LATER POETS OF THE SOUTH
The year 1866 saw the low-water mark, perhaps, not only of the American
novel, but of American literature generally. On May 12 of this year
_The Round Table_ of New York, in an editorial entitled "Plain Talk
with American Writers," declared that "The literary field was never so
barren, never so utterly without hope of life.... The era of genius
and vigor that seemed ready to burst on us only a few months ago has
not been fulfilled. There is a lack of boldness and power. Men do not
seem to strike out in new paths as bravely as of old." Then it issued a
challenge to the new generation of literary men: "We have very little
strong, original writing. Who will awaken us from this sleep? Who
will first show us the first signs of a genuine literary reviving?...
If ever there was a time when a magnificent field opened for young
aspirants for literary renown, that time is the present. Every door is
wide open."
We know now that the reviving was close at hand. Within five years the
flood-gates were opened, and Clemens, Harte, Hay, Burroughs, Howells,
Miller, and all the group were publishing their first work. Among
others a young Georgia school-teacher felt the thrill as he read the
_Round Table_ call, and he made haste to send to the paper a budget
of poems--"Barnacles," "Laughter in the Senate," and some others, to
be, if possible, the first fruits of this new period. A year later, in
1867, he went himself to New York to bring out a novel, _Tiger Lilies_,
a book sent forth with eagerness and infinite hope, for was not every
door wide open? It is a book to linger over: crude as it is, it was the
first real voice from the new South.
I
The little group of Southern poets that had gathered itself about Paul
Hamilton Hayne (1831-1886), the chief of whom were Margaret Junkin
Preston (1820-1897), Francis Orrery Ticknor (1822-1874), and Henry
Timrod (1829-1867)--poets who were contemporary with Bayard Taylor and
his group--belongs rather with the period before the war than with the
new national period that followed it. They were poets of beauty like
Stoddard, singing the music of Keats and Tennyson and the old Cavalier
poets--dreamers, makers of dainty conceits and pretty similes, full of
grace and often of real melody, but with little originality either of
manner or message. The war came into their lives sharply and suddenly,
a cataclysm that shook all their plans into ruins about them. It swept
away their property, their homes, their libraries, even their health.
For a time during the conflict they turned their poetry into martial
channels: invectives on the invading "Huns," rallying songs, battle
lyrics, patriotic calls. When the war was over they found themselves
powerless to adjust themselves. Hayne before the war was a graceful
sonneteer, a worshiper of classic beauty, a writer of odes, not to the
nightingale but to the mocking bird:
A golden pallor of voluptuous light
Filled the warm southern night:
The moon, clear orbed, above the sylvan scene
Moved like a stately queen,
So rife with conscious beauty all the while,
What could she do but smile
At her own perfect loveliness below,
Glassed in the tranquil flow
Of crystal fountains and unruffled streams?
Even his war poems are gentle and softly poetic. After the war he
lapsed into lyrics of retrospect and contemplation with a minor note
always of gentle resignation. He lived to write elegies on Timrod and
Lanier and to make himself the threnodist of the old South:
Forgotten! Tho' a thousand years should pass,
Methinks our air will throb with memory's thrills,
A common grief weigh down the faltering grass,
A pathos shroud the hills;
Waves roll lamenting; autumn sunsets yearn
For the old time's return.
A more sensitively imaginative poet was Timrod, yet even he was not
strong enough to lead his time and become more than a minor singer. He
was of the old South and would have been wholly out of place in the new
even had he lived. More fire and Hebraic rage there were in him than in
Hayne, indeed than in any other American poet save Whittier. Once or
twice when his life was shaken to the center by the brutalities of war
he burst into cries that still quiver with passion:
Oh! standing on this desecrated mold,
Methinks that I behold,
Lifting her bloody daisies up to God,
Spring kneeling on the sod,
And calling with the voice of all her rills,
Upon the ancient hills
To fall and crush the tyrants and the slaves
That turn her meads to graves.
And again at the climax of "The Cotton Boll":
Oh, help us, Lord! to roll the crimson flood
Back on its course, and, while our banners wing
Northward, strike with us! till the Goth shall cling
To his own blasted altar-stones, and crave
Mercy; and we shall grant it, and dictate
The lenient future of his fate
There, where some rotting ships and crumbling quays
Shall one day mark the port which ruled the Western seas.
And what other poet save Whittier could after victory burst into
Hebraic ecstasy of joy like this?
Our foes are fallen! Flash, ye wires!
The mighty tidings far and nigh!
Ye cities! write them on the sky
In purple and in emerald fires!
They came with many a haughty boast;
Their threats were heard on every breeze;
They darkened half the neighboring seas;
And swooped like vultures on the coast.
False recreants in all knightly strife,
Their way was wet with woman's tears;
Behind them flamed the toil of years,
And bloodshed stained the sheaves of life.
They fought as tyrants fight, or slaves;
God gave the dastards to our hands;
Their bones are bleaching on the sands,
Or moldering slow in shallow graves.
But it was like pouring molten bullet lead from Satsuma vase. The
fragile, beautiful life that should have known nothing harsher than the
music of poets and the laughter of children and lovers, broke under the
strain of war and poverty and neglect, and his life went out miserably
at thirty-eight.
