— * Baskervill's 'Southern Writers' is the best study that has been made of the Southern literature of this period. A second volume was prepared by his pupils and friends after his death. —

One of the most significant characteristics of the Southern writers was that they all showed a certain discipline in their artistic work. They had little patience with much of the criticism that had prevailed in the South. As early as 1871 the editor of the "Southern Magazine", in a review of "Southland Writers", said: "We shall not have a literature until we have a criticism which can justify its claims to be deferred to; intelligent enough to explain why a work is good or bad, . . . courageous enough to condemn bad art and bad workmanship, no matter whose it be; to say, for instance, to more than half the writers in these volumes: 'Ladies, you may be all that is good, noble, and fair; you may be the pride of society and the lights of your homes; so far as you are Southern women our hearts are at your feet — but you have neither the genius, the learning, nor the judgment to qualify you for literature.'" In the same magazine for June, 1874, Paul Hamilton Hayne condemned severely the provincial literary criticism which had prevailed, — "indiscriminate adulations, effervescing commonplace, shallowness and poverty of thought." "No foreign ridicule," he said, "however richly deserved, nothing truly either of logic or of laughter, can stop this growing evil, until our own scholars and thinkers have the manliness and honesty to discourage instead of applauding such manifestations of artistic weakness and artistic platitudes as have hitherto been foisted upon us by persons uncalled and unchosen of any of the muses. . . . Can a people's mental dignity and aesthetical culture be vindicated by patting incompetency and ignorance and self-sufficiency on the back?"

Lanier himself wrote to Hayne, May 26, 1873, commending a criticism that Hayne had passed upon a popular Southern novel: "I have not read that production; but from all I can hear 't is a most villainous, poor, pitiful piece of work; and so far from endeavoring to serve the South by blindly plastering it with absurd praises, I think all true patriots ought to unite in redeeming the land from the imputation that such books are regarded as casting honor upon the section. God forbid we should really be brought so low as that we must perforce brag of such works; and God be merciful to that man (he is an Atlanta editor) who boasted that sixteen thousand of these books had been sold in the South! This last damning fact ought to have been concealed at the risk of life, limb, and fortune." Lanier himself saw the futility of such praise of his own work by the Southern people. Referring to the defense made of his Centennial poem by Southern newspapers, he wrote from Macon: "People here are so enthusiastic in my favor at present that they are quite prepared to accept blindly anything that comes from me. Of course I understand all this, and any success seems cheap which depends so thoroughly upon local pride as does my present position with the South." And again: "Much of this praise has come from the section in which he was born, and there is reason to suspect that it was based often on sectional pride rather than on any genuine recognition of those artistic theories of which his poem is — so far as he now knows — the first embodiment. Any triumph of this sort is cheap, because wrongly based, and to an earnest artist is intolerably painful."

Lanier's own standards of criticism did not prevent his recognition of the value of the real artists who lived in the South, nor his encouragement of every young man contemplating an artistic career. He wrote to Judge Bleckley about his son: "I am charmed at finding a Georgia young man who deliberately leaves the worn highways of the law and politics for the rocky road of Art, and I wish to do everything in my power to help and encourage him." Writing to George Cary Eggleston, December 27, 1876, he said: "I know you very well through your 'Rebel's Recollections', which I read in book form some months ago with great entertainment. Our poor South has so few of the guild, that I feel a personal interest in the works of each one." His letters and published writings bear out the truth of this statement. It has already been seen that he was intimate with Paul Hamilton Hayne, who had encouraged him to undertake the literary life at a time when all other forces were tending in another direction. Lanier criticised in detail many of Hayne's poems. In a review of his poems published in the "Southern Magazine", 1874, he paid a notable tribute to his fellow worker in the realm of letters. He does not fail to call attention to trite similes, worn collocations of sound, and commonplace sentiments; and also his diffuseness, principally originating in a lavishness and looseness of adjectives. At the same time he praises the melody of Hayne's poetry, especially of his poem "Fire Pictures", which he compares with Poe's "Bells". In his book on Florida, while giving an account of Southern cities which travelers are apt to pass through in going to and from that State, he has discriminating and sympathetic passages on Timrod, Randall, Jackson, Hayne, and others. Of Timrod he says: "Few more spontaneous or delicate songs have been sung in these later days than one or two of the briefer lyrics. It is thoroughly evident that he never had time to learn the mere craft of the poet, the technique of verse, and that broader association with other poets, and a little of the wine of success, without which no man ever does the very best he might do." In his lectures at the Peabody Institute he quoted one of Timrod's sonnets, prefacing it with the words: "And as I have just read you a sonnet from one of the earliest of the sonnet-writers, let me now clinch and confirm this last position with a sonnet from one of the latest, — one who has but recently gone to that Land where, as he wished here, indeed life and love are the same; one who, I devoutly believe, if he had lived in Sir Philip's time, might have been Sir Philip's worthy brother, both in poetic sweetness and in honorable knighthood."*

— * 'Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. i, p. 170. —

He was one of the first to recognize the genius of Joel Chandler Harris, whose Uncle Remus stories he first read in the "Atlanta Constitution". He refers in his article on the New South to Uncle Remus as a "famous colored philosopher of Atlanta, who is a fiction so founded upon fact and so like it as to have passed into true citizenship and authority, along with Bottom and Autolycus. This is all the more worth giving, since it is really negro-talk, and not that supposititious negro-minstrel talk which so often goes for the original. It is as nearly perfect as any dialect can well be; and if one had only some system of notation by which to convey the TONES of the speaking voice, in which Brer Remus and Brer Ab would say these things, nothing could be at once more fine in humor and pointed in philosophy. Negroes on the corner can be heard any day engaged in talk that at least makes one think of Shakespeare's clowns; but half the point and flavor is in the subtle tone of voice, the gesture, the glance, and these, unfortunately, cannot be read between the lines by any one who has not studied them in the living original."

In a letter to his brother, September 24, 1880, Lanier said: "Have you read Cable's book, 'The Grandissimes'? It is a work of art, and he has a fervent and rare soul. Do you know him?" In his announcement of the course on the English Novel at Johns Hopkins University, he included this novel in a list of recent American novels which he intended to discuss.

Nor was he contented with recognizing the genius of men who wrote of their own accord. His letters to "Father" Tabb were especially stimulating. He was the prime cause in inducing Richard Malcolm Johnston to offer first to the magazines, and then to the publishers, his stories of Middle Georgia. Johnston had published the "Dukesborough Tales" in the "Southern Magazine" as early as 1871, but they had made little or no impression on account of the limited circulation of that periodical. In 1877 "Mr. Neelus Peeler's Condition" was sent by Lanier to Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, then editor of "Scribner's Monthly". He had the rare pleasure of sending Mr. Gilder's letter of acceptance with enclosed check to his friend. The following letter shows how he advised Colonel Johnston as to one of the stories.

55 Lexington Street, Baltimore, Md., November 6, 1877.

My dear Col. Johnston, — Mrs. Lanier's illness on Saturday devolved a great many domestic duties upon me, and rendered it quite impossible for me to make the preparations necessary for my visit to you on Sunday. This caused me a great deal of regret; a malign fate seems to have pursued all my recent efforts in your direction.

I have attentively examined your "Dukesborough Tale". I wish very much that I could read it over aloud in your presence, so that I might call your attention to many verbal lapses which I find and which, I am sure, will hinder its way with the magazine editors. I will try to see you in a day or two, and do this. Again, ascending from merely verbal criticism to considerations of general treatment, I find that the action of the story does not move quite fast enough during the FIRST twenty-five pages, and the LAST ten, to suit the impatience of the modern magazine man.

Aside from these two points, — and they can both be easily remedied, — the story strikes me as exquisitely funny, and your reproduction of the modes of thought and of speech among the rural Georgians is really wonderful. The peculiar turns and odd angles, described by the minds of these people in the course of ratiocination (Good Heavens, what would Sammy Wiggins think of such a sentence as this!), are presented here with a delicacy of art that gives me a great deal of enjoyment. The whole picture of old-time Georgia is admirable, and I find myself regretting that its FULL merit can be appreciated only by that limited number who, from personal experience, can compare it with the original.

Purely with a view to conciliating the editor of the magazine, I strongly advise you to hasten the movement of the beginning and of the catastrophe: that is, from about p. 1 to p. 34, and from p. 57 to p. 67. The middle, i.e., from p. 34 to p. 57, should not be touched: it is good enough for me.

I would not dare to make these suggestions if I thought that you would regard them otherwise than as pure evidences of my interest in the success of the story.

Your friend, Sidney L.

But Lanier's service to the South and to Southern literature is greater than the recognition of any one writer or the encouragement given to any one of them. All of them were cheered in their work by his heroic life; not one but looked to him as a leader. His life, which in a large sense belongs to the nation, belongs in a peculiar sense to the South. He was Southern by birth, temperament, and experience. He knew the South, — he had traveled from San Antonio to Jacksonville, and from Baltimore to Mobile Bay. Its scenery was the background of his poetry, — the marsh, the mountain, the seashore, the forest, the birds and flowers of the South stirred his imagination. He knew personally many of the leaders of the Confederacy, as well as the men who made possible the New South. He was heir to all the life of the past. His chivalry, his fine grace of manners, his generosity and his enthusiasm were all Southern traits; and the work that he has left is in a peculiar sense the product of a genius influenced by that civilization. All these things render him singularly precious to Southerners of the present generation.

