[In the following essay, Havens discusses Lanier's theory that there can be no beauty without moral goodness, and traces this theory of etherealization through Lanier's literary criticism.]

Although Sidney Lanier wrote much about form and the technique of literature, he understood beauty best within a moral context, which in his case is tinged by his own peculiar brand of Calvinism. He would have the “beauty of holiness” become the “holiness of beauty.” In fact, these terms may be mutually transposed when considering his judgment of any work of art as a thing of beauty.¹ With many an overtone of Emerson's dictum that “Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue,” Lanier utterly repudiates the idea that there can be any beauty isolated from moral goodness, that there can be any such thing as art for art's sake:

One hears all about the world nowadays that art is wholly un-moral, that art is for art's sake, that art has nothing to do with good or bad behavior. These are the cries of clever men whose cleverness can imitate genius so aptly as to persuade many that they have genius, and whose smartness can preach so incisively about art that many believe them to be artists. But such catch-words will never deceive the genius, the true artist. The true artist will never remain a bad man; he will always wonder at a wicked artist. The simplicity of this wonder renders it wholly impregnable. The argument of it is merely this: the artist loves beauty supremely; because the good is beautiful, he will clamber continually towards it, through all possible sloughs, over all possible obstacles, in spite of all possible falls.²

Lanier can understand beauty only within religious-ethical terms and, in fact, he equates beauty with “Truth, Love, Wisdom, Goodness, and the like” which, he says, the greatest artists of the world, “the fine and beautiful souls of time,” as they have grown in artistry, have all done, losing “all sense of distinction between the terms.” To prove this Lanier cites Keats' pronouncement that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Emerson's declaration in “Each and All” that “Nothing is fair or good alone” Lanier interprets to mean that “fairness, or beauty, and goodness depend upon relations between creatures” in which relationship alone are we able to understand the unity which inheres in the universe. In addition to citing Keats and Emerson, Lanier, in his attempt to prove that this beauty, which is truth, which is love, which is goodness, is also wisdom, quotes appropriate passages from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emanuel Swedenborg, and concludes with an appeal to the Old Testament King David, who, he says, “practically” confirms his view in Psalm 119, where “he involves the love of the law of God with wisdom in the verse: ‘I understand more than the ancients because I keep thy precepts.’”³

Whether Lanier's procedure proves anything or not, he concludes that the really great artists of all time considered “truth, beauty, wisdom, goodness, love … as if they were but avatars of one and the same essential God,” and he goes on to make his moral position as an artist and critic unmistakeably clear:

… 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 beauty, truth, wisdom, goodness, and love abandon the hope that the ages will accept you as an artist.⁴

For Lanier, then, the artist is the moral super-man, that man among men who is able to retrieve in a measure in himself man's fall from grace; artists are really the shock troops of mankind, leading mankind morally upward and onward. The artist's responsibility is essentially a religious and moral one since

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. … Indeed we may say that he who has not yet perceived how artistic beauty and moral beauty are convergent lines that 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.⁵

Thus, when Lanier says that “For the artist in verse there is no law: the perception and love of beauty constitutes the whole outfit,”⁶ he is not enunciating an art-for-art's-sake creed. For Lanier, beauty, the proper sense of beauty, the right comprehension of it, comprises all the best qualities of a moral being.

Thomas Carlyle had said that Poetic Beauty

dwells and is inborn in the inmost Spirit of Man, united to all love of Virtue, to all true belief in God; or rather, it is one with this love and this belief, another phase of the same highest principle in the mysterious infinitude of the human Soul.⁷