II
Sidney Lanier's life was as brief as Timrod's and as full of harshness
and poverty, but the end of the war found him young enough to have
resiliency and the ability to adapt himself to the new regime of which
willy-nilly he found himself a part. He was thirteen years younger
than Timrod and twelve years younger than Hayne. His temperament was
different: he was broader in his sympathies--no man ever threw himself
more completely into the cause of the Confederacy, yet a decade after
the war we find him with a nation-wide vision of the new era; he was
more democratic of soul than Hayne or Timrod--he could worship beauty
as passionately as they and he could also write ballads of the Pike
County order; he suffered just as acutely from the war as did Timrod,
yet one may search long through his poems or his letters for a single
despondent note. He was buoyant and impetuous: his winning of literary
recognition in the face of physical disabilities seemingly insuperable
places him beside Parkman.
In point of time Lanier was the first of what may be called the Georgia
school of writers. It is notable that the State most harshly dealt with
by the war was the first to arise from its ruins, the first to receive
the vision of a new South, and the first to catch the new national
spirit. Macon, Lanier's birthplace, had about it all the best elements
of the Old South. It was the seat of an influential college for women,
it possessed a cultured society, and it had an art atmosphere--music,
poetry, literary conversation--unusual in that period outside of New
England and some of the larger cities. Lanier's home was in every way
ideal: his father, a lawyer of the old Southern type, was "a man of
considerable literary acquirements and exquisite taste," and, moreover,
like most Southerners of his class, he had a library stocked with
the older classics, a treasure-house of which his son, bookish from
his earliest childhood, made the fullest use. "Sir Walter Scott, the
romances of Froissart, the adventures of Gil Bias," all the older
poets--he read them until he seemed to his boyish companions as one
who lived apart in a different world from theirs.
His formal schooling was meager, yet at fifteen he was able to enter
the sophomore class of Oglethorpe University, a small denominational
college at Midway, Georgia, and in 1860 he was ready for graduation
with the highest honors of his class. Compared with the larger Northern
institutions, the college was pitifully primitive; Lanier in later
years could even call it "farcical," nevertheless it is doubtful if
any university could have done more for the young poet. It brought him
in contact with a man, James Woodrow of the department of science, a
man who was to become later the president of the University of South
Carolina and the author of the famous book, _An Examination of Certain
Recent Assaults on Physical Science_ (1873).
"Such a man," says his biographer, "coming into the life of
Lanier at a formative period, influenced him profoundly. He set
his mind going in the direction which he afterwards followed
with great zest, the value of science in modern life and its
relation to poetry and religion. He also revealed to him the
meaning of genuine scholarship."[124]
This influence it may have been which made Lanier in later years so
tolerant and so broad of view. The attraction between pupil and teacher
seems to have been mutual. Through Woodrow it was that Lanier received
his appointment as tutor in the college, a position which he held
during the year that followed.
It was a year of close study and of wide reading. Throughout his
undergraduate period he had read enormously: often in unusual books:
Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Jeremy Taylor, Keats's _Endymion_,
Chatterton, Christopher North, Tennyson, whose _Maud_ he learned by
heart, Carlyle, and a long list of others. "Without a doubt it was
Carlyle who first enkindled in Lanier a love of German literature and a
desire to know more of that language." He studied with eagerness. His
dream now was to enter a German university and do scholarly work as
Basil Gildersleeve had just done, and Thomas R. Price, two other young
men of the new South, but suddenly as he dreamed all his life plans
fell in ruins about him. The crash of war resounded in his ears. All in
a moment he found himself in an atmosphere of fierce excitement. The
college became an armed camp; Macon became a military center. Before
he had fairly realized it the young tutor, just turned twenty, had
enlisted in the first company to leave the State, and was marching away
to the front.
His career as a soldier need not detain us. It was varied and it was
four years long and it ended dramatically on the stormy night of
November 2, 1864, when the Federal cruiser _Santiago-de-Cuba_ picked
up the blockade runner _Lucy_ off Wilmington, North Carolina, and sent
her crew, among them signal officer Lanier, to Point Lookout prison. A
fellow prisoner and a close friend during the hard days that followed
was another Southern poet, John Bannister Tabb (1845-1909), whose brief
lyrics as we know them to-day possess beauty and finish and often
distinction.
Lanier was released in March, 1865, and after incredible hardships
succeeded in reaching his home in Macon more dead than alive to find
his mother dying of consumption. The poet's tendency to the disease
was congenital; the prison hardships and exposure had broken down his
physical vigor; and two years later while teaching a small country
school in Prattville, Alabama, as he was forced to do by the poverty
of the South and his own lack of money or profession, hemorrhages from
the lungs began, and the rest of his life, like Stevenson's under the
same conditions, was a fight with tuberculosis, a perpetual changing
from place to place that he might find some climate that would afford
relief. With unparalleled heroism he fought off the disease for fifteen
years, and under physical weakness that would have sent the average
man to his bed and his grave he made himself recognized as the leading
poetic voice of the new South, and one of the few poetic voices of his
era.
His life divides itself into three periods: the first one his time of
dreaming, as he himself styled it--his boyhood, ending with the call to
arms in 1861; the second his period of storm and stress, his period of
struggle and uncertainty and final adjustment, ending in 1873 with his
determination to devote his life to music and poetry; and finally the
seven or eight years in which eagerly and unremittingly, with failing
health and long periods of total incapacity, he wrote all those books
and poems for which he is now known.
