The Poems of Sidney Lanier Part 2

It was indeed irresistible that he should turn with those poetical feelings which transcend language to the penetrating gentleness of the flute, or the infinite pa.s.sion of the violin; for there was an agreement, a spiritual correspondence between his nature and theirs, so that they mutually absorbed and expressed each other.

In his hands the flute no longer remained a mere material instrument, but was transformed into a voice that set heavenly harmonies into vibration.

Its tones developed colors, warmth, and a low sweetness of unspeakable poetry; they were not only true and pure, but poetic, allegoric as it were, suggestive of the depths and heights of being and of the delights which the earthly ear never hears and the earthly eye never sees.

No doubt his firm faith in these lofty idealities gave him the power to present them to our imaginations, and thus by the aid of the higher language of Music to inspire others with that sense of beauty in which he constantly dwelt.

"His conception of music was not reached by an a.n.a.lytic study of note by note, but was intuitive and spontaneous; like a woman's reason: he felt it so, because he felt it so, and his delicate perception required no more logical form of reasoning.

"His playing appealed alike to the musically learned and to the unlearned -- for he would magnetize the listener; but the artist felt in his performance the superiority of the momentary living inspiration to all the rules and s.h.i.+fts of mere technical scholars.h.i.+p.

His art was not only the art of art, but an art above art.

"I will never forget the impression he made on me when he played the flute-concerto of Emil Hartmann at a Peabody symphony concert, in 1878: his tall, handsome, manly presence, his flute breathing n.o.ble sorrows, n.o.ble joys, the orchestra softly responding. The audience was spellbound.

Such distinction, such refinement! He stood, the master, the genius."

In the one novel which he wrote at the age of twenty-five, he makes one of his characters say:

== "To make a HOME out of a household, given the raw materials -- to wit, wife, children, a friend or two, and a house -- two other things are necessary. These are a good fire and good music.

And inasmuch as we can do without the fire for half the year, I may say music is the one essential." "Late explorers say they have found some nations that have no G.o.d; but I have not read of any that had no music."

"Music means harmony, harmony means love, love means -- G.o.d!"

The theoretical relation between music and poetry would hardly have attracted his study had it not been that his mind was as truly philosophically and scientifically accurate, as it was poetically sensuous and imaginative. In a letter to Mr. E. C. Stedman he complained that "in all directions the poetic art was suffering from the shameful circ.u.mstance that criticism was without a scientific basis for even the most elementary of its judgments."

Although the work was irksome to him, he could not go on writing at hap-hazard, trusting to his own mere taste to decide what was good, until he had settled for himself scientifically what are the laws of poetical construction. This accounts for his exposition of the laws of beauty in that unique work, "The Science of English Verse", which was based on Dante's thought, "The best conceptions cannot be save where science and genius are." The book is chiefly taken up with a discussion of rhythm and tone-color in verse; and it is well within the truth to say that it is the most complete and thorough original investigation of the formal element in poetry in existence.

The rhythm he treated as the marking of definite time measurements, which could be indicated by bars in musical notation, having their regular time and their regular number of notes, with their proper accent. To this time measurement Mr. Lanier gave the pre-eminence which Coleridge and other writers have given to accent.

He conceived of a line of poetry as consisting of a definite number of bars (or feet), each bar containing, in dactylic metre, three equal "eighth notes", of which the first is accented, or in iambic metre (which has the same "triple" time), of one "eighth note", and one "quarter note", with the accent on the second.

Thus the accented syllable is not necessarily "longer" than the unaccented, except as the rhythm happens to make it so. This idea is very fully developed and with great wealth of curious Old English ill.u.s.trations.

Under the designation of "tone-color" he treats very suggestively of rhyme, alliteration, and vowel and consonant distribution, showing how the recurrence of euphonic vowels and consonants secures that rich variety of tone-color which music gives in orchestration.

The work thus breaks away from the cla.s.sic grammarian's tables of trochees and anapaests, and discusses the forms of poetry in the terms of music; and of both tone-color and of rhythm he would say, in the words of old King James, "the very touch-stone whereof is music."

Ill.u.s.trations of these technical beauties of musical rhythm, and vowel and consonant distribution, abound in Lanier's poetry.

Such is the "Song of the Chattahoochee", which deserves a place beside Tennyson's "Brook". It strikes a higher key, and is scarcely less musical. Such pa.s.sages are numerous in his "Sunrise on the Marshes", as in the lines beginning,

"Not slower than majesty moves,"

or the other lines beginning,

"Oh, what if a sound should be made!"

These investigations in the science of verse bore their fruit especially in the poems written during the last three or four years of his life, when his sense of the solemn sacredness of Art became more profound, and he acquired a greater ease in putting into practice his theory of verse.

And this made him thoroughly original. He was no imitator either of Tennyson or of Swinburne, though musically he is nearer to them than to any others of his day. We constantly notice in his verse that dainty effect which the ear loves, and which comes from deft marshalling of consonants and vowels, so that they shall add their suppler and subtler reinforcement to the steady infantry tramp of rhythm.

Of this delicate art, which is much more than mere alliteration, which is concerned with dominant accented vowels as well as consonants, with the easy flow of liquids and fricatives, and with the progressive opening or closing of the organs of articulation, the laws are not easy to formulate, but examples abound in Lanier's poems.