From this statement by Carlyle Lanier drew the concept that beauty is not only something that only a truly moral person can possess and comprehend. Beauty is also in itself a refining power, a sense which helps us reconcile the antinomies of life, the disparities of our moral existence. In this light, beauty is

a sense, guiding the artist away from the morally bad as well as the artistically bad, and performing precisely the functions of our physical sense; but the power of grasping the contradictory details of our physical and spiritual life and of arranging these contradictions into a tolerable proportion,—contradictions which would drive the lesser world of ordinary men and women to instant suicide if these were not protected by partial blindness and by looking the other way,—this power is at bottom the same with that which seizes upon the similar details of verse-structure, the friction of word against word, the strife of line with line … and … instead of absurdly fighting the fact of this opposition finds it to be the very basis of music and employs it to the purposes of formal poetry.⁸

In such a manner does the sense of beauty, the power which resolves “the antagonistic facts of life,” make of these “facts” a “moral music,” and result in the artist's evolution and growth, not merely in his artistry but also in his life as a moral man among men, the super-man who “sees into the life of things” as they really are.⁹ This refining power, this sense of beauty, is at one and the same time both the cause and the effect of the greatness of the artist's genius.

This power, this ability, was most clearly demonstrated in Shakespeare, Lanier claimed. There is a “wholeness in growth” in Shakespeare by virtue of which he is great. And this greatness of Shakespeare, he says in his essay entitled “Chaucer and Shakspere” consists in the moral vision which attended Shakespeare as he developed as a man and artist, which development may be traced progressively in the chronological order of his plays wherein “we have certain views of man in his relations (1) to Nature, (2) to his Fellowman, and (3) to Art,” or God.¹⁰

Shakespeare was the artistic proof of Lanier's major philosophical idea—his doctrine of etherealization. The interrelationships between man and nature, man and man, and man and art (or God), which Lanier sees developing as Shakespeare matures as an artist

exist, of course by no intent, but solely through the wholeness of Shakspere's life. Given a play to write: he wrote it from the deepest of his then state of mind. Thus every play not only beats like the bosom of a human being, but beats with the rate of rhythm belonging to the stage of growth at which it was written.¹¹

Lanier seems here to be in accord with Samuel Johnson, who says in his Preface to the works of Shakespeare that Shakespeare was a great moral teacher—though by accident and not design. And this is exactly Lanier's point: that any great artist, who, we must remember, is always a moral being of the highest stature, will exhibit this moral growth as he grows in artistry whether he consciously intends it or not because he is imbued with the true sense of beauty. Shakespeare, in his life as reflected in his work, illustrated for Lanier the whole life and movement of the race on the three levels of nature, man, and art. As Shakespeare's aesthetic experience rises from the caprice and irresponsibility portrayed in A Midsummer Night's Dream through the bitterness and trickery and superstition of Hamlet to the benevolence and forgiveness of The Tempest,¹² it becomes for Lanier as he interprets him, the paradigm for the movement of the human race toward perfection. Thus Lanier is not primarily concerned with the individual plays as separate works of art. He is not particularly concerned with explicating Shakespeare's artistry or bent on showing character development within any particular range of circumstances within any particular play. Rather, Lanier's concern is to depict the personality of Shakespeare, Shakespeare the man as he shines through these plays, and to define what significance the development of Shakespeare's personality has for mankind in general. Shakespeare's plays are viewed not so much as dramas as they are moral discourses written “from the deepest of his then state of mind.”

Lanier's object in the whole range of his criticism—not just of Shakespeare, but of novelists like George Eliot—is to validate his master doctrine of etherealization, for this doctrine constituted his philosophy of life with which his critical theory had to harmonize.

