Sidney Lanier by Edwin Mims - HTML preview

The Achievement in Criticism and in Poetry

Speculations as to what Lanier might have done with fewer limitations and with a longer span of years inevitably arise in the mind of any one who studies his life. If, like the late Theodore Thomas, he had at an early age been able to develop his talent for music in the musical circles of New York; if, like Longfellow, he had gone from a small college to a German university, or, like Mr. Howells, from the provinces to Cambridge, where he would have come in contact with a group of men of letters; if, after the Civil War, he had, like Hayne, retired to a cabin and there devoted himself entirely to literary work; if, like Lowell, he could have given attention to literary subjects and lectured in a university without teaching classes of immature students or without resorting to "pot-boilers", "nothings that do mar the artist's hand;" if, like Poe, he could have struck some one vein and worked it for all it was worth, -- if, in a word, the varied activity of his life could have given way to a certain definiteness of purpose and concentration of effort, what might have been the difference! Music and poetry strove for the mastery of his soul. Swinburne, speaking of those who attempt success in two realms of art, says, "On neither course can the runner of a double race attain the goal, but must needs in both races alike be caught up and resign his torch to a runner with a single aim." And yet one feels that if Lanier had had time and health to work out all these diverse interests and all his varied experiences into a unity, if scholarship and music and poetry could have been developed simultaneously over a long stretch of time, there would have resulted, perhaps, a more many-sided man and a finer poetry than we have yet had in America.

So at last the speculation reduces itself to one of time. Lycidas was dead ere his prime. From 1876 till the fatal illness took hold of him he made great strides in poetry. Up to the very last he was making plans for the future. His letters to friends outlining the volumes that he hoped to publish, -- work demanding decades instead of years, -- the memoranda jotted down on bits of paper or backs of envelopes as the rough drafts of essays or poems, would be pathetic, if one did not believe with Lanier that death is a mere incident in an eternal life, or with Browning, that what a man would do exalts him. The lines of Robert Browning's poems in which he sets forth the glory of the life of aspiration -- aspiration independent of any achievement -- ring in one's ears, as he reads the story of Lanier's life.

This low man seeks a little thing to do,

       Sees it and does it;

This high man, with a great thing to pursue,

       Dies ere he knows it.

The imperfect poems, the unfinished poems, the sheaves unharvested, not like Coleridge's for lack of will, but for lack of time, are suggestive of one of the finest aspects of romantic art. "I would rather fail at some things I wot of than succeed at others," said Lanier. There are moods when the imperfection of Lanier pleases more than the perfection of Poe -- even from the artistic standpoint. What he aspired to be enters into one's whole thought about his life and his art. The vista of his grave opens up into the unseen world.

 On earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.

But the time comes when none of these considerations -- neither admiration for the man, nor speculations as to what he might have done under different circumstances, nor thoughts as to what he may be doing in larger, other worlds than ours -- should interfere with a judicial estimate of what he really achieved. It would have been the miracle of history if with all his obstacles he had not had limitations as a writer; and yet many who have insisted most on his sufferings, have resented any criticism passed upon his work. One has the authority of Lanier's writings about other men and his letters about his own poems for judging him only by the highest standards. Did he in aiming at a million miss a unit? Was he blinded by the very excess of light? How will he fare in that race with time of which a contemporary essayist has written? "When the admiration of his friends no longer counts, when his friends and admirers are themselves gathered to the same silent throng," will there be enough inherent worth in his work to keep his fame alive? These are questions that one has a right to ask.

And, first, as to Lanier's prose work. He has suffered from the fact that so many of his unrevised works have been published; these have their excuse for being in the light they throw on his life; but otherwise some of them are disappointing. If, instead of ten volumes of prose, there could be selected his best work from all of them, there would still be a residue of writing that would establish Lanier's place among the prose writers of America. There is no better illustration of his development than that seen in comparing his early prose -- the war letters and "Tiger Lilies", for instance, or such essays as "Retrospects and Prospects" -- with that of his maturer years. I doubt if justice has been done to Lanier's best style, its clearness, fluency, and eloquence. It may be claimed without dispute that he was a rare good letter-writer; perhaps only Lowell's letters are more interesting. The faults of his poetry are not always seen in his best letters. In them there is a playfulness, a richness of humor, an exuberance of spirits, animated talk about himself and his work, and withal a distinct style, that ought to keep them alive. There might be selected, too, a volume of essays, including "From Bacon to Beethoven", "The Orchestra of To-Day", "San Antonio de Bexar", "The Confederate Memorial Address", "The New South", and others.

