A Biography of Sidney Lanier Part 23

A thousand-fold Happy New Year to thee, and I would that thy whole year may be as full of sweetness as my heart is full of thee.

All day I dwell with my dear ones there with thee. I do so long for one hearty romp with my boys again! Kiss them most fervently for me, and say over their heads my New Year's prayer, that whether G.o.d may color their lives bright or black, they may continually grow in a large and hearty manhood, compounded of strength and love.

Let us try and teach them, dear wife, that it is only the small soul that ever cherishes bitterness; for the climate of a large and loving heart is too warm for that frigid plant. Let us lead them to love everything in the world, above the world, and under the world adequately; that is the sum and substance of a perfect life. And so G.o.d's divine rest be upon every head under the roof that covers thine this night, prayeth thy

Husband.

Sweetness of disposition, depth of emotion, and absolute purity of life are frequently regarded as feminine traits. These Lanier had, but they were fused with the qualities of a virile and healthy manhood. He attracted strong and intellectual men as well as refined and cultivated women.

The bravery manifested during the Civil War and the fort.i.tude that he displayed after the war became elemental qualities in his character.

His admiration of the heroic deeds of the age of chivalry arose from a certain inherent knightliness in his own character.

He had the combination of tenderness and strength to which he called attention in Sir Philip Sidney. His admiration for old English poetry was due to the "ruddiness in its cheek and the red corpuscles in its veins."

There is in his later prose the "send and drive" of a vigorous soul.

It was this elemental manhood that attracted him to Whitman, despite all his protests against the latter's carelessness of form and lack of grace.

"Reading him," he says, "is like getting the salt sea spray into one's face."

He had some of the Southerner's resistance to anything like insult.

A story is frequently told in Baltimore of the way in which Lanier resented the conductor's words to a young lady at a rehearsal of the Peabody Orchestra.

"----, irritated in his undisciplined musician's nerves, vented that irritation in a rude outburst towards a timid young woman who was playing the piano, either with orchestra or voice or in solo.

In an instant Lanier's tall, straight figure shot up from his seat and, taking the chair he occupied in his hand, he said: 'Mr. ----, you must retract every word you have uttered and apologize to that young lady before you beat another bar.' There was no mistake of his resoluteness and determination, and Mr. ---- retracted and apologized; the orchestra went on only after the same had been done."

Another element that contributed to the admirable symmetry of Lanier's character was that of humor. One would misjudge him entirely if he took into account only the highly wrought letters on music or the great majority of his poems. From one standpoint he seems a burning flame. As a matter of fact, however, his enthusiasm for anything that was fine and the ecstatic rapture into which he pa.s.sed under the spell of great music or nature or poetry, were balanced by humor that was playful and delicate and at times irresistible.

His pranks as a college boy and as a soldier have already been noted.

His enjoyment of the negro and of the Georgia "Cracker" may be seen in his dialect poems, "A Florida Ghost", "Uncle Jim's Baptist Revival Hymn", "Jones's Private Argument", and others. With his children his spirit of fun-making knew no bounds. The point may still further be seen by any one who reads his lectures, and especially those letters to his friends in which he constantly indulged in playful conceits and fine humor.

He even laughed at his poverty, and got off many a jest in the very face of death. In this respect, as in others, he was strikingly like Robert Louis Stevenson.

Lanier's modernness of mind has already been ill.u.s.trated in his att.i.tude to music and to scholars.h.i.+p. Asked one time what age he preferred, he said, "the Present," and the answer was typical of his whole att.i.tude to things.

He did not rail at his age. He was a close student of current events.

He spoke strongly sometimes, as did Wordsworth and Ruskin, against the materialism of the nineteenth century; he delivered his protest against it in many of his poems; and yet he never lost his faith that all material progress would eventually contribute to the moral and artistic needs of man. "It is often a.s.serted," he said, "that ours is a materialistic age, and that romance is dead; but this is marvelously untrue, and it may be countera.s.serted with perfect confidence that there was never an age of the world when art was enthroned by so many hearthstones and intimate in so many common houses as now."