In the development of civilization, Lanier says, there are

two powerful tendencies, one of which is forward and the other backward; and recent events have caused many people to fear that at present these two tendencies are in equilibrio, or even that the backward tendency is beginning to exceed the forward.¹³

The optimist, on the side of “progress,” looks at the various endeavors of man in all fields and rejoices in, for example, the sea-cable which permits inter-continental communication. But the “Equilibrium men” think these two tendencies of recoil and thrust

are like two expert duellists, who by the constant attrition of mutual parry and thrust are continually sharpening each other's swords, and continually finding occasion to bewail advantage gained at the expense of advantage conferred.¹⁴

Thus for every advance we make, say these latter, we make also a retreat. It must be, however, Lanier says, in the face of these two points of view, worth the effort of “earnest people to look more closely into the age … to see which one of these is really availing itself of the new resources offered by exhaustless invention.”¹⁵

Lanier recognized what man can degrade himself to, what man and beasts in a “state of nature” are. There is always the ambivalence of our moral nature towards either good or evil—towards fruition and realization, or towards putrefaction and negation. This he sets forth in a prose passage of great poetic power: man arises at daybreak, with all the possibilities of good or evil during the day to come, and rubs his eyes.

We are amazed at the singular dawn-noises and dawn-sights which present themselves on all sides in wild contrasts. Yonder are the dim forms of the night-animals slinking away into the forest, and growling in bloody fights for lairs and refuges; above us is the stertorous upstarting of day-animals hungry for prey; above all the blood and snarling bends the morning sky. …¹⁶

The sky bending sweetly above this vision of carnage does not indicate to Lanier the indifference or the amorality of the universe, but rather an anticipation of the possibility of a far, far better world: “… The morning star, that love-light in the misty blue eye overhead, gleams upon the serene dew. …”¹⁷ But still that moral ambivalence recurs, which asks of both man's physical and moral nature,

who at such a moment is so calm of soul that he can scrutinize the low clouds yonder, and prophesy sunshine or foul weather for the day?¹⁸

The two forces in man—the positive and the negative, the forward-looking “soul,” which anticipates the day-star of a brighter spiritual dawn, and the backward-looking “sense,” which revels madly in the black night of animal indulgence—both strive for man's possession.

In the conflict between “sense” and “soul” man, simply because he is a “soul and sense linked together in order to fight each other more conveniently,”¹⁹ must not be merely an umpire of the battlefield, but because he does have the power of choice, simply because he is a man, must tip the balance of the scales in the favor of the “soul.” Man must believe in, and have faith in, the soul and its progress. It is not a case as to whether the soul is by its very nature going to win in the struggle of life—at least, in Lanier's view, man is not able to see such a triumph as the inevitable outcome of the struggle between “sense” and “soul.” Rather, man, because he has this soul by which he knows himself as man, “must” see that his “soul” wins over “sense.” Man, by the possession of his soul is morally necessitated to favor his soul.

Once granted this moral necessitarianism, that man must favor his soul because his soul proves he is man, Lanier proceeds to explain the basis by which “the rightful progress of man [goes] on”:

It is hoped to prove that this is not only the right progress of humanity, but that it is and has been the actual historical progress of men and things and events. For as time flows on, man and nature steadily etherealize. As time flows on, the sense-kingdom continually decreases and the soul-kingdom continually increases, and this is not by the destruction of sense's subjects, but by a system of promotions in which the sensuous things, constantly etherealizing, constantly acquire the dignity of spiritual things, and so diminish their own number and increase the other. This paradoxical ennobling-by-disgrace of the material into the spiritual expresses the historic development of the world. Over this route Nature and Art, like a bird's shadow and a bird, have flown up today. By this course politics and religion, which are respectively the body and soul of life, have acquired their present features.²⁰

At first glance, this may seem to be a vague conglomeration of hazy generalizations. But, in explanation, suppose one is listening to some master violinist playing his instrument. The music is received through the auditory sense, but if one does not like music, has no appreciation for it, no matter how beautiful the music may, in fact, be, the sounds are simply an arrangement of noises which might, in fact, hurt—just as certain sounds hurt the ears of animals. On this level, the sounds perceived through the auditory nerves are locked in the “sense-kingdom.” To another, however, who hears the musical sounds through the same sense-organ as the first, the sounds are translated into something far more meaningful and profound than a mere ordered succession of sounds produced by a scraping of hair against cat gut. By this person the sounds are translated into a symbol of all man's striving, yearning, and hopefulness. Thus are these sounds taken out of the “sense-kingdom” and made to take their place in the “soul-kingdom,” and ultimately come to suggest only spiritual meanings; so do

sensuous things, constantly etherealizing, constantly acquire the dignity of spiritual things, and so diminish their own number and increase the other.

