— * `Southern Bivouac', May, 1887. —
This period of his army life is important also from the fact that here at Fort Boykin he definitely began to contemplate a literary life as his probable vocation. He was studying hard, reading English poetry, and writing to his father to "seize at any price" editions of the German poets, Uhland, Lessing, Schelling, and Tieck. Thus at a time when other Southerners were, as Professor Gildersleeve has said, getting out their classics to reread them, Lanier was voyaging into strange fields of thought alone. Once, when the little camp was captured, he lost several of his choicest treasures, — a volume containing the poems of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, a German glossary, Heine's poems, and "Aurora Leigh". In a letter to his father, January 18, 1864, he says: "Gradually I find that my whole soul is merging itself into this business of writing, and especially of writing poetry. I am going to try it; and am going to test, in the most rigid way I know, the awful question whether it is my vocation." He sends his father a number of poems, that they may be criticised. He has a sense of his own deficiencies as a writer, — deficiencies which he never fully overcame, — for he writes: "I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a CONCEIT rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk."
The tendency is seen in a poem written at Boykin's Bluff on, perhaps, his twenty-first birthday. Notable also is the sense of the dawn of manhood: —
So Boyhood sets: comes Youth,A painful night of mists and dreams,That broods till Love's exquisite truth,The star of a morn-clear manhood, beams.
In this dawn of his manhood — not yet morn-clear, however, — he began "Tiger Lilies", writing those parts having to do with his experience in the mountains, some passages of which have already been quoted.
But Lanier's literary career was not to be begun as soon as he hoped. He was, in August, 1864, transferred to Wilmington, N.C., where he became a signal officer on the blockade-runners. Wilmington was the port which, late in the war, was the scene of the most brilliant successes of these swift vessels and the most strenuous efforts of the blockaders. "Long after every other port was closed, desperate, but wary sea pigeons would evade the big and surly watchers on the coast . . . and ho! for the open sea." This was a service of keen excitement and constant danger, demanding a clear head and iron nerves. In the latter part of 1864 it became more and more difficult for the blockade-runners to make their way to Bermuda. On November 2, a stormy night, Lanier was a signal officer on the Lucy, which made its way out of the harbor, but fourteen hours later was captured in the Gulf Stream by the Federal cruiser Santiago-de-Cuba. He was taken to Point Lookout prison, where he spent four months of dreary and distressing life. To this prison life Lanier always attributed his breakdown in health. In "Tiger Lilies" he afterwards attempted to give a description of the prison and the life led by prisoners, but turned with disgust from the harrowing memories. The few pages he did write serve as a counterpart to Walt Whitman's strictures on Southern prisons in his "Specimen Days in America".
And yet, under these loathsome conditions he read German poetry, translating Heine's "The Palm and the Pine" and Herder's "Spring Greeting". Here, too, he found comfort for himself and his companions in the flute which he had carried with him during the entire war. One of his comrades gives the following account of Lanier's playing: "Late one evening I heard from our tent the clear sweet notes of a flute in the distance, and I was told that the player was a young man from Georgia who had just come among us. I forthwith hastened to find him out, and from that hour the flute of Sidney Lanier was our daily delight. It was an angel imprisoned with us to cheer and console us. Well I remember his improvisations, and how the young artist stood there in the twilight. (It was his custom to stand while he played.) Many a stern eye moistened to hear him, many a homesick heart for a time forgot its captivity. The night sky, clear as a dewdrop above us, the waters of the Chesapeake far to the east, the long gray beach and the distant pines, seemed all to have found an interpreter in him.
"In all those dreary months of imprisonment, under the keenest privations of life, exposed to the daily manifestations of want and depravity, sickness and death, his was the clear-hearted, hopeful voice that sang what he uttered in after years."
The purity of Lanier's soul was never better attested than in a letter written by a fellow-prisoner, Mr. John B. Tabb, to Charles Day Lanier, the oldest son of the poet, trying to impress upon his mind the character of his father as exhibited in this prison life at Point Lookout:
"To realize what our surroundings were, one must have lived in a prison camp. There was no room for pretense or disguise. Men appeared what they really were, noble or low-minded, pure or depraved; and there did one trait of your father's character single him out. In all our intercourse I can remember no conversation or word of his that an angel might not have uttered or listened to. Set this down in your memory. . . . It will throw light upon other points, and prove the truth of Sir Galahad's words, `My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure.'"