He had qualities of mind and ideals of life, however, which have been too rare in his native section. He was a severe critic of some phases of its life. From this standpoint his career and his personality should never lose their influence in the South. There had been men and women who had loved music; but Lanier was the first Southerner to appreciate adequately its significance in the modern world, and to feel the inspiration of the most recent composers. There had been some fine things done in literature; but he was the first to realize the transcendent dignity and worth of the poet and his work. Literature had been a pastime, a source of recreation for men; to him the study of it was a passion, and the creation of it the highest vocation of man. Compared with other writers of the New South, Lanier was a man of broader culture and of finer scholarship. He did not have the power to create character as some of the writers of fiction, but he was a far better representative of the man of letters. The key to his intellectual life may be found in the fact that he read Wordsworth and Keats rather than Scott, George Eliot rather than Thackeray, German literature as well as French. He was national rather than provincial, open-minded not prejudiced, modern and not mediaeval. His characteristics — to be still further noted in the succeeding chapter — are all in direct contrast with those of the conservative Southerner. There have been other Southerners — far more than some men have thought — who have had his spirit, and have worked with heroism towards the accomplishment of enduring results. There have been none, however, who have wrought out in their lives and expressed in their writings higher ideals. He therefore makes his appeal to every man who is to-day working for the betterment of industrial, educational, and literary conditions in the South. There will never be a time when such men will not look to him as the man of letters who, after the war, struck out along lines which meant most in the intellectual awakening of this section. He was a pioneer worker in building up what he liked to speak of as the New South: — The South whose gaze is cast No more upon the past, But whose bright eyes the skies of promise sweep, Whose feet in paths of progress swiftly leap; And whose fresh thoughts, like cheerful rivers, run Through odorous ways to meet the morning sun!



Chapter XI. Characteristics and Ideas



Perhaps the best single description of Lanier is that by his friend H. Clay Wysham: "His eye, of bluish gray, was more spiritual than dreamy — except when he was suddenly aroused, and then it assumed a hawk-like fierceness. The transparent delicacy of his skin and complexion pleased the eye, and his fine-textured hair, which was soft and almost straight and of a light-brown color, was combed behind the ear in Southern style. His long beard, which was wavy and pointed, had even at an early age begun to show signs of turning gray. His nose was aquiline, his bearing was distinguished, and his manners were stamped with a high breeding that befitted the 'Cavalier' lineage. His hands were delicate and white, by no means thin, and the fingers tapering. His gestures were not many, but swift, graceful, and expressive; the tone of his voice was low; his figure was willowy and lithe; and in stature he seemed tall, but in reality he was a little below six feet — withal there was a native knightly grace which marked his every movement."* If to this be added the words of Dr. Gilman as to the impression he produced on people, the picture may be complete: "The appearance of Lanier was striking. There was nothing eccentric or odd about him, but his words, manners, ways of speech, were distinguished. I have heard a lady say that if he took his place in a crowded horse-car, an exhilarating atmosphere seemed to be introduced by his breezy ways."**

— * 'Independent', November 18, 1897. ** 'South Atlantic Quarterly', April, 1905. —

He was mindful of the conventionalities of life. He had nothing of the Bohemian in his looks, his manners, or his temperament. Poor though he was, he was scrupulous with regard to dress. He was a hard worker, but when his health permitted, he was thoroughly mindful of duties that devolved upon him as a member of society. He wrote to Charlotte Cushman: "For I am surely going to find you, at one place or t' other, — provided heaven shall send me so much fortune in the selling of a poem or two as will make the price of a new dress coat. Alas, with what unspeakable tender care I would have brushed this present garment of mine in days gone by, if I had dreamed that the time would come when so great a thing as a visit to YOU might hang upon the little length of its nap! Behold, it is not only in man's breast that pathos lies, and the very coat lapel that covers it may be a tragedy." Professor Gildersleeve gives a characteristic incident: "I remember he came to a dinner given in his honor, fresh from a lecture at the Peabody, in a morning suit and with chalk on his fingers. Came thus, not because he was unmindful of conventionalities. He was as mindful of them as Browning, — came thus because he had to come thus. There was no time to dress. The poor chalk-fingered poet was miserable the whole evening, hardly roused himself when the talk fell on Blake, and when we took a walk together the next day he made his moan to me about it. A seraph with chalk on his fingers. Somehow, that little incident seems to me an epitome of his life, though I have mentioned it only to show how busy he was."*

— * Letter to the author. —

He was a welcome guest in many homes. "He had the most gentle, refined, sweet, lovely manners, I think I may say, of any man I ever met," says Charles Heber Clarke. A letter from the daughter of the late John Foster Kirk, former editor of "Lippincott's Magazine", gives an impression of Lanier in the homes of his friends: —

"My first sight of Lanier was when he came into the room with my father at dusk one evening (they had been walking through the Wissahickon woods and came back to tea), and his presence seemed something beautiful in the room, even more from his manner than from his appearance, gracious and fine as that was. He always seemed to me to stand for chivalry as well as poetry, and his goodness was something you felt at once and never forgot. He was at our house one day with his flute. He and my father were going to Mr. Robert P. Morton's, in Germantown, to play together. We happened to speak of the fact that my sister, then a little girl, though absolutely without ear for music, had a curious delight in listening to it. Mr. Lanier said he would like to play to her; we called her in from the yard where she was playing, and he played some of his own music, explaining to her first what he thought of when he wrote it, describing to her the brook in its course, and other things in nature. He could easily have found a more appreciative listener, but not a happier one.

"I remember his eagerness about all forms of knowledge and expression. We went with him to the Centennial, where we were full of excitement about pictures, though none of us knew much about them. I remember the pleasure Mr. Lanier had in the sense of color and splendor given him by the big Hans Makart ('Caterina Cornaro') and discussions of that and the English and Spanish pictures. Intellectually he seemed to me not so much to have arrived as to be on the way, — with a beautiful fervor and eagerness about things, as if he had never had all that he longed for in books and study and thought."*

— * Letter to the author. —

Lanier had remarkable power for making and keeping friends. This has already been seen in his relations to the Peacocks, Charlotte Cushman, and Bayard Taylor. In the large circle of friends among whom he moved in Baltimore may be seen further attestation of this point. People did not pity him, nor did they dole out charity to him. They did not reverence him merely because he was a poet, a teacher, or a musician of note; they were drawn to him by strong personal ties — he had magnetism. The little informal notes that he wrote to them, or the longer letters he wrote in absence, or the conversations that he had with them, sometimes till far into the night, are cherished as among the most sacred memories of their lives. He knew how to endure human weakness and to inspire human efforts. One of the friends who knew him best has recorded in a tender poem what Lanier meant to those who were intimate with him: — "That love of man for man, That joyed in all sweet possibilities: that faith Which hallowed love and life. . . . So he, Heaven-taught in his large-heartedness, Smiled with his spirit's eyes athwart the veil That human loves too oft keep closely drawn. . . . So hearts leaped up to breathe his freer atmosphere, And eyes smiled truer for his radiance clear, And souls grew loftier where his teachings fell, And all gave love. . . . Aye, the patience and the smile Which glossed his pain; the courtesy; The sweet quaint thoughts which gave his poems birth."*

— * Poem by Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull, read at the presentation of the Lanier bust to Johns Hopkins University. —

She speaks, too, of "his winning tenderness with souls perplexed"; "his eagerness for lofty converse"; "his oneness with all master-minds"; "his thirst for lore"; "his gratitude for that the Lord had made the earth so good!"

In the house of this same friend, Mme. Blanc (Th. Bentzon) first realized the dead poet's personality; she there caught something of the afterglow of his presence: —

"The morning that I spent with Mrs. Turnbull was almost as interesting as an interview with Sidney Lanier himself would have been, so fully does his memory live in that most aesthetic interior, where poetry and music are held in perpetual honor, and where domestic life has all the beauty of a work of art. The hero of Mrs. Turnbull's novel, 'A Catholic Man', is none other than Sidney Lanier, and that scrupulously faithful presentment of a 'universal man' was of the greatest assistance to me.

"The beautiful mansion on Park Avenue has almost the character of a temple, where nothing profane or vulgar is allowed admission. Passing through the reception rooms, I was introduced into a private parlor out of which opened a music-room, from whose threshold I recognized the man whom I had come to seek, — the poet himself, as he was represented in his latest years, by the German sculptor, Ephraim Keyser. . . . By way of contrast, Mrs. Turnbull exhibits a glorified Lanier, crowned with his ultimate immortality. He appears in a symbolic picture, ordered by this American art patroness, from the Italian painter Gatti, where are grouped all the great geniuses of the past, present, and future, — the latter emerging vaguely from the mists of the distance, and including a large number of women. This innumerable multitude of the elite of all ages encircles a mountain which is dominated by Jesus Christ; and from this figure of the Christ emanates the light which Mrs. Turnbull has caused to be shed upon the figures of the picture, with more or less brilliancy according to her own preferences. Designating a tall, draped figure who walks in the front rank of the poets, the lady said to me: 'This is Sidney Lanier;' and when I, despite my admiration for the poet of the marshes, ventured to offer a few modest suggestions, she went on to develop the thesis, that what exalts a man is less what he has done than what he has aspired to do."

