A Biography of Sidney Lanier Part 6

Indeed, the book which I commenced to write in 1863 and have touched at intervals until now, represents in its change of style almost precisely the change of tone which has gradually been taking place in me all the time.

So much so, that it has become highly interesting to me: I seem to see portions of my old self, otherwise forgotten, here preserved."

The note sounded in the preface is characteristic. He professes "a love, strong as it is humble, for what is beautiful in G.o.d's Nature and in man's Art." He utters a plea against "the horrible piquancies of quaint crimes and of white-handed criminals, with which so many books have recently stimulated the pruriency of men; and begs that the following pages may be judged only as registering a faint cry, sent from a region where there are few artists to happier lands that own many; calling on these last for more sunshine and less night in their art, more virtuous women and fewer Lydian Guelts, more household sweetness and less Bohemian despair, clearer chords and fewer suspensions, broader quiet skies and shorter grotesque storms; since there are those, even here in the South, who still love beautiful things with sincere pa.s.sion."

The story may be briefly indicated. The background of the first book is, as has been seen, the mountain scenery of East Tennessee.

A party of hunters -- including Philip Sterling and Paul Ruebetsahl, two young transcendentalists -- are on a stand waiting for deer.

Philip Sterling -- with "large gray poet's eyes, with a dream in each and a sparkle behind it" -- is living in the mountains with his father John Sterling and his sister Felix -- their home a veritable palace of art. Ruebetsahl is from Frankfort, Germany, whence he brings an enthusiasm for music and philosophy, into which he inducts his newly found friends. Another companion is John Cranston, a Northerner who had also lived in Frankfort, where he had often been compared to Goethe in his youth.

He had Lucifer eyes, he spoke French and German; he "walked like a young G.o.d, he played people mad with his violin." These lovers of music and poetry furnish much amus.e.m.e.nt to the native mountaineers, one of whom, Cain Smallin, becomes one of the prominent characters in the latter part of the book. It is worthy of note that in this character and his brother, who turns out to be a villain, Lanier antic.i.p.ated some of the sketches by Charles Egbert Craddock.

The merry party of hunters retire to Sterling's house, where they enjoy the blessings of good friendship and of music and high thought.

They, with other friends from all parts of the South, plan a masquerade party, in which they represent the various characters of Shakespeare's plays and the knights of the Round Table.

After a scene of much merriment and good humor, Cranston and Ruebetsahl fight a duel -- both of them being in love with Felix Sterling, each knowing the other's history at Frankfort. In the mean time Ottilie with her maid comes from Germany to Chilhowee.

She was formerly the lover of Ruebetsahl, and was betrayed by Cranston.

She becomes identified with the Sterling family, she herself being a musician, and naturally finding her place among these music-loving people.

The first book is filled with "high talk" on music, poetry, philosophy, and nature. These conversations and masquerade parties, however, are interrupted by war. The author omits the breaking out of the war and the first three years of it. The action is resumed at Burwell's Bay, where we meet the hero again with "a light rifle on his shoulder, with a good horse bounding along under him, with a fresh breeze that had in it the vigor of the salt sea and the caressing sweetness of the spring blowing upon him." With him are "five friends, tried in the tempests of war, as well as by the sterner tests of the calm a.s.sociation of inactive camp life." The story here is strictly autobiographical, and is filled with some stirring incidents taken from Lanier's life as a scout.

Perhaps the most striking scene in the book is the one in which Cain Smallin finds out that his brother is a deserter. Never did Lanier come so near creating a scene of real dramatic power.* "We was poor.

We ain't never had much to live on but our name, which it was as good as gold.

And now it ain't no better'n rusty copper; hit'll be green and pisenous.

An' whose done it? Gorm Smallin! My own brother, Gorm Smallin!"

When he finds his brother he says to him: "Ef ye had been killed in a fa'r battle, I mought ha' been able to fight hard enough for both of us; for every time I cried a-thinkin' of you, I'd ha' been twice as strong, an' twice as clear-sighted as I was buffore. But -- sich things as these burns me an' weakens me and hurts my eyes that bad that I kin scarcely look a man straight furard in the face. Hit don't make much difference to me now whether we whips the Yanks or they whips us. . . .

We is kin to a deserter! . . . I cain't shoot ye hardly.

