A Biography of Sidney Lanier Part 17

"One will go into few moderately appointed houses in this country without finding a Homer in some form or other; but it is probably far within the truth to say that there are not fifty copies of Beowulf in the United States. Or again, every boy, though far less learned than that erudite young person of Macaulay's, can give some account of the death of Hector; but how many boys -- or, not to mince matters, how many men -- in America could do more than stare if asked to relate the death of Byrhtnoth? Yet Byrhtnoth was a hero of our own England in the tenth century, whose manful fall is recorded in English words that ring on the soul like arrows on armor. Why do we not draw in this poem -- and its like -- with our mother's milk? Why have we no nursery songs of Beowulf and the Grendel? Why does not the serious education of every English-speaking boy commence, as a matter of course, with the Anglo-Saxon grammar?"*

-- * 'Music and Poetry', p. 136. This quotation is an expansion of one in the lectures now under consideration. He evidently overstates his point, but the pa.s.sage suggests what the study of old English meant to Lanier himself.

There would come from such study a strengthening of English prose and a deepening of culture. He continues: --

"For the absence of this primal Anglicism from our modern system goes -- as was said -- to the very root of culture.

The eternal and immeasurable significance of that individuality in thought which flows into idiom in speech becomes notably less recognized among us.

We do not bring with us out of our childhood the fibre of idiomatic English which our fathers bequeathed to us. A boy's English is diluted before it has become strong enough for him to make up his mind clearly as to the true taste of it. Our literature needs Anglo-Saxon iron, -- there is no ruddiness in its cheeks, and everywhere a clear lack of the red corpuscles."

Lanier was more thoroughly at home in the Elizabethan age, however.

He reveled in its myriad-mindedness -- its adventures and exploits, its chivalry and romance. The sonnets especially appealed to him, for they abounded in conceits. One of the striking characteristics that he noted in the leading men of that age was the union of strength and tenderness.

"All this love-making was manly," he says. "It was then as it is now, that the bravest are the tenderest. . . . Stout and fine Walter Raleigh pushes over to America, quite as ready to sigh a sonnet as to plant a colony.

Valorous Philip Sidney, who can write as dainty a sonnet as any lover of them all, can at the same time dazzle the stern eyes of warriors with deeds of manhood before Zuetphen and touch their hearts to pity and admiration as he offers the cup of water -- himself being grievously wounded and in a rage of thirst -- to the dying soldier whose necessity is greater than his. Men's minds in this time were employed with big questions; the old theory of the universe is just losing its long hold upon the intellect, and people are busy with all s.p.a.ce, trying to apprehend the relation of their globe to the solar system.

To all this ferment the desperate conflict of the Catholic religion with the new form of faith now coming in adds an element of stern strength; men are pondering not only the physical relation of the earth to the heavens, but the spiritual relation of the soul to heaven and h.e.l.l.

This is no dandy period."*

-- * 'Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. i, p. 168.

"And if any one should say there is not time to read these poets,"

he says in a strain of excessive admiration, "I reply with vehemence that in any wise distribution of your moments, after you have read the Bible and Shakspere, you have no time to read anything until you have read these . . . old artists. They are so n.o.ble, so manful, so earnest; they have put into such perfect music that protective tenderness of the rugged man for the delicate woman which throbs all down the muscles of the man's life and turns every deed of strength into a deed of love; they have set the woman, as woman, upon such adorable heights of worship, and by that act have so immeasurably uplifted the whole plane upon which society moves; they have given to all earnest men and strong lovers such a dear ritual and litany of chivalric devotion; they have sung us such a high ma.s.s of constancy for our love; they have enlightened us with such celestial revelation of the possible Eden which the modern Adam and Eve may win back for themselves by faithful and generous affection; that -- I speak it with reverence -- they have made another religion of loyal love and have given us a second Bible of womanhood."*

-- * 'Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. i, p. 7.

Following his study of the sonnet-writers of the Elizabethan age, comes a somewhat technical study of the p.r.o.nunciation of Shakespeare's time -- a restatement of Ellis's monumental work on that subject.

