[In the following excerpt, Starke chronicles the scholarship, poetry, and prose of Lanier's final years.]

1

But in considering together the four books for boys, ignoring the fact that work on them extended from 1879, possibly from 1878, through the last days at Camp Robin in the early fall of 1881, we have overlooked some interesting work on which Lanier was engaged while the manuscripts of the King Arthur, the Mabinogion and the Percy remained yet unfinished.

First, there were the translations from Anglo-Saxon and Middle English poetry contained in the Shakspere lectures, in The Science of English Verse, and in separate essays, but undertaken not so much as part of his academic work—not even as an integral part of his treatise on prosody—as for his delight in the labor. The translations, made most likely with some assistance from his distinguished colleague, Professor A. S. Cook, have been called noteworthy;¹ for us they are at least interesting.

Besides the purely literal, interlinear ones, the translations are of two sorts, those made with the emphasis on the content and those made to indicate to ears unfamiliar with the language of the original something of its beauty and power. Those of the first sort are in prose, of dignified words and cadences, and, though pedestrian, are able enough. The translations of the second sort are the more interesting, though not always the more successful. The brief fragments from Beówulf²—as readable a translation as has yet been made—are of the second sort; in the translation of The Phœnix³ we have examples of both sorts. The metrical part does, it is true, preserve to some extent the rhythm and the alliteration of the original, but it is not in itself able poetry. On the other hand, Lanier did not mean it to be considered for its own merits. “I have kept the translation as nearly literal as possible,” he said. It is to his credit that he reproduced as well as he did the rhythm and the meter, suggesting at the same time the idioms of the language.

Part of the translation of “The Battle of Maldon” we have in two versions.⁴ In the unfinished essay on “The Death of Byrhtnoth”—an essay that is a frank plea for the intensive study of Anglo-Saxon literature for the fuller appreciation of the strength of language and vigor of emotion of our later literature—Lanier translated the first hundred lines of the poem with a view to reproducing “the send and drive of the rhythm”; the next eighty-five and the last sixteen lines he translated into unmetrical prose, but with a more accurate reproduction of the order of words, the vocabulary, and the poetic embellishments of the original. In both the metrical and the unmetrical portions of the translation line arrangements are ignored, but so successful is Lanier in reproducing the meter that even the untrained ear must notice the break between the two portions, buried within a paragraph though it is:

“Waded the war-wolves west over Panta, recked not of water, warrior vikings. There, o'er the wave they bore up their bucklers, the seamen lifted their shields to the land. In wait with his warriors, Byrhtnoth stood; he bade form the war-hedge of bucklers, and hold that ward firm to the foe. The fight was at hand, the glory of battle; the time was come for the falling of men that were doomed.”

Lanier was a careful translator, deeply appreciative of the peculiar qualities of the poetry he was translating.⁵ Whatever light an investigation of his translations may throw on Lanier as a poet, it is not without value in revealing in still another way the conscientiousness with which he undertook scholarly investigation.

2

Growing also out of his scholarly studies were the “Songs of Aldhelm,” “half-jotted down” by October 20, 1878.⁶ In the course of his studies Lanier had come upon this old Saxon bishop, Bede's senior, who wrote in his native language poetry which King Alfred greatly admired. None of Aldhelm's English poems is extant, but his Latin works survive, and Lanier—searching for English authority for his pronouncements on English prosody—began his introductory summary of prosodical history with citation of Aldhelm's “Epistola Ad Acircium.” Then, with growing interest, he turned from Aldhelm's essay on verse, to conjectures of what Aldhelm's own verse may have been. He noted, with some show of faith, Grimm's conjecture that The Phœnix may have been written by Aldhelm.⁷ He may have observed from the Latin poems that Aldhelm was a careful stylist, more interested perhaps in the style than in the subject matter of his poems.

In the eleventh of the Peabody Institute Shakspere lectures,⁸ delivered in February, 1879, Lanier spoke of Aldhelm as “a name which stands at the head of our drama as well as of our poetry, a name heard but little, yet to me distinguishing by far the most fascinating figure in the history of English poetry before Chaucer: I had almost said before Shakspere,” and he called Aldhelm “that beautiful soul,” and—in the preface to The Science of English Verse, written a year later—“the Father of English Poetry.”⁹ Aldhelm, it is clear, had been idealized by Lanier and turned into a symbol. The symbol, critics have pointed out, represents poetic authority, and so stands for one of the sturdiest cravings of Lanier, but Aldhelm is for Lanier a symbol of another sort also: the symbol of the poet as a leader of men, correcting their errors, calling them to worship, and commanding their respect.

He is for Lanier not the bishop, the monk, or the scholar, but the poet standing on the bridge, singing to the merchants as they hurried, heedless of church services, about the town. So in one of the poem outlines Aldhelm is made to rebuke the merchants who say they have no time to listen to idle dreams:

“Till ye hear me, ye have no time
Neither for trade nor travelling;
Till ye hear me ye have no time to fight nor
                    marry nor mourn;
There is not time, O world,
Till you hear me, the Poet Aldhelm,
To eat nor drink nor to draw breath.
For until the Song of the Poet is heard
Ye do not live, ye cannot live.”(10)

“The Songs of Aldhelm”—Lanier's unpublished and unfinished volume—is probably represented, in the collected poems, by seven poems grouped as street-cries, all of them poems of rebuke or remonstrance, or assertions of the power of poetry in life. The seven are “Remonstrance,” “The Ship of Earth” (dating from 1868, but with the first two stanzas of that version omitted), “How Love Looked for Hell,” “Spring and Tyranny” (renamed simply “Tyranny”), “Life and Song,” “To Richard Wagner” (in a modified version), and “A Song of Love,”¹¹ the last an exquisitely simple lyric, restrained in metaphor, but clearly suggesting Lanier's ideas of the place of love in life. To these seven poems he prefixed two introductory stanzas¹² which may be freely paraphrased thus: In spite of the noise and confusion of modern life, nature remains a source of comfort and an assurance of the peace into which the confusion must be resolved. In these “Street-Cries” Lanier is the interpreter of nature and the prophet of peace to a generation more vainly busy than that of Aldhelm, and more foolishly convinced than his that the songs of the poet are idle dreams.¹³