III
Lanier's work more than that of any other writer of his time
illustrates the difference between the mid-century literature and that
of the later national period. He is distinctively a transition figure:
he heard both voices and he obeyed both. Until after the war he was
what Hayne and Timrod had been, and Taylor and Stoddard--a disciple
of Keats, a poet of merely sensuous beauty. But for the war he would
have been a Longfellow bringing from Germany _Hyperions_ and _Voices
of the Night_. The four vital years in the camps, on the blockade
runner, in the military prison, with their close contact with life
in its elemental conditions, was a university course far different
from any that he had dreamed of in his college days. It was this that
differentiates him from Hayne and Timrod and that brings him into our
period.
_Tiger Lilies_, his first published book (1867), is a document not only
in the life of Lanier but also in the transition period of the sixties.
It is a crude first novel full of a strange mixture of weakness and
strength. It has been likened to Longfellow's _Hyperion_, but the
likeness extends no further than this: _Tiger Lilies_ is the novel
transitional to the seventies as _Hyperion_ was transitional to the
romantic thirties and forties. In parts it belongs completely to the
older period. It opens with this outburst, not by Paul Fleming, but by
Paul Ruebetsahl:
"Himmel! Cospetto! Cielo! May our nests be built on the
strongest and leafiest bough of the great tree Ygdrasil! May
they be lined with love, soft and warm, and may the storms be
kind to them: Amen and Amen!" said Paul Ruebetsahl.
The first part is florid in the extreme and artificial, full of
literary affectations and conceits:
On the last day of September, 1860, huntsman Dawn leapt out of
the East, quickly ran to earth that old fox, Night, and sat
down on the top of Smoky Mountain to draw breath, etc.
Its discussions of poetry, of music, of the meaning of art and of life
generally are all in the dream-world of German romance, and its chaotic
plot and its impossible characters and happenings are in full keeping.
But with part two the book comes suddenly to life. The hero enters the
war and all at once there is realism, passages like this as graphic
even as Whitman:
The wounded increase. Here is a musket in the road: there is
the languid hand that dropped it, pressing its fingers over a
blue edged wound in the breast. Weary pressure, and vain--the
blood flows steadily.
More muskets, cartridge-boxes, belts, greasy haversacks, strew
the ground.
Here come the stretcher-bearers. They leave a dripping line of
blood. "Walk easy as you kin, boys," comes from the blanket
which the men are carrying by the corners. Easy walking is
desirable when each step of your four carriers spurts out the
blood afresh or grates the rough edges of a shot bone in your
leg.
The sound of a thousand voices, eager, hoarse, fierce, all
speaking together yet differently, comes through the leaves
of the undergrowth. A strange multitudinous noise accompanies
it--a noise like the tremendous sibilation of a mile-long wave
just before it breaks. It is the shuffling of two thousand feet
as they march over dead leaves.
The novel is laid in the Tennessee Mountains in the same region that
was to figure a decade later in the stories of Charles Egbert Craddock.
The Great Smoky Mountains and Chilhowee Mountain--familiar names
now--form the background, but the author puts no individuality into the
landscape. It might be Germany. His mountaineers, however, are alive
and they are sharply characterized. Gorm Smallin and his brother Cain
are among the earliest figures in that vast gallery of realistically
portrayed local types that soon was to figure so prominently in
American literature. The chapter that records the desertion of Gorm and
his arraignment by his brother Cain is worthy of standing with the best
work of Charles Egbert Craddock or Octave Thanet. The prison scenes,
drawn from the author's own first-hand experience, are documents in the
history of the war. On every line is the stamp of reality. Here is a
bivouac scene:
Cain Smallin sat, stiff backed upon the ground, sternly
regarding his packed circle of biscuits in the skillet.
"How do they come on, Cain? Most done?"...
"Bully! Brownin' a little some of 'em. 'Bout ten minutes yit."
At that moment a shell that has buried itself in the ground explodes
in the midst of the group, literally burying the party and scattering
havoc. Cain Smallin, unhurt, digs himself from the ruins and scrapes
the dirt from his face.
"Boys," said he, in a broken voice of indignant but mournful
inquiry, "have any of ye seed the skillet?"
In the words of its preface, the book was a cry, "a faint cry, sent
from a region where there are few artists, to happier lands who own
many; calling on these last for more sunshine and less night in their
art.... There are those even here in the South who still love beautiful
things with sincere passion."
But necessity was upon the young dreamer. He was without a profession,
and he had married a wife. There was no refuge but his father's
profession, which always had been the last as well as the first resort
of young Southerners. His father's law firm was glad to employ him,
though it could offer but meager compensation. No more novels, no more
dreams of the scholar's life, of Heidelberg, and poetry. Until 1873
he was busy, like Cable during the same period, with his conveyances
and his bills of sale. The ambitious plan of a long poem of medieval
France, "The Jacquerie," he kept in his desk, a beautiful dream that
often he returned to. He wrote exquisite little songs for it:
May the maiden,
Violet-laden
Out of the violet sea,
Comes and hovers
Over lovers,
Over thee, Marie, and me,
Over me and thee.
His poetic experiments of this period one may find at the back of the
definitive edition of his work. With Timrod and Hayne he was still
dreamy and imaginative, more prone to look at the beautiful than at
the harsher realities of humanity, yet even as he was dreaming over
his "Jacquerie" he was not oblivious to the problems of his own time.
