A Biography of Sidney Lanier Part 11

A description of the "Hunt of Henry IV" shows how Lanier a.s.sociated nature, music, and poetry with each other. He was an ardent advocate of "programme-music". He saw music as he heard poetry.

He felt the musical effects in poetry and the poetical effects in music: "Then, the 'Hunt of Henry IV'! . . . It openeth with a grave and courteous invitation, as of a cavalier riding by some dainty lady, through the green aisles of the deep woods, to the hunt, -- a lovely, romantic melody, the first violins discoursing the man's words, the first flute replying for the lady. Presently a fanfare; a sweet horn replies out of the far woods; then the meeting of the gay cavaliers; then the start, the dogs are unleashed, one hound gives tongue, another joins, the stag is seen -- hey, gentlemen! away they all fly through the sweet leaves, by the great oaks and beeches, all a-dash among the brambles, till presently, bang! goeth a pistol (it was my veritable old revolver loaded with blank cartridge for the occasion, the revolver that hath lain so many nights under my head), fired by 'Tympani' (as we call him, the same being a nervous little Frenchman who playeth our drums), and then the stag dieth in a celestial concord of flutes, oboes, and violins. Oh, how far off my soul was in this thrilling moment! It was in a rare, sweet glen in Tennessee; the sun was rising over a wilderness of mountains, I was standing (how well I remember the spot!) alone in the dewy gra.s.s, wild with rapture and with expectation. Yonder came, gracefully walking, a lovely fawn. I looked into its liquid eyes, hesitated, prayed, gulped a sigh, then overcame with the savage hunter's instinct, fired; the fawn leaped convulsively a few yards, I ran to it, found it lying on its side, and received into my agonized and remorseful heart the reproaches of its most tender, dying gaze. But luckily I had not the right to linger over this sad scene; the conductor's baton shook away the dying pause; on all sides shouts and fanfares and gallopings 'to the death', to which the first flute had to reply in time, recalled me to my work, and I came through brilliantly."*

-- * 'Letters', p. 85.

Because of its culture value, Lanier believed that music should have its place in every college and university. As far back as 1867 -- in "Tiger Lilies" -- he had advocated the appointment of professors of music in American colleges of equal dignity with other specialists. He himself hoped that he might be appointed to such a chair, first in the College of Music in New York and later in Johns Hopkins University. It is easy to conceive that he might have become an expert teacher in the science of music, but it is more probable that if he had held a chair in an academic inst.i.tution he would have forwarded the work that has now become a distinct feature of all the larger universities. He would have made an excellent "literary" teacher of music, interesting men in the biographies of great musicians, and interpreting for them the mysteries of orchestra and opera. He conceived of music as one of the humanities, and would have agreed with President Eliot that "music is a culture study, if there is one in the world."

In his life it took the place that travel and many literatures held in the lives of Longfellow and Lowell. He believed with Theodore Thomas that Beethoven's music is "something more than mere pleasure; it is education, thought, emotion, love, and hope."

Furthermore, Lanier believed in the religious value of music; it was a "gospel whereof the people are in great need, -- a later revelation of all gospels in one." "Music," he says, "is to be the Church of the future, wherein all creeds will unite like the tones in a chord." He was one of "those fervent souls who fare easily by this road to the Lord." Haydn's inscription, "Laus Deo", was in Lanier's mind whenever he listened to great music; for it tended to "help the emotions of man across the immensity of the known into the boundaries of the Unknown." He would have composers to be ministers of religion. He could not understand the indifference of some leaders of orchestras, who could be satisfied with appealing to the aesthetic emotions of an audience, while they might "set the hearts of fifteen hundred people afire."

The final meaning of music to him was that it created within man "a great, pure, una.n.a.lyzable yearning after G.o.d."

Holding this exalted view of music, he believed that its future was immense and that in America its triumphs were to be greater than they had been elsewhere. At a time when musical culture was rare in this country, he looked forward with hope and expectation to the time when America would become a patron of the best music. "When Americans,"

he said, "shall have learned the supreme value and glory of the orchestra, . . . then I look to see America the home of the orchestra, and to hear everywhere the profound messages of Beethoven and Bach to men."

And again: "All the signs of the times seem to point to this country as the scene of the future development of music. . . . It only needs direction, artistic atmosphere, and technique in order to fill the land with such orchestras as the world has never heard. When our so-called conservatories and music schools, instead of straining every nerve to outdo each other in turning out hosts of bad piano-players, shall address themselves earnestly to the education of performers upon all the orchestral instruments; when our people shall have become aware of the height and glory of the orchestra, as the only instrument for the deepest adorations in man; . . .

when our young women shall ask themselves for any serious reason why they should all, with one accord, devote themselves to the piano instead of to the flute, the violin, the hautboy, the harp, the viola, the violoncello, the horn instruments which pertain to women fully as much as to men, and some of which actually belong by nature to those supple, tactile, delicate, firm, pa.s.sionate, and tender fingers with which the woman is endowed; when our young men shall have discovered that the orchestral player can so exercise his office as to make it of far more dignity and worth than any political place in the gift of the people, and that the business of making orchestral music may one day become far higher in n.o.bility than the ign.o.ble sentinelship over one's pocket to which most lawyers are reduced, or the melancholy slaveries of the shop and the counting-room and the like 'business' which is now paramount in esteem; when -- I will not say when we have a new music to perform, but when we shall have played Beethoven's symphonies as they should be played, and shall have revealed to us all the might, all the faith, all the religion, the tenderness, the heavenly invitation, the subtle excursions down into the heart of man, the brotherhood, the freedom, the exaltation, the whisperings of sorrow unto sorrow, the messages of G.o.d which these immortal and yet unmeasured compositions embody,"*

then will America give to music the place it deserves.

