A Biography of Sidney Lanier Part 12

Yet shall the great G.o.d turn thy fate, And bring thee back into thy monarch state And majesty immaculate.

Lo, through hot waverings of the August morn, Thou givest from thy vasty sides forlorn Visions of golden treasuries of corn -- Ripe largesse lingering for some bolder heart That manfully shall take thy part, And tend thee, And defend thee, With antique sinew and with modern art.

This vision of the South's restored agriculture was one that remained with Lanier to the end. He did not properly appreciate the development of manufacturing in the South, but he believed that the redemption of the country would come through the development of agriculture -- not the restoration of the large plantations of the old regime, but the large number of small farms with diversified products. On a later visit to the South he exclaimed to his brother, "My countrymen, why plant ye not the vineyards of the Lord?" and later he wrote in his essay on the "New South"

of the actual fulfillment of his prophecy in "Corn".

Encouraged by the success of "Corn", Lanier, while giving a large part of his time to music during the winter of 1874-75, looked more and more in the direction of poetry. He writes again to Judge Bleckley, November 15, 1874: "Your encouraging words give me at once strength and pleasure. I hope hard and work hard to do something worthy of them some day. My head and my heart are both so full of poems which the dreadful struggle for bread does not give me time to put on paper, that I am often driven to headache and heartache purely for want of an hour or two to hold a pen." He then proceeds to outline what is to be his first 'magnum opus', "a long poem, founded on that strange uprising in the middle of the fourteenth century in France, called 'The Jacquerie'. It was the first time that the big hungers of THE PEOPLE appear in our modern civilization; and it is full of significance. The peasants learned from the merchant potentates of Flanders that a man who could not be a lord by birth, might be one by wealth; and so Trade arose, and overthrew Chivalry. Trade has now had possession of the civilized world for four hundred years: it controls all things, it interprets the Bible, it guides our national and almost all our individual life with its maxims; and its oppressions upon the moral existence of man have come to be ten thousand times more grievous than the worst tyrannies of the Feudal System ever were. Thus in the reversals of time, it is NOW the GENTLEMAN who must rise and overthrow Trade. That chivalry which every man has, in some degree, in his heart; which does not depend upon birth, but which is a revelation from G.o.d of justice, of fair dealing, of scorn of mean advantages; which contemns the selling of stock which one KNOWS is going to fall, to a man who BELIEVES it is going to rise, as much as it would contemn any other form of rascality or of injustice or of meanness -- it is this which must in these latter days organize its insurrections and burn up every one of the cunning moral castles from which Trade sends out its forays upon the conscience of modern society. -- This is about the plan which is to run through my book: though I conceal it under the form of a pure novel."*

-- * Quoted in part in Callaway's 'Select Poems of Lanier', p. 65.

Lanier never finished this poem, but he was soon hard at work on another which was based on the same idea, "The Symphony". Writing to his newly acquired friend, Mr. Peac.o.c.k, March 24, 1875, he says: "About four days ago, a certain poem which I had vaguely ruminated for a week before took hold of me like a real James River ague, and I have been in a mortal shake with the same, day and night, ever since.

I call it 'The Symphony': I personify each instrument in the orchestra, and make them discuss various deep social questions of the times, in the progress of the music. It is now nearly finished; and I shall be rejoiced thereat, for it verily racks all the bones of my spirit."

The poem was published in "Lippincott's Magazine", June, 1875; and besides confirming the good opinion of Mr. Peac.o.c.k, won the praise of Bayard Taylor, George H. Calvert, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Charlotte Cushman, and was copied in full in Dwight's "Journal of Music".

As in his first poem Lanier had pointed out a defect in Southern life, so in his second long poem he struck at one of the evils of national life.

In the South he felt that there was not enough of the spirit of industry; looking at the nation as a whole, however, he exclaims: --

"O Trade! O Trade! would thou wert dead!

The time needs heart -- 't is tired of head: We are all for love," the violins said.