His discussion of music in Shakespeare's time has already been noticed.

He next tried to reproduce for his cla.s.s the domestic life of the age, commenting in full on the sermons, the plays, the customs of the time.

In order to give unity to this study, he sketches in a somewhat fanciful way the boyhood of Shakespeare in Stratford and his early manhood in London.

The most important part of the lectures, however, is his discussion of the growth of Shakespeare's mind and art, a study made possible by recent publications of the New Shakespeare Society.

Lanier never wrote any more vigorous or eloquent prose than these chapters, although it must be said that he makes too much of the dramatist's personality as revealed in his plays. Two pa.s.sages are quoted to indicate in the first place the standpoint from which he studied the plays, and in the second place to show his conception of the moral height attained by Shakespeare as compared with contemporary dramatists: --

"The keenest scholarship, the freest discussion, the widest search for external evidence, the most careful checking of conclusions by the Metrical Tests one after another, have all been applied to establish this general succession in time of these three plays;*

and it is not in the least necessary to commit ourselves to the exact years here given in order to feel sure that these three plays represent three perfectly distinct epochs, separated from each other by several years, in Shakspere's spiritual existence. . . .

-- * The 'Midsummer Night's Dream', 'Hamlet', and 'The Tempest'.

"In short, the young eye already sees the twist and cross of life, but sees it as in a dream: and those of you who are old enough to look back upon your own young dream of life will recognize instantly that the dream is the only term which represents that unspeakable SEEING of things, without in the least REALIZING them, which brings about that the youth admits all we tell -- we older ones -- about life and the future, and, admitting it fully, nevertheless goes on right in the face of it to ACT just as if he knew nothing of it. In short, he sees as in a dream.

It is the Dream Period. But here suddenly the dream is done, the real pinches the young dreamer and he awakes. This, too, is typical.

Every man remembers the time in his own life, somewhere from near thirty to forty, when the actual oppositions of life came out before him and refused to be danced over and stared him grimly in the face: G.o.d or no G.o.d, faith or no faith, death or no death, honesty or policy, men good or men evil, the Church holy or the Church a fraud, life worth living or life not worth living, -- this, I say, is the shock of the real, this is the Hamlet period in every man's life.

"And finally, -- to finish this outline, -- just as the man settles all these questions shocked upon him by the real, will be his Ideal Period.

If he finds that the proper management of these grim oppositions of life is by goodness, by humility, by love, by the fatherly care of a Prospero for his daughter Miranda, by the human tenderness of a Prospero finding all his enemies in his power and forgiving their bitter injuries and practicing his art to right the wrongs of men and to bring all evil beginnings to happy issues, then his Ideal Period is fitly represented by this heavenly play, in which, as you recall its plot, you recognize all these elements. Shakspere has unquestionably emerged from the cold, paralyzing doubts of Hamlet into the human tenderness and perfect love and faith of 'The Tempest', a faith which can look clearly upon all the wretched crimes and follies of the crew of time, and still be tender and loving and faithful. In short, he has learned to manage the Hamlet antagonisms, to adjust the moral oppositions, with the same artistic sense of proportion with which we saw him managing and adjusting the verse-oppositions and the figure-oppositions."*

-- * 'Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. ii, p. 260.

"Surely the genius which in the heat and struggle of ideal creation has the enormous control and temperance to arrange and adjust in harmonious proportions all these aesthetic antagonisms of verse, surely that is the same genius which in the heat and battle of life will arrange the moral antagonisms with similar self-control and temperance.

Surely there is a point of technic to which the merely clever artist may reach, but beyond which he may never go, for lack of moral insight; surely your Robert Greene, your Kit Marlowe, your Tom Nash, clever poets all, may write clever verses and arrange clever dramas; but if we look at their own flippant lives and pitiful deaths and their small ideals in their dramas, and compare them, technic for technic, life for life, morality for morality, with this majestic Shakspere, who starts in a dream, who presently encounters the real, who after a while conquers it to its proper place (for Shakspere, mind you, does not forget the real; he will not be a beggar nor a starveling; we have doc.u.ments which show how he made money, how he bought land at Stratford; we have Richard Quincy's letter to 'my lovveinge good frend and contreyman Mr. Wm. Shakspere, deliver thees,' asking the loan of thirty pounds 'uppon Mr. Bush.e.l.ls and my securytee,' showing that Shakspere had money to lend), and finally turns it into the ideal in 'The Tempest'; if we compare, I say, Greene, Marlowe, Nash, with Shakspere, surely the latter is a whole heaven above them in the music of his verse, as well as in the temperance and prudence of his life, as well also as in the superb height of his later moral ideals. Surely, in fine, there is a point of mere technic in art beyond which nothing but moral greatness can attain, because it is at this point that the moral range, the religious fervor, the true seership and prophethood of the poet, come in and lift him to higher views of all things."*

-- * 'Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. ii, p. 324.

Lanier frequently indulged in little homilies, -- "preachments"

Thackeray would call them. They were lectures on life as well as on literature in its more technical sense. Two pa.s.sages indicate a poet's feeling for nature, especially his love of trees: --

"But besides the phase of Nature-communion which we call physical science, there is the other, artistic phase. Day by day we find that the mystic influence of Nature on our human personality grows more intense and individual. Who can walk alone in your beautiful Druid Hill Park, among those dear and companionable oaks, without a certain sense of being in the midst of a sweet and n.o.ble company of friends? Who has not shivered, wandering among these trees, with a certain sense that the awful mysteries which the mother earth has brought with her out of the primal times are being sucked up through those tree-roots and poured upon us out of branch and leaf in vague showers of suggestions that have no words in any language?

Who, in some day when life has seemed TOO bitter, when man has seemed too vile, when the world has seemed all old leather and bra.s.s, when some new twist of life has seemed to wrench the soul beyond all straightening, -- who has not flown, at such a time, to the deep woods, and leaned against a tree, and felt his big arms outspread like the arms of the preacher that teaches and blesses, and slowly absorbed his large influences, and so recovered one's self as to one's fellow-men, and gained repose from the ministrations of the Oak and the Pine?"*

-- * 'Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. i, p. 72.

"In the sweet old stories of ascetics who by living pure and simple lives in the woods came to understand the secrets of Nature, the conversation of trees, the talk of birds, do we not find but the shadows of this modern communion with Nature to keep ourselves simple and pure, to cultivate our moral sense up to that point of insight that we see all Nature alive with energy, that we hear the whole earth singing like a flock of birds, yet so that we remember Death with Mr. Darwin, so that nothing is any more commonplace, so that death has its place and life its place, so that even a hasty business walk along the street to pay a bill is a walk in fairyland amidst unutterable wonders as long as the sky is above and the trees in sight, -- in other words, to be natural . . . natural in our art, natural in our dress, natural in our behavior, natural in our affections, -- is not that a modern consummation of culture? For to him who rightly understands Nature she is even more than Ariel and Ceres to Prospero; she is more than a servant conquered like Caliban, to fetch wood for us: she is a friend and comforter; and to that man the cares of the world are but a fabulous 'Midsummer Night's Dream', to smile at -- he is ever in sight of the morning and in hand-reach of G.o.d."*

-- * 'Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. i, p. 73.

The lectures close, as they began, with an estimate of the value of the poet to the world and with a word of greeting to his audience: --

"Just as our little spheres of activity in life surely combine into some greater form or purpose which none of us dream of, and which no one can see save some unearthly spectator that stands afar off in s.p.a.ce and looks upon the whole of things, -- I was impressed anew with the fact that it is the poet who must get up to this point and stand off in thought at the great distance of the ideal, look upon the complex swarm of purposes as upon these dancing gnats, and find out for man the final form and purpose of man's life. In short, -- and here I am ending this course with the idea with which I began it, -- in short, it is the poet who must sit at the centre of things here, as surely as some great One sits at the centre of things Yonder, and who must teach us how to control, with temperance and perfect art and unforgetfulness of detail, all our oppositions, so that we may come to say with Aristotle, at last, that poetry is more philosophical than philosophy and more historical than history.