He accepted the facts of his time, and sought to make them subservient to the healthy idealism that reigned in his soul.

Furthermore, he was an absolutely open-minded man, eager for any new world which he might enter. He had nothing of the provincialism of the parish or of the period. One of the most striking ill.u.s.trations of this quality of mind is seen in comparing him with Poe, who was irritable and prejudiced. Poe shared the ante-bellum Southerner's prejudice against New England and all her writers. There is nowhere in Lanier any indication that such a spirit found lodgment in his mind.

Emerson -- the transcendentalist -- was one of his "wise masters".

Another striking ill.u.s.tration of his breadth of view was his profound reverence for science. That he had this so early was due, as has been already seen, to the influence of Professor Woodrow at college.

In "Tiger Lilies" he said, in commenting on Macaulay's idea of poetry declining as science grows: "How long a time intervened between Humboldt and Goethe; how long between Aga.s.siz and Tennyson?

One can scarcely tell whether Humboldt and Aga.s.siz were not as good poets as Goethe and Tennyson were certainly good philosophers."

"The astonis.h.i.+ng effect of the stimulus which has been given to investigation into material nature by the rise of geology and the prosperity of chemistry"

is seen in the literary development of the day. "To-day's science bears not only fruit, but flowers also! Poems, as well as steam engines, crown its growth in these times." The pa.s.sage closes with these significant words: "Poetry will never fail, nor science, nor the poetry of science." This view remained with him till the end of his life. He hailed the scientific progress of the nineteenth century as one of its greatest achievements, and constantly related it to the rise of landscape painting, modern nature poetry, modern music, and the English novel. His att.i.tude thereto is made all the more notable by the fact that throughout the country, and especially in the South, there prevailed the utmost distrust of scientific investigations and hypotheses. During the seventies the criticism of the invitation extended to Huxley to deliver the princ.i.p.al address at the opening of Johns Hopkins University, and the controversy arising out of President White's enunciation of the principles that would dominate the newly created Cornell University, all tended to make the controversy between science and religion especially acute. American poets, notably Poe and Lowell, had expressed their distrust of modern scientific methods and conclusions.

But Lanier saw no danger either to religion or to poetry in science.

He constantly referred to Tyndall, Huxley, and Darwin, in a way which suggested his familiarity with their writings.

I have seen a copy of the "Origin of Species" owned by Lanier, -- the marks and annotations indicating the most careful and thoughtful reading thereof. In his lectures on the English Novel, in contrasting ancient science with modern science, he says: "In short, I find that early thought everywhere, whether dealing with physical fact or metaphysical problems, is lacking in what I may call the intellectual conscience, -- the conscience which makes Mr. Darwin spend long and patient years in investigating small facts before daring to reason upon them, and which makes him state the facts adverse to his theory with as much care as the facts which make for it."

Again he refers to him as "our own grave and patient Charles Darwin."

He did not write about science at second-hand, either, -- he studied it.

Mrs. Sophie Bledsoe Herrick, Lowell's Baltimore friend, tells of Lanier's interest in microscopic work: "Mrs. Lanier and family were not with him then, and he was busy writing some articles on the science of composition. Evening after evening he would bring the ma.n.u.script of these articles and read them, and talk them over.

"I was at that time intensely interested in microscopic work.

It was curious and interesting to see how Mr. Lanier kindled to the subject, so foreign to his ordinary literary interests. I was too busy with editorial work to go on with my microscopic work then, and it was a great pleasure to leave my instrument and books on the subject with him for some months. He plunged in with all the ardor of a naturalist, not using the microscope as a mere toy, but doing good hard work with it.

I think I can detect in his work after this time, -- as well as in his letters, -- many little touches which show the influence this study of nature had upon his mind."*

-- * Letter to the author.

So he had little patience with "those timorous souls who believe that science, in explaining everything, -- as they singularly fancy, -- will destroy the possibility of poetry, of the novel, in short of all works of the imagination: the idea seeming to be that the imagination always requires the hall of life to be darkened before it displays its magic, like the modern spiritualistic seance-givers who can do nothing with the rope-tying and the guitars unless the lights are put out."* And again: "Here are thousands upon thousands of acute and patient men to-day who are devoutly gazing into the great mysteries of Nature and faithfully reporting what they see.