Lanier secured his release from prison through some gold which a friend of his had smuggled into the prison in his mouth. He came out "emaciated to a skeleton, down-hearted for want of news from home, down-headed for weariness." On his voyage to Fortress Monroe an incident occurred which, although told in somewhat overwrought language, is a fitting climax to his career as a soldier.
The story of his rescue from death, says Baskervill, is graphically told by the lady herself who was the good Samaritan on this occasion. "She was an old friend from Montgomery, Ala., returning from New York to Richmond; and her little daughter, who had learned to call him Brother Sid, chanced to hear that he was down in the hold of the vessel dying. On application to the colonel in command permission was promptly given to her to minister to his necessity, and she made haste to go below. `Now my friends in New York,' continued she, `had given me a supply of medicines, for we had few such things in Dixie, and among the remedies were quinine and brandy. I hastily took a flask of brandy, and we went below, where we were led to the rude stalls provided for cattle, but now crowded with poor human wretches. There in that horrible place dear Sidney Lanier lay wrapped in an old quilt, his thin hands tightly clenched, his face drawn and pinched, his eyes fixed and staring, his poor body shivering now and then in a spasm of pain. Lilla fell at his side, kissing him and calling: `Brother Sid, don't you know me? Don't you know your little sister?' But no recognition or response came from the sunken eyes. I poured some brandy into a spoon and gave it to him. It gurgled down his throat at first with no effort from him to swallow it. I repeated the stimulant several times before he finally revived. At last he turned his eyes slowly about until he saw Lilla, and murmured: `Am I dead? Is this Lilla? Is this heaven?' . . . To make a long story short, the colonel assisted us to get him above to our cabin. I can see his fellow prisoners now as they crouched and assisted to pass him along over their heads, for they were so packed that they could not make room to carry him through. Along over their heads they tenderly passed the poor, emaciated body, so shrunken with prison life and benumbed with cold. We got him into clean blankets, but at first he could not endure the pain from the fire, he was so nearly frozen. We gave him some hot soup and more brandy, and he lay quiet till after midnight. Then he asked for his flute and began playing. As he played the first few notes, you should have heard the yell of joy that came up from the shivering wretches down below, who knew that their comrade was alive. And there we sat entranced about him, the colonel and his wife, Lilla and I, weeping at the tender music, as the tones of new warmth and color and hope came like liquid melody from his magic flute."*
— * `Southern Writers', p. 169. —
Thus closes his war period. His name does not appear in any of the official records, but no private soldier had a more varied experience.* One scarcely knows which to admire most, — the soldier, brave and knightly, the poet, preparing his wings for a flight, or the musician, inspiriting his fellow-soldiers in camp and in prison.
—* It is said that he refused promotion several times in order to bewith his brother. In a memorandum on the photograph herewith presentedhe refers to himself as "captain" in the late Confederate army.I have been unable to reconcile these statements.[Photograph not included in this ASCII edition. — A. L.]—
Lanier reached Macon March 15, after a long and painful journey through the Carolinas. Immediately upon his arrival, losing the stimulus which had kept him going so long, he fell dangerously ill, and remained so for nearly two months. Early in May, just as he was convalescing, General Wilson captured Macon, and Jefferson Davis and Clement C. Clay were brought to the Lanier House, whence they were to start on their way as prisoners to Fortress Monroe. Clifford Lanier reached home May 19. He had, after the blockade was closed at Wilmington, gone to Cuba. From there he sailed to Galveston and walked thence to Macon. He arrived just in time to see his mother, who a few days after died of consumption. She had kept herself alive for months by "a strong conviction, which she expressed again and again, that God would bring both her boys to her before she died." Sidney spent the summer months with his father and his sister, ministering to them in their sorrow. In September he began to tutor on a large plantation nine miles from Macon. With thirty classes a day and failing health, he whose brain was "fairly teeming with beautiful things" was shut up to the horrible monotony of the "tear and tret" of the schoolroom. He spent the winter at Point Clear on Mobile Bay, where he was greatly invigorated by the sea breezes and the air of the pine forests.
After these months of sorrow and struggle he settled in Montgomery, Ala., as clerk in the Exchange Hotel, the property of his grandfather and his uncles. His first feeling as he faces the new conditions which he is trying to explain to Northrup, his Northern friend, is one of bewilderment, — the immense distance between the beginning and the end of the war: —
"So wild and high are the big war-waves dashing between '61 and '66, as between two shores, that, looking across their `rude, imperious surge', I can scarcely discern any sight or sound of those old peaceful days that you and I passed on the `sacred soil' of M——. The sweet, half-pastoral tones that SHOULD come from out that golden time, float to me mixed with battle cries and groans. It was our glorious spring: but, my God, the flowers of it send up sulphurous odors, and their petals are dabbled with blood.