3

Of interest to Lanier still, of course, and still absorbing much of his thought if not any longer a great deal of his working time, was that other poem of protest against the deadening, decivilizing forces in the social structure, “The Jacquerie.”¹⁴ It was a poem dreamed of in his youth as a memory of Froissart, given poetic form and shape over more than a decade of years, influenced, conditioned, and changed by the reading of Michelet's Histoire de France in Texas and full research in the ample library of the Peabody Institute, but left unfinished at Lanier's death—an interesting fragment sketched by a hand that had learned much of the novelist's art since Tiger-Lilies and much concerning the writing of verse, richly suggesting how fine a narrative poem Lanier might under favorable conditions have produced. The first chapter of the published fragment—beginning with four lines in rhyme but quickly changing to blank verse that never moves gracefully—dates possibly from 1868, but other parts of “The Jacquerie,” particularly Chapter II, seem to date from a later period. “A Song of Love,” published posthumously, is said by Mrs. Lanier to have been designed as one of the songs of the fool in “The Jacquerie,” and to have been given its final form in 1879. The fragment as a whole probably represents the revision and reworking of thirteen years rather than the work of any one year.

Nothing that Lanier ever planned was quite so dear to him as this long poem, which should be not only a novel in verse but an indictment of Trade. Nothing perhaps remained more persistently in his mind, but during these years what leisure Lanier found from rehearsals and concerts and lectures and classes and his new job of editing had to be given to further study at the library and to the writing of prose articles. He had precious little time for poetry.

4

The prose of these last years met with little success. It is doubtful if Lanier received any more than the most nominal fee for his musical criticism that appeared in the Baltimore Sun of January 31, 1880.¹⁵ The paper called “The Death of Byrhtnoth” was still unsold and it remained unpublished until seventeen years later when it appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, which under the editorship of Scudder and Page showed a disposition to pay honor to Lanier dead which under Howells it had denied to Lanier living. The fragmentary “Legend of St. Leonor,” taken from the Acta Sanctorum and planned as part of an essay on “The Relations of Poetry and Science,” was published in 1885,¹⁶ the essay “How to Read Chaucer” in 1891, and “John Barbour's Bruce” in 1897. The last essay of any importance that Lanier himself saw published was the essay on “The New South” (written in February, 1880) which appeared in Scribner's Monthly for October, 1880.¹⁷

In this essay Lanier compared the social and economic significance of the large-scale farming of the West with the small farming of the post-bellum South, drawing his information from “a mass of clippings” from Georgia newspapers which he had been collecting for several years. “The quiet rise of the small farmer in the Southern States” since 1860 with the consequent improvement in the products raised, the organization of library societies and of amateur dramatic clubs in rural districts, the growth of the public school system for whites and blacks, etc., said Lanier, was “the notable circumstance of the period, in comparison with which the noisier events signify nothing.” The predictions that he made have by and large proved true; his idea that intellectual and social progress depends upon economic progress has been accepted; and his intelligently liberal attitude toward the relations of Negroes and whites reveals Lanier as one of the real leaders of the new South. But his essay on small farming seems to have been inspired not only by a study of contemporary conditions but also by the contrasting picture of large farming in England three centuries before which his scholarly studies had shown him, and to which he devoted one-third of his article, making rich use of the materials republished by the New Shakspere Society, quoting liberally from statistics, from the Lenten sermons preached in 1548 by Bishop Latimer,¹⁸ in which the good bishop described the evil situation of the yeoman and agricultural laborers caused by the sudden rage for sheep-raising and the destruction of the small farms, from More's Utopia and from statutes of the reigns of Henry VIII and of Elizabeth.

Into his essay any number of things can be read. Lanier under-rated the development of manufacturing in the South, but recent events have raised serious doubts concerning the benefits of the existing industrial system in the southern states. Large farming too often produces overproduction; the plight of cotton planters in 1930 and 1931 has given ample evidence of the attendant dangers. Diversified farming means self-sufficiency, and newspaper accounts of the suffering of so many southern farmers in the winter of 1930-31 emphasized the failure of these farmers to attempt to raise more than one crop and the willingness to buy from dealers what they themselves should have raised and preserved. But Lanier was not so much a prophet or an astute student of an agricultural problem so enormous that it is essentially a problem of civilization, as he was a son of Georgia, burning with a deep and reverent love for his boyhood home. His economics may have been false, his proposed program ultraconservative and impractical. But his affection is not to be questioned, and this after all, rather than economic theory, justifies the essay. The melancholy tone of the last paragraph reveals this fully: “it is,” he wrote,

“because many of [the blissful mountain ranges of the southeastern states] are actually virgin to plough, pillar, axe, or mill-wheel, while others have known only the insulting and mean cultivation of the earlier immigrants who scratched the surface for cotton a year or two, then carelessly abandoned all to sedge and sassafras, and sauntered on toward Texas: … that these lands are, with sadder significance than that of small farming, also a New South.”