. . . . .

"Mrs. Turnbull had too much tact to multiply her personal anecdotes of Sidney Lanier, but she pictured him to me as he loved to sit by the fireside, where he had always his own special place; coming, of an evening, unannounced, into the room where we then were, rising like a phantom beside her husband and herself, in the hour between daylight and dark, and pouring forth those profound, unexpected, and delightful things which seem to belong to him alone, which characterize his correspondence also, and all his literary remains."*

— * 'Revue des Deux Mondes', 1898. Translated for 'Littell's Living Age', May 14 and May 21, 1898. —

The quality of affection in Lanier reached its climax in his home life. There he was seen and known at his best. An early aspiration of his was "to show that the artist-life is not necessarily a Bohemian life, but that it may coincide with and BE the home-life." Such poems as "Baby Charley" and "Hard Times in Elfland", and the story of "Bob" reveal the playful and affectionate father, while "My Springs", "In Absence", "Laus Mariae" and many published and unpublished letters are but variations of the oft-recurring theme: — When life's all love, 't is life: aught else, 't is naught. A letter written to his wife will serve to give the spirit which prevailed in the home: —

January 1, 1875.

A thousand-fold Happy New Year to thee, and I would that thy whole year may be as full of sweetness as my heart is full of thee.

All day I dwell with my dear ones there with thee. I do so long for one hearty romp with my boys again! Kiss them most fervently for me, and say over their heads my New Year's prayer, that whether God may color their lives bright or black, they may continually grow in a large and hearty manhood, compounded of strength and love.

Let us try and teach them, dear wife, that it is only the small soul that ever cherishes bitterness; for the climate of a large and loving heart is too warm for that frigid plant. Let us lead them to love everything in the world, above the world, and under the world adequately; that is the sum and substance of a perfect life. And so God's divine rest be upon every head under the roof that covers thine this night, prayeth thy

Husband.

Sweetness of disposition, depth of emotion, and absolute purity of life are frequently regarded as feminine traits. These Lanier had, but they were fused with the qualities of a virile and healthy manhood. He attracted strong and intellectual men as well as refined and cultivated women. The bravery manifested during the Civil War and the fortitude that he displayed after the war became elemental qualities in his character. His admiration of the heroic deeds of the age of chivalry arose from a certain inherent knightliness in his own character. He had the combination of tenderness and strength to which he called attention in Sir Philip Sidney. His admiration for old English poetry was due to the "ruddiness in its cheek and the red corpuscles in its veins." There is in his later prose the "send and drive" of a vigorous soul. It was this elemental manhood that attracted him to Whitman, despite all his protests against the latter's carelessness of form and lack of grace. "Reading him," he says, "is like getting the salt sea spray into one's face."

He had some of the Southerner's resistance to anything like insult. A story is frequently told in Baltimore of the way in which Lanier resented the conductor's words to a young lady at a rehearsal of the Peabody Orchestra. "——, irritated in his undisciplined musician's nerves, vented that irritation in a rude outburst towards a timid young woman who was playing the piano, either with orchestra or voice or in solo. In an instant Lanier's tall, straight figure shot up from his seat and, taking the chair he occupied in his hand, he said: 'Mr. ——, you must retract every word you have uttered and apologize to that young lady before you beat another bar.' There was no mistake of his resoluteness and determination, and Mr. —— retracted and apologized; the orchestra went on only after the same had been done."

Another element that contributed to the admirable symmetry of Lanier's character was that of humor. One would misjudge him entirely if he took into account only the highly wrought letters on music or the great majority of his poems. From one standpoint he seems a burning flame. As a matter of fact, however, his enthusiasm for anything that was fine and the ecstatic rapture into which he passed under the spell of great music or nature or poetry, were balanced by humor that was playful and delicate and at times irresistible. His pranks as a college boy and as a soldier have already been noted. His enjoyment of the negro and of the Georgia "Cracker" may be seen in his dialect poems, "A Florida Ghost", "Uncle Jim's Baptist Revival Hymn", "Jones's Private Argument", and others. With his children his spirit of fun-making knew no bounds. The point may still further be seen by any one who reads his lectures, and especially those letters to his friends in which he constantly indulged in playful conceits and fine humor. He even laughed at his poverty, and got off many a jest in the very face of death. In this respect, as in others, he was strikingly like Robert Louis Stevenson.

Lanier's modernness of mind has already been illustrated in his attitude to music and to scholarship. Asked one time what age he preferred, he said, "the Present," and the answer was typical of his whole attitude to things. He did not rail at his age. He was a close student of current events. He spoke strongly sometimes, as did Wordsworth and Ruskin, against the materialism of the nineteenth century; he delivered his protest against it in many of his poems; and yet he never lost his faith that all material progress would eventually contribute to the moral and artistic needs of man. "It is often asserted," he said, "that ours is a materialistic age, and that romance is dead; but this is marvelously untrue, and it may be counterasserted with perfect confidence that there was never an age of the world when art was enthroned by so many hearthstones and intimate in so many common houses as now." He accepted the facts of his time, and sought to make them subservient to the healthy idealism that reigned in his soul.

Furthermore, he was an absolutely open-minded man, eager for any new world which he might enter. He had nothing of the provincialism of the parish or of the period. One of the most striking illustrations of this quality of mind is seen in comparing him with Poe, who was irritable and prejudiced. Poe shared the ante-bellum Southerner's prejudice against New England and all her writers. There is nowhere in Lanier any indication that such a spirit found lodgment in his mind. Emerson — the transcendentalist — was one of his "wise masters".

Another striking illustration of his breadth of view was his profound reverence for science. That he had this so early was due, as has been already seen, to the influence of Professor Woodrow at college. In "Tiger Lilies" he said, in commenting on Macaulay's idea of poetry declining as science grows: "How long a time intervened between Humboldt and Goethe; how long between Agassiz and Tennyson? One can scarcely tell whether Humboldt and Agassiz were not as good poets as Goethe and Tennyson were certainly good philosophers." "The astonishing effect of the stimulus which has been given to investigation into material nature by the rise of geology and the prosperity of chemistry" is seen in the literary development of the day. "To-day's science bears not only fruit, but flowers also! Poems, as well as steam engines, crown its growth in these times." The passage closes with these significant words: "Poetry will never fail, nor science, nor the poetry of science." This view remained with him till the end of his life. He hailed the scientific progress of the nineteenth century as one of its greatest achievements, and constantly related it to the rise of landscape painting, modern nature poetry, modern music, and the English novel. His attitude thereto is made all the more notable by the fact that throughout the country, and especially in the South, there prevailed the utmost distrust of scientific investigations and hypotheses. During the seventies the criticism of the invitation extended to Huxley to deliver the principal address at the opening of Johns Hopkins University, and the controversy arising out of President White's enunciation of the principles that would dominate the newly created Cornell University, all tended to make the controversy between science and religion especially acute. American poets, notably Poe and Lowell, had expressed their distrust of modern scientific methods and conclusions. But Lanier saw no danger either to religion or to poetry in science. He constantly referred to Tyndall, Huxley, and Darwin, in a way which suggested his familiarity with their writings. I have seen a copy of the "Origin of Species" owned by Lanier, — the marks and annotations indicating the most careful and thoughtful reading thereof. In his lectures on the English Novel, in contrasting ancient science with modern science, he says: "In short, I find that early thought everywhere, whether dealing with physical fact or metaphysical problems, is lacking in what I may call the intellectual conscience, — the conscience which makes Mr. Darwin spend long and patient years in investigating small facts before daring to reason upon them, and which makes him state the facts adverse to his theory with as much care as the facts which make for it." Again he refers to him as "our own grave and patient Charles Darwin."

He did not write about science at second-hand, either, — he studied it. Mrs. Sophie Bledsoe Herrick, Lowell's Baltimore friend, tells of Lanier's interest in microscopic work: "Mrs. Lanier and family were not with him then, and he was busy writing some articles on the science of composition. Evening after evening he would bring the manuscript of these articles and read them, and talk them over.

"I was at that time intensely interested in microscopic work. It was curious and interesting to see how Mr. Lanier kindled to the subject, so foreign to his ordinary literary interests. I was too busy with editorial work to go on with my microscopic work then, and it was a great pleasure to leave my instrument and books on the subject with him for some months. He plunged in with all the ardor of a naturalist, not using the microscope as a mere toy, but doing good hard work with it. I think I can detect in his work after this time, — as well as in his letters, — many little touches which show the influence this study of nature had upon his mind."*

— * Letter to the author. —

So he had little patience with "those timorous souls who believe that science, in explaining everything, — as they singularly fancy, — will destroy the possibility of poetry, of the novel, in short of all works of the imagination: the idea seeming to be that the imagination always requires the hall of life to be darkened before it displays its magic, like the modern spiritualistic seance-givers who can do nothing with the rope-tying and the guitars unless the lights are put out."* And again: "Here are thousands upon thousands of acute and patient men to-day who are devoutly gazing into the great mysteries of Nature and faithfully reporting what they see. These men have not destroyed the fairies: they have preserved them in more truthful and solid shape."