A volume of American Criticism, edited by Mr. William Morton Payne, includes Lanier among the dozen best American critics, giving a selection from the "English Novel" as a typical passage. Has he a right to be in such a book? His work as a scholar has been discussed in a previous chapter; his rank as a critic is a very different matter. It goes without saying that Lanier was not a great critic. He did not have the learning requisite for one. One might turn the words of his criticism of Poe and say that he needed to know more. He knew but little of the classics beyond what he studied in college; while he read French and German literature to some extent, he did not go into them as Lowell did. Homer, Dante, and Goethe were but little more than names to him. Furthermore, his criticism is often marked by a tendency to indulge in hasty generalizations, due to the fact that he had not sufficient facts to draw upon. An illustration is his preference of the Elizabethan sonnets to the English sonnets written on the Italian model, or his discussion of personality as found in the Greek drama. His generalizations are often either patently obvious or far-fetched. He was too eager to "bring together people and books that never dreamed of being side by side." His tendency to fancy, so marked in his poetry, is seen also in his criticism, as for instance, his comparison of a sonnet to a little drama, or his statement that every poem has a plot, a crisis, and a hero. He had De Quincey's habit of digressing from the main theme, -- what he himself called in speaking of an Elizabethan poet, the "constant temptation, to the vigorous and springy mind of the poet, to bound off wherever his momentary fancy may lead him." This is especially seen in his lectures on the English Novel, where he is often carried far afield from the general theme. In his lectures on "Shakspere and His Forerunners", he was so often troubled with an embarrassment of riches that he did not endeavor to follow a rigidly formed plan.

A more serious defect, however, was his lack of catholicity of judgment. He had all of Carlyle's distaste for the eighteenth century; his dislike of Pope was often expressed, and he went so far as to wish that the novels of Fielding and Richardson might be "blotted from the face of the earth." His characterization of Thackeray as a "low-pitched artist" is wide of the mark. As Lanier had his dislikes in literature and expressed them vigorously, so he over-praised many men. When he says, for instance, that Bartholomew Griffin "will yet obtain a high and immortal place in English literature," or that William Drummond of Hawthornden is one of "the chief glories of the English tongue," or that Gavin Douglas is "one of the greatest poets of our language," one wonders to what extent the "pleasant peril of enthusiasm" will carry a man. One may be an admirer of George Eliot and yet feel that Lanier has overstated her merits as compared with other English novelists, and that his praise of "Daniel Deronda" is excessive.

Such defects as are here suggested should not, however, blind the reader to some of Lanier's better work. The history of criticism, especially of romantic criticism, is full of just such unbalanced judgments. It is often true in criticism that a man "should like what he does like; and his likings are facts in criticism for him." Without very great learning and with strong prejudices in some directions, Lanier yet had remarkable insight into literature. Lowell's saying that he was "a man of genius with a rare gift for the happy word" is especially true of some of his critical writing. Examples are his well-known characterizations of great men in "The Crystal": --

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.

 . . . . .

                Langley, that with but a touch

Of art had sung Piers Plowman to the top

Of English song, whereof 't is dearest, now

And most adorable.

 . . . . .

                       Emerson,

Most wise, that yet, in finding Wisdom, lost

Thy Self, sometimes.

 . . . . .

               Tennyson, largest voice

Since Milton, yet some register of wit

Wanting.