This explanation is very elementary and on the lowest level of what Lanier means. Behind his doctrine of etherealization, and implicit in the statement of it given above, is also a doctrine of evolution, a doctrine of inevitable and eternal progression;²¹ these were doctrines which he “spent most of his life formulating”²² from his wide reading in Carlyle, Ruskin, Novalis and other German romanticists, Darwin,²³ Herbert Spencer, Coleridge, Browning, Wackenroder,²⁴ Friedrich Schlegel,²⁵ William Wordsworth, Byron, Shakespeare, Keats, Tennyson,²⁶ and others. Under the influence of these “even as a college student he … began to form an idealistic philosophy of his own which he was to follow more or less consistently for the rest of his life.”²⁷ The core of this philosophy was expressed in his doctrine of etherealization.

Having briefly examined Lanier's doctrine of etherealization, let us, as briefly as justice will allow, turn to the evolutionary theory in back of the doctrine. In so doing, we must consider Lanier's idea of the theory of evolution and his belief in the idea of inevitable progress—which he derived from his idea of evolution and incorporated into his doctrine of etherealization.

Lanier accepted evolution “in a less exacting sense” than that in which it says “that living beings are wholly explicable in terms of ‘precedent conditions,’ whether these conditions are of heredity, environment, or the immanent action of God.”²⁸

When Lanier entered Oglethorpe College in 1857, he became optimistic “as to the effect of the ‘new science’ on art,”²⁹ largely because of the influence upon him of James Woodrow, his science teacher. But he always had certain reticences about evolution, and exactly what these were came out in a letter to John F. Kirk in the year before Lanier's death in 1881:³⁰

I have been studying science, 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 … ‘Individuality’ [published posthumously as “The Cloud,” Works, I, 139] 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 shown me a single sentence 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.³¹

We see here that Lanier did not accept the genesis of species because he was interested in preserving the “artist's autonomy”; he wanted to protect the autonomy of everyone in particular, and anyone in general; he did not want anyone to be explained by “precedent conditions” of any sort whatever. Lanier's belief in the divinity of man and his moral perfectibility was in back of his objection to the idea of the genesis of species. The morality and spirituality of a biologically evolved man was a contradiction in terms to Lanier.

An example of where Lanier particularly attacks the idea of the individual's being determined by “precedent conditions” occurs in The English Novel. In reply to a critic who had said that “‘the writings of George Eliot must be regarded … as one of the earliest triumphs of the Spencerian method of studying personal character and the laws of social life,’” Lanier answers,

This seems to me so far from being true that many of George Eliot's characters appear like living objections to the theory of evolution. How could you, according to this theory, evolve the moral stoutness and sobriety of Adam Bede, for example, from his precedent conditions, to wit, his drunken father and querulous mother? How could you evolve the intensity and intellectual alertness of Maggie Tulliver from her precedent conditions, to wit, a father wooden by nature and sodden by misfortune and a flaccid mother? Though surely influenced by circumstances her characters everywhere seem to flout evolution in the face.³²

However, when Lanier says he accepts evolution, “he may be shown … to have accepted [it] in a less exacting sense.”³³ Lanier followed Herbert Spencer when he defined

evolution ‘as a process from the uniform and indefinite to the multiform and definite,’ and … he agreed that ‘all accounts, the scientific, the religious, the historical, agree that the progress of things is from chaos or formlessness to form, … afterwards from the one-formed to the many-formed.’³⁴ Evolution in this sense, in fact, was the theme of his whole work [i.e., The English Novel], in which Lanier sought to show that cultural history since the time of the Greeks, and especially since the Renaissance, has consisted in the liberation and differentiation of individual personality.³⁵