The same uns raised us and fed us. I cain't do it; an' I am sorry I cain't."

He then makes him swear a vow: "G.o.d A'mighty's a-lookin at you out o' the stars yon, an' he's a-listenin' at you out o' the sand here, and he won't git tired by mornin'."

-- * Part ii, chapter vi.

The coming of gunboats up the river scatters the party in all directions, some to prison and others to the final scenes around Richmond, with the burning of which the story closes, not, however, before the palace in the mountains -- where John Sterling and his wife, Felix and Ottilie, have spent the intervening time -- is set fire to by Gorm Smallin. The story is scarcely significant enough to follow all the threads.

"Tiger Lilies" has the same place in Lanier's life that "Hyperion" has in Longfellow's. They are both failures as novels or romances, but they are valuable as autobiographies. Instead of laying the scene in Germany, which he had never seen and yet yearned for, Lanier brings Germany to America. There are long disquisitions on the place of music and science in the modern world, many crude fancies, some striking descriptions of nature, some of which have already been quoted.

Above all, there is Lanier's idea of what a musician or a poet ought to be, -- a study, therefore, of himself.

Perhaps the best single pa.s.sage on music is that describing Phil's playing of the flute. "It is like walking in the woods, amongst wild flowers, just before you go into some vast cathedral.

For the flute seems to me to be peculiarly the woods-instrument: it speaks the gloss of green leaves or the pathos of bare branches; it calls up the strange mosses that are under dead leaves; it breathes of wild plants that hide and oak fragrances that vanish; it expresses to me the natural magic of music. Have you ever walked on long afternoons in warm, sunny spots of the woods, and felt a sudden thrill strike you with the half fear that a ghost would rise out of the sedge, or dart from behind the next tree, and confront you?"*

-- * 'Tiger Lilies', p. 28.

Two pa.s.sages may be cited to show the author's tendency to use personifications and his insight into the "burthen of the mystery of all this unintelligible world": --

"A terrible melee of winged opposites is forever filling the world with a battle din which only observant souls hear: Love contending with Impurity; Pa.s.sion springing mines under the calm entrenchment of Reason; scowling Ignorance thrusting in the dark at holy-eyed Reverence; Romance deathfully encountering Sentimentality on the one side and Commonplace on the other; young Sensibility clanging swords with gigantic maudlin Conventionalities. . . . I have seen no man who did not suffer from the shock of these wars, unless he got help from that One Man whom it is not unmanly to acknowledge our superior."*

-- * 'Tiger Lilies', p. 41.

"Nature has no politics. She'll grow a rose as well for York as Lancaster, and mayhap beat both down next minute with a storm!

"She has no heart; else she never had rained on Lear's head.

"She has no eyes; for, seeing, she could never have drowned that dainty girl, Ophelia.

"She has no ears; or she would hear the wild Sabian hymns to Night and prayers to Day that men are uttering evermore.

"O blind, deaf, no-hearted Beauty, we cannot woo thee, for thou silently contemnest us; we cannot force thee, for thou art stronger than we; we cannot compromise with thee, for thou art treacherous as thy seas; what shall we do, we, unhappy, that love thee, coquette Nature?"*

-- * 'Tiger Lilies', p. 178.

When "Tiger Lilies" appeared it was very favorably received.

Lanier writes to his brother of the "continual heavy showers of compliment and congratulation" that he has received in Macon; that the Macon paper had an editorial on his novel, and that a book firm in the town had already disposed of a large number of copies.

Writing to Northrup, March 8, 1868, he says: "My book has been as well received as a young author could have expected on his first plunge, and I have seen few criticisms upon it which are not on the whole favorable.

My publishers have just made me an offer to bring out a second edition on very fair terms; from which I infer that the sale of the article is progressing."* At twenty-five, then, he was recognized as one of the promising writers of the South; a biographical article referring to his recent success, the "Tiger Lilies", was written by J. Wood Davidson for his "Living Writers of the South", which appeared in 1869, and his name was sought by ambitious editors of mushroom magazines that sprang up in abundance after the war.

-- * There was never a second edition, however.