Music will be one of the redeemers of the people from cra.s.s commercialism.

-- * An uncollected essay by Lanier, "Mazzini on Music", 'The Independent', June 27, 1878.

While Lanier held before the American people the vision of what they might accomplish in music, he held up to musicians the high ideal of what they should be. In the essay just quoted, he indorses the saying of Mazzini's that "musicians may become a priesthood and ministry of moral regeneration. . . . Why rest contented with stringing notes together -- mere trouveres of a day -- when it remains with you to consecrate yourselves, even on earth, to a mission such as in the popular belief only G.o.d's angels know?"

With his high ideal of what a musician should be, he could not but be disgusted at times with the Bohemianism of the men who played with him, and with the loose moral life of many more eminent musicians.

"Ah, these heathenish Germans!" he exclaims, as he sees some of the orchestra at a church service making fun of the communion service: "Double-ba.s.s was a big fellow, with a black mustache, to whom life was all a joke, which he expressed by a comical smile, and Viola was a young Hercules, so full of beer that he dreamed himself in heaven, and Oboe was a young sprig, just out from Munich, with a complexion of milk and roses, like a girl's, and miraculously bright spectacles on his pale blue eyes, and there they sat -- Oboe and Viola and Double-ba.s.s -- and ogled each other, and raised their brows, and snickered behind the columns, without a suspicion of interest either in the music or the service.

Dash these fellows, they are utterly given over to heathenism, prejudice, and beer."*

-- * 'Letters', p. 88.

The best expression of his ideal of what a great composer should be, is in a letter written to his wife just after he had read the life of Robert Schumann: --

New York, Sunday, October 18, 1874.

I have been in my room all day; and have just concluded a half-dozen delicious hours, during which I have been devouring, with a hungry ferocity of rapture which I know not how to express, "The Life of Robert Schumann", by his pupil, von Wasielewski.

This pupil, I am sure, did not fully comprehend his great master.

I think the key to Schumann's whole character, with all its labyrinthine and often disappointing peculiarities, is this: That he had no mode of self-expression, or, I should rather say, of self-expansion, besides the musical mode. This may seem a strange remark to make of him who was the founder and prolific editor of a great musical journal, and who perhaps exceeded any musician of his time in general culture.

But I do not mean that he was confined to music for self-expression, though indeed, the sort of critical writing which Schumann did so much of is not at all like poetry in its tranquillizing effects upon the soul of the writer. What I do mean is that his sympathies were not BIG enough, he did not go through the awful struggle of genius, and lash and storm and beat about until his soul was grown large enough to embrace the whole of life and the All of things, that is, large enough to appreciate (if even without understanding) the magnificent designs of G.o.d, and tall enough to stand in the trough of the awful cross-waves of circ.u.mstance and look over their heights along the whole sea of G.o.d's manifold acts, and deep enough to admit the peace that pa.s.seth understanding. This is, indeed, the fault of all German culture, and the weakness of all German genius. A great artist should have the sensibility and expressive genius of Schumann, the calm grandeur of Lee, and the human breadth of Shakespeare, all in one.

Now in this particular, of being open, unprejudiced, and unenvious, Schumann soars far above his brother Germans; he valiantly defended our dear Chopin, and other young musicians who were struggling to make head against the abominable pettiness of German prejudice. But, withal, I cannot find that his life was great, as a whole; I cannot see him caring for his land, for the poor, for religion, for humanity; he was always a restless soul; and the ceaseless wear of incompleteness finally killed, as a maniac, him whom a broader Love might have kept alive as a glorious artist to this day.

The truth is, the world does not require enough at the hands of genius.

Under the special plea of greater sensibilities, and of consequent greater temptations, it excuses its gifted ones, and even sometimes makes "a law of their weakness". But this is wrong: the sensibility of genius is just as much greater to high emotions as to low ones; and whilst it subjects to stronger temptations, it at the same time interposes -- if it WILL -- stronger considerations for resistance.

These are scarcely fair things to be saying APROPOS of Robert Schumann; for I do not think he was ever guilty of any excesses of genius -- as they are called: I only mean them to apply to the UNREST of his life.

And yet, for all I have said, how his music does burn in my soul!

It stretches me upon the very rack of delight; I know no musician that fills me so full of heavenly anguish, and if I had to give up all the writers of music save one, my one should be Robert Schumann.