"These things being so, I thank you, more than I can well express, for your kind letter. It comes to me, like a welcome sail, from that old world to this new one, through the war-storms. It takes away the sulphur and the blood-flecks, and drowns out the harsh noises of battle. The two margins of the great gulf which has divided you from me seem approaching each other: I stretch out my hand across the narrowing fissure, to grasp yours on the other side. And I wish, with all my heart, that you and I could spend this ineffable May afternoon under that old oak at Whittaker's and `talk it all over'."*
—* This and the following letter were printed in `Lippincott's Magazine',March, 1905. A few changes are made to conform to the original copies.—
In another letter (June 29, 1866) he encloses a photograph and comments on the life in Montgomery: —
"The cadaverous enclosed is supposed to represent the face of your friend, together with a small portion of the Confederate gray coat in which enwrapped he did breast the big wars.
"I have one favor to entreat; and that is, that you will hold in consideration the very primitive state of the photographic art in this section, and believe that my mouth is not so large, by some inches, as this villainous artist portrays it.
"I despair of giving you any idea of the mortal stagnation which paralyzes all business here. On our streets, Monday is very like Sunday: they show no life, save late in the afternoon, when the girls come out, one by one, and shine and move, just as the stars do an hour later. I don't think there's a man in town who could be induced to go into his neighbor's store and ask him how's trade; for he would have to atone for such an insult with his life. Everything is dreamy, and drowsy, and drone-y. The trees stand like statues; and even when a breeze comes, the leaves flutter and dangle idly about, as if with a languid protest against all disturbance of their perfect rest. The mocking-birds absolutely refuse to sing before twelve o'clock at night, when the air is somewhat cooled: and the fireflies flicker more slowly than I ever saw them before. Our whole world here yawns, in a vast and sultry spell of laziness. An `exposition of sleep' is come over us, as over Sweet Bully Bottom; we won't wake till winter. Himmel, my dear Boy, you are all so alive up there, and we are all so dead down here! I begin to have serious thoughts of emigrating to your country, so that I may live a little. There's not enough attrition of mind on mind here, to bring out any sparks from a man."
Into this strange new world — "the unfamiliar avenue of a new era" — Lanier passed with unfaltering courage. He was to show that "fortitude is more manly than bravery, for noble and long endurance wins the shining love of God; whereas brilliant bravery is momentary, is easy to the enthusiastic, and only dazzles the admiration of the weak-eyed." Did any young man ever have to begin life under more disadvantageous circumstances? Cherishing in his heart the ideal long since formed of the scholar's or the artist's life, he looked around on the blankest world one could imagine. It is perhaps in a later letter to Bayard Taylor that Lanier came nearest to expressing the situation that confronted him at the end of the war. "Perhaps you know that with us of the younger generation of the South, since the war, pretty much the whole of life has been merely not dying."
Added to his own poverty and sickness, was that of his family. His grandfather had been compelled to leave his estate in East Tennessee in 1863, and was now in old age deprived of his negroes and much of his land and money. His father, weighed down with sorrow, had to take up the practice of law from the start. Some members of his family, "who used to roll in wealth, are every day," he writes, "with their own hands plowing the little patch of ground which the war has left them, while their wives do their cooking and washing."
Moreover, the entire South — and to those who had shared the hopes of a Southern republic it was still the land they loved — was in a state of despair. Middle Georgia had lost through Sherman's march to the sea $100,000,000.* In the wake of Sherman's armies Richard Malcom Johnston had lost his estate of $50,000, Maurice Thompson's home was in ashes, and Joel Chandler Harris, who had begun life on the old Turner plantation under such favorable auspices, was forced to seek an occupation in New Orleans. Only those who lived through that period or who have imaginatively reproduced it, can realize the truth of E. L. Godkin's statement: "I doubt much if any community in the modern world was ever so ruthlessly brought face to face with what is sternest and hardest in human life." It was not simply the material losses of the war, — these have often been commented on and statistics given, — it was the loss of libraries like those of Simms and Hayne, the burning of institutions of learning like the University of Alabama, the closing of colleges, like Lanier's own alma mater. It was the passing away of a civilization which, with all its faults, had many attractive qualities — a loss all the more apparent at a time when a more democratic civilization had not yet taken its place. The South was
Wandering between two worlds — one dead,The other powerless to be born.