There are scattered throughout his prose works criticisms of writers that are at once penetrating and subtle. The one on Browning has already been quoted. The best known of these criticisms is that on Walt Whitman, but it is too long for insertion here. There is a sentence in one of his letters to Bayard Taylor, however, that hits the mark better than the longer criticism, perhaps: "Upon a sober comparison, I think Walt Whitman's `Leaves of Grass' worth at least a million of `Among my Books' and `Atalanta in Calydon'. In the two latter I could not find anything which has not been much better said before; but `Leaves of Grass' was real refreshing to me -- like rude salt spray in your face -- in spite of its enormous fundamental error that a thing is good because it is natural, and in spite of the world-wide difference between my own conceptions of art and the author's." Another good one is that on Shelley: "In truth, Shelley appears always to have labored under an essential immaturity: it is very possible that if he had lived a hundred years he would never have become a man; he was penetrated with modern ideas, but penetrated as a boy would be, crudely, overmuch, and with a constant tendency to the extravagant and illogical; so that I call him the modern boy."

Lanier writes of the songs of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as "short and unstudied little songs, as many of them are, songs which come upon us out of that obscure period like brief little bird-calls from a thick-leaved wood." He speaks of Chaucer's works as "full of cunning hints and twinkle-eyed suggestions which peep between the lines like the comely faces of country children between the fence bars as one rides by." He draws a fine comparison between William Morris and Chaucer: "How does the spire of hope spring and upbound into the infinite in Chaucer; while, on the other hand, how blank, worldbound, and wearying is the stone facade of hopelessness which rears itself uncompromisingly behind the gayest pictures of William Morris! . . . Again, how openly joyful is Chaucer, how secretly melancholy is Morris! Both, it is true, are full of sunshine; but Chaucer's is spring sunshine, Morris's is autumn. . . . Chaucer rejoices as only those can who know the bound of good red blood through unobstructed veins, and the thrilling tingle of nerve and sinew at amity; and who can transport this healthy animalism into their unburdened minds, and spiritualize it so that the mere drawing of breath is at once a keen delight and an inwardly felt practical act of praise to the God of a strong and beautiful world. Morris too has his sensuous element, but it is utterly unlike Chaucer's; it is dilettante, it is amateur sensualism; it is not strong, though sometimes excessive, and it is nervously afraid of that satiety which is at once its chief temptation and its most awful doom.

 "Again, Chaucer lives, Morris dreams. . . . `The Canterbury Tales' is simply a drama with somewhat more of stage direction than is common; but the `Earthly Paradise' is a reverie, which would hate nothing so much as to be broken by any collision with that rude actual life which Chaucer portrays.

"And, finally, note the faith that shines in Chaucer and the doubt that darkens in Morris. Has there been any man since St. John so lovable as the `Persoune'? or any sermon since that on the Mount so keenly analytical, . . . as `The Persoune's Tale'? . . . A true Hindu life-weariness (to use one of Novalis' marvelous phrases) is really the atmosphere which produces the exquisite haze of Morris's pictures. . . . Can any poet shoot his soul's arrow to its best height, when at once bow and string and muscle and nerve are slackened in this vaporous and relaxing air, that comes up out of the old dreams of fate that were false and of passions that were not pure?"*

--

 * `Music and Poetry', p. 198.

 --

Lanier's enthusiasm for Chaucer is typical of much of his critical writing. He was a generous praiser of the best literature, and generally his praise was right. "Lyrics of criticism" would be a good title for many of his passages. There was nothing of indifferentism in him. In a letter to Gibson Peacock he wrote of a certain type of criticism which, it may be said, has been widely prevalent in recent years: "In the very short time that I have been in the hands of the critics, nothing has amazed me more than the timid solicitudes with which they rarefy in one line any enthusiasm they may have condensed in another -- a process curiously analogous to those irregular condensations and rarefactions of air which physicists have shown to be the conditions of producing an indeterminate sound. Many of my critics have seemed -- if I may change the figure -- to be forever conciliating the yet-unrisen ghosts of possible mistakes." Enough quotations have already been given from his lectures in Baltimore to show his enthusiasm for many of the periods and many of the authors of English literature. It is a distinction for him as a critic that he has set forth in so many passages his conception of the mission of poetry, -- passages that are in the line of succession of defenses of poetry by Sidney, Hazlitt, and Shelley.