— * 'The English Novel', p. 28. —

But while he estimated at its proper value the development of modern physical science, he saw it in its proper relation to music, poetry, and religion. "The scientific man," he says in his "Legend of St. Leonor", "is merely the minister of poetry. He is cutting down the Western Woods of Time; presently poetry will come there and make a city and gardens. This is always so. The man of affairs works for the behoof and the use of poetry. Scientific facts have never reached their proper function until they emerge into new poetic relations established between man and man, between man and God, or between man and nature."

Lanier's view of the theory of evolution is interesting. "I have been studying science, biology, chemistry, evolution, and all," he writes to J. F. Kirk, June 15, 1880. "It pieces on, perfectly, to those dreams which one has when one is a boy and wanders alone by a strong running river, on a day when the wind is high but the sky clear. These enormous modern generalizations fill me with such dreams again.

"But it is precisely at the beginning of that phenomenon which is the underlying subject of this poem, 'Individuality', that the largest of such generalizations must begin, and the doctrine of evolution when pushed beyond this point appears to me, after the most careful examination of the evidence, to fail. It is pushed beyond this point in its current application to the genesis of species, and I think Mr. Huxley's last sweeping declaration is clearly parallel to that of an enthusiastic dissecter who, forgetting that his observations are upon dead bodies, should build a physiological conclusion upon purely anatomical facts.

"For whatever can be proved to have been evolved, evolution seems to me a noble and beautiful and true theory. But a careful search has not shown me a single instance in which such proof as would stand the first shot of a boy lawyer in a moot court, has been brought forward in support of an actual case of species differentiation.

"A cloud (see the poem) MAY be evolved; but not an artist; and I find, in looking over my poem, that it has made itself into a passionate reaffirmation of the artist's autonomy, threatened alike from the direction of the scientific fanatic and the pantheistic devotee."

With all of Lanier's development — whether in science and scholarship, or in music and literature — he retained a vital faith in the Christian religion. He reacted against the Calvinism of his youth to almost as great a degree as did some of the New England poets. He at times felt keenly the narrowness and bigotry of the church — the warring of the sects over the unessential points.* In his thinking he found no place for the rigid and severe creed which dominated his youth. He gave up the forms, not the spirit, of worship. He lived the abundant life, and all of the roads which he traveled led to God. His faith was as broad as "the liberal marshes of Glynn". In the spirit of St. Francis he said: — I am one with all the kinsmen things That e'er my Father fathered.

— * See especially the poem "Remonstrance". —

Notwithstanding his vivid realization of the evil of dogma and of sect, he maintained throughout his life a reverent faith; he could distinguish, as Browning said Shelley could not, between churchdom and Christianity. Not only in the "Crystal" and "A Ballad of Trees and the Master", and in the spirit of nearly all of his poems, is this evident; but throughout his lectures, essays, and letters he never missed an opportunity to relate knowledge to faith. "He was the most Christlike man I ever knew," said one of his intimate friends, and those who have looked upon his bust at Johns Hopkins have involuntarily found the resemblance of physical form. Certainly there has been no tenderer poem written about the Master than the lines written during Lanier's last year: — Into the woods my Master went, Clean forspent, forspent. Into the woods my Master came, Forspent with love and shame. But the olives they were not blind to Him, The little gray leaves were kind to Him: The thorn-tree had a mind to Him When into the woods He came. Out of the woods my Master went, And He was well content. Out of the woods my Master came, Content with death and shame. When Death and Shame would woo Him last, From under the trees they drew Him last: 'T was on a tree they slew Him — last When out of the woods He came.



Chapter XII. The Last Year



One of the pieces of advice that Lanier gave to consumptives who went to Florida for their health was, "Set out to get well, with the thorough assurance that consumption is curable." He had literally followed his own advice, and had fought death off for seven years. By the spring of 1880 he had won his fight over every obstacle that had been in his way. He had a position which, supplemented by literary work, could sustain him and his family. By prodigious work he had overcome, to a large extent, his lack of training in both music and scholarship. The years 1878 and 1879 were his most productive. By the "Science of English Verse" and the "Marshes of Glynn" he had won the admiration of many who had at first been doubtful about his ability. From an obscure man of the provinces out of touch with artists or musicians, he had become the idol of a large circle of friends and admirers.

During all these years he had had to fight the disease which he inherited from both sides of his family and which was accentuated by hardships during the war and the habits of a bent student. His flute-playing had helped to mitigate the disease. Finally, however, in the summer of 1880, he entered upon the last fight with his old enemy. Lanier had laughed in the face of death, and each new acquisition in the realms of music and poetry had been a challenge to the enemy. In 1876 he almost succumbed, but in the mean time three years of hard work had intervened. What he had suffered from disease, even when he was at his best, may be divined by one of imagination. He once referred to consumptives as "beyond all measure the keenest sufferers of all the stricken of this world," and he knew what he was talking about. He wrote to Hayne, November 19, 1880: "For six months past a ghastly fever has been taking possession of me each day at about twelve M., and holding my head under the surface of indescribable distress for the next twenty hours, subsiding only enough each morning to let me get on my working-harness, but never intermitting. A number of tests show it not to be the 'hectic' so well known in consumption; and to this day it has baffled all the skill I could find in New York, in Philadelphia, and here. I have myself been disposed to think it arose purely from the bitterness of having to spend my time in making academic lectures and boy's books — pot-boilers all — when a thousand songs are singing in my heart that will certainly kill me if I do not utter them soon. But I don't think this diagnosis has found favor with any practical physician; and meantime I work day after day in such suffering as is piteous to see."* With his fever at 104 degrees he wrote "Sunrise", which, though considered by many his best poem, shows an unmistakable weakness when compared with the "Marshes of Glynn". There is a letting down of the robust imagination. He delivered his lectures on the English Novel under circumstances too harrowing to describe. His audience did not know whether he could finish any one of them.

— * 'Letters', p. 244. —

And yet the story of his life shall not close with a pathetic account of those last sad months. Even during the last year he maintained his cheerfulness, his playfulness, his good humor, and also his buoyancy. In August, a fourth son, Robert Sampson Lanier, was born at West Chester, and the father writes letters to his friends, announcing his joy thereat. One is to his old friend, Richard Malcolm Johnston.

West Chester, Pa., August 28, 1880.

My dear and sweet Richard, — It has just occurred to me that you were OBLIGED to be as sweet as you are, in order to redeem your name; for the other three Richards in history were very far from being satisfactory persons, and something had to be done. Richard I, though a man of muscle, was but a loose sort of a swashbuckler after all; and Richard II, though handsome in person, was "redeless", and ministered much occasion to Wat Tyler and his gross following; while Richard III, though a wise man, allowed his wisdom to ferment into cunning and applied the same unto villainy.

But now comes Richard IV, to wit, you, — and, by means of gentle loveliness and a story or two, subdues a realm which I foresee will be far more intelligent than that of Richard I, far less turbulent than that of Richard II, and far more legitimate than that of Richard III, while it will own more, and more true loving subjects than all of those three put together.

I suppose my thoughts have been carried into these details of nomenclature by your reference to my own young Samson, who, I devoutly trust with you, shall yet give many a shrewd buffet and upsetting to the Philistines. Is it not wonderful how quickly these young fledgelings impress us with a sense of their individuality? This fellow is two weeks old to-day, and every one of us, from mother to nurse, appears to have a perfectly clear conception of his character. This conception is simply enchanting. In fact, the young man has already made himself absolutely indispensable to us, and my comrade and I wonder how we ever got along with ONLY three boys.

I rejoice that the editor of "Harper's" has discrimination enough to see the quality of your stories, and I long to see these two appear, so that you may quickly follow them with a volume. When that appears, it shall have a review that will draw three souls out of one weaver — if this pen have not lost her cunning.

I'm sorry I can't send a very satisfactory answer to your health inquiries, as far as regards myself. The mean, pusillanimous fever which took under-hold of me two months ago is still THERE, as impregnably fixed as a cockle-burr in a sheep's tail. I have tried idleness, but (naturally) it won't WORK. I do no labor except works of necessity — such as kissing Mary, who is a more ravishing angel than ever — and works of mercy — such as letting off the world from any more of my poetry for a while. But it's all one to my master the fever. I get up every day and drag around in a pitiful kind of shambling existence. I fancy it has come to be purely a go-as-you-please match between me and the disease, to see which will wear out first, and I think I will manage to take the belt, yet.

Give my love to the chestnut trees* and all the rest of your family.

— * It is said that he wrote the 'Marshes of Glynn' under one of these. —

Your letter gave us great delight. God bless you for it, my best and only Richard, as well as for all your other benefactions to

Your faithful friend, S. L.

