Select Poems of Sidney Lanier Part 6

"Each artist -- gift of terror! -- owns his will."*2*

But he accepts the responsibility reverently and confidently:

"I work in freedom wild, But work, as plays a little child, Sure of the Father, Self, and Love, alone."*3*

-- *1* 'Individuality', l. 62.

*2* 'Individuality', l. 76.

*3* 'Individuality', ll. 89-91.

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Again, the province of poetry is pointed out, as in 'Clover':

"The artist's market is the heart of man; The artist's price, some little good of man;"*1*

and in 'The Bee':

"Wilt ask, 'What profit e'er a poet brings?'

He beareth starry stuff about his wings To pollen thee and sting thee fertile."*2*

In 'Corn',*3* too, the "tall corn-captain" "types the poet-soul sublime."

-- *1* 'Clover', ll. 126-127.

*2* 'The Bee', ll. 40-42.

*3* 'Corn', l. 52 ff.

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But it is in his prose works that Lanier has treated the matter most at length, and to these I turn. In the first place, he insists that to be an artist one must know a great deal, a statement that would appear superfluous but for its frequent overlooking by would-be artists. Hence he is right in warning young writers: "You need not dream of winning the attention of sober people with your poetry unless that poetry and your soul behind it are informed and saturated with at least the largest final conceptions of current science."*

That Lanier strove to follow this precept, we have abundant evidence in his life and in his works; and I think that, if we remember his environments, we must wonder at the vastness, the accuracy, and the variety of his knowledge. As additionally ill.u.s.trative of the last, I may add that Lanier invented some improvements for the flute, and made a discovery in the physics of music that the Professor of Physics in the University of Virginia thought considerable.**

-- * 'Gates', p. 29.

** See 'West', p. 23.

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In the second place, Lanier thinks that a poet's knowledge of his art should be scientific. It was this that led him to write 'The Science of English Verse', the motto of which is, "But the best conceptions cannot be, save where science and genius are."

In 'The English Novel' he declares that "not a single verse was ever written by instinct alone since the world began,"*

and fortifies his statement by Ben Jonson's tribute to Shakespeare, --

"For a good poet's made as well as born, And such wert thou."

But Lanier clearly saw that no formal laws and no amount of scientific knowledge could alone make a poet, as appears from the motto above quoted, from the closing chapter of 'The Science of English Verse', which tells us that the educated love of beauty is the artist's only law, and from this other motto, from Sir Philip Sidney: "A Poet, no industrie can make, if his owne Genius bee not carried unto it."

-- * 'The English Novel', p. 33.

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In the third place, Lanier holds that a moral intention on the part of an artist does not interfere with the naturalness or intrinsic beauty of his work; that in art the controlling consideration is rather moral than artistic beauty; but that moral beauty and artistic beauty, so far from being distinct or opposed, are convergent and mutually helpful.

This thesis he upholds in the following eloquent and cogent pa.s.sage: "Permit me to recall to you in the first place that the requirement has been from time immemorial that wherever there is contest as between artistic and moral beauty, unless the moral side prevail, all is lost. Let any sculptor hew us out the most ravishing combination of tender curves and spheric softness that ever stood for woman; yet if the lip have a certain fulness that hints of the flesh, if the brow be insincere, if in the minutest particular the physical beauty suggest a moral ugliness, that sculptor -- unless he be portraying a moral ugliness for a moral purpose -- may as well give over his marble for paving-stones. Time, whose judgments are inexorably moral, will not accept his work. For indeed we may say that he who has not yet perceived how artistic beauty and moral beauty are convergent lines which run back into a common ideal origin, and who therefore is not afire with moral beauty just as with artistic beauty -- that he, in short, who has not come to that stage of quiet and eternal frenzy in which the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty mean one thing, burn as one fire, shine as one light, within him; he is not yet the great artist."* By copious quotations Lanier then shows that "many fine and beautiful souls appear after a while to lose all sense of distinction between these terms, Beauty, Truth, Love, Wisdom, Goodness, and the like," and concludes thus: "And if this be true, cannot one say with authority to the young artist, -- whether working in stone, in color, in tones, or in character-forms of the novel: so far from dreading that your moral purpose will interfere with your beautiful creation, go forward in the clear conviction that unless you are suffused -- soul and body, one might say -- with that moral purpose which finds its largest expression in love -- that is, the love of all things in their proper relation -- unless you are suffused with this love, do not dare to meddle with beauty; unless you are suffused with beauty, do not meddle with love; unless you are suffused with truth, do not dare to meddle with goodness; -- in a word, unless you are suffused with beauty, truth, wisdom, goodness, AND love, abandon the hope that the ages will accept you as an artist."**

