Part 15 (2/2)

Johnson found the adventure which all the young poets and artists were seeking; he knew that the only answer to their question was the Catholic Faith.

The atmosphere of the literary world in which he lived seems to have had no effect upon Lionel Johnson's mind and soul. He was ”of the centre”

not ”of the movement.” He gladly accepted the gracious traditions of English poetry. He followed the time-hallowed conventions of his craft as faithfully as did Tennyson. He had no desire to toss Milton's wreath either to Whitman or to Baudelaire.

But these virtues are perhaps chiefly negative. Almost the same thing might be said of many poets, of the late Stephen Phillips, for example, who certainly was an honest traditionalist, uninfluenced by decadence or aestheticism. But Lionel Johnson had also (what Stephen Phillips lacked) a great and beautiful philosophy. And his philosophy was true. He was so fortunate as to hold the Catholic Faith. This Faith inspired his best poems, s.h.i.+nes through them and makes them, as the word is used, immortal.

While Lionel Johnson was not exclusively a devotional and religious poet, the theme which he sang with the most splendid pa.s.sion and the most consummate art was the Catholic Church. This was the great influence in his life; it is to this that his poetry owes most of its enduring beauty. But there were other influences, there were other things which claimed, to a less degree, his devotion. One of these is Ireland.

Lionel Johnson's chivalrous loyalty to Ireland was not without its quaint humor. He was descended from the severe and brutal general who savagely put down the insurrection of 1798. But he by no means shared his ancestor's views in Irish matters; he was an enthusiastic advocate of Irish freedom and a devoted lover of everything Irish.

Although he hailed with delight the revival of ancient Celtic customs and the ancient Celtic language, Lionel Johnson was far from being what we have come to call a neo-Celt. He did not spend his time in writing elaborately annotated chants in praise of Cuchulain and Deidre and Oengus, and other creatures of legend; the attempt to reestablish Ireland's ancient paganism seemed to him singularly unintelligent. He saw that the greatest glory of Ireland is her fidelity to the Catholic Faith, a fidelity which countless cruel persecutions have only strengthened. And so when he wrote of Ireland's dead, he did not see them entering into some Ossianic land of dead warriors. Instead he wrote:

For their loyal love, nought less, Than the stress of death sufficed: Now with Christ, in blessedness, Triumph they, imparadised.

Similarly, in what is generally considered to be his greatest poem, the majestic and pa.s.sionate ”Ireland,” his most joyous vision is that of the ”Bright souls of Saints, glad choirs of intercession from the Gael,”

and he concludes with this splendid prayer:

O Rose! O Lily! O Lady full of grace!

O Mary Mother! O Mary Maid! hear thou.

Glory of Angels! Pity, and turn they face, Praying thy Son, even as we pray thee now, For thy dear sake to set thine Ireland free: Pray thou thy Little Child!

Ah! who can help her, but in mercy He?

Pray then, pray thou for Ireland, Mother mild!

O heart of Mary! Pray the Sacred Heart: His, at Whose word depart Sorrows and hates, home to h.e.l.l's waste and wild.

Lionel Johnson was, as Miss Louise Imogen Guiney has written, ”a tower of wholesomeness in the decadence which his short life spanned.” His purely secular poems are best when his Catholic Faith, seemingly without his willing it, unexpectedly s.h.i.+nes out in a splendor of radiant phrases. And of all his poems, those which const.i.tute his most important contributions to literature, are those which are directly the fruit of his religious experiences or of his love for Ireland. He was not so great a poet as Francis Thompson. He never wrote a poem that will stand comparison with ”The Hound of Heaven” or the ”Orient Ode.” But the sum of the beauty in all his work is great, and his poetry is, on the whole, more companionable than that of Francis Thompson; it is more human, more personal, more intimate.

