SIDNEY LANIER
Lanier's genius was predominantly musical. He descended from a musical
ancestry, which included in its line a "master of the king's music" at
the court of James I. His musical gifts manifested themselves in early
childhood. Without further instruction in music than a knowledge of the
notes, which he learned from his mother, he was able to play, almost by
intuition, the flute, guitar, violin, piano, and organ. He organized his
boyish playmates into an amateur minstrel band; and when in early manhood
he began to confide his most intimate thoughts to a notebook, he wrote,
"The prime inclination--that is, natural bent (which I have checked,
though)--of my nature is to music, and for that I have the greatest
talent; indeed, not boasting, for God gave it me, I have an extraordinary
musical talent, and feel it within me plainly that I could rise as high
as any composer."
This early bent and passion for music never left him. His thought
continually turned to the subject of music, and in the silences of his
soul he frequently heard wonderful melodies. In his novel, _Tiger
Lilies_, he lauds music in a rapturous strain: "Since in all holy
worship, in all conditions of life, in all domestic, social, religious,
political, and lonely individual doings; in all passions, in all
countries, earthly or heavenly; in all stages of civilization, of time,
or of eternity; since, I say, in all these, music is always present to
utter the shallowest or the deepest thoughts of man or spirit--let us
cease to call music a fine art, to class it with delicate pastry cookery
and confectionery, and to fear to make too much of it lest it should make
us sick." At a later period, while seeking to regain his health by a
sojourn in Texas, he wrote to his wife: "All day my soul hath been
cutting swiftly into the great space of the subtle, unspeakable deep,
driven by wind after wind of heavenly melody. The very inner spirit and
essence of all wind-songs, bird-songs, passion-songs, folk-songs,
country-songs, sex-songs, soul-songs, and body-songs, hath blown upon me
in quick gusts like the breath of passion, and sailed me into a sea of
vast dreams, whereof each wave is at once a vision and a melody."
[Illustration: SIDNEY LANIER.]
This predominance of music in the genius of Lanier is at once the source
of his strength and of his weakness in poetry. In his poems, and in his
work entitled _The Science of English Verse_, it is the musical
element of poetry upon which the principal emphasis is laid. This fact
makes him the successor of Poe in American letters. Both in theory and in
practice Lanier has, as we shall see, achieved admirable results. But,
after all, the musical element of poetry is of minor importance. It is a
means, and not an end. No jingle of sound can replace the delicacy of
fancy, nobleness of sentiment and energy of thought that constitute what
we may call the soul of poetry. Rhapsody is not the highest form of
poetic achievement. In its noblest forms poetry is the medium through
which great souls, like Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson,
give to the world, with classic self-restraint, the fruitage of their
highest thought and emotion.
The life of Lanier was a tragedy. While lighted here and there with a
fleeting joy, its prevailing tone was one of sadness. The heroic courage
with which he met disease and poverty impart to his life an inspiring
grandeur. He was born at Macon, Georgia, February 3, 1842. His sensitive
spirit early responded to the beauties of Nature; and in his hunting and
fishing trips, in which he was usually accompanied by his younger brother
Clifford, he caught something of the varied beauties of marsh, wood, and
sky, which were afterwards to be so admirably woven into his poems. He
early showed a fondness for books, and in the well-stored shelves of his
father's library he found ample opportunity to gratify his taste for
reading. His literary tastes were doubtless formed on the old English
classics--Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Addison--which formed a part of
every Southern gentleman's library.