A few days before, he had written a more serious letter to his friend, Mrs. Isabelle Dobbin, of Baltimore. The concluding words show his realization of the deeper meaning of childhood.

West Chester, August 18, 1880.

Here is come a young man so lovely in his person, and so gentle and high-born in his manners, that in the course of some three days he has managed to make himself as necessary to OUR world as the sun, moon, and stars; at any rate, these would seem quite obscured without him. It just so happens that he is very vividly associated with YOU; for among the few treasures we allowed ourselves to bring away from home is the photograph you gave us, and this stands in the most honorable coign of vantage in Mary's room.

. . . . .

You'll be glad to know that my dear Comrade is doing well. . . . We have reason to expect a speedy sight of our dear invalid moving about her accustomed ways again. If you could see the Boy asleep by her side! The tranquillity of his slumber, and the shine of his mother's eyes thereover, seem to melt up and mysteriously absorb the great debates of the agnostics, and of science and politics, and to dissolve them into the pellucid Faith long ago reaffirmed by the Son of Man. Looking upon the child, this term seems to acquire a new meaning, as if Christ were in some sort reproduced in every infant.

In the fall he was busy again with his books for boys, — books, it may be said, that had their origin in the stories he told his own boys.* The spirit in which he worked on these "pot-boilers" is seen in a letter to his publisher, Mr. Charles Scribner: —

— * Of these 'The Boy's Froissart' was published in 1878, 'The Boy's King Arthur' in 1880, 'The Boy's Mabinogion' in 1881, and 'The Boy's Percy' in 1882. —

435 N. Calvert St., Baltimore, Md., November 12, 1880.

My dear Mr. Scribner, — You have certainly made a beautiful book of the "King Arthur", and I heartily congratulate you on achieving what seems to me a real marvel of bookmaking art. The binding seems even richer than that of the "Froissart"; and the type and printing leave a new impression of graciousness upon the eye with each reading.

I suspect there are few books in our language which lead a reader — whether young or old — on from one paragraph to another with such strong and yet quiet seduction as this. Familiar as I am with it after having digested the whole work before editing it and again reading it in proof — some parts twice over — I yet cannot open at any page of your volume without reading on for a while; and I have observed the same effect with other grown persons who have opened the book in my library since your package came a couple of days ago. It seems difficult to believe otherwise than that you have only to make the book well known in order to secure it a great sale, not only for the present year but for several years to come. Perhaps I may be of service in reminding you — of what the rush of winter business might cause you to overlook — that it would seem wise to make a much more extensive outlay in the way of special advertisement, here, than was necessary with the "Froissart". It is probably quite safe to say that a thousand persons are familiar with at least the name of Froissart to one who ever heard of Malory; and the facts (1) that this book is an English classic written in the fifteenth century; (2) that it is the very first piece of melodious English prose ever written, though melodious English POETRY had been common for seven hundred years before, — a fact which seems astonishing to those who are not familiar with the circumstance that all nations appear to have produced good poetry a long time before good prose, usually a long time before ANY prose; (3) that it arrays a number of the most splendid ideals of energetic manhood in all literature; and (4) that the stories which it brings together and arranges, for the first time, have furnished themes for the thought, the talk, the poems, the operas of the most civilized peoples of the earth during more than seven hundred years, — ought to be diligently circulated. I regretted exceedingly that I could not, with appropriateness to youthful readers, bring out in the introduction the strange melody of Malory's sentences, by reducing their movement to musical notation. No one who has not heard it would believe the effect of some of his passages upon the ear when read by any one who has through sympathetic study learned the rhythm in which he THOUGHT his phrases. . . .

Sincerely yours, Sidney Lanier.

In January, he began his lectures at Johns Hopkins. Who would have thought that a dying man could give expression to such vigorous ideas in such rhythmic and virile prose as are some of the passages in the "English Novel"? There is not the intellectual strength in this book that there is in the "Science of English Verse". There is more of a tendency to go off in digressions, "to talk away across country", and the whole lacks in unity and in scientific precision. But there are passages in it that men will not willingly let die. His discussion of the growth of personality, of the relations of Science, Art, Religion, and Life, of Walt Whitman and Zola, and above all, of George Eliot, are worthy of Lanier at his best. These passages and the still more important one on the relation of art to morals are too well known to be quoted; they will be considered in another chapter dealing with Lanier's work as critic. They are mentioned here only to show the range of Lanier's interest and the alertness of his mind when his body was fast failing.

Frances E. Willard heard these lectures, and her words descriptive of them indicate that even in those days of intense suffering Lanier impressed her favorably. "It was refreshing," she says, "to listen to a professor of literature who was something more than a 'raconteur' and something different from a bibliophile, who had, indeed, risen to the level of generalization and employed the method of a philosopher. . . . [His] face [was] very pale and delicate, with finely chiseled features, dark, clustering hair, parted in the middle, and beard after the manner of the Italian school of art. . . . He sits not very reposefully in his professorial armchair, and reads from dainty slips of MS. in a clear, penetrating voice full of subtlest comprehension, but painfully and often interrupted by a cough. . . . As we met for a moment, when the lecture was over, he spoke kindly of my work, evincing that sympathy of the scholar with the work of progressive philanthropy. 'We are all striving for one end,' said Lanier, with genial, hopeful smile, 'and that is to develop and ennoble the humanity of which we form a part.'"*

— * 'Independent', Sept. 1, 1881. —

Just after finishing his lectures, which were reduced from twenty to twelve out of consideration for his health, Lanier went to New York to consult his publishers about future work. The impression made by him on one of his old students is seen in this passage: "One day I had a startling letter from Mrs. Lanier, saying that he was coming to New York on business, though he was in no condition for such an effort, and begging me, as one whom he loved, to meet him and to watch over him as best I could. I found him at the St. Denis, and we had dinner together. I now know how completely he deceived me as to his condition. With the intensity and exaltation often characteristic of the consumptive, he led me to think that he was only slightly ailing, was gay and versatile as ever, insisted on going somewhere for the evening 'to hear some music,' and absolutely demanded to exercise through the evening the rights of host in a way that baffled my inexperience completely. Only just as I left him did he let fall a single remark that I later saw showed how severe and unfortunate, probably, was the strain of it all."

Brave as he was, however, and eager to keep at his work, he finally submitted to the inevitable, and in May started with his brother to the mountains of western North Carolina. His final interview with Dr. Gilman is thus related by the latter: —

"The last time that I saw Lanier was in the spring of 1881, when after a winter of severe illness he came to make arrangements for his lectures in the next winter and to say good-bye for the summer. His emaciated form could scarcely walk across the yard from the carriage to the door. 'I am going to Asheville, N.C.,' he said, 'and I am going to write an account of that region as a railroad guide. It seems as if the good Lord always took care of me. Just as the doctors had said that I must go to that mountain region, the publishers gave me a commission to prepare a book.' 'Good-bye,' he added, and I supported his tottering steps to the carriage door, never to see his face again."*

— * 'South Atlantic Quarterly', April, 1905. —

The last months of Lanier's career seem to bring together all the threads of his life. He was in the mountains which had first stimulated his love of nature and were the background of his early romance. He was lovingly attended by father, brother, and wife, and took constant delight in the little boy who had come to cheer his last days of weariness and sickness. He named the tent Camp Robin, after his youngest son, and from that camp sent his last message to the boys of America. They are the words of the preface to "The Boy's Mabinogion", or "Knightly Legends of Wales": "In now leaving this beautiful book with my young countrymen, I find myself so sure of its charm as to feel no hesitation in taking authority to unite the earnest expression of their gratitude with that of my own to Lady Charlotte Guest, whose talents and scholarship have made these delights possible; and I can wish my young readers few pleasures of finer quality than that surprised sense of a whole new world of possession which came with my first reading of these Mabinogion, and made me remember Keats's watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken."

A letter to President Gilman indicates his continued interest in scientific investigation: —

Asheville, N.C., June 5, 1881.

Dear Mr. Gilman, — Can you help me — or tell me how I can help myself — in the following matter? A few weeks from now I wish to study the so-called no-frost belt on the side of Tryon Mountain; and in order to test the popular account I propose to carry on two simultaneous series of meteorological observations during a fortnight or longer, — the one conducted by myself in the middle of the belt, the other by a friend stationed well outside its limits. For this purpose I need two small self-registering thermometers, two aneroid thermometers, and two hygrometers of any make. It has occurred to me that since these observations will be conducted during the University recess I might — always provided, of course, that there is any authority or precedent for such action — procure this apparatus from the University collection, especially as no instrument is included which could not easily be replaced. Of course I would cheerfully deposit a sum sufficient to cover the value of the whole outfit.

Should this arrangement be possible, I merely ask that you turn this letter over to Dr. Hastings, with the request that he will have this apparatus packed at my expense and shipped by express to me at this point immediately.

Yours very sincerely, Sidney Lanier.