It is significant and pleasing that in this last published essay there should be epitomized all the important interests of Lanier's life—the ideals of personal conduct that he expressed in “The Symphony,” the political ideals expressed in “Retrospects and Prospects,” the economic interests revealed through a series of poems culminating in “Corn,” the scholarly interests of his last years, the passionate loyalty to the southern soil, the intelligent but equally passionate loyalty to southern society—the southern scheme of things and manner of life, the intelligent conviction concerning the necessary disappearance of the color-line from the economic and political life of the South, and the religious idealism of all his poetry and all his music—of all his thought. For small farming, as Lanier envisioned it, must, by improving the economic condition of men, improve their moral condition; and moral growth in personality was, as he intimated in the Shakspere lectures and as we shall find him saying quite clearly in The English Novel, the essential fact of modern life. “The New South,” it should also be pointed out, is a restatement in prose of a faith and a program stated nine years before in the poem “The Homestead.”

5

The poems of this year are chiefly occasional pieces, little versified thoughts of no consequence, expressed however with charm and grace. Among these are the posthumously published and uncollected Valentine poem to Miss Lucie Browne; the untitled lines (called in the collected poems “Ireland”) which he contributed to an art album published in May, 1880, to raise money for the relief of the Irish famine;¹⁹ the sonnets “To My Class, On Certain Fruits and Flowers Sent Me in Sickness” and “On Violet's Wafers, Sent Me When I Was Ill,” written during the serious illness of December, 1880, and January, 1881;²⁰ and the epigrammatic lines “To Dr. Thomas Shearer.”²¹ Even the Johns Hopkins ode is an occasional poem. But three or four other poems of the greatest merit, of undeniable beauty and power, were also written in 1880, so that the year made memorable for English prosody by the appearance of his Science of English Verse is memorable also in the life of Lanier. It is the year of the writing of “Individuality,” “The Crystal,” “A Ballad of Trees and the Master,” and—chief poem of all—“Sunrise.”

The first of these poems, “Individuality,”²² reveals more fully than any other of Lanier's poems his interest in scientific theory and the effect of his scientific studies upon his thought. References to physical science we have observed from time to time in his work, from Tiger-Lilies through the essays on the physics of music and of verse to the Shakspere lectures. In Baltimore he had actually done some scientific experimentation, working on problems connected with sound, and he had used for a period of several months a microscope lent to him by Mrs. Sophie Bledsoe Herrick, Lowell's Baltimore friend, for the study of natural objects. “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.”²³ Finally, out of much study and grave deliberation he was to declare in “The Legend of St. Leonor,” using a figure from the old legend of the Acta Sanctorum: “The scientific man 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 use of poetry. Scientific facts have never reached their proper function until they merge into new poetic relations established between man and man, between man and God, or between man and Nature.” Conversely he might have declared that poetry never fulfills its proper function of elevating man morally unless it grows out of a deep understanding of the relations of man with man, man with God, and man with nature. But poetry, he would have added, states truths of which science may not yet be aware.

The relation of his scientific studies, and his thought on scientific matters, to the poem “Individuality” is made clear in a letter to J. F. Kirk of June 15, 1880, sent with the poem. “I have been studying science,” Lanier wrote,

“biology, chemistry, evolution, and all. 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 noble and beautiful and true theory. But a careful search has not yet 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 passionate reaffirmation of the artist's autonomy, threatened alike from the direction of the scientific fanatic and the pantheistic devotee.²⁴

“Individuality” is, unfortunately, not a very good poem in spite of its high thought and a few truly lyrical stanzas: the passion of Lanier's reaffirmation of the artist's responsibility produced only a few fine lines. The poem is too long and the misplaced accents rob it of the rhythmical beauty that might have helped to redeem its other faults. It is, to state the charge more briefly, labored; and without the letter to Kirk we do not find interpretation easy. The letter, however, guides us to the key verse:

What the cloud doeth
The Lord knoweth,
          The cloud knoweth not.
What the artist doeth,
The Lord knoweth;
          Knoweth the artist not?

The cloud, that is to say, may be explained as a physical phenomenon; the artist cannot be so explained, for the artist possesses free-will.

Awful is Art because 'tis free.
The artist trembles o'er his plan
          Where men his self must see.
Who made a song or picture, he
Did it, and not another, God nor man.
.....Each artist—gift of terror!—owns his will.

This then is individuality. But the whole tendency of scientific teaching is against the doctrine of individuality and individual responsibility; so Lanier—in a generation before studies in psychology had tended to lessen still further the responsibility of the individual for his own actions—rebelled against science. The poem ends:

Pass, kinsman Cloud, now fair and mild:
Discharge the will that's not thine own.
                    I work in freedom wild,
But work, as plays a little child,
                    Sure of the Father, Self, and Love, alone.

That Lanier should have rebelled against science and rejected the theory of physical evolution as it is applied to man, in spite of his ardent advocacy of science in other matters, need not surprise us. As his generation understood the theory—indeed, as Spencer and Huxley explained it—the import was materialism and, by consequence, atheism. Furthermore, the theory of evolution implied biological predestination, and to Lanier all these notions were abhorrent. But his gesture of defiance of the scientific trend of things is a gesture only, a brave but futile attempt to preserve in the face of the advance of science and its revelations of unalterable laws his faith in the integrity of the human personality and in the redeeming fact of love.

6

This faith is expressed again in another poem written about this time, “The Crystal,”²⁵ a poem Lanier succeeded in selling, though “Individuality” went unsold and remained unpublished for a full year after his death. As in “Retrospects and Prospects,” “Clover,” the Johns Hopkins ode, and elsewhere, Lanier here lists the names of the great whom he reverenced and loved, but here, as he has not done before, he names the great not to praise them unreservedly but to indicate the defects that reveal their common manhood. Shakspere, for instance, is forgiven weaknesses which others must often have felt without always labeling:

                                                                                Juliet's prurient pun
In the poor, pale face of Romeo's fancied death;
… Henry's fustian roar
Which frights away that sleep he invocates;
.....Too-silly shifts of maids that mask as men
In faint disguises that could ne'er disguise.

