Arts and Letters

Chair No. 14 of the Academy, first occupied by Theodore Roosevelt, was left vacant for the second time on January fifteenth, 1924. On that day, after a long and desperate struggle for life against heavy odds, Maurice Francis Egan, scholar, poet, critic, and diplomatist, to use his own expression, followed his predecessor and friend into "the other room.”

To all who personally knew Dr. Egan there was a note of extreme pathos in the announcement of this event. They who had followed the course of his fatal malady months before had been prepared for this ending; and yet when it came, it fell like a blow, for there had been manifested in the life of this man a spirit of youth and courage that seemed to have baffled death.

In all that the expression implies, Maurice Egan was a man of letters. He literally lived in literature. It was his inspiration, his solace, his amusement, his passion, and his vocation. It directed and dominated his life, furnished the contacts with others that brought him friendship and distinction, and crowned his existence with honor and eminence.

There were three great traditions that entered into Maurice Egan's development: the tradition of the Gaelic race, the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church, and the tradition of American political freedom. As they were tempered and harmonized in the mind of this conscientious scholar and thinker, these three traditions constitute an incomparable trinity of potent yet well-balanced influences in the shaping of a human life. His lineage, his nature, and his education aided in promoting their effect upon him, and enabled him to find in them a wealth of material for thought and expression.

Born in Philadelphia, on May 24, 1852, he inherited from his parents the sensibility and imagination of a race that is marked by strong individual qualities of personality and a remarkable self-expression. Even as a child, we learn from his account of his early life, he was an eager reader of many books, with a strong relish for something "with a fight in it." He found the New Testament "radiant with interest," and came to the conclusion that "nobody could tell a short story as well as our Lord Himself." One of his favorite characters was the Centurion,—“he seemed such a good soldier; and his plea, 'Lord, I am not worthy'," he says, "flashes across my mental vision every day of my life."

"The Life of Saint Rose of Lima" produced a quite different effect upon him. He cites the passage

So pure was the little Saint, even in her infancy, that when her uncle, who was her godfather, kissed her after her baptism, a rosy glow, a real blush of shame, overspread her countenance.

"In that book," he adds, "I read no more that day!"

Educated in La Salle College and Georgetown University, from which he was graduated in 1875, Egan devoted his time chiefly to editorial work upon several periodicals published in the interest of the Catholic Church, until 1880, when he became professor of English Literature in the University of Notre Dame, whence he was called in 1895 to a similar chair in the Catholic University of America, at Washington, which he occupied with distinction for twelve years.

During this whole period he was prolific in both prose and verse, producing nearly a score of volumes on various subjects. To lucidity and precision his style adds charm—that indefinable glamour that only imagination tinged with emotion can give to the printed page. Accurate learning, patient exposition, penetrating wit, and keen discrimination mark his writing. In all he wrote he revealed the hand of an artist, but his art was not mere spontaneous efflorescence. It issued in a style devoid of exaggeration, chastened by self-criticism, the result of conscientious workmanship that did not hesitate.

To file off the mortal part
Of thought with Attic art.

As a teacher of literary form, he considered versification a useful exercise for perfecting the art of expression. Its rigid laws of quantity, rhythm, rhyme, and cadence,—against which vers libre rebels,—were to him, like the paradigms of the classic languages, an apparatus of discipline not to be lightly disregarded. Nor did he think them merely disciplinary. They were inherent canons of expression for the emotions, comparable to the laws of thought for the operation of intelligence; for as there is beauty in formal truth, there is also a kind of truth in formal beauty. No art can live, he thought, which does not recognize its own laws of life. To satisfy the most exacting of these laws, as he understood them, he would sometimes rewrite his sonnets forty or fifty times, in quest of perfection.

It was the love of letters that brought Theodore Roosevelt and Maurice Egan together and cemented between them an enduring friendship. There was in Egan nothing of the politician in the ordinary sense of the word. He was too broadly human to be a mere partisan. It was not the man of letters seeking office, but the President seeking to utilize the man of letters, that led to Professor Egan's appointment to the diplomatic service of the United States.