"Permit me to thank you earnestly for the patience with which you have listened to many details that must have been dry to you; and let me sincerely hope that, whatever may be your oppositions in life, whether of the verse kind or the moral kind, you may pa.s.s, like Shakspere, through these planes of the Dream Period and the Real Period, until you have reached the ideal plane from which you clearly see that wherever Prospero's art and Prospero's love and Prospero's forgiveness of injuries rule in behavior, there a blue sky and a quiet heaven full of sun and stars are shining over every tempest."*

-- * 'Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. ii, p. 328. I have quoted freely from these lectures because they are in a form not easily accessible to the general reader, and because, more than any other of his prose works, they reveal the inner man.

One of the things which enabled Lanier to produce the effect that he did in teaching literature was the fact that he was an excellent reader.

He had a singularly clear and resonant voice and a power to enter so into the spirit of a work of art that he had no trouble in keeping a large audience thoroughly interested. The following account by one of his hearers, written a short time after his death, gives the effect produced by his readings: --

"Mr. Lanier did not lay claim to any extraordinary power as a reader; indeed, he once, when first requested to instruct a cla.s.s of ladies in poetic lore, modestly demurred, on the ground of his inability to read aloud. 'I cannot read,' he said simply; 'I have never tried.'

All, however, who afterwards heard him read such scenes from Shakespeare as he selected to ill.u.s.trate his lectures were thrilled by his vivid realization of that great dramatist. His voice, though distinct, was never elevated above a moderate tone; he rarely made use of a gesture; certainly, there was no approach to action or to the adaptation of his voice to the varied characters of the play; yet many scenes which I have heard him read, I can hardly believe that I have never seen produced on the stage, so truly and vividly did he succeed in presenting them to my imagination. At the time I used to wonder in what element lay the charm. Partly, of course, in his own profound appreciation of the author's meaning, partly also in his clear and correct emphasis, but most of all in the wonderful word-painting with which, by a few masterly strokes, he placed the whole scene before the mental vision.

In theatrical representation, a man with a bush of thorn and lantern must 'present moonshine' and another, with a bit of plaster, the wall which divides Pyramus from his Thisbe; but in Mr. Lanier's readings, a poet's quick imagination brought forth in full perfection all the accessories of the play. When he read, in the Johns Hopkins lecture hall, that scene from 'Pericles' in which Cerimon restores Thaisa's apparently lifeless body to animation, a large audience listened with breathless attention. His graphic comments caused the whole rapidly moving scene to engrave itself on the memory."*

-- * Letter of Mrs. Arthur W. Machen to the author.

Such readings and lectures are treasured in the minds of those who heard them.

In addition to his work at the Peabody Inst.i.tute Lanier taught in various schools, and so extended his influence. It is easy to overstate the good he accomplished, but it is within bounds to say that his efforts to develop the culture life of the city bore fruit, and that he has his place among those who have contributed to the new Baltimore. He shared in all the advantages made possible by the philanthropy of George Peabody and Johns Hopkins, and in such aesthetic influences as the Allston Art a.s.sociation and the Walters collection of French and Spanish pictures. In turn he promoted a love of music and poetry. The successive invasions of Baltimore by people from New England, Virginia, and Georgia had added a cosmopolitan and cultured society. By a wide circle Lanier was much beloved. His admiration for the city and his ideals for its future are well expressed in his "Ode to the Johns Hopkins University": --

And here, O finer Pallas, long remain, -- Sit on these Maryland hills, and fix thy reign, And frame a fairer Athens than of yore In these blest bounds of Baltimore. . . .

Yea, make all ages native to our time, Till thou the freedom of the city grant To each most antique habitant Of Fame, -- . . .

And many peoples call from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e, 'The world has bloomed again at Baltimore!'