But the forgiveness is not only of literary defects, or of insufficient morality. Sometimes it is of blind teaching:

So Buddha, beautiful! I pardon thee
That all the All thou hadst for needy man
Was Nothing, and thy Best of being was
But not to Be.

Thus for one reason or another are named for forgiveness and characterized in phrases that have been called “sudden electric flashes”²⁶ the great whom Lanier loved: Shakspere, Homer, Socrates, Buddha, Dante, Milton, Æschylus, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, Thomas à Kempis, Epictetus, Behmen, Swedenborg, Langley (Langland), Cædmon, Emerson, Keats, and Tennyson.²⁷ These are great, but each possesses a

                                                                                                    little mole that marks
[Him] brother and [his] kinship seals to man.(28)

It is only Christ who is perfect beyond forgiveness:

But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love,
O perfect life in perfect labor writ,
O all men's Comrade, Servant, King or Priest—
What if or yet, what mole, what flaw, what lapse,
What least defect or shadow of defect,
What rumor, tattled by an enemy,
Of inference loose, what lack of grace
Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's—
Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee,
Jesus, good Paragon, thou Crystal Christ?

But there is something here that justifies us in refusing to accept “The Crystal” as an invocation of the Christ of the Churches, of the Christ of Christian theology, as Christian theologians would have us accept the poem. For it is Jesus as the perfect man, the great exemplar of Christian teachings, not God nor of God save as all men may be of God, that Lanier apostrophizes. Lanier's theology was altogether too simple and reasonable to admit a trinity or a duality of divinity. This fact, which is more evident in his poems than the essays on Lanier by Christian ministers would lead one to suspect, seems to have been appreciated by at least one minister who knew him, for such indeed seems the implication of the statement of the Reverend William Kirkus, rector of the Protestant Episcopal Church of Saint Michael and All Angels, Baltimore, who preached Lanier's funeral sermon. Writing for the Christian Churchman in the very month of Lanier's death Kirkus pointed out that Lanier's reverence for science, his contempt for sectarian disputes, his great honesty, and his rebellion against the Calvinistic training of his youth, “kept him somewhat apart from what is considered formal orthodoxy.” But he was, Kirkus added, “a truly godly man. Few men, indeed, had firmer belief in the living power, the perpetual gracious presence, of the Eternal Father.”

7

Born and bred, like Herman Melville, “in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church,” Lanier had of course once been perfectly orthodox in his thinking. But he possessed the true Protestant's passionate, relentless sense of personal responsibility, and he was, moreover, a man of original genius. He rebelled, therefore, as strongly as Melville against the narrowness of Calvinistic theology and the complacent mediocrity of contemporary Christian practice.²⁹ And his rebellion against organized Christianity had of course an effect upon his conception of God, and upon his personal relations to divinity.

Lanier's Christ of the later years is not the Christ of theology, nor is he actually a religious figure. In one of the poem outlines Lanier reveals the final end of his thinking:

“The Church is too hot, and Nothing is too cold. I find my proper Temperature in Art. Art offers to me a method of adoring the sweet master Jesus Christ, the beautiful souled One, without the straitness of a Creed which confines my genuflexions, a Church which confines my limbs, and without the vacuity of the doubt which numbs them. An unspeakable gain has come to me in simply turning a certain phrase the other way: the beauty of holiness becomes a new and wonderful saying to me when I figure it to myself in reverse as the holiness of beauty. This is like opening a window of dark stained glass, and letting in a flood of white light. I thus keep upon the walls of my soul a church-wall rubric which has been somewhat clouded by the expiring breaths of creeds dying their natural death. For in art there is no doubt. My heart beat all last night without my supervision: for I was asleep; my heart did not doubt a throb; I left it beating when I slept, I found it beating when I woke; it is thus with art: it beats in my sleep. A holy tune was in my soul when I fell asleep; it was going when I awoke. This melody is always moving along in the background of my spirit. If I wish to compose, I abstract my attention from the thoughts which occupy the front of the stage, the dramatis personae of the moment, and fix myself upon the deeper scene in the rear.”³⁰

Christ to Lanier is not God made man, but the Jewish Jesus—than whom there has been no “man more dear and friendly and helpful and strong and human and Christly.”³¹ He is not God to be worshipped, but an ethical figure to be admired and adored. For the scientist, He sets the goal for spiritual evolution; for the artist, He is the artist of conduct; for the democrat, He is the brave, democratic hero; for the poet, He is a symbol, without which our poetry would be the poorer.

It is as a perfect democrat that Jesus appears in “The Crystal” but it is as symbol of mankind that He appears in another poem of Lanier's last year, “A Ballad of Trees and the Master.”³² The “ballad” is apparently only a versification of the story of Gethsemane, told with the simplicity of true art, but attentive reading reveals that the moral of the poem is not the meekness of Christ nor Lanier's tender love for Him: as in most of Lanier's poems, it is the healing effect of nature on the troubled spirit.³³ The poem is a ballad of trees and the master, not of the master and trees, certainly not of the master alone. It is, therefore, not so much a Christian poem as a pagan one, a poem of kinship with nature, as one realizes even more when one reads it in connection with the pantheistic “Sunrise” for which it was intended originally as an interlude. It was into the woods that Lanier went continually to escape the desolating sense of defeat that contact with society brought; it is into the woods that he goes again as death approaches, into remembered woods of the Georgia seacoast where he receives, in ecstasy, the inspiration for the poem that is his supreme poetic vision.

8

And death was stealing softly upon him now, not to be fought off again. The opening of the year 1880 had found him seriously ill: the routine of giving eight lectures weekly—two public lectures at the university or two to university classes,³⁴ and six at private schools—and attending rehearsals and concerts of the orchestra, to say nothing of keeping up his private literary work, was a severe drain on his insufficient reserve of strength, and though he soon recovered from his January illness, his walking remained slow and difficult, and he suffered a relapse toward the end of May.