At the age of fifteen he entered the Sophomore class of Oglethorpe
College, near Milledgeville, an institution that did not have sufficient
vitality to survive the Civil War. He did not think very highly of the
course of instruction, and found his chief delight, as perhaps the best
part of his culture, in the congenial circle of friends he gathered
around him. The evenings he spent with them were frequently devoted to
literature and music. A classmate, Mr. T. F. Newell, gives us a vivid
picture of these social features of his college life. "I can recall," he
says, "my association with him with sweetest pleasure, especially those
Attic nights, for they are among the dearest and tenderest recollections
of my life, when with a few chosen companions we would read from some
treasured volume, it may have been Tennyson, or Carlyle, or Christopher
North's _Noctes Ambrosianoe_, or we would make the hours vocal with
music and song; those happy nights, which were veritable refections of
the gods, and which will be remembered with no other regret than that
they will nevermore return. On such occasions I have seen him walk up and
down the room and with his flute extemporize the sweetest music ever
vouchsafed to mortal ear. At such times it would seem as if his soul were
in a trance, and could only find existence, expression, in the ecstasy of
tone, that would catch our souls with his into the very seventh heaven of
harmony."
Lanier was a diligent student, and easily stood among the first of his
classes, particularly in mathematics. His reading took a wide range. In
addition to the leading authors of the nineteenth century, he showed a
fondness for what was old and quaint in our literature. He delighted in
Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_ and in the works of "the poet-
preacher," Jeremy Taylor. At this time, too, his thoughtful nature turned
to the serious problem of his life work. He eagerly questioned his
capabilities as preliminary, to use his own words, "to ascertaining God's
will with reference to himself." As already learned from his notebook, he
early recognized his extraordinary gifts in music. But his ambition aimed
at more than a musician's career, for it seemed to him, as he said, that
there were greater things that he might do.
His ability and scholarship made a favorable impression on the college
authorities, and immediately after his graduation he was elected to a
tutorship. From this position, so congenial to his scholarly tastes, he
was called, after six months, by the outbreak of the Civil War. In his
boyhood he had shown a martial spirit. With his younger brother he joined
the Macon Volunteers, and soon saw heavy service in Virginia. He took
part in the battles of Seven Pines, Drewry's Bluffs, and Malvern Hill, in
all of which he displayed a chivalrous courage. Afterward he became a
signal officer and scout. "Nearly two years," he says, in speaking of
this part of his service, "were passed in skirmishes, racing to escape
the enemy's gunboats, signaling dispatches, serenading country beauties,
poring over chance books, and foraging for provender." In 1864 he became
a blockade runner, and in his first run out from near Fort Fisher, he was
captured and taken to Point Lookout prison.
It is remarkable that, amid the distractions and hardships of active
service, his love of music and letters triumphantly asserted itself. His
flute was his constant companion. He utilized the brief intervals of
repose that came to him in camp to set some of Tennyson's songs to music
and to prosecute new lines of literary study. He took up the study of
German, in which he became quite proficient, and by the light of the camp
fire at night translated from Heine, Schiller, and Goethe. At the same
time his sympathy with the varied aspects of Nature was deepened. Trees
and flowers and ferns revealed to him their mystic beauty; and like
Wordsworth, he found it easy, "in the lily, the sunset, the mountain, and
rosy hues of all life, to trace God."
It was during his campaigns in Virginia that he began the composition of
his only novel, _Tiger Lilies_, which was not completed, however,
till 1867. It is now out of print. Though immature and somewhat chaotic,
it clearly reveals the imaginative temperament of the author. War is
imaged to his mind as "a strange, enormous, terrible flower," which he
wishes might be eradicated forever and ever. As might be expected, music
finds an honored place in its pages. He regards music as essential to the
home. "Given the raw materials," he says, "to wit, wife, children, a
friend or two, and a house,--two other things are necessary. These are a
good fire and good music. And inasmuch as we can do without the fire for
half the year, I may say that music is the one essential. After the
evening spent around the piano, or the flute, or the violin, how warm and
how chastened is the kiss with which the family all say good night! Ah,
the music has taken all the day cares and thrown them into its terrible
alembic and boiled them and rocked them and cooled them, till they are
crystallized into one care, which is a most sweet and rare desirable
sorrow--the yearning for God."