The impulse to poetry was with him, too. He jotted down or dictated to his wife outlines and suggestions of poems which he hoped to write. Of these one has been printed: — I was the earliest bird awake, It was a while before dawn, I believe, But somehow I saw round the world, And the eastern mountain top did not hinder me. And I knew of the dawn by my heart, not by mine eyes. One agrees with "Father" Tabb that no utterance of the poet ever betrayed more of his nature, — "feeble and dying, but still a 'bird', awake to every emotion of love, of beauty, of faith, of star-like hope, keeping the dawn in his heart to sing, when the mountain-tops hindered it from his eyes."

On August 4 the party started across the mountains to Lynn, Polk County, North Carolina. On the way they stopped with a friend in whose house Lanier gave one more exhibition of his love of music. "It was in this house," says Miss Spann, "the meeting-place of all sweet nobility with nature and with the human spirit, that he uttered his last music on earth. At the close of the day Lanier came in and passed down the long drawing-room until he reached a western window. In the distance were the far-reaching Alleghany hills, with Mt. Pisgah supreme among them, and the intervening valley bathed in sunset beauty. Absorbed away from those around him, he watched the sunset glow deepen into twilight, then sat down to the piano, facing the window. Sorrow and joy and pain and hope and triumph his soul poured forth. They felt that in that twilight hour he had risen to an angel's song."*

— * 'Independent', June 28, 1894. —

Lynn is in a sheltered valley among the mountains of Polk County, whose "climate is tempered by a curious current of warm air along the slope of Tryon Mountain, its northern boundary, a sort of ethereal Gulf Stream." Here death came soon than was anticipated by the brother, who had gone back to Montgomery, preceded already by his father. Mrs. Lanier's own words tell the story of the end in simplicity and love: "We are left alone (August 29) with one another. On the last night of the summer comes a change. His love and immortal will hold off the destroyer of our summer yet one more week, until the forenoon of September 7, and then falls the frost, and that unfaltering will renders its supreme submission to the adored will of God." His death before the open window was a realization of Matthew Arnold's wish with regard to dying: — Let me be, While all around in silence lies, Moved to the window near, and see Once more, before my dying eyes, — Bathed in the sacred dews of morn The wide aerial landscape spread, The world which was ere I was born, The world which lasts when I am dead."

The closing lines of "Sunrise" express better than anything else Lanier's own confident faith as he passed behind the veil: — And ever my heart through the night shall with knowledge abide thee, And ever by day shall my spirit, as one that hath tried thee, Labor, at leisure, in art — till yonder beside thee My soul shall float, friend Sun, The day being done.

His body was taken to Baltimore, where it rests in Greenmount Cemetery in the lot of his friends, the Turnbulls, close by the son whose memory they have perpetuated by the endowment of a permanent lectureship on poetry in Johns Hopkins University. The grave is unmarked — even by a slab. It divides the interest of visitors to Baltimore with the grave of Poe, which, however, is in another part of the city. So these two poets, whose lives and whose characters were so strikingly unlike, sleep in their adopted city.

Shortly after Lanier's death memorial services were held at Johns Hopkins University, at which time beautiful tributes were paid to him by his colleagues and friends. A committee of the citizens of Baltimore was appointed to raise a fund for the sustenance and education of the poet's family. They were aided in this by admirers of Lanier and public-spirited citizens throughout the country. Meantime his fame was growing, the publication of his poems in 1884 giving fresh impetus thereto.

Seven years after his death a bust of the poet was presented to the University by Mr. Charles Lanier of New York.* "The hall was filled," says ex-President Gilman, "with a company of those who knew and admired him. On the pedestal which supported the bust hung his flute and a roll of his music; a garland of laurels crowned his brow, and the sweetest of flowers were strewn at his feet. Letters came from Lowell, Holmes, Gilder, Stedman; young men who never saw him, but who had come under his influence, read their tributes in verse; a former student of the University made a critical estimate of the 'Science of Verse'; a lady read several of Lanier's own poems; another lady sang one of his musical compositions adapted to words of Tennyson, and another song, one of his to which some one else wrote the music; a college president of New Jersey held up Lanier as a teacher of ethics; but the most striking figure was the trim, gaunt form of a Catholic priest, who referred to the day when they, two Confederate soldiers (the Huguenot and the Catholic), were confined in the Union prison, and with tears in his eyes said, his love for Lanier was like that of David for Jonathan. The sweetest of all the testimonials came at the very last moment, unsolicited and unexpected, from that charming poetess, Edith Thomas. She heard of the memorial assembly, and on the spur of the moment wrote the well-known lines, suggested by one of Lanier's own verses: — On the Paradise side of the river of death."

— * For a full record of the exercises see 'A Memorial of Sidney Lanier', Baltimore, 1888. —

The aftermath of Lanier's home life is all pleasant to contemplate. His wife, although still an invalid, has, by her readings from her husband's letters and poems, and by her sympathetic help for all those who have cared to know more about him, done more than any other person to extend his fame. With tremendous obstacles in her way, she has reared to manhood the four sons, three of whom are now actively identified with publishing houses in New York city, and one of whom, bearing the name of his father, is now living upon a farm in Georgia. Charles Day Lanier is president of the Review of Reviews Company, and is associated with his youngest brother, Robert Sampson Lanier, in editing "The Country Calendar". Henry Wysham Lanier is a member of the firm of Doubleday, Page & Company, and editor of "Country Life in America". They all inherit their father's love of music and poetry, and through their magazines are doing much to foster among Americans a taste for country life. By a striking coincidence — entirely unpremeditated on their part — three of the sons and their mother live at Greenwich, Connecticut. It will be remembered that the home of the English Laniers was at Greenwich, — and so the story of the Lanier family begins and ends with this name, — one in the Old World and one in the New.



Chapter XIII. The Achievement in Criticism and in Poetry



Speculations as to what Lanier might have done with fewer limitations and with a longer span of years inevitably arise in the mind of any one who studies his life. If, like the late Theodore Thomas, he had at an early age been able to develop his talent for music in the musical circles of New York; if, like Longfellow, he had gone from a small college to a German university, or, like Mr. Howells, from the provinces to Cambridge, where he would have come in contact with a group of men of letters; if, after the Civil War, he had, like Hayne, retired to a cabin and there devoted himself entirely to literary work; if, like Lowell, he could have given attention to literary subjects and lectured in a university without teaching classes of immature students or without resorting to "pot-boilers", "nothings that do mar the artist's hand;" if, like Poe, he could have struck some one vein and worked it for all it was worth, — if, in a word, the varied activity of his life could have given way to a certain definiteness of purpose and concentration of effort, what might have been the difference! Music and poetry strove for the mastery of his soul. Swinburne, speaking of those who attempt success in two realms of art, says, "On neither course can the runner of a double race attain the goal, but must needs in both races alike be caught up and resign his torch to a runner with a single aim." And yet one feels that if Lanier had had time and health to work out all these diverse interests and all his varied experiences into a unity, if scholarship and music and poetry could have been developed simultaneously over a long stretch of time, there would have resulted, perhaps, a more many-sided man and a finer poetry than we have yet had in America.

So at last the speculation reduces itself to one of time. Lycidas was dead ere his prime. From 1876 till the fatal illness took hold of him he made great strides in poetry. Up to the very last he was making plans for the future. His letters to friends outlining the volumes that he hoped to publish, — work demanding decades instead of years, — the memoranda jotted down on bits of paper or backs of envelopes as the rough drafts of essays or poems, would be pathetic, if one did not believe with Lanier that death is a mere incident in an eternal life, or with Browning, that what a man would do exalts him. The lines of Robert Browning's poems in which he sets forth the glory of the life of aspiration — aspiration independent of any achievement — ring in one's ears, as he reads the story of Lanier's life. This low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it; This high man, with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it. The imperfect poems, the unfinished poems, the sheaves unharvested, not like Coleridge's for lack of will, but for lack of time, are suggestive of one of the finest aspects of romantic art. "I would rather fail at some things I wot of than succeed at others," said Lanier. There are moods when the imperfection of Lanier pleases more than the perfection of Poe — even from the artistic standpoint. What he aspired to be enters into one's whole thought about his life and his art. The vista of his grave opens up into the unseen world. On earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.

But the time comes when none of these considerations — neither admiration for the man, nor speculations as to what he might have done under different circumstances, nor thoughts as to what he may be doing in larger, other worlds than ours — should interfere with a judicial estimate of what he really achieved. It would have been the miracle of history if with all his obstacles he had not had limitations as a writer; and yet many who have insisted most on his sufferings, have resented any criticism passed upon his work. One has the authority of Lanier's writings about other men and his letters about his own poems for judging him only by the highest standards. Did he in aiming at a million miss a unit? Was he blinded by the very excess of light? How will he fare in that race with time of which a contemporary essayist has written? "When the admiration of his friends no longer counts, when his friends and admirers are themselves gathered to the same silent throng," will there be enough inherent worth in his work to keep his fame alive? These are questions that one has a right to ask.