Even States like Georgia, which soon showed signs of recuperation and rejuvenation, suffered with their more unfortunate sisters, South Carolina and Louisiana, where the ravages of war were terrific. There was confusion in the public mind — uncertainty as to the future. The memories of these days are suggested here, not for the purpose of awakening in any mind bitter memories, but that some idea may be given of the tremendous obstacles that confronted a young man like Lanier.
— * Rhodes's `History of the United States', v, 22. —
It is no wonder that under these circumstances men went to other countries, and that some of those who did not go cherished the project of transporting the people of various States to other lands, where the spirit of the civilization that had passed away might be preserved.* Many men whose names are now lost passed out to the States of the West. Business men, scholars, and men of all professions, who have since become famous in other States, were as complete a loss to the South as those who died on the battlefield. And when to all these are added the men and women who died broken-hearted at the losses of war, some idea may be conceived of the disadvantages under which the South began her work.
— * See the `Life and Letters of R. L. Dabney', for a plan in which many Virginians were interested. —
The work of those men who remained in the South and set about to inaugurate a new era cannot be too highly estimated, — a work made all the more difficult by strong men who resisted the march of events, and who refused to accept the conditions that then prevailed. The readjustment came soon to more men than some have thought. Lanier, writing in 1867, before the pressure of reconstruction government had been felt, said, in commenting on the growing lack of restraint in modern political life: "At the close of that war, three armies which had been fighting on the Southern side, and which numbered probably forty thousand men, were disbanded. These men had for four years been subjected to the unfamiliar and galling restrictions of military discipline, and to the most maddening privations. . . . At the same time four millions of slaves, without provisions and without prospect of labor in a land where employers were impoverished, were liberated. . . . The reign of law at this thrilling time was at an end. The civil powers of the States were dead; the military power of the conquerors was not yet organized for civil purposes. The railroad and the telegraph, those most efficient sheriffs of modern times, had fallen in the shock of war. All possible opportunities presented themselves to each man who chose to injure his neighbor with impunity. The country was sparsely settled, the country roads were intricate, the forests were extensive and dense, the hiding-places were numerous and secure, the witnesses were few and ignorant. Never had crime such fair weather for his carnival. Serious apprehensions had long been entertained by the Southern citizens that in the event of a disastrous termination of the war, the whole army would be frenzied to convert itself, after disintegration, into forty thousand highwaymen. . . . Moreover, the feuds between master and slave, alleged by the Northern parties in the contest to have been long smouldering in the South, would seize this opportunity to flame out and redress themselves. Altogether, regarding humanity from the old point of view, there appeared to many wise citizens a clear prospect of dwelling in [the] midst of a furious pandemonium for several years after an unfavorable termination of the war; but was this prospect realized? Where were the highway robberies, the bloody vengeances, the arsons, the rapine, the murders, the outrages, the insults? They WERE, not anywhere. With great calmness the soldier cast behind him the memory of all wrongs and hardships and reckless habits of the war, embraced his wife, patched his cabin-roof, and proceeded to mingle the dust of recent battles yet lingering on his feet with the peaceful clods of his cornfield. What restrained these men? Was it fear? The word cannot be spoken. Was he who had breasted the storms of Gettysburg and Perryville to shrink from the puny arm of a civil law that was more powerless than the shrunken muscle of Justice Shallow? And what could the negro fear when his belief and assurance were that a conquering nation stood ready to support him in his wildest demands? It was the spirit of the time that brought about these things. . . . A thousand Atlantic Cables and Pacific Railroads would not have contributed cause for so earnest self-gratulation as was afforded by this one feature in our recent political convulsion."*
— * `Retrospects and Prospects', p. 29. —
Many Southerners were ready, like Lee, to forget the bitterness and prejudice of the war — all but the hallowed memories. Lanier, at the close of a fanciful passage on the blood-red flower of war which blossomed in 1861, said: —
"It is supposed by some that the seed of this American specimen (now dead) yet remain in the land; but as for this author (who, with many friends, suffered from the unhealthy odors of the plant), he could find it in his heart to wish fervently that these seed, if there be verily any, might perish in the germ, utterly out of sight and life and memory and out of the remote hope of resurrection, forever and forever, no matter in whose granary they are cherished!"*