There is enough good criticism in the Shakespeare lectures and in the "English Novel", in the prefaces of the boy's books and in his letters, to make a volume of interest and importance. Suppose we cease to think of the first two as formal treatises on the subjects they discuss, and rather select from them such passages as the discussion of personality, the relation of music, science, and the novel, the criticism of Whitman's theory of art, the discussion of the relation of morals to art, the best passages on Anglo-Saxon poetry and the Elizabethan sonneteers, and the finer passages on Shakespeare's growth as a man and as a dramatist. Such a volume would, I believe, confirm one in the opinion that Lanier belongs by right among the best American critics. Certainly, the "Science of English Verse" entitles him to that distinction.

 About 1875 Lanier became interested in the formal side of poetry and projected a work on a scientific basis. It was natural that one who had so much reverence for science and who had studied the "physics of music", should apply the scientific method to the study of poetry. He knew that the science of versification was not the most important phase of poetry: in the preface, as in the epilogue, to the "Science of English Verse", he makes clear that "for the artist in verse there is no law: the perception and love of beauty constitute the whole outfit." In many other passages in his writings may be seen his view of the moral significance of poetry. He desired, however, to formulate for himself and for students certain metrical laws. What differentiates poetry from prose? How does a writer produce certain effects with certain rhythms and vowel and consonant arrangements? The student wishes to know why the forms are fair and hear how the tale is told. By the study of rhythm, tune, and color, Lanier believed that one might receive "a whole new world of possible delight." He believed with Sylvester that "versification has a technical side quite as well capable of being reduced to rules as that of painting or any other fine art." His book was intended to furnish students with such an outfit of facts and principles as would serve for pursuing further researches.

The time was ripe for such a study. Lanier wrote to Mr. Stedman that "in all directions the poetic art was suffering from the shameful circumstance that criticism was without a scientific basis." The book at once received commendation from competent critics. Edward Rowland Sill wrote Dr. Gilman that it was "the only thing extant on that subject that is of any earthly value. I wonder that so few seem to have discovered its great merit,"   -- an opinion afterwards repeated by him in the "Atlantic Monthly". The late Richard Hovey, in a series of articles in the "Independent" on the technic of poetry, said that Lanier had begun such a scientific study with "great soundness and common sense;" the book is "accurate, scientific, suggestive." The editor of the "Dial" referred to it as "the most striking and thoughtful exposition yet published on the technics of English poetry." Within the past ten years books on English verse have multiplied fast. In Germany, in England, and in America, the discussion of metrics has gone on. While dissenting from some of Lanier's conclusions, few of the writers have failed to recognize his work as of great importance.* One man rarely sees all round any great subject like this, -- each man sees some one special point and states it in an individual way, and finally, in the course of time, the truth is evolved.

--

 * See, for instance, Winchester's `Principles of Literary Criticism', Alden's `English Verse', Paul Elmer More's `Shelburne Essays', and Omond's `English Metrists'.

 --

There is little objection to Parts II and III of the "Science of English Verse". They are generally recognized as strikingly suggestive and helpful. It is with the main thesis of the first part that many disagree -- the author's insistence that the laws of music and of verse are identical. According to Lanier, verse is in all respects a phenomenon of sound. From time immemorial the relation of music and of poetry has been spoken of in figurative terms, as in Carlyle's discussion of the subject in the essay on the "Hero as Poet". Lanier, however, was the first to work the idea out in a thorough-going fashion. He was especially qualified to do so because of his knowledge of the two arts. His general conclusion was the same as that reached by Professor Gummere in his searching discussion of "Rhythm as the Essential Fact of Poetry".* Both of them saw that the origin of poetry was in the dance and the march, and later the song. In modern times the two arts had become distinct. Lanier believed that, in accordance with its origin and the practice of the best poets, the basis of rhythm is time and not accent. Every line is made up of bars of equal time value. "If this equality of time were taken away, no possibility of rhythm would remain." "The accent serves only to mark for the ear these equal intervals of time, which are the units of poetic measurement." Lanier's theory of quantity, however, is different from the rigid laws of classic quantity, for he allows for variations from the regular type of verse that may prevail in a certain poem or line, thus providing for "an escape out of the rigidities of the type into the infinite field of those subtle rhythms which pervade familiar utterance." He separates himself therefore from such writers as Abbott and Guest, who applied the rule of thumb to English verse. To such men "Shakspere's verse has often seemed a mass of `license', of `irregularity', and of lawless anomaly to commentators; while, approached from the direction of that great rhythmic sense of humanity displayed in music, in all manner of folk-songs, and in common talk, it is perfect music."

