A Biography of Sidney Lanier Part 8

This, too, is a n.o.ble quality which your a.s.sociation tends to keep alive.

Who in all the world needs tranquillity more than we?

I know not a deeper question in our Southern life at this present time, than how we shall bear our load of wrong and injury with the calmness and tranquil dignity that become men and women who would be great in misfortune; and believe me, I know not where we will draw deeper inspirations of calm strength for this great emergency than in this place where we now stand, in the midst of departed heroes who fought against these things to death. Why, yonder lies my brave, brilliant friend, Lamar; and yonder, genial Robert Smith; and yonder, generous Tracy, -- gallant men, all, good knights and stainless gentlemen.

How calmly they sleep in the midst of it! Unto this calmness shall we come, at last. If so, why should we disquiet our souls for the petty stings of our conquerors? There comes a time when conqueror and conquered shall alike descend into the grave.

In that time, O my countrymen, in that time the conqueror shall be ashamed of his lash, and the conquered shall be proud of his calm endurance; in that time the conqueror shall hide his face, and the conquered shall lift his head with an exultation in his tranquil fort.i.tude which G.o.d shall surely pardon!

"For the contemplation of this tranquillity, my friends of this a.s.sociation, in the name of a land stung half to madness, I thank you.

"To-day we are here for love and not for hate. To-day we are here for harmony and not for discord. To-day we are risen immeasurably above all vengeance. To-day, standing upon the serene heights of forgiveness, our souls choir together the enchanting music of harmonious Christian civilization.

To-day we will not disturb the peaceful slumbers of these sleepers with music less sweet than the serenade of loving remembrances, breathing upon our hearts as the winds of heaven breathe upon these swaying leaves above us."

Lanier did not abandon altogether his ideal of doing literary work.

He was much encouraged at this time by a sympathetic correspondence with Paul Hamilton Hayne, who, after the Civil War, had settled in a little cottage near Augusta. His beautiful home in Charleston had been burned to the ground and his large, handsome library utterly lost.

With heroic spirit at a time when, as Lanier said of him, "the war of secession had left the South in a condition which appeared to render an exclusively literary life a hopeless impossibility, he immured himself in the woods of Georgia and gave himself wholly to his pen." When Simms visited him here in 1866, the poet had for supplies "a box of hard tack, two sides of bacon, and fourscore, more or less, of smoked herring, a frying-pan and a grid-iron." He and his wife lived as simply as the Hawthornes did in the Old Manse. His writing desk was a carpenter's work-bench. He wrote continually for the magazines, corresponded with the poets of England and New England, received visitors, with whom he talked about the old days in Charleston when he and Timrod and Simms had projected "Russell's Magazine", and held out to young Southern writers the encouragement of an older brother.

It was this man who, at a critical time in Lanier's life, inspired him to believe that he might succeed in a literary career.

"I have had constantly in mind the kindly help and encouragement which your cheering words used to bring me when I was even more obscure than I am now," wrote the younger poet at a later time.

He did not have time, however, to act on this encouragement.

He wrote now and then a dialect poem which was printed in the Georgia dailies and attracted attention by its humor and its insight into contemporary life, and occasionally an exquisite lyric like "Nirvana".

In the main he had to say: --

"I have not put pen to paper in a literary way in a long time.

How I thirst to do so, -- how I long to sing a thousand various songs that oppress me, unsung, -- is inexpressible. Yet the mere work that brings me bread gives me no time. I know not, after all, if this is a sorrowful thing. n.o.body likes my poems except two or three friends, -- who are themselves poets, and can supply themselves!" And yet he writes, "It gives me great encouragement that you think I might succeed in the literary life; for I take it that you are in earnest in saying so, believing that you love Art with too genuine affection to trifle with her by bringing to her service, through mere politeness, an unworthy worker."*

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

Hayne was impressed with Lanier's intimate knowledge of Elizabethan and older English literature, as displayed in his letters of this period.

He says: --

"He had steeped his imagination from boyhood in the writings of the earlier English annalists and poets, -- Geoffrey of Monmouth, Sir Thomas Malory, Gower, Chaucer, and the whole bead-roll of such ancient English worthies.

I was of course a little surprised during our earlier epistolary communion to perceive, not only his unusually thorough knowledge of Chaucer, for example, whose couplets flowed as trippingly from his pen as if 'The Canterbury Tales' and 'The Romaunt of the Rose'

were his daily mental food, but to find him quoting as naturally and easily from 'Piers Plowman' and scores of the half-obsolete ballads of the English and Scottish borders.