And to at least two of Lionel Johnson's poems, the adjective ”great”

may, by every sound critical standard, safely be applied. One of these is the ”Dark Angel,” a masterly study of the psychology of temptation, written in stanzas that glow with feeling, that are the direct and pa.s.sionate utterance of the poet's soul, and yet are as polished and accurate as if their author's only purpose had been to make a thing of beauty. The other is ”Te Martyrum Candidatus,” a poem which may without question be given its place in any anthology which contains ”Burning Babe,” ”The Kings,” and Crashaw's ”Hymn to St. Teresa.” It has seemed to me that these brave and beautiful lines, which have for their inspiration the love of G.o.d, and echo with their chiming syllables the hoof-beats of horses bearing knights to G.o.d's battles, might serve as a fitting epitaph for the accomplished scholar, the true poet, the n.o.ble and kindly Catholic gentleman who wrote them.

SWINBURNE AND FRANCIS THOMPSON

I feel a certain diffidence in approaching the subject of Francis Thompson before such an audience as this. For I know that there are many among you who could teach me much about that great poet, the modern laureate of the Catholic Church. I suppose that many of you have studied the profound philosophy of ”From the Night of Forebeing,” ”The Mistress of Vision” and ”The Hound of Heaven,” have curiously examined the beautiful verbal intricacies of ”Sister Songs” and ”The Orient Ode,” and are familiar with the triumphs and the tragedies of Francis Thompson's brief life.

But there may be some among you to whom Francis Thompson is little more than a name. To such let me say that Francis Thompson was born of Catholic parents in Lancas.h.i.+re, England, in 1859, that he died, fortified by the last rites of the Church he loved, at the age of forty-eight, that most of his life was spent in poverty and ill-health, that he was subject to terrible and persistent temptations, but remained faithful to the Church, and made in the Church's honor some of the greatest poems in the English language. I compare him to a contemporary poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne, chiefly because Swinburne was the poet of Paganism as Francis Thompson was the poet of Catholicity, because their careers present interesting resemblances as well as interesting contrasts, and because both are what is called ”Victorian” poets.

Now, in this connection let me ask you if you ever seriously considered the advantages of living in a Republic, of living, for example, in the United States of America instead of in England? There is, for example, the recurrent excitement of changing the president once every four years, of having every so often a new chief executive on whom to vent your enthusiastic affection or your enthusiastic loathing. A president is a wonderful safety-valve for the pent-up feelings of a nation. The suffrage, the right to vote, must be a golden privilege indeed, otherwise so many members of the wiser s.e.x would not pursue it with such zeal and devotion.

But the advantage of living in a Republic to which I desire particularly to call your attention this afternoon is the advantage of escaping from the custom of calling periods of artistic and literary endeavor after the sovereigns who happened to rule during them. You never hear James Whitcomb Riley or Edwin Markham spoken of as Wilsonian poets. But you do hear Ben Jonson called an Elizabethan poet, which is just as absurd. You never hear Bryant and Whittier called poets of the Lincoln period. But you do hear such utterly dissimilar poets as Algernon Charles Swinburne and Francis Thompson spoken of as Victorian poets.

Why is this? Why is the Elizabethan era? Why should the age that glowed with the deathless flames of Shakespeare's genius, that echoed with Ben Jonson's lyric laughter, that was pierced by the poignant music of Robert Southwell, the martyred Jesuit poet, be named after Elizabeth, the persecutor of the saints, the vain and selfish and cruel woman who then occupied England's throne, to England's lasting shame?

And why are we to-day considering, in Swinburne and Francis Thompson, two Victorian poets? Why Victorian? Of course, Queen Victoria was a good wife and mother, a n.o.ble gentlewoman. I think that we all like everything that we know about Queen Victoria except perhaps her politics.

But why should the name of this estimable woman be used to designate the intellectual and spiritual life of the time during which she ruled, a life from which she was as remote as was the Queen of Sheba? Why should we give the placid name Victorian to that time of violent sin and violent virtue, of pa.s.sionate infidelity and pa.s.sionate faith, that time which produced the Darwinian theory, and the Oxford Movement, which produced the cruel reign of dogmatic science and the Catholic renascence, which produced the poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne and the poetry of Francis Thompson?

The combination of these two names may strike you as unusual. You know that Swinburne was what is called a Pagan, that he hated all forms of Christianity and especially the Catholic Church. You know also that Francis Thompson was the Church's poet-laureate, the greatest Catholic poet of modern times. And you wonder why Swinburne and Francis Thompson should be mentioned in the same breath.

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