On July 19 he wrote to a friend:

“It is now nearly six weeks that I've had a villainous fever, which has finally become the disgust of my doctor and the opprobrium of all medicine. Nothing seems to have the least effect on it. If it goes on it must result in overturning the fundamental concepts of philosophy: for it is apparently without cause and without end,—though it certainly had a beginning,—and it is self-existent,—though a parasite.

“Day and night it remains, calm, inexpugnable. I am satisfied that nothing ever acquired a state of existence so wholly imperturbable and elevated beyond the powers or the prayers of men,—except perhaps one of the grand gods of Lucretius, whose nature

Ipsa suis pollens opibus, nihil indiga nostri,
Nec bene promeritis capitur nec tangitur irâ.

“In truth this last line seems almost allegorical, in this connection; for bene promeritis may well enough symbolize the mild homœopathic suasives with which my Fever had been appealed to; while ira admirably represents the heroic doses of allopathic truculence with which it has been fought; but with the former nec capitur, with the latter nec tangitur.

“Seriously, I've been ill enough; and your imagination is all I can rely on—for words are here simply exasperating—when I tell you that about three weeks ago, thinking a change might help me, I managed to crawl down to Charles Street Station and went to New York,—and took to bed as soon as I reached the hotel, there,—and tossed thereon for four days with a fairly flaming fever,—and finally had to crawl back to Baltimore, without having accomplished a single stroke of business, without having seen a single picture or friend, without having heard a single crash of the horns and violins,—for which I longed unspeakably.”³⁵

On the 21st of July, having sent his sons to a farm in Virginia, Lanier went with his wife and her father to West Chester in search of quiet and rest. Here on August 14 was born the Laniers' fourth child, Robert. In a letter to Richard Malcolm Johnston Lanier announced the birth of the new baby, admitting at the same time his own ill-health. But with his characteristic gaiety he made even now a pun: “This mean, pusillanimous fever which took under-hold of me two months ago is still there, as impregnably fixed as a cockle-burr in a sheep's tail. I have tried idleness, but (naturally) it won't work.” And, convinced still that the illness was curable, he added: “I get up every day and drag around in a pitiful kind of shambling existence. I fancy it has come to be purely a go-as-you-please match between me and the disease, to see which will wear out first, and I think I will manage to take the belt, yet.”³⁶

But the shadow of death has fallen now across all that he does, in spite of this brave boast. To a friend he confesses in a letter of September 5: “I was so ill during the time we were together on Wednesday evening—I really thought I would fall on the floor, and busied myself with picturing the scene, detailing the curious faces and so on, and regretting in advance the trouble it was going to give you—that I postponed until a better time many questions I wanted to ask. …”³⁵ However, he returned alone to Baltimore the middle of September to resume his studies in preparation for his third course of lectures at Johns Hopkins.

He interrupted his studies to prepare a textbook of selections from Chaucer and Shakspere, hoping through the publication of the book to increase his income, to provide a textbook for his own course on Chaucer and Shakspere, should he give it again, and to make available to young students an anthology that should open to them beauties of literature that are too often closed mysteries. The projected volume—like the earlier projected Chaucer volume—came to naught, but three papers constituting an introduction to it have ben preserved and published.³⁷ A reading of them will suggest reasons why the book was rejected and will also throw light on Lanier's work as a scholar.

In the Shakspere lectures we have followed Lanier's interpretation of Shakspere's character on the basis of evidence presented by placing three plays in chronological order. In his textbook Lanier proposed reprinting these three plays and with them three works of Chaucer: the knight's tale of Palamon and Arcite, to be studied in conjunction with A Midsummer Night's Dream; the pardoner's tale of the three robbers, to be studied in conjunction with Hamlet; and the clerk's tale of patient Griselda, to be studied in conjunction with The Tempest. The purpose of such a comparative study was to reveal Shakspere as man and artist and Chaucer as man and artist, and—though Lanier does not state these other aims here—to help the student arrive at a comparative estimate of the two as men and as artists and gain some idea of the change in status of man as an individual since the Middle Ages. Lanier planned to add copious footnotes to the texts.

But the choice of the three plays as typical of the three periods of Shakspere's life is an arbitrary choice on Lanier's part, representing his own preferences among the plays; and the choice of the three stories by Chaucer depends entirely upon the previous choice of plays. Furthermore, the conclusions presented seem not so much to have been drawn from the plays and stories chosen as the plays and stories to have been chosen according to preconceived ideas. This is, of course, legitimate in a lecture course or essay, in which the lecturer's or the essayist's personality is of as much interest as the factual matter that he presents. But it was almost audacious of Lanier to have expected other teachers to accept his views unquestioningly and to use a textbook that allowed no deviation from them. Such a textbook as Lanier was preparing could have been used with success and profit to the class by Lanier alone; and the expense of issuing such a work for the limited number of pupils who studied with Lanier would have caused any publisher to decline to publish it.

The introduction reveals, however, not only Lanier's lack of perspective on his own method of teaching but the superficiality of much of his scholarship, the inadequacy of his scholarly methods. For we have here little discussion of Chaucer and Shakspere, but much discussion of Shakspere and little of Chaucer. The moral views of Shakspere, the artistic structure of his plays, and the actual dates of the plays are discussed in considerable detail, much as in The Science of English Verse and in the Shakspere lectures, but there is no discussion of Chaucer's moral views on art, and no suggestions even for determining the chronology of his works to be studied. Perhaps such studies should not be and cannot be made; but if so, Chaucer and Shakspere should not be studied together in the way that Lanier suggested. The introduction to his ill-conceived textbook confirms our opinion that Lanier was too prone to make flashy generalizations, in what one critic has called his “drolly American self-confident fashion of making a dash at difficult speculations that have long exercised the minds of theorists, as if these questions had never been raised before.”³⁸

The same critic added, however: “But the fairness of his intentions often almost justifies his audacity, and one delights in the ardency of [his] spirit and the courageousness of his questioning, even when one is least able to accept his conclusions,” and with this we must agree. If we have not quarreled more with Lanier's method and taken issue more ardently with his conclusions, it is because in the work in which we have found both most fully revealed—the Shakspere lectures—we have also found much that is so genuinely delightful and fine that we have forgiven easily and ignored much in the act of forgiving. The same conclusions presented more succinctly and more baldly, as in this introduction, offend us more.