He wrote dialect poems: "Jones's Private Argument," "Thar's More in
the Man than Thar Is in the Land," "Nine from Eight," and the like,
and published them in Southern papers. They deal with the Georgia
"Crackers" and with the social and financial conditions of the times,
and they were written in 1868, two years before the Pike County
balladry. In 1875 with his brother Clifford he published in _Scribner's
Monthly_ "The Power of Prayer; or, the First Steamboat up the Alabama,"
a negro dialect poem adapted undoubtedly from a similar episode
recounted in Mark Twain's _The Gilded Age_, yet original in tone and
realistically true. Had it been unsigned we should attribute it without
hesitation to Irwin Russell, who by many is believed to have been the
first to discover the literary possibilities of the negro, at least in
the field of poetic balladry. How like Russell is a stanza like this:
It 'pear to me dis mornin' I kin smell de fust o' June.
I 'clar', I b'lieve dat mockin'-bird could play de fiddle soon!
Dem yonder town-bells sounds like dey was ringin' in de moon.
But Russell's first poem, "Uncle Cap Interviewed," appeared in
_Scribner's_ almost a year later. The Lanier brothers contributed to
the magazine at least one more dialect poem, "Uncle Jim's Baptist
Revival Hymn," a product as realistically true to the negro as anything
written later by Harris or Page:
Sin's rooster's crowed, Ole Mahster's riz,
De sleepin'-time is pas';
Wake up dem lazy Baptissis,
_Chorus._ _Dey's mightily in de grass, grass,
Dey's mightily in de grass._
De Meth'dis team's done hitched; O fool,
De day's a-breakin' fas';
Gear up dat lean old Baptis' mule,
_Dey's mightily in de grass, grass,
Dey's mightily in de grass._ Etc.
Lanier was a pioneer in a rich field.
IV
The turning point came in 1873. The poet's physical condition had
become so alarming that he had been sent to spend the winter at San
Antonio, Texas. He found what least he was looking for. The German
Maennerchor of the city, an unusual circle of musicians, discovered him
and asked him to play to them the flute, an instrument that had been
his companion since boyhood. "To my utter astonishment," he wrote his
wife, "I was master of the instrument. Is not this most strange? Thou
knowest I had never learned it; and thou rememberest what a poor muddle
I made at Marietta in playing difficult passages; and I certainly have
not practised; and yet there I commanded and the blessed notes obeyed
me, and when I had finished, amid a storm of applause, Herr Thielepape
arose and ran to me and grasped my hand, and declared that he hat never
heert de flude accompany itself pefore."[125]
Judging from contemporary testimony, we are compelled to rate Lanier
as a musical genius. Though he never had had formal training in the
art, from his childhood music had been with him a consuming passion.
He had taken his flute to the war, he had smuggled it into the prison,
and he had moved all his life amid a chorus of exclamations over the
magic beauty of his improvisations. The masters were praising him now:
he would be a master himself. He would toil no longer at the task he
despised; he would live now for art. In November, 1873, he wrote to his
father:
How can I settle myself down to be a third-rate struggling
lawyer for the balance of my little life, as long as there is
a certainty almost absolute that I can do something so much
better? Several persons, from whose judgment in such matters
there can be no appeal, have told me, for instance, that I am
the greatest flute-player in the world; and several others,
of equally authoritative judgment, have given me an almost
equal encouragement to work with my pen. My dear father, think
how, for twenty years, through poverty, through pain, through
weariness, through sickness, through the uncongenial atmosphere
of a farcical college and of a bare army and then of an
exacting business life, through all the discouragement of being
wholly unacquainted with literary people and literary ways--I
say, think how, in spite of all these depressing circumstances,
and of a thousand more which I could enumerate, these two
figures of music and poetry have steadily kept in my heart so
that I could not banish them. Does it not seem to you as to
me, that I begin to have the right to enroll myself among the
devotees of these two sublime arts, after having followed them
so long and so humbly, and through so much bitterness?[126]
He gave himself first to music. So perfect was his mastery of his
instrument that he secured without difficulty the position of first
flute in Hamerik's Peabody Orchestra of Baltimore, and he played at
times even with Thomas's Orchestra of New York. It was the opinion of
Hamerik, himself a rare artist, that Lanier was a musician of highest
distinction:
His human nature was like an enchanted instrument, a magic
flute, or the lyre of Apollo, needing but a breath or a touch
to send its beauty out into the world.... In his hands the
flute 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--His playing appealed alike
to the musically learned and to the unlearned--for he would
magnetize the listener; but the artist felt in his performance
the superiority of the momentary inspiration to all the rules
and shifts of mere technical scholarship. His art was not only
the art of art, but an art above art. I will never forget the
impression he made on me when he played the flute concerta of
Emil Hartman at a Peabody symphony concert, in 1878--his tall,
handsome, manly presence, his flute breathing noble sorrows,
noble joys, the orchestra softly responding. The audience was
spellbound. Such distinction, such refinement! He stood the
master, the genius.[127]
His first recognition as a poet came in 1875 with the publication of
"Corn" in _Lippincott's Magazine_. The poem caught the attention of
Taylor and brought to the poet the commission to furnish the words
for the Cantata to be sung at the Centennial Exposition. After that
commission Lanier was a national figure.
During the scant six years that followed, the years of his literary
life in which he wrote all that is distinctive in his poetry, he lived
in a whirlwind of activity, of study in the large libraries to which
he now had access, of music, of literary hack-work, or he lay totally
incapacitated by sickness that threatened always the speedy termination
of all. Poetry he could write only in moments stolen from more
imperative things. He compiled a guide book to Florida, he prepared
courses of lectures on Shakespeare for clubs of women, he delivered
two scholarly courses of lectures at Johns Hopkins University, and he
published four juveniles that adapted for boys the old romances of
chivalry. He wrote lyrics and songs, but his future as a poet must rest
on five poems: "Corn," the first significant poem from the new South;
"The Symphony," a latter-day ode to St. Cecilia; "The Psalm of the
West," which he intended should do for the centennial year what Taylor
had failed so lamentably to do in his Fourth of July ode; "The Marshes
of Glynn," a symphony without musical score; and, finally on his death
bed, held in life only by his imperious will, "Sunrise," his most
joyous and most inspired improvisation of all.