After the war came a rude struggle for existence--a struggle in which
tuberculosis, contracted during his camp life, gradually sapped his
strength. Hemorrhages became not infrequent, and he was driven from one
locality to another in a vain search for health. But he never lost hope;
and his sufferings served to bring out his indomitable, heroic spirit,
and to stimulate him to the highest degree of intellectual activity. Few
men have accomplished more when so heavily handicapped by disease and
poverty. The record of his struggle is truly pathetic. In a letter to
Paul Hamilton Hayne, written in 1880, he gives us a glimpse both of his
physical suffering and his mental agony. "I could never tell you," he
says, "the extremity of illness, of poverty, and of unceasing toil, in
which I have spent the last three years, and you would need only once to
see the weariness with which I crawl to bed after a long day's work, and
after a long night's work at the heels of it--and Sundays just as well as
other days--in order to find in your heart a full warrant for my silence.
It seems incredible that I have printed such an unchristian quantity of
matter--all, too, tolerably successful--and secured so little money; and
the wife and the four boys, who are so lovely that I would not think a
palace good enough for them if I had it, make one's earnings seem all the
less." During all these years of toil he longed to be delivered from the
hard struggle for bread that he might give himself more fully to music
and poetry.
In 1867, while in charge of a prosperous school at Prattville, Alabama,
he married Miss Mary Day, of Macon, Georgia. It proved a union in which
Lanier found perpetual inspiration and comfort. His new-found strength
and happiness are reflected in more than one of his poems. In
_Acknowledgment_ we read:--
"By the more height of thy sweet stature grown,
Twice-eyed with thy gray vision set in mine,
I ken far lands to wifeless men unknown,
I compass stars for one-sexed eyes too fine."
And in _My Springs_, he says again, with great beauty:--
"Dear eyes, dear eyes and rare complete--
Being heavenly-sweet and earthly-sweet--
I marvel that God made you mine,
For when He frowns, 'tis then ye shine!"
In 1873, after giving up the study of law in his father's office, he went
to Baltimore, where he was engaged as first flute for the Peabody
Symphony concerts. This engagement was a bold undertaking, which cannot
be better presented than in his own words. In a letter to Hayne he says:
"Aside from the complete _bouleversement_ of proceeding from the
courthouse to the footlights, I was a raw player and a provincial withal,
without practice, and guiltless of instruction--for I had never had a
teacher. To go under these circumstances among old professional players,
and assume a leading part in a large orchestra which was organized
expressly to play the most difficult works of the great masters, was (now
that it's all over) a piece of temerity that I don't remember ever to
have equaled before. But I trusted in love, pure and simple, and was not
disappointed; for, as if by miracle, difficulties and discouragements
melted away before the fire of a passion for music which grows ever
stronger within my heart; and I came out with results more gratifying
than it is becoming in me to specify." His playing possessed an exquisite
charm. "In his hands the flute," to quote from the tribute paid him by
his director, "no longer remained a mere material instrument, but was
transformed into a voice that set heavenly harmonies into vibration. Its
tones developed colors, warmth, and a low sweetness of unspeakable
poetry; they were not only true and pure, but poetic, allegoric as it
were, suggestive of the depths and heights of being and of the delights
which the earthly ear never hears and the earthly eye never sees."
Henceforth Baltimore was to be Lanier's home. In addition to music, he
gave himself seriously to literature. Before this period he had written a
number of poems, limited in range and somewhat labored in manner. The
current of his life still set to music, and his poetic efforts seem to
have been less a matter of inspiration than of deliberate choice. In
literary form the influence of Poe is discernible; but in subject-matter
the sounds and colors of Nature, as in the poetry of his later years,
occupy a prominent place. Of the poems of this early period the songs for
_The Jacquerie_ are the best. Here is a stanza of _Betrayal_:--
"The sun has kissed the violet sea,
And burned the violet to a rose.
O sea! wouldst thou not better be
More violet still? Who knows? Who knows?
Well hides the violet in the wood:
The dead leaf wrinkles her a hood,
And winter's ill is violet's good;
But the bold glory of the rose,
It quickly comes and quickly goes--
Red petals whirling in white snows,
Ah me!"