And, first, as to Lanier's prose work. He has suffered from the fact that so many of his unrevised works have been published; these have their excuse for being in the light they throw on his life; but otherwise some of them are disappointing. If, instead of ten volumes of prose, there could be selected his best work from all of them, there would still be a residue of writing that would establish Lanier's place among the prose writers of America. There is no better illustration of his development than that seen in comparing his early prose — the war letters and "Tiger Lilies", for instance, or such essays as "Retrospects and Prospects" — with that of his maturer years. I doubt if justice has been done to Lanier's best style, its clearness, fluency, and eloquence. It may be claimed without dispute that he was a rare good letter-writer; perhaps only Lowell's letters are more interesting. The faults of his poetry are not always seen in his best letters. In them there is a playfulness, a richness of humor, an exuberance of spirits, animated talk about himself and his work, and withal a distinct style, that ought to keep them alive. There might be selected, too, a volume of essays, including "From Bacon to Beethoven", "The Orchestra of To-Day", "San Antonio de Bexar", "The Confederate Memorial Address", "The New South", and others.

A volume of American Criticism, edited by Mr. William Morton Payne, includes Lanier among the dozen best American critics, giving a selection from the "English Novel" as a typical passage. Has he a right to be in such a book? His work as a scholar has been discussed in a previous chapter; his rank as a critic is a very different matter. It goes without saying that Lanier was not a great critic. He did not have the learning requisite for one. One might turn the words of his criticism of Poe and say that he needed to know more. He knew but little of the classics beyond what he studied in college; while he read French and German literature to some extent, he did not go into them as Lowell did. Homer, Dante, and Goethe were but little more than names to him. Furthermore, his criticism is often marked by a tendency to indulge in hasty generalizations, due to the fact that he had not sufficient facts to draw upon. An illustration is his preference of the Elizabethan sonnets to the English sonnets written on the Italian model, or his discussion of personality as found in the Greek drama. His generalizations are often either patently obvious or far-fetched. He was too eager to "bring together people and books that never dreamed of being side by side." His tendency to fancy, so marked in his poetry, is seen also in his criticism, as for instance, his comparison of a sonnet to a little drama, or his statement that every poem has a plot, a crisis, and a hero. He had De Quincey's habit of digressing from the main theme, — what he himself called in speaking of an Elizabethan poet, the "constant temptation, to the vigorous and springy mind of the poet, to bound off wherever his momentary fancy may lead him." This is especially seen in his lectures on the English Novel, where he is often carried far afield from the general theme. In his lectures on "Shakspere and His Forerunners", he was so often troubled with an embarrassment of riches that he did not endeavor to follow a rigidly formed plan.

A more serious defect, however, was his lack of catholicity of judgment. He had all of Carlyle's distaste for the eighteenth century; his dislike of Pope was often expressed, and he went so far as to wish that the novels of Fielding and Richardson might be "blotted from the face of the earth." His characterization of Thackeray as a "low-pitched artist" is wide of the mark. As Lanier had his dislikes in literature and expressed them vigorously, so he over-praised many men. When he says, for instance, that Bartholomew Griffin "will yet obtain a high and immortal place in English literature," or that William Drummond of Hawthornden is one of "the chief glories of the English tongue," or that Gavin Douglas is "one of the greatest poets of our language," one wonders to what extent the "pleasant peril of enthusiasm" will carry a man. One may be an admirer of George Eliot and yet feel that Lanier has overstated her merits as compared with other English novelists, and that his praise of "Daniel Deronda" is excessive.

Such defects as are here suggested should not, however, blind the reader to some of Lanier's better work. The history of criticism, especially of romantic criticism, is full of just such unbalanced judgments. It is often true in criticism that a man "should like what he does like; and his likings are facts in criticism for him." Without very great learning and with strong prejudices in some directions, Lanier yet had remarkable insight into literature. Lowell's saying that he was "a man of genius with a rare gift for the happy word" is especially true of some of his critical writing. Examples are his well-known characterizations of great men in "The Crystal": — Buddha, beautiful! I pardon thee That all the All thou hadst for needy man Was Nothing, and thy Best of being was But not to be. . . . . . Langley, that with but a touch Of art had sung Piers Plowman to the top Of English song, whereof 't is dearest, now And most adorable. . . . . . Emerson, Most wise, that yet, in finding Wisdom, lost Thy Self, sometimes. . . . . . Tennyson, largest voice Since Milton, yet some register of wit Wanting.

There are scattered throughout his prose works criticisms of writers that are at once penetrating and subtle. The one on Browning has already been quoted. The best known of these criticisms is that on Walt Whitman, but it is too long for insertion here. There is a sentence in one of his letters to Bayard Taylor, however, that hits the mark better than the longer criticism, perhaps: "Upon a sober comparison, I think Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass' worth at least a million of 'Among my Books' and 'Atalanta in Calydon'. In the two latter I could not find anything which has not been much better said before; but 'Leaves of Grass' was real refreshing to me — like rude salt spray in your face — in spite of its enormous fundamental error that a thing is good because it is natural, and in spite of the world-wide difference between my own conceptions of art and the author's." Another good one is that on Shelley: "In truth, Shelley appears always to have labored under an essential immaturity: it is very possible that if he had lived a hundred years he would never have become a man; he was penetrated with modern ideas, but penetrated as a boy would be, crudely, overmuch, and with a constant tendency to the extravagant and illogical; so that I call him the modern boy."

Lanier writes of the songs of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as "short and unstudied little songs, as many of them are, songs which come upon us out of that obscure period like brief little bird-calls from a thick-leaved wood." He speaks of Chaucer's works as "full of cunning hints and twinkle-eyed suggestions which peep between the lines like the comely faces of country children between the fence bars as one rides by." He draws a fine comparison between William Morris and Chaucer: "How does the spire of hope spring and upbound into the infinite in Chaucer; while, on the other hand, how blank, world-bound, and wearying is the stone facade of hopelessness which rears itself uncompromisingly behind the gayest pictures of William Morris! . . . Again, how openly joyful is Chaucer, how secretly melancholy is Morris! Both, it is true, are full of sunshine; but Chaucer's is spring sunshine, Morris's is autumn. . . . Chaucer rejoices as only those can who know the bound of good red blood through unobstructed veins, and the thrilling tingle of nerve and sinew at amity; and who can transport this healthy animalism into their unburdened minds, and spiritualize it so that the mere drawing of breath is at once a keen delight and an inwardly felt practical act of praise to the God of a strong and beautiful world. Morris too has his sensuous element, but it is utterly unlike Chaucer's; it is dilettante, it is amateur sensualism; it is not strong, though sometimes excessive, and it is nervously afraid of that satiety which is at once its chief temptation and its most awful doom.

"Again, Chaucer lives, Morris dreams. . . . 'The Canterbury Tales' is simply a drama with somewhat more of stage direction than is common; but the 'Earthly Paradise' is a reverie, which would hate nothing so much as to be broken by any collision with that rude actual life which Chaucer portrays.

"And, finally, note the faith that shines in Chaucer and the doubt that darkens in Morris. Has there been any man since St. John so lovable as the 'Persoune'? or any sermon since that on the Mount so keenly analytical, . . . as 'The Persoune's Tale'? . . . A true Hindu life-weariness (to use one of Novalis' marvelous phrases) is really the atmosphere which produces the exquisite haze of Morris's pictures. . . . Can any poet shoot his soul's arrow to its best height, when at once bow and string and muscle and nerve are slackened in this vaporous and relaxing air, that comes up out of the old dreams of fate that were false and of passions that were not pure?"*

— * 'Music and Poetry', p. 198. —

Lanier's enthusiasm for Chaucer is typical of much of his critical writing. He was a generous praiser of the best literature, and generally his praise was right. "Lyrics of criticism" would be a good title for many of his passages. There was nothing of indifferentism in him. In a letter to Gibson Peacock he wrote of a certain type of criticism which, it may be said, has been widely prevalent in recent years: "In the very short time that I have been in the hands of the critics, nothing has amazed me more than the timid solicitudes with which they rarefy in one line any enthusiasm they may have condensed in another — a process curiously analogous to those irregular condensations and rarefactions of air which physicists have shown to be the conditions of producing an indeterminate sound. Many of my critics have seemed — if I may change the figure — to be forever conciliating the yet-unrisen ghosts of possible mistakes." Enough quotations have already been given from his lectures in Baltimore to show his enthusiasm for many of the periods and many of the authors of English literature. It is a distinction for him as a critic that he has set forth in so many passages his conception of the mission of poetry, — passages that are in the line of succession of defenses of poetry by Sidney, Hazlitt, and Shelley.

There is enough good criticism in the Shakespeare lectures and in the "English Novel", in the prefaces of the boy's books and in his letters, to make a volume of interest and importance. Suppose we cease to think of the first two as formal treatises on the subjects they discuss, and rather select from them such passages as the discussion of personality, the relation of music, science, and the novel, the criticism of Whitman's theory of art, the discussion of the relation of morals to art, the best passages on Anglo-Saxon poetry and the Elizabethan sonneteers, and the finer passages on Shakespeare's growth as a man and as a dramatist. Such a volume would, I believe, confirm one in the opinion that Lanier belongs by right among the best American critics. Certainly, the "Science of English Verse" entitles him to that distinction.