9

Work on this textbook was an interruption in Lanier's work in preparation for the lectures of the coming winter lecture course. Time for other such bread-and-meat work he also found, for he prepared an article on King Arthur for St. Nicholas' Magazine,³⁹ a summarization of material he had included in the preface to The Boy's King Arthur and of certain incidents from the story. The article was supposedly designed to give some account of Sir Thomas Malory's book which would bring it before minds younger than those for whom the introduction to The Boy's King Arthur was intended, but publication of it in the December number of the Scribner owned St. Nicholas' Magazine was also a move planned by the Scribners to encourage the sale of the book. The article is the sheerest kind of bread-and-meat work, a piece of no importance save for the recompense it brought Lanier.

But he found time also, in spite of such work and the laborious reading of English novels in preparation for a course that, as originally planned, was to have included a discussion of contemporary novels also, to write to his old friend Hayne:

“I have been wishing to write you a long time and have thought several letters to you. But I could never tell you the extremity of illness, of poverty, and of unceasing work, in which I have spent the last three years; and you would need only once to see the weariness with which I crawl to bed after a long day's work—and often a long night's work at the heel of it,—and Sundays just as well as other days,—in order to find in your heart a full warrant for my silence. It seems incredible that I have printed such an unchristian quantity of matter,—all, too, tolerably successful,—and earned so little money; and the wife and the four boys—who are so lovely that I would not think a palace good enough for them if I had it—make one's earnings seem all the less. …

“For six months past a ghastly fever has been taking possession of me each day at about twelve m., and holding my head under the surface of indescribable distress for the next twenty hours, subsiding only enough each morning to let me get on my working-harness, but never intermitting. A number of tests show it not to be the ‘hectic’ so well known in consumption; and to this day it has baffled all the skill I could find in New York, in Philadelphia, and [in Baltimore]. I have myself been disposed to think it arose purely from the bitterness of having to spend my time in making academic lectures and boy's books—pot-boilers all—when a thousand songs are singing in my ear that will certainly kill me if I do not utter them soon. But I don't think this diagnosis has found favor with any practical physician; and meantime I work day after day in such suffering as is piteous to see.”⁴⁰

He had reached at this time that stage of development of his poetic powers when he could compose spontaneously and well, and when a poem that had to be written seized him he would, in spite of pot-boilers and ill-health, give it form. For at least one poem, “A Ballad of Trees and the Master,” was written thus. Mrs. Lanier has described the circumstances:

“It was cold November weather. … I was to go out for a little while to see a friend who was also ill. He urged me to go. As I went to change my house-dress for a warmer one, he began to write on a sheet of paper. I had been gone from the room perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes. When I came back he handed me the paper, saying, ‘Take this to her and tell her that it is fresh from the mint.’ It was ‘The Ballad of Trees and the Master,’ just as we have it without erasure or correction.”⁴¹

10

The suffering Lanier experienced at this time shows plainly in the finely molded face of the bust Mr. Ephraim Keyser made of him. Keyser, a native of Baltimore who had for some time worked in Rome, had returned to Baltimore to execute several commissions. One day Lanier went with his friend, J. R. Tait, to Keyser's studio, and Keyser, seeing him for the first time, was so impressed by the beauty of his head and the fineness of his personality that he begged Lanier to pose for him. The bust, completed in ten sittings of an hour each,⁴² is of all portraits of Lanier the most satisfying; it portrays Lanier as he was at the period of his highest development as man and artist. Suffering shows in the face; but victory also—the victory of one who has met and conquered all opposition and is ready to face death as courageously as he had faced life.

His illness increased to such an extent that he was confined to his home and to bed. In December he was no better; his fever maintained an almost constant maximum of 104°; but it was during this illness, while he lay all but extinguished by the fierce fire of this fever, and with so little strength in his arms that he could not lift food to his lips, and his hand had to be propped to the level of his adjustable writing desk, that he pencilled in delicate, almost illegible script the superb “Sunrise.”⁴³

The restlessness and the burning of his fever pervade the lines; it is into the dream-troubled sleep of illness, no restful, natural sleep, that the clean nature odors of marsh and forest and sea come as something stronger than memories, less resistible than reality, to trouble Lanier and to waken him. But the sleep is stranger, more troubled even than the sleep of illness and of fever; it is surely the sleep of life, and awakening is to the freedom of all-releasing death.

I have waked, I have come, my beloved! I might not
                    abide:
I have come ere the dawn, O beloved, my live-oaks,
                    to hide
                              In your gospeling glooms,—to be
As a lover in heaven, the marsh my marsh, and the
                    sea, my sea.