After taking up his residence in Baltimore, Lanier entered upon a
comprehensive course of reading and study, particularly in early English
literature. He studied Anglo-Saxon, and familiarized himself with
Langland and Chaucer. He understood that any great poetic achievement
must be based on extensive knowledge. A sweet warbler may depend on
momentary inspiration; but the great singer, who is to instruct and move
his age, must possess the insight and breadth of vision that come alone
from a profound acquaintance with Nature and human history. With keen
critical discernment Lanier said that "the trouble with Poe was, he did
not _know_ enough. He needed to know a good many more things in
order to be a great poet." It was to prepare himself for the highest
flights possible to him that he entered, with inextinguishable ardor,
upon a wide course of reading.
In 1874 he was commissioned by a railroad company to write up the
scenery, climate, and history of Florida. While spending a month or two
with his family in Georgia, he wrote _Corn_, which deservedly ranks
as one of his noblest poems. The delicate forms and colors of Nature
touched him to an ecstasy of delight; and at the same time they bodied
forth to his imagination deep spiritual truths. As we read this poem, we
feel that the poet has reached a height of which little promise is given
in his earlier poems. Here are the opening lines:--
"To-day the woods are trembling through and through
With shimmering forms, and flash before my view,
Then melt in green as dawn-stars melt in blue.
The leaves that wave against my cheek caress
Like women's hands; the embracing boughs express
A subtlety of mighty tenderness;
The copse-depths into little noises start,
That sound anon like beatings of a heart,
Anon like talk 'twixt lips not far apart.
The beach dreams balm, as a dreamer hums a song;
Through that vague wafture, expirations strong
Throb from young hickories breathing deep and long
With stress and urgence bold of prisoned spring
And ecstasy burgeoning."
This poem is remarkable, too, for its presentation of Lanier's conception
of the poetic office. The poet should be a prophet and leader, arousing
mankind to all noble truth and action:--
"Look, out of line one tall corn-captain stands
Advanced beyond the foremost of his bands,
And waves his blades upon the very edge
And hottest thicket of the battling hedge.
Thou lustrous stalk, that ne'er mayst walk nor talk,
Still shalt thou type the poet-soul sublime
That leads the vanward of his timid time,
And sings up cowards with commanding rhyme--
Soul calm, like thee, yet fain, like thee, to grow
By double increment, above, below;
Soul homely, as thou art, yet rich in grace like thee,
Teaching the yeomen selfless chivalry
That moves in gentle curves of courtesy;
Soul filled like thy long veins with sweetness tense.
By every godlike sense
Transmuted from the four wild elements."
For a time Lanier had difficulty in finding a publisher. He made a visit
to New York, but met only with rebuffs. But upheld, like Wordsworth, by a
strong consciousness of the excellence of his work, he did not lose his
cheerful hope and courage. "The more I am thrown against these people
here, and the more reverses I suffer at their hands, the more confident I
am of beating them finally. I do not mean by 'beating' that I am in
opposition to them, or that I hate them or feel aggrieved with them; no,
they know no better and they act up to their light with wonderful energy
and consistency. I only mean that I am sure of being able, some day, to
teach them better things and nobler modes of thought and conduct."
_Corn_ finally appeared in _Lippincott's Magazine_ for February,
1875.
From this time poetry became a larger part of Lanier's life. His poetic
genius had attained to fullness of power. He gave freer rein to
imagination and thought and expression. Speaking of _Special
Pleading_, which was written in 1875, he says: "In this little song, I
have begun to dare to give myself some freedom in my own peculiar style,
and have allowed myself to treat words, similes, and meters with such
freedom as I desired. The result convinces me that I can do so now
safely." In the next two or three years he produced such notable poems as
_The Song of the Chattahoochee_, _The Symphony_, _The Revenge
of Hamish_, _Clover_, _The Bee_, and _The Waving of the
Corn_. They slowly gained recognition, and brought him the fellowship
and encouragement of not a few literary people of distinction, among whom
Bayard Taylor and Edmund Clarence Stedman deserve especial mention.