About 1875 Lanier became interested in the formal side of poetry and projected a work on a scientific basis. It was natural that one who had so much reverence for science and who had studied the "physics of music", should apply the scientific method to the study of poetry. He knew that the science of versification was not the most important phase of poetry: in the preface, as in the epilogue, to the "Science of English Verse", he makes clear that "for the artist in verse there is no law: the perception and love of beauty constitute the whole outfit." In many other passages in his writings may be seen his view of the moral significance of poetry. He desired, however, to formulate for himself and for students certain metrical laws. What differentiates poetry from prose? How does a writer produce certain effects with certain rhythms and vowel and consonant arrangements? The student wishes to know why the forms are fair and hear how the tale is told. By the study of rhythm, tune, and color, Lanier believed that one might receive "a whole new world of possible delight." He believed with Sylvester that "versification has a technical side quite as well capable of being reduced to rules as that of painting or any other fine art." His book was intended to furnish students with such an outfit of facts and principles as would serve for pursuing further researches.

The time was ripe for such a study. Lanier wrote to Mr. Stedman that "in all directions the poetic art was suffering from the shameful circumstance that criticism was without a scientific basis." The book at once received commendation from competent critics. Edward Rowland Sill wrote Dr. Gilman that it was "the only thing extant on that subject that is of any earthly value. I wonder that so few seem to have discovered its great merit," — an opinion afterwards repeated by him in the "Atlantic Monthly". The late Richard Hovey, in a series of articles in the "Independent" on the technic of poetry, said that Lanier had begun such a scientific study with "great soundness and common sense;" the book is "accurate, scientific, suggestive." The editor of the "Dial" referred to it as "the most striking and thoughtful exposition yet published on the technics of English poetry." Within the past ten years books on English verse have multiplied fast. In Germany, in England, and in America, the discussion of metrics has gone on. While dissenting from some of Lanier's conclusions, few of the writers have failed to recognize his work as of great importance.* One man rarely sees all round any great subject like this, — each man sees some one special point and states it in an individual way, and finally, in the course of time, the truth is evolved.

— * See, for instance, Winchester's 'Principles of Literary Criticism', Alden's 'English Verse', Paul Elmer More's 'Shelburne Essays', and Omond's 'English Metrists'. —

There is little objection to Parts II and III of the "Science of English Verse". They are generally recognized as strikingly suggestive and helpful. It is with the main thesis of the first part that many disagree — the author's insistence that the laws of music and of verse are identical. According to Lanier, verse is in all respects a phenomenon of sound. From time immemorial the relation of music and of poetry has been spoken of in figurative terms, as in Carlyle's discussion of the subject in the essay on the "Hero as Poet". Lanier, however, was the first to work the idea out in a thorough-going fashion. He was especially qualified to do so because of his knowledge of the two arts. His general conclusion was the same as that reached by Professor Gummere in his searching discussion of "Rhythm as the Essential Fact of Poetry".* Both of them saw that the origin of poetry was in the dance and the march, and later the song. In modern times the two arts had become distinct. Lanier believed that, in accordance with its origin and the practice of the best poets, the basis of rhythm is time and not accent. Every line is made up of bars of equal time value. "If this equality of time were taken away, no possibility of rhythm would remain." "The accent serves only to mark for the ear these equal intervals of time, which are the units of poetic measurement." Lanier's theory of quantity, however, is different from the rigid laws of classic quantity, for he allows for variations from the regular type of verse that may prevail in a certain poem or line, thus providing for "an escape out of the rigidities of the type into the infinite field of those subtle rhythms which pervade familiar utterance." He separates himself therefore from such writers as Abbott and Guest, who applied the rule of thumb to English verse. To such men "Shakspere's verse has often seemed a mass of 'license', of 'irregularity', and of lawless anomaly to commentators; while, approached from the direction of that great rhythmic sense of humanity displayed in music, in all manner of folk-songs, and in common talk, it is perfect music."

— * 'The Beginnings of Poetry', chapter 2. —

Lanier's theory is a good one in so far as it applies to the ideal rhythm, for the melody of verse does approximate that of music. If one considers actual rhythm, however, he is forced to come to the conclusion that no such mathematical relation exists between the syllables of a foot of verse as that existing between the notes of a musical bar. In poetry another element enters in to interfere with the ideal rhythm of music, and that is what Mr. More has called "the normal unrhythmical enunciation of the language." The result is a compromise shifting toward one extreme or another. Lanier's theory would apply to the earliest folk-songs. He illustrated his point by referring to the negro melodies, which, says Joel Chandler Harris, "depend for their melody and rhythm upon the musical quality of the time, and not upon long or short, accented or unaccented syllables." His citation of Japanese poetry was also a case in point. Unquestionably, the lyrics and choruses of the Greek drama were thoroughly musical; Sophocles and Aeschylus were both teachers of the chorus. Many of the lyrics of the Elizabethan age were written especially for music, and more than one collector of these lyrics has bemoaned the fact that in later times there has been such a divorce between the two arts. Who will say that Coleridge's "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan" are not disembodied music? Lamb said that Coleridge repeated the latter poem "so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into any parlor when he says or sings it to me." Mr. Arthur Symons has recently said: "'Christabel' is composed like music; you might set at the side of each section, especially of the opening, 'largo vivacissimo', and as the general expressive signature, 'tempo rubato'." Tennyson realized the musical effect of "Paradise Lost" when he spoke of Milton as "England's God-gifted organ-voice"; and he himself in such lyrics as those in the "Princess" and the eighty-sixth canto of "In Memoriam" wrought musical effects with verse. Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton says of Poe's "Ulalume" that, if properly intoned, "it would produce something like the same effect upon a listener knowing no word of English that it produces upon us." It needs to be said, in parenthesis, that in all these cases, while there is the musical effect from the standpoint of time and tone-color, there is still the perfection of speech. The theory will not hold, however, in much dramatic verse, or in meditative blank verse, as used by Wordsworth. Much of the poetry of Byron, Browning, Keats, and Shakespeare, while supremely great from the standpoint of color, or dramatic power, or picturesqueness, or thought, is not musical. To bring some poems within the limit of musical notation would be impossible.

While then one must modify Lanier's theory, the book emphasizes a point that needs constantly to be emphasized, both by poets and by students of poetry. Followed too closely by minor poets, it will tend to develop artisans rather than artists. Followed by the greater poets, — consciously or unconsciously, — it may prove to be one of the surest signs of poetry. This phase of poetical work needed to be emphasized in America, where poetry, with the exception of Poe's, has been deficient in this very element. Whatever else one may say of Emerson, Bryant, Whittier, or Longfellow, he must find that their poetry as a whole is singularly lacking in melody. Moreover, the poet who was the most dominant figure in American literature at the time when Lanier was writing, prided himself on violating every law of form, using rhythm, if at all, in a certain elementary or oriental sense. "I tried to read a beautifully printed and scholarly volume on the theory of poetry received by mail this morning from England," said Whitman, "but gave it up at last as a bad job." One may be thoroughly just to Whitman and grant the worth of his work in American literature, and yet see the value of Lanier's contention that the study of the formal element in poetry will lead to a much finer poetry than we have yet had in this country. Other books will supplant the "Science of English Verse" as text-books, and few may ever read it understandingly; but the author's name will always be thought of in any discussion of the relations of music and poetry. It is not only a scientific monograph, but a philosophical treatise on a subject that will be discussed with increasing interest.

While Lanier thus stated his conception of the formal element in poetry, he has, in many other places, given his ideas of the poet's character and his work in the world. If on the one hand he criticised Whitman for lack of form, on the other he blamed Swinburne for lack of substance. Seemingly a follower of Poe, he yet would have incurred the displeasure of that poet for adopting the "heresy of the didactic". He had an exalted sense of what poetry means in the redemption of mankind. He had little patience with the cry, "Art for art's sake," or with the justification so often made for the immorality of the artist's life. Milton himself did not believe more ardently that a poet's life ought to be a true poem. In the poems "Individuality", "Clover", "Life and Song", and the "Psalm of the West", Lanier expresses his view of the responsibility of the artist. In the first he says: — Awful is Art because 't is free; The artist trembles o'er his plan Where men his Self must see.

In the "English Novel" he says: "For, indeed, we may say that he who has not yet perceived how artistic beauty and moral beauty are convergent lines which run back into a common ideal origin, and who is therefore not afire with moral beauty just as with artistic beauty; that he, in short, who has not come to that stage of quiet and eternal frenzy in which the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty mean one thing, burn as one fire, shine as one light within him, he is not yet the great artist."

Lanier believed that he was, or would be, a great poet. While for a time he considered music as his special field of work and "poetry as a mere tangent," after 1875 his aspiration took the direction of poetry. Criticism of his work only strengthened his conviction that it was of a high order. Letters to his father and to his wife indicate his positive conviction that he was meeting with the misunderstanding that every great artist has met since the world began: "Let my name perish, — the poetry is good poetry and the music is good music, and beauty dieth not, and the heart that needs it will find it." "I KNOW, through the fiercest tests of life, that I am in soul, and shall be in life and utterance, a great poet," he said again.