V
For Lanier was essentially an improvisatore. He left behind him no
really finished work: he is a poet of magnificent fragments. He was
too excited, too impetuous, to finish anything. Poetry was a thing of
rhapsodic outbursts, of tiptoe glimpses: his eager jottings for poems
made on the backs of envelopes, scraps of paper, anything that was
at hand, fill a volume. He may be likened to a child in a meadow of
daisies: he filled his hands, his arms, full of the marvelous things,
then threw them aside to gather more and ever more. There was no
time to arrange them, no time even to look at them twice. Ideas came
in flocks; he lived in a tumult of emotion. His letters quiver with
excitement as do those of no other American poet. "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." "I cannot tell you
with what eagerness I devoured _Felix Holt_." "My heart was all a-cry."
"The fury of creation is on me to-day." "Lying in the music-waters,
I floated and flowed, my soul utterly bent and prostrate." "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 me in quick gusts like the breath of passion and sailed me into a
sea of vast dreams." One may quote interminably.
Hamerik's characterization of his flute-playing may be taken as the key
to all his work: "The artist felt in his performance the superiority
of the _momentary inspiration_ to all the rules and shifts of mere
technical scholarship." It explains the unevenness of his work and its
lack of finish. He had no patience to return to a poem and labor upon
it. Other and more rapturous melodies were calling to him. It explains
his lack of constructive power: inspiration is a thing of rapturous
glimpses, not of long, patient coordinating effort. His poems are
chaotic in structure even to the point often of obscurity. "Corn," for
example, was intended to be a poem with a message, and that message
doubtless the superiority of corn over cotton as a crop for the new
South. But half the poem has only the vaguest connection with the
subject. One-third of it outlines the duties and privileges of the poet
soul. The message is not brought home: one has to labor to find it.
There is a succession of beautiful images expressed often with rare
melody and distinction, but inconsecutive even to vagueness.
His prose has the same characteristics. The lectures on the English
novel seem like the first draft of work rather than like a finished
product. He changes his plan as he proceeds. It was to be a study of
the novel as a literary form, but as he progresses he changes it into
a study of the development of personality in literature, and finally
ends it by devoting half his total space to a rhapsody upon George
Eliot. _The Science of English Verse_ has the same faults. He rides a
pet theory through chapters and dismisses really basic principles with
a paragraph. It is a book of magnificent, even at times of inspired
sections, but as a complete treatise it has no great value. The same
may be said of all his prose work: he had flashes of inspiration but
no consecutive message. The cause for it was partly pathological,
partly temperamental. He was first of all a musician, a genius, an
improvisatore.
That his conception of the poet's office was a broader and saner and
more modern one than that of most of his contemporaries was undoubtedly
true. In "Corn" he addresses thus the stalk that stands high above its
fellows:
Still shalt thou type the poet-soul sublime
That leads the vanward of his timid time
And sings up cowards with commanding rime--
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.
The poet then is not to be a mere dreamer of beauty, a dweller in the
clouds apart from the men of his time. He is to stand squarely on the
earth:
Thou lift'st more stature than a mortal man's,
Yet ever piercest downward in the mold
And keepest hold
Upon the reverend and steadfast earth
That gave thee birth.
But despite his conception of the poet's office, Lanier himself is not
often a leader and a prophet. He had ceased to be Georgia-minded and
he had felt the national thrill that was making a new America, but it
was not his to be the strong voice of the new era. "The Psalm of the
West," which casts into poetic form certain vital episodes of American
history, has no message. One searches it in vain for any interpretation
of the soul of the great republic, or any forecasting of the future
years, or any passages expressing what America is to stand for among
the nations. It is a fragment, the introduction to what should have
been the poem.
In "The Symphony" more than elsewhere, perhaps, he is the poet of his
period. The poem is a cry against the materialism that Lanier felt was
crushing the higher things out of American life:
"O Trade! O, Trade! Would thou wert dead!
The Time needs heart--'t is tired of head:
We're all for love," the violins said.
Each instrument in the orchestra joins in the argument. "A velvet flute
note" followed the passion of the violins, the reeds whispered, "the
bold straightforward horn" spoke out,
And then the hautboy played and smiled
And sang like any large-eyed child.
The solution of the problem was the same that Shelley had brought. Love
alone could master the evils of the time:
Life! Life! thou sea-fugue, writ from east to west,
Love, love alone can pore
On thy dissolving score
Of harsh half-phrasings,
Blotted ere writ,
And double erasings
Of chords most fit.
And love was to come through music:
Music is love in search of a word.
The poem is indeed a symphony. One feels that the poet is composing
rather than writing, that he is thinking in terms of orchestration,
balancing parts and instruments, and working out tone values. The same
is true of "The Marshes of Glynn" and "Sunrise": they are symphonies.