Perhaps none of Lanier's poems has been more popular than _The Song of
the Chattahoochee_. It does not reach the poetic heights of a few of
his other poems, but it is perfectly clear, and has a pleasant lilting
movement. Moreover, it teaches the important truth that we are to be dumb
to the siren voices of ease and pleasure when the stern voice of duty
calls. The concluding stanza is as follows:--
"But oh, not the hills of Habersham,
And oh, not the valleys of Hall,
Shall hinder the rain from attaining the plain,
For downward the voices of duty call--
Downward to toil and be mixed with the main.
The dry fields burn and the mills are to turn,
And a thousand meadows mortally yearn,
And the final main from beyond the plain
Calls o'er the hills of Habersham,
And calls through the valleys of Hall."
In 1876, upon the recommendation of Bayard Taylor, Lanier was invited to
write the centennial _Cantata_. As a poem, not much can be said in
its favor. Its thought and form fall far below its ambitious conception,
in which Columbia presents a meditation on the completed century of our
country's history. On its publication it was subject to a good deal of
unfavorable criticism; but through it all, though it must have been a
bitter disappointment, the poet never lost his faith in his genius and
destiny. "The artist shall put forth, humbly and lovingly," he wrote to
his father, "and without bitterness against opposition, the very best and
highest that is within him, utterly regardless of contemporary criticism.
What possible claim can contemporary criticism set up to respect--that
criticism which crucified Jesus Christ, stoned Stephen, hooted Paul for a
madman, tried Luther for a criminal, tortured Galileo, bound Columbus in
chains, and drove Dante into a hell of exile?"
The need of a regular income became more and more a necessity. "My head
and my heart," he wrote, "are both so full of poems, which the dreadful
struggle for bread does not give me time to put on paper, that I am often
driven to headache and heartache purely for want of an hour or two to
hold a pen." He sought various positions--a clerkship in Washington, an
assistant's place in the Peabody Library, a consulship in the south of
France--all in vain. He lectured to parlor classes in literature--an
enterprise from which he seems to have derived more fame than money.
Finally, in 1879, he was appointed to a lectureship in English literature
in Johns Hopkins University, from which dates the final period of his
literary activity and of his life.
The first fruits of this appointment were a series of lectures on
metrical forms, which appeared, in 1880, in a volume entitled _The
Science of English Verse_. It is an original and suggestive work, in
which, however, the author's predilections for music carry him too far.
He has done well to emphasize the time element in English versification;
but his attempt to reduce all forms of verse to a musical notation can
hardly be regarded as successful. His work, though comprehensive in
scope, was not intended to impose a new set of laws upon the poet. "For
the artist in verse," he says in his brief concluding chapter, "there is
no law: the perception and love of beauty constitute the whole outfit;
and what is herein set forth is to be taken merely as enlarging that
perception and exalting that love. In all cases, the appeal is to the
ear; but the ear should, for that purpose, be educated up to the highest
possible plane of culture."
A second series of lectures, composed and delivered when the anguish of
mortal illness was upon him, was subsequently published under the title,
_The English Novel_. Its aim was to trace the development of
personality in literature. It contains much suggestive and sound
criticism. He did not share the fear entertained by some of his
contemporaries, that science would gradually abolish poetry. Many of the
finest poems in our language, as he pointed out, have been written while
the wonderful discoveries of recent science were being made. "Now," he
continues, "if we examine the course and progress of this poetry, born
thus within the very grasp and maw of this terrible science, it seems to
me that we find--as to the _substance_ of poetry--a steadily
increasing confidence and joy in the mission of the poet, in the
sacredness of faith and love and duty and friendship and marriage, and
the sovereign fact of man's personality, while as to the _form_ of
the poetry, we find that just as science has pruned our faith (to make it
more faithful), so it has pruned our poetic form and technic, cutting
away much unproductive wood and effloresence, and creating finer reserves
and richer yields." Among novelists he assigns the highest place to
George Eliot, who "shows man what he maybe in terms of what he is."