-- Some of his experiences cover some of my own as aptly as one half of an oyster sh.e.l.l does the other half.*

-- * 'Letters', p. 103.

Chapter VII. The Beginning of a Literary Career

During the winter of 1873-74, the first winter in Baltimore, Lanier had, as has been seen, given his entire time to music.

The only poetry he had written had been inspired by love for his absent wife, -- poems breathing of the deepest and tenderest affection.

Scarcely less poetical were the letters written to her giving expression to his joy in the large new world into which he was entering, and at the same time to his sense of loneliness and pain at their separation.

To her and his boys he went as soon as his engagement with the Peabody Orchestra was ended. In one of his letters he had spoken of himself as "an exile from his dear Land, which is always the land where my loved ones are." He found delight during this summer, as in the following ones, in the renewal of home ties, and in the enjoyment of the natural scenery of Macon and Brunswick, to whose beauty he never ceased to be sensitive.

It was in August, 1874, that he received a fresh impulse towards poetry, or, at least, towards the writing of more important poems than those he had heretofore written. While visiting at Sunnyside, Georgia, some sixty miles from Macon, he was struck at once with the beauty of cornfields and the pathos of deserted farms.

Hence arose his first poem that attracted attention throughout the country.

He took it to New York with him in the fall. Writing to his friend, Judge Logan E. Bleckley, now Chief Justice of Georgia, who during this summer spoke encouraging words to him about the faith he had in his literary future, he inclosed his recently finished poem with these words: --

195 Dean St., Brooklyn, N.Y.

October 9, 1874.

My dear Sir, -- I could never tell you how sincerely grateful I am to you, and shall always be, for a few words you spoke to me recently.

Such encouragement would have been pleasant at any time, but this happened to come just at a critical moment when, although I had succeeded in making up my mind finally and decisively as to my own career, I was yet faint from a desperate struggle with certain untoward circ.u.mstances which it would not become me to detail.

Did you ever lie for a whole day after being wounded, and then have water brought you? If so, you will know how your words came to me.

I inclose the ma.n.u.script of a poem in which I have endeavored to carry some very prosaic matters up to a loftier plane. I have been struck with alarm in seeing the number of old, deserted homesteads and gullied hills in the older counties of Georgia; and though they are dreadfully commonplace, I have thought they are surely mournful enough to be poetic.

Please give me your judgment on my effort, WITHOUT RESERVE; for if you should say you do not like it, the only effect on me will be to make me write one that you do like.

Believe me always your friend, Sidney Lanier.

The answer to this letter, giving a detailed criticism of the poem, was very helpful to Lanier. Judge Bleckley is a man of much cultivation, and is widely known throughout Georgia as at once one of the leading lawyers of the State and a man who can in his leisure moments engage in literary work which, though not published, gives evidence of imagination and taste. Lanier was wise enough to accept most of his criticism: the revised form of the poem compared with the first form shows a great many changes, and is striking evidence of Lanier's power to improve his work.

Judge Bleckley's characterization of "Corn" so accurately describes it that his words may be quoted here: "It presents four pictures; three of them landscapes and one a portrait. You paint the woods, a cornfield, and a worn-out hill. These are your landscapes.

And your portrait is the likeness of an anxious, unthrifty cotton-planter, who always spends his crop before he has made it, borrows on heavy interest to carry himself over from year to year, wears out his land, meets at last with utter ruin, and migrates to the West.

Your second landscape is turned into a vegetable person [the cornstalk is Lanier's symbol of the poet], and you give its poetry with many touches of marvel and mystery in vegetable life.

Your third landscape takes for an instant the form and tragic state of King Lear; you thus make it seize on our sympathies as if it were a real person, and you then restore it to the inanimate, and contemplate its possible beneficence in the distant future."*

-- * Quoted in Callaway's 'Select Poems of Lanier', p. 61.

The poem was published in "Lippincott's Magazine", February, 1875, and at once attracted the attention of some discriminating readers of magazines, notably Mr. Gibson Peac.o.c.k, the editor of the Philadelphia "Evening Bulletin", who reviewed it in a most sympathetic manner, and became one of the poet's best friends during the remainder of his life.

It is noteworthy that the scenery of the poem should be so distinctively and realistically Southern. There is in the first part all of Lanier's love of the Southern forest: the shimmering forms in the woods, the leaves, the subtlety of mighty tenderness in the embracing boughs, the long muscadines, the mosses, ferns, and flowers, are all delicately felt and described -- with a suggestion of Keats.

As he wanders from this forest to the zigzag-cornered fence, his fieldward-faring eyes take in the beauty of the cornfield, "the heaven of blue inwoven with a heaven of green." One tall corn captain becomes to his mind the symbol of the poet-soul sublime, who takes from all that he may give to all. The picture of the thriftless and negligent Southern farmer, "a gamester's cat'spaw and a banker's slave,"

shows Lanier's keen insight into Southern conditions, which he had, while living in Macon, studied with much care and which he now lifted into the realm of poetry. The red hills of Georgia, deserted and barren, are presented with true pathos. Nevertheless, like a genuine prophet, the poet looks forward to a better day: --