— * `Tiger Lilies', p. 116. —
In this spirit Lanier began his work in Montgomery, Ala. As has been seen, he had extended the hand of fellowship to his Northern friend, thus laying the basis for the spirit of reconciliation afterwards so dominant in his poetry. Uncongenial as was his work, he went about it with a new sense of the "dignity of labor". His aunt, Mrs. Watt, who had in the more prosperous times before the war traveled much in the North, and had graced the brilliant scenes of the opening of the Confederate Congress in Montgomery, becoming the intimate friend of Jefferson Davis and Stephens, now threw around her nephews — Clifford was also working in the hotel — the charm of the olden days. They found pleasure in social life: close to Montgomery lived the Cloptons and Ligons, who on their plantations enjoyed the gifts of "Santa Claus Cotton", just after the war. Lanier writes to his sister, September 26, 1866: "I have just returned from Tuskegee, where I spent a pleasant week. . . . They feted me to death, nearly. . . . Indeed, they were all so good and so kind to me, and the fair cousins were so beautiful, that I came back feeling as if I had been in a week's dream of fairyland." The two brothers, eager for more intellectual companionship, organized a literary club, for the meetings of which Sidney prepared his first literary exercises after the war. He played the pipe-organ in the Presbyterian church in Montgomery. He writes to a friend about some one who was in a state of melancholy: "She is right to cultivate music, to cling to it; it is the only REALITY left in the world for her and many like her. It will revolutionize the world, and that not long hence. Let her study it intensely, give herself to it, enter the very innermost temple and sanctuary of it. . . . The altar steps are wide enough for all the world." To another friend he writes at the same time: "Study Chopin as soon as you become able to play his music; and get his life by Liszt. 'T is the most enjoyable book you could read."
Most of the leisure time of the brothers, however, was spent in literary work, with even more ardor than while they had plenty of time to devote to it. By May 12 Clifford had finished his novel, "Thorn-Fruit", and Sidney was at work on "Tiger Lilies", the novel begun at Burwell's Bay in 1863 and retouched at different times since then. They were planning, too, a volume of poems, although with the exception of their father they had not been able "to find a single individual who sympathized in such a pursuit enough to warrant them in showing him their production, — so scarce is general cultivation here; but," Sidney adds, "we work on, and hope to become at least recognized as good orderly citizens in the fair realm of letters yet." Indeed, they planned to go North in the fall "with bloody literary designs on some hapless publisher."*
— * Letters to Northrup. —
In order to find out what was going on in the world of letters, Lanier subscribed to the "Round Table", which was then an important weekly paper of New York — indeed, it was more like the London "Spectator" than any paper ever published on this side the water — a journal, said the New York "Times", which "has the genius and learning and brilliancy of the higher order of London weeklies, and which at the same time has the spirit and instincts of America." Moncure D. Conway was at that time writing letters of much interest from England and Justin Winsor from Cambridge, while Howells, Aldrich, Stedman, and Stoddard were regular contributors. The reviews of books were thoroughly cosmopolitan, and the editorials setting forth the interpretation of contemporary events were characterized by sanity and breadth.
In addition to the fact that Lanier's first poems were published in this journal,* it is to be noted that it exerted considerable influence over him — especially in two directions. Its broad national policy — more sympathetic than that of the "Nation" even — was evidence to him that there were Northern people who were magnanimous in their attitude to Southern problems. He was especially impressed with an editorial on the "Duties of Peace" (July 7, 1866) as "the most sensible discussion" he had seen of the whole situation. In it were these striking words: "The people of the South are our brothers, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. They have courage, integrity, honor, patriotism, and all the manly virtues as well as ourselves. . . . Can we realize that our duty now is to heal, not to punish? . . . Consider their dilapidated cities, their deserted plantations, their impoverished country, their loss of personal property by thousands of millions; far more than this, their buried dead and desolate hearts. . . . No one with a heart can realize the truth of their condition without feeling that the punishment has been terrific. We should address ourselves to the grave task of restoring the disrupted relations of the two sections by acts of genuine kindness, truthfulness, fairness, and love. . . . In a word, let the era of blood be followed by another era of good feeling." The whole editorial is in accordance with the previously announced policy of the paper: "The Rebellion extinguished, the next duty is to extinguish the sectional spirit, and to seek to create fraternal feeling among all the States of the Union."
