To you my quick thoughts go.”
And summing up, he tells us the kind of a bond that holds them. It is the
“Love that lives;
Its spring-time blossoms blow
’Mid the fruit that autumn gives;
And its life outlasts the snow.”
In 1875 he became assistant editor of that staid and stately magazine the Atlantic Monthly, thereby adding to his fame, while it brought him into intimate relationship with the best current thought of the time. Few American literary men have not, at some time of their career, been closely allied with the press. Mr. Lathrop has been no exception. For two years, from ’77 to ’79, his brilliant pen guided the destinies of the Boston Courier. In 1879 he purchased Hawthorne’s old home, “The Wayside,” in Concord, Mass., making it his home until his removal to New York in 1883. His present residence is at New London, Conn., where a beautiful home, with its every nook consecrated to books and paintings, tells of an ideal literary life and companionship. Mr. Lathrop’s genius is many sided. This is often a sign of strength. Men, says a recent critic, with a great and vague sense of power in them are always doubtful whether they have reached the limits of that power, and naturally incline to test this in the field in which they feel they have fewer rather than more numerous auguries of success. Into many fields this brilliant writer has gone, and with success. In some he has sowed, in others reaped a golden harvest. He was a pioneer in that movement which rightfully held that an author had something to do with his brain-work. It seems strange that in this nineteenth century such a proposition should demand a defender. Sanity, however, is not so widespread as the optimists tell. The contention of those that denied copyright was, “Ideas are common property.” So they are, says our author, but granting this, don’t think you have bagged your game? How about the form in which those ideas are presented? Is not the author’s own work, wrought out with toil, sweat and privation—is not the labor bestowed upon that form as worthy of proper wage as the manual skill devoted to the making of a jumping jack? Yet no one has denied that jumping-jacks must be paid for. This was sound reasoning and would have had immediate effect, had Congress possessed a ha’penny worth of logic. As it was, years were wasted agitating for a self-evident right, men’s energies spent, and at length a half-loaf reluctantly given.
In another field Mr. Lathrop has been a worker almost single-handed, that of encouraging a school of American art. A few years ago a daub from France was valued more than a marvellous color-study of John La Farge, or a canvas breathing the luminous idealism of Waterman. Critics sniffed at American art, while they went into rhapsody over some foreign little master. Our author, whose keen perception had taught him that the men who toiled in attics, without recompense in the present, and dreary prospects for the future, for the sake of art, were not to be branded as daubers, but as real artists, the fathers of American art, became their defender. He pointed out the beauties of this new school, its strength, and above all, that whatever it might have borrowed from foreign art, it was American in the core. Men listened more for the sake of the writer than interest in his theme. Gradually they became tolerant and admitted that there was such a thing as American art.
It was natural that the son-in-law of America’s greatest story-teller should try his strength in fiction. His first novels show a trace of Hawthorne. They are romantic, while the wealth of language bewilders. This, as a critic remarks, was an “indication of opulence and not of poverty.” The author was feeling his way. His later works bear no trace of Hawthorne; they are marked by his own fine spiritual sense. The plots are ingenious, poetically conceived and worked out with a deftness and subtlety that charms the reader. There is an air of fineness about them totally foreign to the pyrotechnic displays of current American fiction. The author is an acute observer, one who looks below the surface, an ardent student of psychology. His English is scholarly, has color and dramatic force. His novels are free from immoral suggestions, straining after effect, overdoing the pathetic and incongruous padding, the ordinary stock of our fin de siècle novelists. The reading of them not only amuses, a primary condition of all works of fiction, but instructs and widens the reader’s horizon on the side of the good and true. In poetry Mr. Lathrop has attained his greatest strength. Some of his war-poems are full of fine feeling and manly vigor. He is no carver of cherry-stones or singer of inane sonnets and meaningless rondeaus, but a poet who has something to say; none of your humanity messages, but songs that are human, songs that find root in the human heart. Of his volumes “Rose and Rooftree,” “Dreams and Days,” a critic writes:
“There are poems in tenderer vein which appeal to many hearts, and others wrought out of the joys and sorrows of the poet’s own life, which draw hearts to him, as “May Rose” and the “Child’s Wish Granted” and “The Flown Soul,” the last two referring to his only son, whose death in early childhood has been the supreme grief of his life. The same critic notes the exquisite purity and delicacy of these poems, and that “in a day when the delusion is unfortunately widespread that these cannot co-exist with poetic fervor and strength.”