One of the reasons why Lanier says Aeschylus is inferior to Shakespeare is that Aeschylus does not have a full and complete doctrine of the human personality.³⁶ Lanier is tremendously concerned with individuation; the individual personality, its freedom, its idiosyncratic character, must be upheld against even the attractiveness of the theory of evolution which he had in the back of his mind to help him explain every other aspect of his aesthetic theory—except, of course, where the self-law, self-will of the individual artist was at stake. What Lanier says in the opening lecture of The English Novel is significant:

My first line will concern itself with the enormous growth in the personality of man which our time reveals when compared, for instance, with the time of Aeschylus. I shall insist with the utmost reverence that between every human being and every other human being exists a radical, unaccountable, inevitable difference from birth; this sacred difference between man and man, by virtue of which I am I and you are you, this marvelous separation which we express by the terms “personal identity,” “self-hood,” “me,”—it is the unfolding of this, I shall insist, which since the time of Aeschylus (say) has wrought all those stupendous changes in the relation of man to God, to physical nature, and to his fellow, which have culminated in the modern cultus.³⁷

The things which the individual man or artist, who cannot be explained by “precedent conditions,” acts upon, in all fields of endeavor, evolve; they have evolved in imagination and in themselves—there has been a real evolutionary process, and this process as Lanier views it is inevitably upward. Why, then, the question might be asked was Lanier, since he is a “soft” evolutionist, so fearful in applying this view to the artist?

In his discussion of “this sacred difference between man, by virtue of which I am I and you are you,” Lanier quotes John Fiske on the evolution of genius:

“Every species of animals or plants consists of a great number of individuals which are nearly but not exactly alike. Each individual varies slightly in one characteristic or another from a certain type which expresses the average among all the individuals of the species. … Now the moth with his proboscis twice as long as the average … is what we call a spontaneous generation, and the Darwin or the Helmholtz is what we call a ‘genius’; and the analogy between the two kinds of deviation is obvious enough. … We cannot tell why a given moth has a proboscis exactly an inch and a quarter in length any more than we can tell why Shakspere was a great dramatist.”³⁸

Fiske, an evolutionist, is describing the role chance plays in the generation of the extraordinary. He admits that chance plays such a role, admits that he does not know why certain individuals in any particular species should deviate from the average, and admits that these deviations cannot be predicted. But Lanier says immediately after he has quoted these admissions by Fiske that the reason the evolutionist cannot predict a Shakespeare is that there are “absolutely no precedent conditions by which the most ardent evolutionist could evolve William Shakspere … from old John Shakspere and his wife.”³⁹ And this after Fiske has admitted that the element of chance operates in biological evolution to throw aside the averages of “precedent conditions”!

It is possible to say that Lanier did not follow Fiske's argument. But it is hard to believe that Lanier could boggle at the meaning of a prose passage written by a popular scientist. It is easier to believe he understood perfectly well what Fiske was saying about the role chance plays in biological evolution. But what Lanier understood gave him pause, because chance can also operate to the detriment of biological generation. At the pole opposite the genius lolls the idiot. There is, theoretically, even the possibility of racial retrogression once biological evolution is admitted with its element of chance. Thus Lanier stresses the individual and his “self-hood,” the “sacred difference between man and man,” the genius who represents all that is fine and noble in the human race, without any reference to the chance, the exception, which explains him in the light of biological evolution.

Lanier is concerned that this personality is a God-given possession, that man is a morally necessitated being who must always act up to the power of that possession, who is, as a true man, always moral because Providence has stamped him in the image of God, ineradicably and irrevocably. To admit that man evolved, even to the height of a Shakespeare, a George Eliot, or an Elizabeth Barrett Browning, to admit that man was a fortuitous concourse of atoms, chance-selected, chance-directed, would be too great a risk. The whole sub-structure of man's morality—and Lanier's aesthetic-critical theory is inextricably entwined with his moral views—would be undercut and destroyed for Lanier if chance, not Providence, directed man, if prudence, not divinity, were the basis of the true, the good, the beautiful, the moral.