There is no Wordsworthian reverence of nature here, for Wordsworth never knew such ecstasy or such a sense of the humanity of nature. This is nature worship pure and simple, and unqualified adoration of kinsmen trees, leaves, birds, marsh, and sea, which only just escapes the blighting touch of the nympholeptic longing apparent in “Corn” and in “The Symphony.” The language in which it is expressed lacks perhaps the musical beauty of “The Marshes of Glynn,” but there are in “Sunrise,” as in “The Marshes,” beautiful lines and beautiful rhythms, passages superbly onomatopœic. The rustle of the leaves is in the lines

Ye lispers, whisperers, singers in storms,
Ye consciences murmuring faiths under forms,
Ye ministers meet for each passion that grieves,
Friendly, sisterly, sweetheart leaves;

but in the twelve-line passage beginning “Oh! what if a sound should be made!” there is the magnificence of silence, caught, by paradox, in perfectly attuned phrases. And as in “The Marshes” Lanier conveyed perfectly the hush, and then the noises of water and air at sunset, so here he transcribes the sounds of the breaking of silence, the “low multitudinous stirring” swelling until—all the voices of nature singing together—it ushers in the sun.

But it is no divided allegiance that the worshipper here swears: the divinity to which Lanier makes obeisance is Divine Heat, giver of life, worshipped from of old, but saluted neither by Akhnaton nor by St. Francis more rapturously than by Lanier.

                                                                                Good-morrow, lord Sun!
With several voice, with ascription one,
The woods and the marsh and the sea and my soul
Unto thee, whence the glittering stream of all morrows doth roll,
Cry good and past-good and most heavenly morrow,
          lord Sun!
O Artisan, born in the purple! Workman Heat,
Parter of passionate atoms that travail to meet
And be mixed in the death-cold oneness, …
.....Thou chemist of storms, whether driving the winds
          a-swirl
Or a-flicker the subtiler essences polar that whirl
In the magnet of earth—yea, thou with a storm for a
                    heart,
Rent with debate, many-spotted with question, part
From part oft sundered, yet ever a globèd light,
Yet ever the artist, ever more large and bright
Than the eye of a man may avail of; manifold One.

But the poet leaves us not with the thought of sunrise but with that of sunset, or—to interpret literally—the end of life and the sunrise of death:

I must pass from thy face, I must pass from the face of the Sun.
.....But I fear not, nay, and I fear not the thing to be done;
I am strong with the strength of my lord the Sun:
How dark, how dark soever the race that must needs be run,
                                                  I am lit with the sun.

“Sunrise,” in spite of all the faults of execution, of distracting metaphor and of deceiving rhythm, is, as one critic has said, “marvelous for its enraptured joyousness of spirit and the glorious effulgence of a living dawn, pictured in the very presence of death.”⁴⁴ It is furthermore the very apotheosis of Lanier's poetry and with its rapturous embrace of the sunrise the very apotheosis of Lanier. But to see in “Sunrise” only this and the paganism of Lanier's adoration of nature is to miss the social gospel not only implicit but explicit, the message that makes “Sunrise” a companion piece to “The Symphony,” a chant for a new day more characteristic of Lanier than “The Marshes of Glynn.” For the sun is not only the source of light and heat and life, and the symbol—in Swedenborgian sense—of the soul's immortality; the sun is also surety of a golden earthly day yet to be, architect, builder and bondsman of a perfected social structure. Eleven years previously in the Furlow College commencement address Lanier had asked:

“Has God failed you?

“The dawn that broke in glory upon this morning denies it: yonder sun that hangs upon His right hand in heaven denies it; and to-night, the faithful stars, with a myriad silver voices, will deny.

“When these fail you, religion will fail you. Until then, you have naught to do but smile at those absurd birds of evil, who, having found some decaying carcass of a sensation, straight-way begin to flap wing boisterously through the air, and to screech out that the world is dead.”

“Sunrise” ends on the same note of faith:

Oh, never the mast-high run of the seas
                              Of traffic shall hide thee,
Never the hell-colored smoke of the factories
                                                  Hide thee,
Never the reek of time's fen-politics
                                                  Hide thee,
And ever my heart through the night shall with knowl-
          edge abide thee,
And ever by day shall my spirit, as one that hath tried
          thee,
Labor, at leisure, in art, till yonder beside thee
                              My soul shall float, friend Sun,
                                        The day being done.

“Sunrise” is inferior in execution to “The Marshes of Glynn,” and by no means a perfect poem, but it is a great poem, great as any in our American literature, and like Milton's “Lycidas” a poem to serve as a test by which to distinguish the true lover of poetry. Seldom before had Lanier sung so passionately and with such beauty of phrase and rhythm and with such conviction as he did here, nor was he to do so again. In comparison with the largely conceived “Sunrise” two poems that Lanier published in 1881—a new version of “Eternity in Time”⁴⁵ and “A Sunrise Song”⁴⁶—seem feeble and of little consequence. Into the longer poem he had put all the strength illness had left him; to poetry he had little left to give.

Notes

1. Payne [L. W. Jr.], “Sidney Lanier's Lectures.” [Sewanee Review xi, 452-62. October, 1903]

2. SHF [Shakspere and His Forerunners: Studies in Elizabethan Poetry and its Development from Early English. By Sidney Lanier. Illustrated. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. 1902] i, 46-48.

3. SHF i, 83 ff.

4. Music and Poetry [: Essays upon Some Aspects and Inter-Relations of the Two Arts. By Sidney Lanier. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1899.], 152 ff.; SEV [The Science of English verse. By Sidney Lanier … New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1880], 149-50, 178. The quotation used is from Music and Poetry, 155.

5. See the penultimate line of the fragmentary “Song of Aldhelm” (PO [Poem Outlines by Sidney Lanier. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1908], 50)—obviously an attempt to represent Anglo-Saxon alliteration in modern English verse. Perhaps the poem was intended as a faithful reconstruction of Aldhelm's thought in a close approximation to Aldhelm's language.

6. Letters [of Sidney Lanier. Selections from his Correspondence, 1866-1881. With Portraits. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1899], 215.

7. SHF, i, 77.

8. I.e. SHF, Chapter vii. The reference occurs i, 163.

9. SEV, v, note 1.

10. PO, 50. See also ibid., 70.

11. Century Magazine xxvii, 659. February, 1884; Poems (1884), 97.

12. Poems [of Sidney Lanier. Edited by his wife … New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1884] (1884), 86.