Mr. Stedman, poet and critic, raises the question whether Lanier's extreme conjunction of the artistic with the poetic temperament, which he says no man has more clearly displayed, did not somewhat hamper and delay his power of adequate expression. Possibly, but he was building not for the day, but for time. He must work out his laws of poetry, even if he had almost to invent its language; for to him was given the power of a.n.a.lysis as well as of construction, and he was too conscientious to do anything else than to find out what was best and why, and then tell and teach it as he had learnt it, even if men said that his late spring was delaying bud and blossom.

But it would be a great mistake to find in Lanier only, or chiefly, the artist. He had the substance of poetry. He possessed both elements, as Stedman says, "in extreme conjunction." He overflowed with fancy.

His imagination needed to be held in check. This was recognized in "Corn", and appears more fully in "The Symphony", the first productions which gave him wide recognition as a poet. Ill.u.s.trations too much abound to allow selection.

And for the substance of invention there needed, in Lanier's judgment, large and exact knowledge of the world's facts. A poet must be a student of things, truths, and men. His own studies were wide and his scholars.h.i.+p accurate. He did not believe that art comes all by instinct, without work. In one of his keen criticisms of poets he said of Edgar A. Poe, whom he esteemed more highly than his countrymen are wont to do: "The trouble with Poe was, he did not KNOW enough. He needed to know a good many more things in order to be a great poet." Lanier had "a pa.s.sion for the exact truth,"

and all of it.

The intense sacredness with which Lanier invested Art held him thrall to the highest ethical ideas. To him the most beautiful thing of all was Right. He loved the words, "the beauty of holiness", and it pleased him to reverse the phrase and call it "the holiness of beauty".

When one reads Lanier, he is reminded of two writers, Milton and Ruskin.

More than any other great English authors they are dominated by this beauty of holiness. Lanier was saturated with it.

It s.h.i.+nes out of every line he wrote. It is not that he never wrote a maudlin line, but that every thought was lofty. That it must be so was a first postulate of his Art. Hear his words to the students of Johns Hopkins University:

== "Let any sculptor hew us out the most ravis.h.i.+ng 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 suggests 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, s.h.i.+ne as one light within him; he is not yet the great artist."

And he returns to the theme:

== "Can not 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 dare to meddle with love; unless you are suffused with truth, do not dare to meddle with goodness; in a word, unless you are suffused with truth, wisdom, goodness, and love, abandon the hope that the ages will accept you as an artist."

Thus was it true, as was said of his work by his a.s.sociate, Dr. Wm. Hand Browne, that "one thread of purpose runs through it all.

This thread is found in his fervid love for his fellow-men, and his never ceasing endeavors to kindle an enthusiasm for beauty, purity, n.o.bility of life, which he held it the poet's first duty to teach and to exemplify." And so there came into his verse a solemn, wors.h.i.+pful element, dominating it everywhere, and giving loftiness to its beauty. For he was the democrat whom he described in contrast to Whitman's mere brawny, six-footed, open-s.h.i.+rted hero, whose strength was only that of the biceps:

== "My democrat, the democrat whom I contemplate with pleasure, the democrat who is to write or to read the poetry of the future, may have a mere thread for his biceps, yet he shall be strong enough to handle h.e.l.l; he shall play ball with the earth; and albeit his stature may be no more than a boy's, he shall still be taller than the great redwoods of California; his height shall be the height of great resolution, and love, and faith, and beauty, and knowledge, and subtle meditation; his head shall be forever among the stars."

This standard he could not forget in his judgments of artists.

There was something in Whitman which "refreshed him like harsh salt spray,"

but to Whitman's lawlessness of art he was an utter foe.

We find it written down in his notes:

== "Whitman is poetry's butcher. Huge raw collops slashed from the rump of poetry, and never mind gristle -- is what Whitman feeds our souls with."

"As near as I can make it out, Whitman's argument seems to be, that, because a prairie is wide, therefore debauchery is admirable, and because the Mississippi is long, therefore every American is G.o.d."

So he says of Swinburne:

== "He invited me to eat; the service was silver and gold, but no food therein save pepper and salt."

And of William Morris:

== "He caught a crystal cupful of the yellow light of sunset, and persuading himself to dream it wine, drank it with a sort of smile."

Though not what would be called a religious writer, Lanier's large and deep thought took him to the deepest spiritual faiths, and the vastness of Nature drew him to a trust in the Infinite above us.

Thus, his young search after G.o.d and truth brought him into the members.h.i.+p of the Presbyterian Church while at Oglethorpe College; and though in after years his creed became broader than that imposed by the Church he had joined on its clergy, he could not outgrow the simple faith and consecration which are all it requires of its members.h.i.+p.

His college notebook records his earnestness;

== "Liberty, patriotism, and civilization are on their knees before the men of the South, and with clasped hands and straining eyes are begging them to become Christians."

How naturally his large faith in G.o.d finds expression in his "Marshes of Glynn"; or his reverent disciples.h.i.+p of the great Artist and Master in his "Ballad of the Trees and the Master", or his "The Crystal", which was Christ. Yet, with not a whit less of wors.h.i.+pfulness and consecration, there grew in him a repugnance to the sectarianism of the Churches which put him somewhat out of sympathy with their formal organizations. He wrote, in what may have been a sketch for a poem: