NOTES

New Zealand Tablet, 16 March 1922, Page 26

NOTES

Isaac Butt

In an impression of various Irish leaders, a writer in the Irish World says: "Isaac Butt was eloquent, persuasive, and magnetic, but he lacked the essential quality of grit. He could sway a crowd as few Irish orators could, but the impression he created was transient and evanescent. He could tell the people exactly what to do, but I doubt if he could ever have got them to do it."

Parnell

His appreciation of Parnell is the following: "Parnell was even more magnetic than Butt, and to this personal magnetism, rather than to any gift of oratory, was due his uniform success in swaying the multitude. But he was cold and, in a sense, unsympathetic, and personal contact lessened a good deal the enchantment and the glamor which distance had created. His was not a great constructive mind. 1 More fit to practice than to plan ' he was not a man of initiative, but once he saw the value of a policy or a plan he made the very most of it. He did not, for instance, devise or create the Land League, but he saw what a powerful weapon it could be made and he utilised it to the fullest extent."

John Redmond

Of John Kedmond (the last of the old brigade) he writes:

"John Redmond was the reverse of magnetic, but his public utterances were forceful, well reasoned, and logical. Legal training and long experience had made him an orator of more of equipoise than Parnell, but he lacked the —for it is a natural gift— appealing to the heart of an audience as Charles Stewart Parnell did. Of those three elected leaders of the Irish people Mr. Parnell was unquestionably the best beloved and the most popular. At one time he was everything in Ireland but its king, and king he would have been made if the Irish people had had their say and their way in the matter."

Father Tabb

In the Catholic World for December there is a very interesting article on Father Tabb, which we recommend lovers of the gentle American priest-poet to read. .. Among sound critics Father Tabb has found many friends, and if it is unlikely that he will ever become a "popular poet," it is equally certain that he will be more and more appreciated by the cognoscenti as time goes on. Mrs. Meynell, who surely is qualified to pronounce a verdict on the merits of good

poetry, said that his verses, reminded her of George Herbert and of Mozart: a happy criticism which says all that could be said about his tender, devotional spirit and the music in which it found expression. However, the article to which we refer is concerned with his personality rather than with his work, and it gives us a welcome insight into his heart. We quote one passage that throws a flood of light on the priest and the sufferer:

"Of course the supreme test of the poet-priest's patience came with the partial and at . last complete failure of his eyesight during the final years. This ever-darkening shadow of blindness he met with constant work, and equally constant wit, almost to the very end. Many and historic have become the puns and bons mots with which he bantered his calamity—his request that Cardinal Gibbons confer upon him ' a new see '; his quips about taking ' his two worst pupils' up to his volume of poems bound in ' blind-man's buff,' etc., etc. But like the long line of laughing saints, John Bannister Tabb smiled at sorrow because he had learned the stark secret of abandonment in God's hands. To his friend and former pupil, Father Connor of Scranton, he declared a while before the end: If the Almighty came to me and said: 'John Tabb, you can have your eyesight back by asking for it.' 'I would, not ask. . I would be afraid of proving unfaithful to responsibilities of which I might not be fully aware. Now I know perfectly what is God's will, and lam resigned to it. The one supreme privilege of offering up Holy Mass was permitted Father Tabb even in blindness, and it is not easy to think unmoved of this ultimate union between the silent, hidden Victim and the priest whose eyes were closed to all but Him. In the Later Poems, published after Father Tabb's death, one finds that supreme message of Helplessness, which so consummately distills the threefold secret of the Purgative, the Illuminative, and the Unitive ways:

In patience as in labor must thou be

A follower of Me, Whose hands and feet, when I most wrought for thee, Were nailed unto a tree. ...

The article ends with a fine note of appreciation : "But all this is simply repeating that Father Tabb was a consummate artist—one of the very few consummate artists in American literature. Within his chosen and highly specialised field he stands peerless. Always in his work the vision is unique, the music like a swift, sure clash of bells."