"He gloried in antiquarian lore and antiquarian literature.

Hardly 'Old Monkbarns' himself could have pored over a black-letter volume with greater enthusiasm. Especially he loved the tales of chivalry, and thus, when the opportunity came, was fully equipped as an interpreter of Froissart and 'King Arthur' for the benefit of our younger generation of students. With the great Elizabethans Lanier was equally familiar. Instead of skimming Shakespeare, he went down into his depths. Few have written so subtly of Shakespeare's mysterious sonnets. Through all Lanier's productions we trace the influence of his early literary loves; but nowhere do the pithy quaintnesses of the old bards and chroniclers display themselves more effectively -- not only in the ill.u.s.trations, but through the innermost warp and woof of the texture of his ideas and his style -- than in some of his familiar epistles."*

-- * 'Letters', p. 220.

That Lanier kept in touch, too, with contemporary literature is shown by an acute criticism of Browning's "The Ring and the Book", then recently published: "Have you seen Browning's 'The Ring and the Book'?

I am confident that, at the birth of this man, among all the good fairies who showered him with magnificent endowments, one bad one -- as in the old tale -- crept in by stealth and gave him a const.i.tutional twist i' the neck, whereby his windpipe became, and has ever since remained, a marvelous tortuous pa.s.sage.

Out of this glottis-labyrinth his words won't, and can't, come straight.

A hitch and a sharp crook in every sentence bring you up with a shock.

But what a shock it is! Did you ever see a picture of a la.s.so, in the act of being flung? In a thousand coils and turns, inextricably crooked and involved and whirled, yet, if you mark the noose at the end, you see that it is directly in front of the bison's head, there, and is bound to catch him! That is the way Robert Browning catches you.

The first sixty or seventy pages of 'The Ring and the Book'

are altogether the most doleful reading, in point either of idea or of music, in the English language; and yet the monologue of Giuseppe Caponsacchi, that of Pompilia Comparini, and the two of Guido Franceschini, are unapproachable, in their kind, by any living or dead poet, 'me judice'.

Here Browning's jerkiness comes in with inevitable effect.

You get lightning glimpses -- and, as one naturally expects from lightning, zigzag glimpses -- into the intense night of the pa.s.sion of these souls.

It is entirely wonderful and without precedent. The fitful play of Guido's l.u.s.t, and scorn, and hate, and cowardice, closes with a master stroke: --

"Christ! Maria! G.o.d! . . .

POMPILIA, WILL YOU LET THEM MURDER ME?

"Pompilia, mark you, is dead, by Guido's own hand; deliberately stabbed, because he hated her purity, which all along he has reviled and mocked with the Devil's own malignant ingenuity of sarcasm."*

-- * 'Letters', p. 206; letter to Hayne, April 13, 1870.

On account of ill health Lanier frequently had to leave Macon and go to places better suited to his physical temperament. At Brunswick, Georgia, -- the scene of the Marsh poems, -- at Alleghany Springs in Virginia, and at Lookout Mountain in Tennessee, he spent successive summers.

In all of these places he reveled in the beauty and grandeur of the scenery.

His letters written to his wife and his father during his absences from Macon are evidence that he was at this time developing steadily in that subtle appreciation of nature which was afterwards to play such an important part in his poetry. In fact, the letters themselves, when published, as they will be some time, show artistic growth when compared with the writings already noted. He was all his life a prolific letter-writer -- and a great one. Writing from Alleghany Springs, July 12, 1872, he says to his wife: --

"How necessary is it that one should occasionally place oneself in the midst of those more striking forms of nature in which G.o.d has indulged His fantasy! It is very true that the flat land, the bare hillside, the muddy stream comes also directly from the creative hand: but these do not bring one into the sweetness of the heartier moods of G.o.d; in the midst of them it is as if one were transacting the business of life with G.o.d: whereas, when one has but to lift one's eyes in order to receive the exquisite shocks of thrilling form and color and motion that leap invisibly from mountain and groves and stream, then one feels as if one had surprised the Father in his tender, sportive, and loving moments.