One must appreciate fully this musical basis of Lanier's art if one is
to understand him. He thought in musical forms. The best illustration,
perhaps, may be found in his Centennial Cantata. To the average man
the poem meant little. One must read it and reread it and study it if
one is to get any consecutive thought from it. But read after Lanier's
explanation, it becomes not only clear but illuminating:
The principal matter over which the United States can
legitimately exult is _its present existence as a Republic_,
in spite of so much opposition from Nature and from man. I
therefore made the refrain of the song--about which all its
train of thought moves--concern itself wholly with the _Fact of
existence_: the waves cry "_It shall not be_"; the powers of
nature cry "It shall not _be_"; the wars, etc., utter the same
cry. This Refrain is the key to the whole poem.
A knowledge of the inability of music to represent any shades
of meaning save those which are very intense, and very
highly and sharply contrasted, led me to divide the poem
into the eight paragraphs or movements which it presents,
and make these vividly opposed to each other in sentiment.
Thus the first movement is reflection, measured and sober:
this suddenly changes into the _agitato_ of the second: this
agitato, culminating in the unison shout "_No! It shall not
be_," yields in the third movement to the _pianissimo_ and
meager effect of the skeleton voices from Jamestown, etc.: this
_pianissimo_ in the fourth movement is turned into a climax of
the wars of armies and of faiths, again ending in the shout,
"No!" etc.: the fifth movement opposes this with a _whispered_
chorus--Huguenots whispering _Yea_, etc.: the sixth opposes
again with loud exultation, "Now praise," etc.: the seventh
opposes this with the single voice singing the Angels' song;
and the last concludes the series of contrasts with a broad
full chorus of measured and firm sentiment.
The metrical forms were selected purely with reference to their
descriptive nature: the four trochaic feet of the opening
strophe measure off reflection, the next (Mayflower) strophe
swings and yaws like a ship, the next I made outre and bizarre
and bony simply by the device of interposing the line of two
and a half trochees amongst the four trochee lines: the swift
action of the Huguenot strophe of course required dactyls: and
having thus kept the first part of the poem (which describes
the time _before_ we were a real nation) in meters which are
as it were exotic to our tongue, I now fall into the iambic
meter--which is the genius of English words--as soon as the
Nation becomes secure and firm.
My business as member of the orchestra for three years having
caused me to sit immediately in front of the bassoons, I had
often been struck with the possibility of producing the ghostly
effects of that part of the bassoon register so well known to
students of Berlioz and Meyerbeer--by the use of the syllable
_ee_ sung by a chorus. With this view I filled the ghostly
Jamestown stanza with _ee_'s and would have put in more if I
could have found them appropriate to the sense.[128]
No one can read this without thinking of Poe's "Philosophy of
Composition." It explains much of Lanier's work.
VI
Had Lanier lived a decade longer, had he had time and strength to
devote himself completely to his poetry, had his impetuous soul
had time to gain patience and poise, and divest itself of florid
extravagance and vague dithyramb, he might have gained a much higher
place as a poet. He was gaining in power: his last poem is his
greatest. He was laying plans that would, we feel sure, have worked
themselves out to high poetic achievement. For at least four books
of poetry he had already selected titles: _Hymns of the Mountains_,
_Hymns of the Marshes_, _Songs of Aldheim_, and _Poems on Agriculture_.
What they were to be we can judge only from "The Marshes of Glynn" and
"Sunrise."
In these two poems we have work that is timeless and essentially
placeless. There is a breadth and sweep about it that one finds only in
the greater poets:
And invisible wings, fast fleeting, fast fleeting,
Are beating
The dark overhead as my heart beats--and steady and free
Is the ebb-tide flowing from marsh to sea.
Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea?
Somehow my soul seems suddenly free
From the weighing of fate and the sad discussions of sin,
By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of
Glynn.
As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God:
I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies
In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the
skies:
By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod
I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God:
Oh, like the greatness of God is the greatness within
The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.
The jottings that he made in his notebooks and the fragments of poems
that he noted down as the inspiration came to him remind us often of
Whitman. They have sweep and range:
I fled in tears from the men's ungodly quarrel about God: I
fled in tears to the woods, and laid me down on the earth; then
somewhat like the beating of many hearts came up to me out of
the ground, and I looked and my cheek lay close by a violet;
then my heart took courage and I said:
"I know that thou art the word of God, dear violet.
And, oh, the ladder is not long that to my heaven leads!
Measure the space a violet stands above the ground,
'Tis no farther climbing that my soul and angels have to do than
that!"
I went to the church to find my Lord.
They said He is here. He lives here.
But I could not see him
For the creed-tables and bonnet flowers.
Lanier is essentially a poet of unfulfilled promise. He seems always
about to do greater things than in reality he ever does. His lyrics
like "Evening Song," and "The Trees and the Master" and "The Song of
the Chattahoochee," have strains in them almost Shelley-like, but
there is always the fatal defect somewhere. Nothing is perfect. It
seems strange sometimes that one who could at moments go so far could
not go the whole way and remain long. He must hold his place among
the American poets by virtue of a few fragments. A few times was he
rapt into the pure ether of poetry, but he was allowed to catch only
fleeting glimpses.
VII
The period may be said to have produced in the South two inspired
poets, Lanier and Irwin Russell, and in many ways the two were alike.
Both were frail of body and sensitive of temperament, both were
passionately given to music and found their poetic field by means of
it, both were educated men, eager students of the older literatures,
both discovered the negro as poetic material, and both died when
their work was just beginning, Russell, like Keats, at the boyish
age of twenty-six. But Russell added what Lanier had no trace of, a
waywardness of character and a genius for goodfellowship that wrecked
him even earlier than it did Burns.