Lanier was not destined, however, to begin his literary career as yet, nor was the South to have such an easy way out of her disaster as he had hoped. He had made only one reference to politics in his romance, and that was his manly utterance in behalf of Jefferson Davis, who was then confined in prison under rather disagreeable circ.u.mstances at Fortress Monroe. He said, "If there was guilt in any, there was guilt in nigh all of us, between Maryland and Mexico; Mr. Davis, if he be termed the ringleader of the Rebellion, was so, not by virtue of any instigating act of his, but purely by the unanimous will and appointment of the Southern people; and the hearts of the Southern people bleed to see how their own act has resulted in the chaining of Mr. Davis, who was as innocent as they, and in the pardon of those who were guilty as he."

The Davis incident was an indication that forces other than those which one might have hoped to see were in the air. By the fall of 1867 the reaction against the magnanimous policy of Lincoln had come in the North.

Reconstruction governments were being inaugurated throughout the South.

This was due in part to the lack of wisdom displayed by Southern legislatures under the Johnson governments, -- a "disposition on the part of the Southern States to claim rights instead of submitting to conditions,"

and harsh laws of Southern legislatures concerning the freedmen.

It must be confessed that the extreme men of the South were in some localities as rash, unreasonable, and impracticable as the radicals of the North.

The magnanimous spirit of Lincoln and the heroic, chivalric spirit of Lee could not prevail in the two sections; hence followed a direful period in American history. As E. L. G.o.dkin said, "That the chapter which tells the story of reconstruction should have followed in American history the chapter which tells the story of the war and emanc.i.p.ation, is something over which many a generation will blush."

Again it must be said, as was said of the effect of the war on the South, that reconstruction was something more than excessive taxation, grinding and unjust as that was, something more than the fear of black domination, as unthinkable as that is.

There was the uncertainty of the situation, the sense of despair that rankled in the hearts of men, with the knowledge that nothing the South could do could have any influence in deciding its fate. It was the closing of inst.i.tutions of learning, or running them under such circ.u.mstances that the better element of the South could have nothing to do with them.

Lanier, writing about a position in the University of Alabama which he very much desired, said: "The trustees, who are appointees of the State, are so hampered by the expected change of State government that nothing can be certainly predicated as to their action."

Lanier felt the effect of reconstruction at every point, -- he was baptized with the baptism of the Southern people.

The weight of that sad time bore heavily upon him. As he had during the war touched the experience of his people at every point, so now he went down with them into the Valley of Humiliation.

Under these circ.u.mstances his friend Northrup wrote him, inviting him to go to Germany with him. He replied: "Indeed, indeed, y'r trip-to-Europe invitation finds me all THIRSTY to go with you; but, alas, how little do you know of our wretched poverties and distresses here, -- that you ask me such a thing. . . .

It spoils our dreams of Germany, ruthlessly. I've been presiding over eighty-six scholars, in a large Academy at Prattville, Ala., having two a.s.sistants under me; 't is terrible work, and the labor difficulties, with the recent poor price of cotton, conspire to make the pay very slim. I think y'r people can have no idea of the slow terrors with which this winter has invested our life in the South. Some time I'm going to give you a few simple details, which you must publish in your paper."

Prattville, where he spent the winter of 1867-68, was a small manufacturing town, with all the crudeness of a new industrial order and without any of the refinement to which Lanier had been accustomed in Macon and elsewhere. Perhaps there was never a time when drudgery so weighed upon him, although his usual playfulness is seen in the remark: "There is but one man in my school who could lick me in a fair fight, and he thinks me at once a Samson and a Solomon." He worked for people who thought that he was defrauding them if he did not work from "sun up to sun down", as one of his patrons expressed it.

It was here, too, that he suffered from his first hemorrhages.

His poetry written at this time was an expression of the despair which prevailed throughout the South. He whom the Civil War had not inspired to speech, and who had kept silent under the suffering of the days after the war, now gave expression to his disgust and his indignation.

It is not great poetry, for Lanier was not adapted to that kind of poetry, and consequently neither he nor his wife ever collected all the poems.

"Laughter in the Senate", published in the "Round Table", is typical of a group, several of which he left in an old ledger: --

Comes now the Peace, so long delayed?

Is it the cheerful voice of aid?

Begins the time, his heart has prayed, When men may reap and sow?

Ah, G.o.d! back to the cold earth's breast!

The sages chuckle o'er their jest!

Must they, to give a people rest, Their dainty wit forego?