Lanier's doctrine of etherealization provided for man's free-willed choice at the same time that man's moral and spiritual progress was assured by an ever-upward, progressive, evolutionary process inherent in the very order of nature, of the universe. Thus, Lanier was able to keep the basic Christian distinction between good and evil (which the individual had to choose between by exercising his power of ethical choice). At the same time, he was able to be tolerant of the more idealistic phases of science (admitting the idea of evolution, but limiting its application to man's moral and spiritual condition).

The implications this had for his critical theory were that he looked on any artist worthy of the name as first and foremost a supremely great moral teacher, and detailed aesthetic considerations within any particular work of an artist were of less importance to him than the progress the artist seemed to make in his moral development through the whole corpus of his work. In a very real sense, Lanier viewed the artist in relation to his work the way he viewed God in his manifestation in the natural order. In the natural order, the ultimate end towards which all things moved was perfection, and this by the impulse of the Spirit which moved in all things. So, too, in the corpus of any artist's work. The work was inseparable from the quality of life breathed into it by the moral perceptions of its author. The artist, then, is a demi-god to whom lesser men can look for a knowledge of the pattern which consists in all things.

Notes

1. The Centennial Edition of the Works of Sidney Lanier, ed. Charles R. Anderson, et al. (Baltimore, 1945), IV, 233. Hereafter referred to as Works.

2. Ibid., II, 288.

3. Ibid., IV, 233-239 passim.

4. Ibid., p. 239.

5. Ibid., p. 233.

6. Ibid., II, 244.

7. Ibid., IV, 50, quoted from Carlyle's The State of German Literature.

8. Ibid., p. 327.

9. Ibid., p. 328.

10. Ibid., pp. 327-328.

11. Ibid., p. 328.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., V, 281.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., p. 282.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., p. 283.

20. Ibid., p. 284.

21. For more of what Lanier says on this score, see his entire essay, “Retrospects and Prospects,” in Works, V, 280-305.

22. Gay Wilson Allen, “Sidney Lanier as a Literary Critic,” Philological Quarterly, XVII (1938), 121.

23. Frederick William Conner, Cosmic Optimism (Gainesville, 1949), p. 200, notes that Lanier owned a copy of The Origin of Species, that he read it very carefully, making many marginal comments. At Oglethorpe College Lanier came under the influence of the science teacher, James Woodrow, who was convinced that science and the humanities had common cause.

24. Allen, p. 125.

25. Ibid., p. 126.

26. Aubrey Harrison Starke, Sidney Lanier (Chapel Hill, 1933), p. 29, says that Tennyson was Lanier's favorite poet because he “wrote of the chivalric ages as he himself intended to, but wrote still of the present day, reconciling science and religion, glorifying the power of love, paying high tributes to music, reiterating his faith in the existence of God.” Starke goes on to say that, as Tennyson was his favorite poet, Lanier's “favorite essayist was surely Carlyle.”

27. Allen, pp. 121-122.

28. Conner, p. 204.

29. Philip Graham, “Lanier and Science,” American Literature, IV (November, 1932), 288-289.

30. Lanier's letter of June 15, 1880, Works, X, 205.

31. See also Lanier's poem, “To Bayard Taylor,” in which he says that the “shame / Of science [is] that [it] cannot prove proof is.”

32. Works, IV, 248.

33. Conner, p. 204.

34. Works, IV, 27, quoted by Conner, p. 205.

35. Conner, p. 205.

36. Works, IV, 22.

37. Ibid., pp. 5-6.

38. John Fiske, “Sociology and Hero Worship,” Atlantic Monthly, XLVII (January, 1881), quoted in Works, IV, 6.

39. Works, IV, 6.