"To the soul then, weak with the long flesh fight and filled with a sluggish languor by those wearisome disappointments which arise from the constant contemplation of men's weaknesses, and from the constant back-thrusting of one's consciousness of impotence to strengthen them -- thou, with thy nimble fancy, canst imagine what ethereal and yet indestructible essences of new dignity, of new strength, of new patience, of new serenity, of new hope, new faith, and new love, do continually flash out of the gorges, the mountains, and the streams, into the heart, and charge it, as the lightnings charge the earth, with subtle and heavenly fires.

"A bewildering sorcery seems to spread itself over even those things which are commonplace. The songs and cries of birds acquire a strange sound to me: I cannot understand the little spontaneous tongues, the quivering throats, the open beaks, the small bright eyes that gleam with unknown emotion, the nimble capricious heads that twist this way and that with such bizarre unreasonableness.

"Nor do I fathom this long unceasing monotone of the little shallow river that sings yonder over the rocks in its bosom as a mother crooning over her children; it is but one word the stream utters: but as when we speak a well-known word over and over again until it comes to have a frightful mystery in it, so this familiar stream-sound fills me with indescribable wonder.

"Nor do I comprehend the eloquence of the mountains which comes in a strange 'patois' of two tongues; for the mountains speak at once the languages of repose and of convulsion, two languages which have naught in common.

"Wondering therefore, from day to night, with a good wonder which directs attention not to one's ignorance but to G.o.d's wisdom, stricken, but not exhausted, by continual tranquil surprises; surrounded by a world of enchantments which, so far from being elusive, are the most substantial of realties, -- thou knowest that nature is kind to me."

He went to New York in 1869, 1870, and 1871, now on business and now to consult medical experts. In May, 1869, we find him trying to make the sale of some property on which iron was supposed to be.

He writes his father that he has been down on Wall Street all day.

There is -- now as compared with his 1867 visit -- a certain fascination for him in the intense spirit of hurry which displays itself on every side.

He finds himself in compet.i.tion with many Southerners who were at that time projecting similar enterprises. He is also visiting the clients of Lanier and Anderson, and is anxious to extend the firm's name.

He is given much social attention, -- "teas, dinners, calls, visits, business" consume his time. He visits the superb villa of his cousin on the Hudson near Poughkeepsie. He writes, on May 15, that he is beginning "to feel entirely unflurried in the crowd and to go about business deliberately." He is in New York again in 1871, when the Tweed ring is being exposed, and he cannot but compare the situation there with the reconstruction government that prevails in his own State. "Somehow this isn't a good day for thieves," he says.

"Wouldn't it be a curious and refreshing phenomenon if Tweed, Hall, Bullock,* and that ilk should all continue in the service of the State -- only changing the scene of their labors from the office to the penitentiary?"

-- * Governor of Georgia during reconstruction days.

Most of all, however, Lanier was interested in the music which he heard on these trips to the metropolis. He had kept up his flute-playing while busy with his law work, frequently playing at charity concerts in Macon and other cities of Georgia. In New York he reveled in the singing of Nilsson, in religious music at St. Paul's Church, but above all in Theodore Thomas's orchestra, then just beginning its triumphant career. He writes, August 15, 1870: "Ah, how they have belied Wagner! I heard Theodore Thomas's orchestra play his overture to 'Tannhaeuser'. The 'Music of the Future' is surely thy music and my music. Each harmony was a chorus of pure aspirations.

The sequences flowed along, one after another, as if all the great and n.o.ble deeds of time had formed a procession and marched in review before one's EARS instead of one's EYES. These 'great and n.o.ble deeds'

were not deeds of war and statesmanship, but majestic victories of inner struggles of a man. This unbroken march of beautiful-bodied Triumphs irresistibly invites the soul of a man to create other processions like it.

I would I might lead a so magnificent file of glories into heaven!"*

-- * 'Letters', p. 68.

And again, in 1871: "And to-night I come out of what might have been heaven. . . .

"'T was opening night of Theodore Thomas's orchestra, at Central Park Garden, and I could not resist the temptation to go and bathe in the sweet amber seas of the music of this fine orchestra, and so I went, and tugged me through a vast crowd, and, after standing some while, found a seat, and the baton tapped and waved, and I plunged into the sea, and lay and floated. Ah! the dear flutes and oboes and horns drifted me hither and thither, and the great violins and small violins swayed me upon waves, and overflowed me with strong lavations, and sprinkled glistening foam in my face, and in among the clarinetti, as among waving water-lilies with flexile stems, I pushed my easy way, and so, even lying in the music-waters, I floated and flowed, my soul utterly bent and prostrate."*

-- * 'Letters', p. 70.