In the formidable catalogue of books read by President Roosevelt in the first two years of his Presidency, as recorded by him in a letter to Dr. Butler, and printed in Bishop's Life,—a list that might well cover the lifetime of an ordinary man,—we find, imbedded in a whole library of history, biography, adventure, romance, essays, and drama, Dasent's translation of the Sagas of Gisli and Burnt Njal, Lady Gregory's and Miss Hull's Cuchulain Saga, together with the Children of Lir, the Children of Tuirenn, the Tale of Deirdre, etc.

In the last paragraph of the last complete book Dr. Egan published, referring to these Irish folk-tales, he modestly writes of this great book-lover:

Do you remember his Dante in the Bowery, and The Ancient Irish Sagas? He caught fire at the quotation from the "Lament of Deirdre;" and concluded at once that the Celts were the only people who, before Christianity invented chivalry, understood the meaning of romantic love. It is a great temptation to write at length on the books he liked, and how he fought for them, and explained them, and lived with them. Thinking of him, the most constant of book-lovers, I can only say, "Farewell and Hail!"

Thus ends Maurice Egan's Confessions of a Book-Lover; but in it there is not a word of the well-authenticated incident, that, in the intimacy begun when this adept in the lore in which Roosevelt revelled was summoned to the White House to interpret and discuss these Irish sagas, the President discovered his future Minister to Denmark. It was, in truth, a discovery, and not a creation by appointment; for real diplomatists, like poets, are born, not made. The unerring tactfulness, the correct judgment, the double capacity for speech and for silence, the clairvoyance to find the true meaning between the lines of written words, patience with impetuosity, the serenity of conscious rectitude,—all these are gifts of nature, phases and projections of that inborn chivalry, that noblesse of intelligence, that is not derived from titles and cannot be conferred by kings.

Superficially regarded, it seemed to many incongruous to send a Roman Catholic envoy from the United States to a Court where Protestantism is the established religion. And yet Maurice Francis Egan, transferred directly from a Catholic University to a capital where Lutheranism is the official religion of the State, from 1907 to 1918, nearly half of the time during a war that shook all the foundations of Europe and in which his own country was eventually a participant, while he was the dean of the diplomatic body, not only preserved his own equanimity, but maintained intimate personal intercourse with his colleagues, friendly relations with society, and the status of persona gratissima with the Danish King and his Court! This test of his quality was so satisfactory in Washington that he remained as Minister at Copenhagen not only through the administrations of President Roosevelt and President Taft, but continued under that of President Wilson until, after more than ten years of service, he resigned from his post on account of his failing health. As a further mark of the appreciation in which his services to his country were held, he was offered by President Taft, and again by President Wilson, the ambassadorship to Austria-Hungary, which he declined.

Of his diplomatic experience we have an interesting record in his Ten Years Near the German Frontier. Its unostentatious chapters, under the guise of a pleasant volume of literature, constitute a revelation of the forces operating to draw Denmark into the maëlstrom of the tragic struggle for Germanic supremacy and are a substantial contribution to the history of the time. But this man of letters was a man of action also. In circumstances of peculiar difficulty from many quarters, it was his tact and his persistence that resulted in the acquisition by purchase of the Virgin Islands by the United States, an achievement that secures to him an honorable place in the history of our territorial expansion.

Already crowned with many academic laurels, after his return from his long mission new honors were accorded him, not only by universities and colleges, but by the King of Denmark and the King of the Belgians. The leading magazines sought and obtained contributions from his pen, and his reviews of books were notable for their learning, their penetration, and their comprehensiveness. Among the honors received by him was election, on February 20, 1908, to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, of which he was President during the last year of his life; and, on November 19, 1919, he was chosen in succession to Theodore Roosevelt a Member of the Academy, in which he took an active interest.

Loyal to his friends and colleagues in letters and diplomacy, a man of faith without fanaticism, of convictions without bigotry, of sentiment without sentimentalism, of patriotism without narrow partisanship, Maurice Francis Egan is enshrined in the hearts of those who knew him as a knight "without fear and without reproach,"—gentle, courageous, noble, and just,—whose life has shown that all that was admirable in the Age of Chivalry is still possible in the ever-recurrent tournament for the defense of beauty, truth, and honor.