The germ of this poem is found perhaps in a letter written from Wheeling, West Virginia, where he went with some of his fellow musicians to give a concert, April 16, 1874. It is a realistic picture of a city completely dominated by factory life. What he afterwards called "the h.e.l.l-colored smoke of the factories" created within him a feeling of righteous indignation akin to that of Ruskin, although it must be said in justice to Lanier that, in combating the evils of industrial life, he never went to the extreme of eccentric pa.s.sion displayed by the English writer. Nor, on the other hand, could he say with Walt Whitman: "I hail with joy the oceanic, variegated, intense practical energy, the demand for facts, even the business materialism, of the current age. . . . I perceive clearly that the extreme business energy and this almost maniacal appet.i.te for wealth prevalent in the United States are parts of a melioration and progress, indispensably needed to prepare the very results I demand."

Lanier's poem is more applicable to the conditions that prevail to-day than to those of his own time. He shows himself a prophet, the truth of whose words is realized by many of the finer minds of the country. He lets the various instruments of the orchestra utter their protest against the evils of modern trade. The violin, speaking for the poor who stand wedged by the pressing of trade's hand and "weave in the mills and heave in the kilns," protests against the spirit of compet.i.tion that says even when human life is involved, "Trade is only war grown miserly."

Alas, for the poor to have some part In yon sweet living lands of art.

Then the flute -- Lanier's own flute, summing up the voices of nature, "all fair forms, and sounds, and lights" -- echoes the words of the Master, "All men are neighbors." Trade, the king of the modern days, will not allow the poor a glimpse of "the outside hills of liberty".

The clarionet is the voice of a lady who speaks of the merchandise of love and yearns for the old days of chivalry before trade had withered up love's sinewy prime: --

If men loved larger, larger were our lives; And wooed they n.o.bler, won they n.o.bler wives.

To her the bold, straightforward horn answers, "like any knight in knighthood's morn." He would bring back the age of chivalry, when there would be "contempts of mean-got gain and hates of inward stain."

He voices, too, the idea long ago expressed by Milton that men should be as pure as women: --

Shall woman scorch for a single sin, That her betrayer may revel in, And she be burnt, and he but grin When that the flames begin, Fair lady?

Shall ne'er prevail the woman's plea, 'We maids would far, far whiter be If that our eyes might sometimes see Men maids in purity.'

Then the hautboy sings, "like any large-eyed child," calling for simplicity and naturalness in this modern life. And all join at the last in a triumphant chant of the power of love to heal all the ills of life: --

And ever Love hears the poor-folks' crying, And ever Love hears the women's sighing, And ever sweet knighthood's death-defying, And ever wise childhood's deep implying, But never a trader's glozing and lying.

And yet shall Love himself be heard, Though long deferred, though long deferred: O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred: Music is Love in search of a word.

By this time Lanier was hard at work for the publishers.

Although he never lost his love for music -- he could not -- he began to see that his must be a literary career. In a letter of March 20, 1876, he says to Judge Bleckley that he has had a year of frightful overwork.

"I have been working at such a rate as, if I could keep it up, would soon make me the proverb of fecundity that Lope de Vega now is."

He refers to the India papers written for "Lippincott's".

"The collection of the mult.i.tudinous particulars involved in them cost me such a world of labor among the libraries of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore as would take a long time to describe. . . .

In addition to these I have written a number of papers not yet published, and a dozen small poems which have appeared here and there.

"Now, I don't work for bread; in truth, I suppose that any man who, after many days and nights of tribulation and b.l.o.o.d.y sweat, has finally emerged from all doubt into the quiet and yet joyful activity of one who KNOWS exactly what his Great Pa.s.sion is and what his G.o.d desires him to do, will straightway lose all anxiety as to what he is working FOR, in the simple glory of doing that which lies immediately before him. As for me, life has resolved simply into a time during which I must get upon paper as many as possible of the poems with which my heart is stuffed like a schoolboy's pocket."

He quotes from "that simple and powerful sonnet of dear old William Drummond of Hawthornden": --

Know what I list, this all cannot me move, But that, O me! -- I both must write and love.

He had to give much of his time, however, to hack work.

During the summer of 1875 he was engaged in writing a book on Florida for the Lippincotts. It is, as he wrote to Paul Hamilton Hayne, "a sort of spiritualized guide-book" to a section which was then drawing a large number of visitors. "The thing immediately began to ramify and expand, until I quickly found I was in for a long and very difficult job: so long, and so difficult, that, after working day and night for the last three months on the materials I had previously collected, I have just finished the book, and am now up to my ears in proof-sheets and wood-cuts which the publishers are rushing through in order to publish at the earliest possible moment, the book having several features designed to meet the wants of winter visitors to Florida." It is filled with facts in regard to climate and scenery, practical hints for travelers, and other things characteristic of a guide-book; but it is more than that.

