Father Tabb and His Tradition
Shuster, George N.
September 23, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 473 FATHER TABB AND HIS TRADITION By GEORGE N. SHUSTER A NATIONAL literature is always the naughty child of tradition* And tradition in the United States...
...We have reason to wonder, not at the smallness of Father Tabb's kingdom, but at his having any kingdom at all...
...and even the flash of sabres in the moonlight, which is summoned up by Stuart's name...
...Grant also that the influence of Father Tabb has been small—the tragedy of the United States is precisely the limited attention which anyone, not in the Puritan movement, has been able to get...
...Few seem to realize that there has been another great composite American past—a legacy of attitude and experience as well defined as anything which ever came out of New England...
...Suppose we remember, for instance, all that was done by Catholic and Latin civilization in America—the Jesuits of Louis Quatorze tramping from bayou to wigwam...
...But it is not in the least Franciscan...
...the stand made by Lord Baltimore—and the Irish, too, by the way—for freedom...
...and, to choose a last example, the warblers have "their phonograph, the mocking-bird...
...The poetry of the romantic tradition in America is like a limb from the same tree—though a new and sappy limb...
...Creoles dancing through Mardi Gras in Louisiana...
...It stained every-day life with colors much less prim than conformist white...
...Nature must be wooed into poetry, let us say...
...Sir Philip Sidney come to life again in Robert Lee...
...Where his tone is chiefly moral— often enough the case—our poet moves not so much from the laws of nature to the law for man, as out of reverie into contemplation...
...Where the tone of Father Tabb is predominately reflective, you will almost certainly find a metaphor shaded with peculiar whimsicality...
...First, there was his independence—not the ordinary "have-my-own-way" kind of temperament, but the sterling isolation of the principled rebel...
...The fundamental impressive thing about his poetry is its agricultural and patrician character...
...A dozen characteristics which seem oddities prove upon inspection really representative of the folk to whom he belonged...
...In Father Tabb's case, of course, this independence was by no means merely political...
...Such is the lineage of Father Tabb, not merely because of individual choice but first of all by the proud reason of his race...
...Group with this everything which the Anglican memories of the South have meant—faith and ruffles of a gracious stamp...
...Who is the American Shelley if it be not Poe...
...Obviously that is no note of Assisi, and the sample is characteristic enough...
...In him the fugitive notes of a myriad scattered songs came to their places as in an octave...
...There was, for instance, his power of shrewd satire, which cut and stabbed into the dead-level with unerring ability to detect softnesses...
...Wild Flowers suggests that the Eucharist is God's dew upon us...
...Nevertheless he was utterly simple of heart, and...
...Like Virgil, he trained his eyes on the broad acres of his domain...
...His blows fell swiftly and left their mark, so that many contemporaries felt Tabbian phrases "stick fast in the throat like burrs...
...September 23, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 473 FATHER TABB AND HIS TRADITION By GEORGE N. SHUSTER A NATIONAL literature is always the naughty child of tradition* And tradition in the United States is commonly supposed by both its friends and enemies to have been tossed like a parcel from the Mayflower...
...Grant that Poe was greater and gave America poetic literature, to date, its pinnacles in Ulalume, and The City in the Sea...
...The fervent intimacy with nature which Father Tabb reveals throughout his work is his very own—it is an art of whistling a way into the woodland, of treating all creatures blithely and yet with reverence...
...Spanish cowls bright and soft against the first olive groves of California...
...Who is more like Keats than Lanier...
...If any one man seems to be the interpreter of this romantic tradition, echoing with his voice its thousand moods and making room in his heart for the things it reverenced, it is Father John Bannister Tabb...
...An agricultural and patrician race, this...
...Thus he speaks of the golden-rod's "lifted staff...
...Everywhere the metamorphosis of the impression given by nature is effected in the fashion peculiar to the poetic family to which Father Tabb belonged, though with added whimsy...
...Nature is the constant background of his song—a nature courted in regal leisure, the poet's hand stroking the stars as a lover smoothes his mistress's golden hair...
...But Poe is representative only of romanticism, wearing the cloak of Coleridge and Mangan with a new majesty, and scanning the dead face of beauty on which Shelley never dared to look...
...In this mood, The Sisters finds an equal blessing for Martha and Mary in the movement of waves and the rest of hills...
...The Water-Lily, for instance, makes this comparison— Nay...
...but in the caresses of Father Tabb there is always a teasing gesture...
...and in Westward, love bears suffering for the beloved as night lifts shadows from the day...
...the rain is a truant, "sorry to have gone with the mist that lured him on...
...Lowell's rhymed prose...
...methinks the maiden moon, When the daylight came too soon, Fleeting from her bath to hide, Left her garment in the tide...
...The more one comes to know of Father Tabb, the more certain it appears that he could only have been his kind of American...
...Poe himself was canonized in Europe, and the vision of Sidney Lanier has been overborne by The Vision of Sir Launfal in Mr...
Vol. 2 • September 1925 • No. 20
