JOHN BANISTER TABB (1845-1909)

Tabb was born in Amelia County, Virginia, on 22 March, 1845. His education was obtained through private study. In 1862 he became captain's clerk on the Confederate blockade-runner, R. E. Lee, and two years later he was taken prisoner by a Union vessel. He was sent to the same prison (Point Lookout) as was Sidney Lanier, and there the two became firm friends. Tabb's deepest interests were poetry and music, and it was Lanier's flute-playing that drew them together. After his release Tabb studied music in Baltimore, and later became a teacher at Racine College, Wisconsin. Later still he underwent a course of study at St. Charles College, Ellicott City, Maryland, and at St. Mary's Seminary, Baltimore, and in 1884 he was ordained a priest of the Roman Catholic Church. He continued, however, his work as a teacher, returning to St. Charles College and holding a professorship of literature there until his death in 1909. From his early youth he had suffered from a weakness of the eyes which was incurable, and during the last three years of his life he was totally blind.

Tabb's production of poetry was small in its amount, and his poems, besides, are almost invariably short, often quatrains. Moreover, the range of his interests was small. These are the familiar signs of the minor poet, and the classification need not be disputed. But Tabb had the true poet's searching eye for the unseen meanings lying beneath the variegated, ever-changing appearances of the world, and the brevity of his poems is not caused by paucity of matter, but rather by the severe compression of his utterance. It has been claimed, not without reason, that Tabb achieved beauties beyond the reach of his friend Lanier, and certainly he was the finer workman of the two, and had the deeper insight. He was not a great poet, but he was a true one, and he deserves to be read and remembered. He privately printed a few poems in 1883. Later volumes were: Poems (1894), Lyrics (1897), Child Verse (1899), Later Lyrics (1902), and Later Poems (1910).

GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE (1844-1925)

Cable was born in New Orleans on 12 October, 1844. His mother was a woman of New Eng land ancestry, a fact not without significance in view of some of Cable's characteristics and of his dominant interests in later life. His father died when he was fourteen, whereupon his period of schooling ceased, as he had at once to earn what he could in order to help with the support of the family. Reading, however, was not impossible, and the youth, studious by inclination, read widely in both English and French literature, while his days were spent, until the Civil War began, in marking boxes at the New Orleans custom house. During the War he became a Confederate soldier. Upon his return to civil life in 1865 he found employment with the New Orleans Picayune, but discovered after a short time that newspaper reporting was not his vocation. He then, after an attempt to become a surveyor and a period of illness, entered the office of a firm of cotton factors, and remained an accountant there until 1879. Meanwhile he had continued to read, and had steeped himself in the history and traditions of his city and in the distinctive manners, social customs, habits of thought, language, and even architecture of the creoles of Louisiana. And in 1872 Edward King, then traveling through the South in search of material for papers which he was contributing to Scribner's Monthly, had made Cable's acquaintance, had perceived his possibilities, and had secured from him the promise of a contribution to the Monthly. In the autumn of 1873 Cable's first story, 'Sieur George, had appeared in Scribner's Monthly, to be followed at intervals by the other tales which were republished in 1879 in the volume entitled Creole Days. The tales made no pronounced impression upon the public until they were collected in this book. Then, however, they immediately aroused widespread and deep interest, and Cable suddenly found himself a nationally known figure. It was soon recognized, indeed, that, whatever else he might do, Cable had in Creole Days achieved so distinctive and remarkable a performance that his fame in America was secure. For in these tales of the vanishing French civilization of Louisiana he had opened up to readers a new world, full of romantic charm, highly picturesque, and, though exotic, at the same time real and living and a portion of the American scene. It was as if Americans had suddenly discovered that the background of their civilization was more rich and varied and, in a word, interesting than they had realized. And in this respect Cable's achievement was similar in character to Bret Harte's in the volume entitled The Luck of Roaring Camp-with the important difference, however, that Cable was the master of a finer style, had a more delicate eye, and was by far the sincerer artist of the two.

So eager was the reception of Creole Days that Cable at once gave his whole time to literary work. He published The Grandissimes in 1880, a novel in which he amplified his picture of creole life, but also showed, despite the very real interest of the book, that his powers were most congenially exercised in the short tale. In Madame Delphine (1881), however, he achieved another unquestioned masterpiece, the tale being as charming and as perfect in style and tone and form as any of those in Creole Days. But with this slender volume Cable's greatest work, that which is responsible for his secure fame, was done. In 1884 he removed to Northampton, Massachusetts, where he continued to live for the rest of his life, and the changed environment, coupled probably with self-consciousness induced by his fame, made it impossible for him again to capture the style and the charm and interest of his earlier work. He wrote many articles, about the creoles, about the condition of the South, and about the negro question, and he interested himself largely in social work in Northampton, attempting to broaden and enrich the lives of wage-earners. This was useful and praiseworthy work, but it took him far from the atmosphere as well as the scene of his first books, and only one of the many volumes of fiction which he published after 1884-Lovers of Louisiana (1918)—shows any genuine return of his earlier powers. He died on 31 January, 1925.

The titles and dates of Cable's volumes, other than those which already have been mentioned, follow: The Creoles of Louisiana (1884), The Silent South (1885), Doctor Sevier (1885), Bonaventure, A Prose Pastoral of Louisiana (1888), The Negro Question (1890), John March, Southerner (1894), Strong Hearts (1899), The Cavalier (1901), Bylow Hill (1902), Kincaid's Battery (1908), Posson Jone and Père Raphael (1909), The Amateur Garden (1914), Gideon's Band (1914), and The Flower of the Chapdelaines (1918).