--

 * `The Beginnings of Poetry', chapter 2.

 --

Lanier's theory is a good one in so far as it applies to the ideal rhythm, for the melody of verse does approximate that of music. If one considers actual rhythm, however, he is forced to come to the conclusion that no such mathematical relation exists between the syllables of a foot of verse as that existing between the notes of a musical bar. In poetry another element enters in to interfere with the ideal rhythm of music, and that is what Mr. More has called "the normal unrhythmical enunciation of the language." The result is a compromise shifting toward one extreme or another. Lanier's theory would apply to the earliest folk-songs. He illustrated his point by referring to the negro melodies, which, says Joel Chandler Harris, "depend for their melody and rhythm upon the musical quality of the time, and not upon long or short, accented or unaccented syllables." His citation of Japanese poetry was also a case in point. Unquestionably, the lyrics and choruses of the Greek drama were thoroughly musical; Sophocles and Aeschylus were both teachers of the chorus. Many of the lyrics of the Elizabethan age were written especially for music, and more than one collector of these lyrics has bemoaned the fact that in later times there has been such a divorce between the two arts. Who will say that Coleridge's "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan" are not disembodied music? Lamb said that Coleridge repeated the latter poem "so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into any parlor when he says or sings it to me." Mr. Arthur Symons has recently said: "`Christabel' is composed like music; you might set at the side of each section, especially of the opening, `largo vivacissimo', and as the general expressive signature, `tempo rubato'." Tennyson realized the musical effect of "Paradise Lost" when he spoke of Milton as "England's God-gifted organ-voice"; and he himself in such lyrics as those in the "Princess" and the eighty-sixth canto of "In Memoriam" wrought musical effects with verse. Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton says of Poe's "Ulalume" that, if properly intoned, "it would produce something like the same effect upon a listener knowing no word of English that it produces upon us." It needs to be said, in parenthesis, that in all these cases, while there is the musical effect from the standpoint of time and tone-color, there is still the perfection of speech. The theory will not hold, however, in much dramatic verse, or in meditative blank verse, as used by Wordsworth. Much of the poetry of Byron, Browning, Keats, and Shakespeare, while supremely great from the standpoint of color, or dramatic power, or picturesqueness, or thought, is not musical. To bring some poems within the limit of musical notation would be impossible.

While then one must modify Lanier's theory, the book emphasizes a point that needs constantly to be emphasized, both by poets and by students of poetry. Followed too closely by minor poets, it will tend to develop artisans rather than artists. Followed by the greater poets, -- consciously or unconsciously, -- it may prove to be one of the surest signs of poetry. This phase of poetical work needed to be emphasized in America, where poetry, with the exception of Poe's, has been deficient in this very element. Whatever else one may say of Emerson, Bryant, Whittier, or Longfellow, he must find that their poetry as a whole is singularly lacking in melody. Moreover, the poet who was the most dominant figure in American literature at the time when Lanier was writing, prided himself on violating every law of form, using rhythm, if at all, in a certain elementary or oriental sense. "I tried to read a beautifully printed and scholarly volume on the theory of poetry received by mail this morning from England," said Whitman, "but gave it up at last as a bad job." One may be thoroughly just to Whitman and grant the worth of his work in American literature, and yet see the value of Lanier's contention that the study of the formal element in poetry will lead to a much finer poetry than we have yet had in this country. Other books will supplant the "Science of English Verse" as text-books, and few may ever read it understandingly; but the author's name will always be thought of in any discussion of the relations of music and poetry. It is not only a scientific monograph, but a philosophical treatise on a subject that will be discussed with increasing interest.