These men have not destroyed the fairies: they have preserved them in more truthful and solid shape."

-- * 'The English Novel', p. 28.

But while he estimated at its proper value the development of modern physical science, he saw it in its proper relation to music, poetry, and religion. "The scientific man," he says in his "Legend of St. Leonor", "is merely the minister of poetry. He is cutting down the Western Woods of Time; presently poetry will come there and make a city and gardens. This is always so. The man of affairs works for the behoof and the use of poetry. Scientific facts have never reached their proper function until they emerge into new poetic relations established between man and man, between man and G.o.d, or between man and nature."

Lanier's view of the theory of evolution is interesting.

"I have been studying science, biology, chemistry, evolution, and all,"

he writes to J. F. Kirk, June 15, 1880. "It pieces on, perfectly, to those dreams which one has when one is a boy and wanders alone by a strong running river, on a day when the wind is high but the sky clear.

These enormous modern generalizations fill me with such dreams again.

"But it is precisely at the beginning of that phenomenon which is the underlying subject of this poem, 'Individuality', that the largest of such generalizations must begin, and the doctrine of evolution when pushed beyond this point appears to me, after the most careful examination of the evidence, to fail.

It is pushed beyond this point in its current application to the genesis of species, and I think Mr. Huxley's last sweeping declaration is clearly parallel to that of an enthusiastic dissecter who, forgetting that his observations are upon dead bodies, should build a physiological conclusion upon purely anatomical facts.

"For whatever can be proved to have been evolved, evolution seems to me a n.o.ble and beautiful and true theory. But a careful search has not shown me a single instance in which such proof as would stand the first shot of a boy lawyer in a moot court, has been brought forward in support of an actual case of species differentiation.

"A cloud (see the poem) MAY be evolved; but not an artist; and I find, in looking over my poem, that it has made itself into a pa.s.sionate reaffirmation of the artist's autonomy, threatened alike from the direction of the scientific fanatic and the pantheistic devotee."

With all of Lanier's development -- whether in science and scholars.h.i.+p, or in music and literature -- he retained a vital faith in the Christian religion. He reacted against the Calvinism of his youth to almost as great a degree as did some of the New England poets.

He at times felt keenly the narrowness and bigotry of the church -- the warring of the sects over the unessential points.* In his thinking he found no place for the rigid and severe creed which dominated his youth.

He gave up the forms, not the spirit, of wors.h.i.+p. He lived the abundant life, and all of the roads which he traveled led to G.o.d. His faith was as broad as "the liberal marshes of Glynn". In the spirit of St. Francis he said: --

I am one with all the kinsmen things That e'er my Father fathered.

-- * See especially the poem "Remonstrance".

Notwithstanding his vivid realization of the evil of dogma and of sect, he maintained throughout his life a reverent faith; he could distinguish, as Browning said Sh.e.l.ley could not, between churchdom and Christianity.

Not only in the "Crystal" and "A Ballad of Trees and the Master", and in the spirit of nearly all of his poems, is this evident; but throughout his lectures, essays, and letters he never missed an opportunity to relate knowledge to faith. "He was the most Christlike man I ever knew," said one of his intimate friends, and those who have looked upon his bust at Johns Hopkins have involuntarily found the resemblance of physical form. Certainly there has been no tenderer poem written about the Master than the lines written during Lanier's last year: --

Into the woods my Master went, Clean forspent, forspent.

Into the woods my Master came, Forspent with love and shame.

But the olives they were not blind to Him, The little gray leaves were kind to Him: The thorn-tree had a mind to Him When into the woods He came.

Out of the woods my Master went, And He was well content.

Out of the woods my Master came, Content with death and shame.

When Death and Shame would woo Him last, From under the trees they drew Him last: 'T was on a tree they slew Him -- last When out of the woods He came.

Chapter XII. The Last Year