-- * 'The English Novel', p. 272 f.

** 'The English Novel', p. 280. Of the numerous discussions of this thesis, the student should consult at least those by Matthew Arnold ('Preface' to his edition of 'Wordsworth's Poems'), John Ruskin ('Stones of Venice', vol. iii., chap. iv.), and Victor Hugo ('William Shakespeare', Book VI.).

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VI. Conclusion

Milton has somewhere said that in order to be a great poet one must himself be a true poem, a dictum none the less trustworthy because of its inapplicability to its author along with several other great poets. Now of all English poets, I know of none that came nearer being a true poem than did Lanier.

He was as spotless as "the Lady of Christ's", and infinitely more lovable.

Indeed, he seems to me to have realized the ideal of his own knightly Horn, who hopes that some day men will be "maids in purity".*

I will not recall his gentle yet heroic life amid drawbacks almost unparalleled; for it is even sadder than it is beautiful.

It is my deliberate judgment that, while, as the poet says in his 'Life and Song', no singer has ever wholly lived his minstrelsy, Lanier came so near it that we may fairly say, in the closing lines of the poem,

"His song was only living aloud, His work, a singing with his hand."

And, for my part, I am as grateful for his n.o.ble private life as for his distinguished public work.

-- * 'The Symphony', l. 302.

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And yet I will not close with this picture of the man; for my purpose is rather to present the poet. Hampered though he was by fewness of years, by feebleness of body, by shortness of bread, and, most of all perhaps, by over-luxuriance of imagination, Lanier was yet, to my mind, indisputably a great poet. For in technique he was akin to Tennyson;*

in the love of beauty and in lyric sweetness, to Keats and Sh.e.l.ley; in the love of nature, to Wordsworth; and in spirituality, to Ruskin, the gist of whose teaching is that we are souls temporarily having bodies; to Milton, "G.o.d-gifted organ-voice of England"; and to Browning, "subtlest a.s.sertor of the soul in song". To be sure, Lanier's genius is not equal to that of any one of the poets mentioned, but I venture to believe that it is of the same order, and, therefore, deserving of lasting remembrance.

-- * Mr. Thayer puts it stronger: "As a master of melodious metre only Tennyson, and he not often, has equalled Lanier." Mr. F. F. Browne, Editor of 'The Dial' (Chicago), compares the two poets in another aspect: "'The Symphony' of Lanier may recall some parts of 'Maud'; but the younger poet's treatment is as much his own as the elder's is his own. The comparison of Lanier with Tennyson will, indeed, only deepen the impression of his originality, which is his most striking quality. It may be doubted if any English poet of our time, except Tennyson, has cast his work in an ampler mould, or wrought with more of freedom, or stamped his product with the impress of a stronger personality. His thought, his stand-point, his expression, his form, his treatment, are his alone; and through them all he justifies his right to the t.i.tle of poet."

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Poems

Life and Song

If life were caught by a clarionet, [1]

And a wild heart, throbbing in the reed, Should thrill its joy and trill its fret, And utter its heart in every deed,

Then would this breathing clarionet Type what the poet fain would be; For none o' the singers ever yet Has wholly lived his minstrelsy,

Or clearly sung his true, true thought, Or utterly bodied forth his life, Or out of life and song has wrought [11]

The perfect one of man and wife;