The life of Russell is associated with four cities: Port Gibson,
Mississippi, where he was born in 1853; St. Louis, where he spent the
earlier years of his life and where later he completed the course at
the Jesuit University; Port Gibson again, where he studied law and was
admitted to the bar; New York City, of which he was a resident from
January until July, 1879; and New Orleans, where he died in December
of the same year. His life was fitful and restless. He did little with
his profession, turning from it to learn the printer's trade, and then
after a few listless months, drifting into other things. He had dreams
of California and wandered on foot in its direction as far as Texas; he
attempted to run away to sea, and he spent much time on the river boats
making jovial friends of the captains and the pilots. His banjo assured
him of a welcome wherever he might go.
The writing of poetry was never to him a serious occupation. He
composed with abandon when the mood was on him, he seldom revised, and
he cared little for the finished product save as it might please his
friends. One finds many evidences in his work that he learned his art
from Burns, whom he considered the greatest poet the world had ever
produced. He had saturated himself too with the English balladists and
the genuine old poets of the early periods. The poetry of his own time
angered him. In "The Hysteriad" (_Scribner's_, 16:759) he satirizes
with bitterness the contemporary product. "A poem of the period," he
said, "or a periodical poem, is a thing that is altogether emotional,
and is not intended to convey any idea in particular." To him poetry
meant something not esoteric and idealized, but something that lay very
close to the life of every day, something redolent of humanity, like
Burns's songs. He maintained that his own inspiration had come not at
all from other poets, but from actual contact with the material that he
made use of. His own words concerning the composition of his first poem
have a peculiar value. They are a part of the history of the period:
You know I am something of a banjoist. Well, one evening I was
sitting in our back yard in old Mississippi "twanging" on the
banjo, when I heard the missis--our colored domestic, an old
darkey of the Aunt Dinah pattern--singing one of the outlandish
camp-meeting hymns of which the race is so fond. She was an
extremely "'ligious" character and, although seized with the
impulse to do so, I hesitated to take up the tune and finish
it. I did so, however, in the dialect I have adopted, and
which I then thought and still think is in strict conformity
to their use of it, I proceeded, as one inspired, to compose
verse after verse of the most absurd, extravagant, and, to
her, irreverent rime ever before invented, all the while
accompanying it on the banjo and imitating the fashion of the
plantation negro.... I was then about sixteen and as I had soon
after a like inclination to versify, was myself pleased with
the performance, and it was accepted by a publisher, I have
continued to work the vein indefinitely.[129]
To what extent the poet was indebted to the Pike balladry that had
preceded his first work, at least so far as wide publication in
Northern magazines was concerned, is not easily determined. It seems
extremely probable that he had seen it. Lanier, as has been shown, had
published negro dialect poetry in _Scribner's_ nearly a year before
Russell, but whoever was pioneer, the author of "Christmas-night
in the Quarters" was the one who first caught the attention of the
reading public and exerted the greatest influence upon the period. He
undoubtedly was the leading pioneer. Page and Gordon dedicated their
_Befo' de War_ "To Irwin Russell, who awoke the first echo," and Joel
Chandler Harris, manifestly an authority, declared that "Irwin Russell
was among the first--if not the very first--of Southern writers to
appreciate the literary possibilities of the negro character, and of
the unique relations existing between the two races before the war, and
was among the first to develop them."[130]
In the last year of his life Russell, encouraged by the reception of
his magazine poems, went to New York to make literature his profession.
Bunner, the editor of _Puck_, and Gilder and Robert Underwood Johnson
of the _Century_ staff, and others, recognized his ability, and gave
him every encouragement possible. One of the most prominent of the
poets of the older school, it may be remarked, also became interested
in him and urged him to drop the ephemeral type of verse to which he
had addicted himself and devote his talents to really serious work.
For a brief period he obeyed, with what success one may judge from the
poems at the end of his volume.
Success came too late. His friends were powerless to control his
wayward genius. His frail constitution gave way. From a bed of fever he
arose still half delirious, staggered to the docks, engaged to work his
way on a New Orleans boat as a coal-heaver, and in New Orleans secured
a position on the _Times_. But the end was near. To a member of the
_Times_ staff he opened his heart in words that might have come from
Poe:
It has been the romance of a weak young man threaded in with
the pure love of a mother, a beautiful girl who hoped to be my
wife, and friends who believed in my future. I have watched
them lose heart, lose faith, and again and again I have been so
stung and startled that I have resolved to save myself in spite
of myself.... I never shall.[131]
He died a few weeks later.
VIII
The value of Russell's work depends not so much upon the poetic
quality of it as upon the faithfulness and the skill with which he has
portrayed the negro. Within this narrow field he has had no superior.
Harris has summed it up thus:
The most wonderful thing about the dialect poetry of Irwin
Russell is his accurate conception of the negro character.
The dialect is not always the best--it is often carelessly
written--but the negro is there, the old-fashioned,
unadulterated negro, who is still dear to the Southern heart.
There is no straining after effect--indeed the poems produce
their result by indirection; but I do not know where could be
found to-day a happier or a more perfect representation of
negro character.[132]
Russell is less romantic in his picture of the negro than are Page and
Harris. Once in a while he throws the mellow light over the old days,
as in "Mahsr John," where he represents the freed slave dwelling in
imagination upon the glories that he has once known, but he holds the
strain not long:
I only has to shet my eyes, an' den it seems to me
I sees him right afore me now, jes' like he use' to be,
A-settin' on de gal'ry, lookin' awful big an' wise,
Wid little niggers fannin' him to keep away de flies.