There are two poems of this closing period that exhibit Lanier's
characteristic manner at its best. They are the high-water mark of his
poetic achievement. They exemplify his musical theories of meter. They
show the trend forced upon him by his innate love of music; and though he
might have written much more, if his life had been prolonged, it is
doubtful whether he would have produced anything finer. Any further
effort at musical effects would probably have resulted in a kind of
ecstatic rhapsody. The first of the poems in question is the _Marshes
of Glynn_, descriptive of the sea marshes near the city of Brunswick,
Georgia.
"Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free--
Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!
Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun,
Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won
God out of knowledge, and good out of infinite pain,
And sight out of blindness, and purity out of a stain."
The other poem of his closing period, _Sunrise_, his greatest
production, was written during the high fever of his last illness. In the
poet's collected works, it is placed first in the series called _Hymns
of the Marshes_. At times it almost reaches the point of ecstasy. His
love of Nature finds supreme utterance.
"In my sleep I was fain of their fellowship, fain
Of the live-oak, the marsh, and the main.
The little green leaves would not let me alone in my sleep;
Up-breathed from the marshes, a message of range and of sweep,
Interwoven with waftures of wild sea-liberties, drifting,
Came through the lapped leaves sifting, sifting,
Came to the gates of sleep.
Then my thoughts, in the dark of the dungeon-keep
Of the Castle of Captives hid in the City of Sleep,
Upstarted, by twos and by threes assembling:
The gates of sleep fell a-trembling
Like as the lips of a lady that forth falter _yes_,
Shaken with happiness:
The gates of sleep stood wide.
* * * * *
"Oh, what if a sound should be made!
Oh, what if a bound should be laid
To this bow-and-string tension of beauty and silence a-spring,--
To the bend of beauty the bow, or the hold of silence the string!
I fear me, I fear me yon dome of diaphanous gleam
Will break as a bubble o'erblown in a dream,--
Yon dome of too-tenuous tissues of space and of night,
Overweighted with stars, overfreighted with light,
Oversated with beauty and silence, will seem
But a bubble that broke in a dream,
If a bound of degree to this grace be laid,
Or a sound or a motion made."
Throughout his artistic life Lanier was true to the loftiest ideals. He
did not separate artistic from moral beauty. To his sensitive spirit, the
beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty seemed interchangeable
terms. He did not make the shallow cry of "art for art's sake" a pretext
or excuse for moral taint. On the contrary, he maintained that all art
should be the embodiment of truth, goodness, love. "Can not one say with
authority," he inquires in one of his university lectures, "to the young
artist, whether working in stone, in color, in tones, or in character-
forms of the novel: so far from dreading that your moral purpose will
interfere with your beautiful creation, go forward in the clear
conviction that, unless you are suffused--soul and body, one might say--
with that moral purpose which finds its largest expression in love--that
is, the love of all things in their proper relation--unless you are
suffused with this love, do not dare to meddle with beauty; unless you
are suffused with beauty, do not dare to meddle with truth; unless you
are suffused with truth, do not dare to meddle with goodness. In a word,
unless you are suffused with truth, wisdom, goodness, and love, abandon
the hope that the ages will accept you as an artist."
Through these years of high aspiration and manly endeavor, the poet and
musician was waging a losing fight with consumption. He was finally
driven to tent life in a high, pure atmosphere as his only hope. He first
went to Asheville, North Carolina, and a little later to Lynn. But his
efforts to regain his health proved in vain; and on the 7th of September,
1881, the tragic struggle was brought to a close.
The time has hardly come to give a final judgment as to Lanier's place in
American letters. He certainly deserves a place by the side of the very
best poets of the South, and perhaps, as many believe, by the side of the
greatest masters of American song. His genius had elements of originality
equaled only by Poe. He had the high moral purpose of the artist-
prophets; but his efforts after musical effects, as well as his untimely
death, prevented the full fruitage of his admirable genius. Many of the
poems that he has left us are lacking in spontaneity and artistic finish.
Alliterative effects are sometimes obtrusive. His poetic theories, as
presented in _The Science of English Verse_, often outstripped his
execution. But, after all these abatements are made, it remains true that
in a few pieces he has reached a trembling height of poetic and musical
rapture that is unsurpassed in the whole range of American poetry.
[Illustration: FATHER RYAN.]