war he was stationed in New Orleans where he
edited _The Star_, a Roman Catholic weekly. Afterward he was in
Nashville, Clarksville, and Knoxville, and from there went to Augusta,
Georgia, where he founded and edited the "_Banner of the South_,"
which was permanently furled after having waved for a few years.
Unlike most Southern poets, Father Ryan did not take his themes from
Nature, and when her phenomena enters into his verse it is usually as
a setting for the expression of some ethic or emotional sentiment. He
has been called "the historian of a human soul," and it was in the
crises of life that his feeling claimed poetical expression. When he
heard of Lee's surrender "The Conquered Banner" drooped its mournful
folds over the heart-broken South. In his memorial address at
Fredericksburg when the Southern soldiers were buried, he first read
"March of the Deathless Dead," closing with the lines:
And the dead thus meet the dead,
While the living' o'er them weep;
And the men by Lee and Stonewall led,
And the hearts that once together bled,
Together still shall sleep.
June 28, 1883, I was in Lexington and saw the unveiling of Valentine's
recumbent statue of General Lee in Washington and Lee University. At
the conclusion of Senator Daniel's eloquent oration Father Ryan
recited his poem, "The Sword of Lee," the first time that it had been
heard.
In Lexington I was at a dinner where Father Ryan was a guest. He told
a story of a reprobate Irishman, for whom he had stood godfather. Upon
one occasion the man took too much liquor and, under its influence,
killed a man, for which he was sentenced to a term in the
penitentiary. Through the efforts of the Father he was, after a time,
pardoned and employment secured for him. One evening he came to the
priest's house intoxicated and asked permission to sleep in the barn.
"No," said the Father, "go sleep in the gutter." "Ah, Father, sure an'
I've shlept in the gutter till me bones is all racked with the
rheumatism." "I can't help that; I can't let you sleep in the barn;
you will smoke, you drunken beast, and set the barn on fire and maybe
burn the house, and they belong to the parish." "Ah, Father, forgive
me! I've been bad, very bad; I've murdered an' kilt an' shtole an'
been dhrunk, an' I've done a heap of low things besides, but low as
I'm afther gettin', Father, I never got low enough to shmoke." The man
slept in the barn and the parish suffered no loss.
One evening at a supper at Governor Letcher's we were responding to
the sentiment, "Life." I gave some verses which, in Father Ryan's
view, were not serious enough for a subject so solemn. He looked at me
through his wonderfully speaking eyes and answered me in his melodious
voice:
Life is a duty--dare it,
Life is a burden--bear it,
Life is a thorn-crown--wear it;
Though it break your heart in twain
Seal your lips and hush your pain;
Life is God--all else is vain.
"Yes, Father," I said, and there was silence.
[Illustration: ST. MARY'S CHURCH, MOBILE.
FATHER RYAN'S LATE RESIDENCE ADJOINING
By courtesy of P.J. Kenedy & Sons]
Always a wanderer, our Poet-Priest found his first real home, since
his childhood, when pastor of St. Mary's Church in Mobile. To that
home he pays a tribute in verse.
It was an enchanting solitude for the "restless heart,"--the plain
little church with its cross pointing the way upward, the front
half-hidden by trees through which its window-eyes look out to the
street. A short distance from the church and farther back was the
priest's house, set in a bewilderment of trees and vines and shrubbery
from which window, chimney, roof, and cornice peep out as if with
inquisitive desire to see what manner of world lies beyond the forest.
Up into the silent skies
Where the sunbeams veil the star,
Up,--beyond the clouds afar,
Where no discords ever mar,
Where rests peace that never dies.
Here, amid the "songs and silences," he wrote "just when the mood
came, with little of study and less of art," as he said, his thoughts
leaping spontaneously into rhymes and rhythms which he called verses,
objecting to the habit of his friends of giving them "the higher title
of poems," never dreaming of "taking even lowest place in the rank of
authors."
I sing with a voice too low
To be heard beyond to-day,
In minor keys of my people's woe,
But my songs will pass away.
To-morrow hears them not--
To-morrow belongs to fame--
My songs, like the birds', will be forgot,
And forgotten shall be my name.
But a touch of prophecy adds the thought:
And yet who knows? Betimes
The grandest songs depart,
While the gentle, humble, and low-toned rhymes
Will echo from heart to heart.
So the "low-toned rhymes" of him to whom "souls were always more than
songs," written "at random--off and on, here, there, anywhere," touch
the heart and linger like remembered music in a long-gone twilight.
In 1872 Father Ryan travelled in Europe, visited Rome and had an
audience with the Pope, of whom he wrote:
I saw his face to-day; he looks a chief
Who fears nor human rage, nor human guile;
Upon his cheeks the twilight of a grief,
But in that grief the starlight of a smile.
In 1883 he began an extended lecture tour in support of a charity of
deep interest in the South, but his failing health brought his effort
to an early close.
The fiery soul of Father Ryan soon burned out its frail setting. In
his forty-eighth year he retired to a Franciscan Monastery in
Louisville, intending to make the annual retreat and at its close to
finish his "Life of Christ," begun some time before. He arrived at the
Convent of St. Bonifacius March 23, 1886. The environment of the old
Monastery, the first German Catholic establishment in Louisville,
built in 1838, is not attractive. The building is on a narrow side
street filled with small houses and shops crowded up to the sidewalk.
But the interior offered a peaceful home for which the world-weary
heart of the Poet-Priest was grateful. From a balcony where he would
sit, breathing in the cool air and resting his soul in the unbroken
silence, he looked across the courtyard shaded by beautiful trees,
filled with flowers and trellised vines, his heart revelling in the
riot of color, the wilderness of greenery, all bathed in golden floods
of sunshine and canopied with an ever-changing and ever-glorious
stretch of azure sky.
Father Ryan was never again to go out from this peaceful harbor into
the tumultuous billows of world-life. He had been there but a short
time when his physician told him that he must prepare for death.
"Why," he said, "I did that long years ago." The time of rest for
which he had prayed in years gone by was near at hand.
My feet are wearied and my hands are tired,
My soul oppressed--
And I desire, what I have long desired--
Rest--only rest.
* * * * *
The burden of my days is hard to bear,
But God knows best;
And I have prayed--but vain has been my prayer
For rest--sweet rest.
In his last days his mind was filled with reminiscences of the war and
he would arouse the monastery and tell the priests and brothers, "Go
out into the city and tell the people that trouble is at hand. War is
coming with pestilence and famine and they must prepare to meet the
invader."
On Thursday of Holy Week, April 22, 1886, the weary life drifted out
upon the calm sea of Eternal Peace.
"BACON AND GREENS"