13. See SEV, 265.

14. Poems (1884), 183-203.

15. Baltimore Sun, January 31, 1880, p. 1, col. 7; as “Two Descriptions of Orchestral Works.” Music and Poetry, 68-69.

16. Independent xxxvii, 1627. December 17, 1885; Music and Poetry, 91-94.

17. Scribner's Monthly xx, 840-51. October, 1880; Retrospects and Prospects [: Descriptive and Historical Essays. By Sidney Lanier. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1899], 104-35.

18. Cf. Lanier's use of material from Latimer's sermons in SHF ii, 127 ff.

19. The Art Autograph. New York, May, 1880, plate 10. (Published by the Art Interchange to raise money for the fund organized by the New York Herald for relief of the Irish famine.) Lanier's poem—reproduced in a facsimile of the manuscript—is on a page with “The Relief Ship at Twilight” by Helen Hunt Jackson and opposite the page containing “The Album Fiend” by Oliver Wendell Holmes and “Arbutus” by J. G. Whittier. Reprinted, Poems (1884), 148.

20. Published together, Independent xxxvi, 1409. November 6, 1884; Poems (1884), 146-47.

21. Poems (1884), 112.

22. Century Magazine xxv, 222-23. December, 1882; Poems (1884), 10-13.

23. Mims [Edwin], [Sidney Lanier. Boston. 1905] 314-15.

24. Mims, 316-17.

25. Independent xxxii, No. 1650, 1. July 15, 1880; Poems (1884), 29-32.

26. Ward [William Hayes], “Four Poems.” [Independent xlix, 933. July 22, 1897].

27. Cf. with the characterizations here PO, 111.

28. I cannot agree with Professor H. M. Jones in finding in this poem the “fastidious air of a spiritual amateur,” nor the “syrupy patronage … of a very young clergyman.” The sentence quoted,

                        little mole that marks
    [Him] brother and [his] kinship seals to man,

    defines Lanier's own sense of imperfection, and of kinship with other artists, rather than any sense of superiority to them.

29. It is altogether possible that a realization of the inconsistency of Christian teaching and of Christian practice in tolerating slavery and in waging war served to inaugurate Lanier's rejection of orthodox Christianity.

30. PO, 104-05.

31. English Novel [: A Study in the Development of Personality. By Sidney Lanier … Revised Edition. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1897] (1897), p. 296. Cf. PO, 76.

32. Independent xxxii, No. 16073, 1. December 23, 1880; Poems (1884), 141. And see note, Poems (1884), 245.

33. Cf. PO, 13, 30, and especially 112.

34. [Ward, William Hayes. Poems of Sidney Lanier … New York, 1884.] (Poems, xxviii) says ten, but implies that the Hopkins Hall lectures and the class lectures ran concurrently.

    The following announcement was made in the Johns Hopkins University Circular No. 2, p. 18 (January, 1880):

    “Readings in English Literature. Mr. Sidney Lanier, Lecturer in English Literature, will give ten expository readings of Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Shakspere's Midsummer [sic] Night's Dream in connection, beginning in the middle of January. …

    “This course is intended only for the members of the University, and especially for those whose principal studies are directed to other subjects, and who have consequently but little time at command for English Literature.

    “The aim of the lecturer will be to awaken an interest in the poems under review solely as works of art. The course will embrace a wide range of considerations bearing upon this end.

    “The instructor will take pleasure in giving three or four preliminary sessions to students unacquainted with Fourteenth Century English, for the purpose of familiarizing them with the archaic forms of Chaucer.”

    In a letter of September 27, 1897, to Professor G. S. Wills (Unpublished MS., University of North Carolina Library), President Gilman called this course “Art of Expression,” and stated that it was given “twice weekly, beginning March 13, 1880.” But Dr. W. S. Pratt, who attended the lectures, states that they began the week of February 8, 1880. Is it possible that Gilman, forgetting the course on Chaucer and Shakspere, refers to another course—one Lanier proposed in the letter to Gilman of March 16, 1880, quoted pp. 374-75 above?

35. To W. S. Pratt. Unpublished MS. in possession of Dr. Pratt.

36. Mims, 324-25.

37. Independent xliii, 1337-38, 1371-72, 1401-02. September 10, 17, 24, 1891; Music and Poetry, 159-96. The papers may have been prepared somewhat earlier, circa January, 1880. See the letter of February 10, 1880, to an unnamed person (unpublished MS., Pennsylvania Historical Society) and the Johns Hopkins University Circular No. 2, p. 18—the announcement of a course quoted in note 34 above.

38. Critic n. s. xxxi, 365-66. April, 1899.

39. “King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table.” St. Nicholas' Magazine viii, 9-93. December, 1880; The Lanier Book, 23-35. MS., Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, H M 7996.

40. Letters, 243-45.

41. “A Festival Program to Honor Sidney Lanier … Sunday, August 15, 1926, at 4 p. m. in Calvary Episcopal Church, Fletcher, N. C.”

42. I am indebted for this information to Mr. Ephraim Keyser, and his letter to me of July 30, 1930.

43. Independent xxxiv, No. 1776, 1. December 14, 1882; Poems (1884), 3-9. See Mrs. Lanier's account of the composition of this poem in [Lanier, Henry Wysham. Selections From Sidney Lanier. Prose and Verse … New York. 1916], 164, note 16.

44. Abernethy.

45. Independent xxxiii, No. 1683, 1. March 3, 1881; Poems (1884), 46. Called in this version, “A Song of Eternity in Time.”

46. Independent xxxiii, No. 1691, 1. April 28, 1881; Poems [of Sidney Lanier. Edited by his wife … New Edition. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.] (1891), 152.