While Lanier thus stated his conception of the formal element in poetry, he has, in many other places, given his ideas of the poet's character and his work in the world. If on the one hand he criticised Whitman for lack of form, on the other he blamed Swinburne for lack of substance. Seemingly a follower of Poe, he yet would have incurred the displeasure of that poet for adopting the "heresy of the didactic". He had an exalted sense of what poetry means in the redemption of mankind. He had little patience with the cry, "Art for art's sake," or with the justification so often made for the immorality of the artist's life. Milton himself did not believe more ardently that a poet's life ought to be a true poem. In the poems "Individuality", "Clover", "Life and Song", and the "Psalm of the West", Lanier expresses his view of the responsibility of the artist. In the first he says:  --

Awful is Art because 't is free;

The artist trembles o'er his plan

Where men his Self must see.

In the "English Novel" he says: "For, indeed, we may say that he who has not yet perceived how artistic beauty and moral beauty are convergent lines which run back into a common ideal origin, and who is therefore 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."

Lanier believed that he was, or would be, a great poet. While for a time he considered music as his special field of work and "poetry as a mere tangent," after 1875 his aspiration took the direction of poetry. Criticism of his work only strengthened his conviction that it was of a high order. Letters to his father and to his wife indicate his positive conviction that he was meeting with the misunderstanding that every great artist has met since the world began: "Let my name perish, -- the poetry is good poetry and the music is good music, and beauty dieth not, and the heart that needs it will find it." "I KNOW, through the fiercest tests of life, that I am in soul, and shall be in life and utterance, a great poet," he said again.

Accordingly he hoped that he would accomplish something different from the popular poetry of the period. Time and again he spoke of "the feeble magazine lyrics" of his time. "This is the kind of poetry that is technically called culture poetry, yet it is in reality the product of a WANT of culture. If these gentlemen and ladies would read the old English poetry . . . they could never be content to put forth these little diffuse prettinesses and dandy kickshaws of verse." And again: "In looking around at the publications of the younger American poets, I am struck with the circumstance that none of them even ATTEMPT anything great. . . . Hence the endless multiplications of those little feeble magazine lyrics which we all know: consisting of one minute idea each, which is put in the last line of the fourth verse, the other three verses and three lines being mere surplusage." His characterizations of contemporary poetry are strikingly like those of Walt Whitman. Different as they were in nearly every respect, the two poets were yet alike in their idea that there should be a reaction against the conventional and artificial poetry of their time, -- the difference being, that Whitman's reaction took the direction of formlessness, while Lanier's was concerned about the extension and revival of poetic forms. In both poets there is a range and sweep, both of conception and of utterance, that sharply differentiates them from all other poets since the Civil War.

The question then is, whether Lanier, with his lofty conception of the poet's work, and with his faith in himself, succeeded in writing poetry that will stand the test of time. He undoubtedly had some of the necessary qualities of a poet. He had, first of all, a sense of melody that found vent primarily in music and then in words which moved with a certain rhythmic cadence. "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 things which occupy the front of the stage, the `dramatis personae' of the moment, and fix myself upon the deeper scene in the rear." "All day my soul hath been cutting swiftly into the great space of the subtle, unspeakable deep, driven by wind after wind of heavenly melody," he writes at another time. His best poems move to the cadence of a tune. He probably heard them as did Milton the lines of "Paradise Lost". Sometimes there was a lilt like the singing of a bird, and sometimes the lyric cry, and yet again the music of the orchestra. "He has an ear for the distribution of instruments, and this gives him a desire for the antiphonal, for introducing an answer, or an echo, or a compensating note," says Mr. Higginson. Sometimes, as in the "Marshes of Glynn" and in the best parts of "Sunrise", there is a cosmic rhythm that is like unto the rhythmic beating of the heart of God, of which Poe and Lanier have written eloquently.

Besides this melody that was temperamental, Lanier had ideas. He was alive to the problems of his age and to the beauties of nature. One has only to think of the names of his poems to realize how many themes occupied his attention. He wrote of religion, social questions, science, philosophy, nature, love. "My head and my heart are both [so] full of poems," he says. "So many great ideas for art are born to me each day, I am swept into the land of All-delight by their strenuous sweet whirlwind." "Every leaf that I brush against breeds a poem." "A thousand vital elements rill through my soul." So he is in no sense a "jingle man". There is a note of healthy mysticism in his poetry