A Biography of Sidney Lanier Part 26

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 circ.u.mstances, 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 pa.s.sed 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 pa.s.sage.

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 cla.s.sics 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 embarra.s.sment 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 Gra.s.s'

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 Gra.s.s' 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 Sh.e.l.ley: "In truth, Sh.e.l.ley 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 un.o.bstructed 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 G.o.d 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 a.n.a.lytical, . . . 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 pa.s.sions 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 t.i.tle for many of his pa.s.sages. There was nothing of indifferentism in him.

In a letter to Gibson Peac.o.c.k 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 a.n.a.logous 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 pa.s.sages his conception of the mission of poetry, -- pa.s.sages that are in the line of succession of defenses of poetry by Sidney, Hazlitt, and Sh.e.l.ley.

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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sages on Anglo-Saxon poetry and the Elizabethan sonneteers, and the finer pa.s.sages 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" ent.i.tles 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 const.i.tute the whole outfit."

In many other pa.s.sages 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 circ.u.mstance 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 quant.i.ty, however, is different from the rigid laws of cla.s.sic quant.i.ty, 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 ma.s.s 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 j.a.panese 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.