He alluz wore de berry bes' ob planters' linen suits,
An' kep' a nigger busy jes' a-blackin' ob his boots;
De buckles on his galluses wuz made of solid gol',
An' diamon's!--dey wuz in his shut as thick as it would hol'.
Page would have stopped after the old negro had ended his glorification
of the old days, but Russell hastens to bring the picture to
present-day conditions:
Well, times is changed. De war it come an' sot de niggers free,
An' now ol' Mahsr John ain't hardly wuf as much as me;
He had to pay his debts, an' so his lan' is mos'ly gone--
An' I declar' I's sorry fur my pore ol' Mahsr John.
It was essentially the later negro, the negro of the poet's own day,
that is represented in the poems. He has become a farmer for himself
now and tries sly tricks when he takes his cotton to market. Detected,
he is voluble in his explanations:
Rocks in dat ar cotton! How de debbil kin dat be?
I packed dat bale mys'f--hol' on a minute, le'--me--see--
My stars! I mus' be crazy! Mahsr Johnny, dis is fine!
I's gone an' hauled my brudder's cotton in, stead ob mine!
He sends his boy to work as waiter on the river boats and as he is
departing overwhelms him with advice:
Dem niggers what runs on de ribber is mos'ly a mighty sharp set;
Dey'd fin' out some way fur to beat you, ef you bet 'em de water
wuz wet;
You's got to watch out for dem fellers; dey'd cheat off de horns
ob a cow.
I knows 'em; I follered de ribber 'fore ebber I follered a plow.
He is inordinately fond of preaching, as witness "Half-way Doin's" and
"A Sermon for the Sisters." He delights to interpret the Scriptures,
and his exegesis is often full of local color:
"Dar's gwine to be a' oberflow," said Noah, lookin' solemn--
Fur Noah tuk the _Herald_, an' he read de ribber column--
An' so he sot his hands to wuk a-cl'arin' timber-patches,
An' 'lowed he's gwine to build a boat to beat the steamah
_Natchez_.
All the characteristics of the negro are touched upon with the
certainty of perfect knowledge: his superstitions, his ignorance of
the world, his awe of legal terms, his humor, his simple trust in his
religion, his childlike attitude toward nature, his habit of addressing
sententious language to his beasts of burden as if they understood all
he said, his conceit, and his firm belief in immortality.
Russell was one of the pioneers of the new era which had as its most
marked characteristic the use of American themes and backgrounds and
absolute truth to American life. No section of the social era was too
lowly or unknown for him to take as material for his art. He could even
plan to write a negro novel with all of its characters negroes and
write the first chapters. Little, however, that he planned ever came to
completion. The thin volume of poems published after his death was but
a fragment of what he might have written under happier conditions. As
it is, he must, like Lanier, be treated as one of those brief excited
lives that are found ever at the opening of new romantic eras--Novalis,
Chatterton, Burns, Keats--poets who left behind only fragments of what
might have been, but who influenced enormously the writers that were to
be.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PAUL HAMILTON HAYNE. (1830-1886.) _Poems_, Boston, 1855; _Sonnets
and Other Poems_, 1857; _Avolio: A Legend of the Island of Cos_,
1860; _Legends and Lyrics_, Philadelphia, 1872; _The Mountain
of the Lovers, with Poems of Nature and Tradition_, 1875; _Life
of Robert Young Hayne_, 1878; _Life of Hugh Swinton Legare_,
1878; Complete edition of the Poems with a sketch by Margaret J.
Preston, 1882.
HENRY TIMROD. (1829-1867.) _Poems_, Boston, 1860; Complete
edition of the Poems with biographical introduction of 60 pages
by Paul Hamilton Hayne, 1872; Poems of Henry Timrod, 1901.
SIDNEY LANIER. (1842-1881.) _Tiger Lilies: a Novel_, 1867;
_Florida: Its Scenery, Climate, and History_, 1876; _Poems_,
1877; _The Boy's Froissart. Being Sir John Froissart's Chronicles
of Adventure, Battle, and Custom in England, France, Spain, etc.
Edited for Boys_, 1878; _The Science of English Verse_, 1880;
_The Boy's King Arthur. Being Sir Thomas Malory's History of King
Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. Edited for Boys_,
1880; _The Boy's Mabinogion. Being the Earliest Welsh Tales of
King Arthur in the Famous Red Book of Hergest. Edited for Boys_,
1881; _The Boy's Percy. Being Old Ballads of War, Adventure, and
Love, from Bishop, Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English
Poetry. Edited for Boys_, 1882; _The English Novel and the
Principles of Its Development_, 1883; _Poems of Sidney Lanier,
Edited by His Wife_, with a Memorial by William Hayes Ward, 1884;
Select Poems of Sidney Lanier, edited with an Introduction,
Notes, and Bibliography, by Morgan Callaway, 1895; _Music and
Poetry: Essays_, 1898; _Retrospects and Prospects: Descriptive
and Historical Essays_, 1899; _Letters of Sidney Lanier_.
Selections from His Correspondence 1866-1881, 1899; _Shakespeare
and His Forerunners_, 1902; _Sidney Lanier_, by Edwin Mims, 1905.
_Some Reminiscences and Early Letters of Sidney Lanier_, G. H.
Clarke, 1907; _Poem Outlines_, 1908; _Synthesis and Analysis of
the Poetry of Sidney Lanier_, C. C. Carroll, 1910.
IRWIN RUSSELL. _Poems by Irwin Russell._ With an introduction by
Joel Chandler Harris. New York. 1888.