Like everything else that Lanier ever did, -- even the dreariest hack work, -- he threw himself into it with great zest. It has suggestions to consumptives born out of his own experience. There are allusions to music, literature, and philosophy. There are descriptions and historical anecdotes of the cities of South Carolina and Georgia; above all, there are descriptions of the Florida country which only a poet could write.

Two pa.s.sages are characteristic: --

"And now it is bed-time. Let me tell you how to sleep on an Ocklawaha steamer in May. With a small bribe persuade Jim, the steward, to take the mattress out of your berth and lay it slanting just along the railing that incloses the lower part of the deck in front and to the left of the pilot-house. Lie flat on your back down on the mattress, draw your blanket over you, put your cap on your head, on account of the night air, fold your arms, say some little prayer or other, and fall asleep with a star looking right down on your eye.

When you wake in the morning you will feel as new as Adam."

"Presently we abandoned the broad highway of the St. Johns, and turned off to the right into the narrow lane of the Ocklawaha.

This is the sweetest water-lane in the world, a lane which runs for more than one hundred and fifty miles of pure delight betwixt hedge-rows of oaks and cypresses and palms and magnolias and mosses and vines; a lane clean to travel, for there is never a speck of dust in it save the blue dust and gold dust which the wind blows out of the flags and lilies."

In the discussion of "The Symphony", emphasis was laid upon Lanier's national point of view. The opportunity soon came to him of giving expression to his love of the Union. At Bayard Taylor's suggestion he was appointed by the Centennial Commission to write the words for a cantata to be sung at the opening exercises of the exposition in Philadelphia.

Taylor, in announcing the fact, on December 28, 1875, said: "I have just had a visit from Theodore Thomas and Mr. Buck, and we talked the whole matter over. Thomas remembers you well, and Mr. Buck says it will be especially agreeable to him to compose for the words of a Southern poet. I have taken the liberty of speaking for you, both to them and to General Hawley, and you must not fail me. . . .

"Now, my dear Lanier, I am sure you CAN do this worthily.

It's a great occasion, -- not especially for poetry as an art, but for Poetry to a.s.sert herself as a power."* To this letter Lanier replied: "If it were a cantata upon your goodness, . . . I am willing to wager I could write a stirring one and a grateful withal.

-- * 'Letters', p. 136.

"Of course I will accept -- when 't is offered. I only write a hasty line now to say how deeply I am touched by the friendly forethought of your letter."*

-- * 'Letters', p. 137.

He announces the fact to his wife in a jubilant letter of January 8, 1876: "Moreover, I have a charming piece of news which -- although thou art not yet to communicate it to any one except Clifford -- I cannot keep from thee.

The opening ceremonies of the Centennial Exhibition will be very grand; and among other things there are to be sung by a full chorus (and played by the orchestra, under Thomas's direction) a hymn and a cantata.

General Hawley, President of the Centennial Commission, has written inviting me to write the latter (I mean the POEM; Dudley Buck, of New York, is to write the music). Bayard Taylor is to write the hymn.* This is very pleasing to me; for I am chosen as representative of our dear South; and the matter puts my name by the side of very delightful and honorable ones, besides bringing me in contact with many people I would desire to know.

-- * Whittier wrote this hymn and Bayard Taylor wrote the Ode for the Fourth of July celebration.

"Mr. Buck has written me that he wants the poem by January 15, which as I have not yet had the least time for it, gives me just seven days to write it in. I would much rather have had seven months; but G.o.d is great.

Remember, thou and Cliff, that this is not yet to be spoken of at all."*

-- * Quoted in Baskervill's 'Southern Writers', p. 200.

With enthusiasm the poet entered upon the task a.s.signed him.

The progress of the Cantata from the time when it first presented itself to his mind to the time when he completed it, may be traced in the letters to Bayard Taylor and Gibson Peac.o.c.k, which have already been published.* Writing to Mr. Dudley Buck, January 15, 1876, he said: --

-- * See 'Letters', pa.s.sim.