—* "In the Foam", "Barnacles", "The Tournament", "Resurrection","Laughter in the Senate" (not in his collected poems), "A Birthday Song","Tyranny", and "Life and Song" were published in the `Round Table'during 1867 and 1868.["Laughter in the Senate" is in later editions of his collected poems,including the edition published by Project Gutenberg. — A. L., 1998.]—
In discussing literary questions the "Round Table" showed the same national spirit, manifesting a healthy interest in those few Southern writers who were left after the deluge. The words found in two editorials, calling for a more vigorous and original class of writers, must have appealed to Lanier. An editorial, May 12, 1866, entitled a "Plain Talk with American Writers", said: "In fact the literary field was never so barren, never so utterly without hope or life. . . . The era of genius and vigor that seemed ready to burst upon us only a few months ago has not been fulfilled. There is a lack of boldness and power. Men do not seem to strike out in new paths as bravely as of old. . . . We have very little strong, original writing. Who will waken us from this sleep? Who will first show us the first signs of a genuine literary reviving?" And again, July 14, 1866, "We look to see young men coming forward who shall inaugurate a better literature. . . . If ever there was a time when a magnificent field opened to young aspirants for literary renown, that time is the present. Every door is wide open. . . . All the graces of poesy and art and music stand waiting by, ready to welcome a bold new-comer. . . . Who will come forward and inaugurate a new era of bold, electrical, impressive writing?"
With some such ambition as this in his mind, Lanier gave up his work in Montgomery in the spring of 1867 and went to New York with the completed manuscript of "Tiger Lilies".* He was there for more than a month, finally arranging for its publication with Hurd & Houghton, the predecessors of the present firm of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. He was enabled to publish his book by the generous help of Mr. J. F. D. Lanier. Some of his experiences on this, his first visit to the metropolis, are significant. He is somewhat dazed by the life of the big city. "I tell you," he writes to a friend, "the Heavens are alien to this town, and if it were anybody else but the Infinite God that owned them, he wouldn't let them bend so blue over here." In a letter to his father, April 16, he describes the view of the city from Trinity Church steeple and tells a characteristic incident: "The grand array of houses and ships and rivers and distant hills did not arrest my soul as did the long line of men and women, which at that height seemed to writhe and contort itself in its narrow bed of Broadway as in a premature grave. . . . I have not seen here a single eye that knew itself to be in front of a heart — but one, and that was a blue one, and a child owned it. 'T was the very double of Sissa's [the name for his sister] eye, so I had no sooner seen it than I made love to it, with what success you will hear. On Saturday I dined with J. F. D. Lanier. We had only a family party. . . . Last and best little Kate Lanier, eight years old, pearly cheeked, blue eyed, broad of forehead, cherried i' the lip. About the time that the champagne came on I happened to mention that I had been in prison during the war.
— * William Gilmore Simms was there at about the same time trying to get started again in his literary work, and Edward Rowland Sill was making his first venture into the literary world. —
"`Poor fellow!' says little Katie, `and how did the rebels treat you?'
"`Rebels,' said I, `I am a rebel myself, Kate!'
"`What!' she exclaimed, and lifted up her little lilies (when I say lilies I mean hands), and peered at me curiously with all her blue eyes astare. `A live Reb!'
"This phrase in Katie's nursery had taken the time-honored place of bugaboos, and hobgoblins, and men under the bed. She could not realize that I, a smooth-faced, slender, ordinary mortal, in all respects like a common man, should be a live reb. She was inclined to hate me, as in duty bound.
"I will not describe the manner of the siege I laid to her: suffice it that when I rose to take leave, Katie stood up before [me], and half blushed, and paused a minute.
"With a coquetry I never saw executed more prettily, `I know,' said she, `that you are dying for a kiss, and you're ashamed to ask for it. You may take one.' . . . And so in triumph, and singing poems to all blue eyes, I said good night."
Leaving "Tiger Lilies" in the hands of the publishers, he returned to Macon, where in September we find him reading the proof of the same. The novel appeared in October and was reviewed somewhat at length in the "Round Table".* The review refers to Lanier as "the author of some quaint and graceful verses published from time to time in the `Round Table'." "His novel goes a long way to confirm the good opinion which his poems suggested. We have, indeed, seldom read a first book more pregnant with promise, or fuller of the faults which, more surely than precocious perfection, betoken talent. . . . His errors seem to be entirely errors of youth and in the right direction." "Exuberance is more easily corrected than sterility." "His dialogue reads too often like a catalogue `raisonne' of his library." The critic finds traces of a scholarly and poetic taste, but withal a straining after novelty and "an affectation of quaintness so marked as to be often unpleasant." He objects to long abstract disquisitions on metaphysics and music. He commends it, however, for being "unmarred by the bad taste of its contemporaries in fanning a senseless and profitless sectional rancor."
— * `Round Table', December 14, 1867. —
With this review the reader of "Tiger Lilies" at the present time must agree. It is seldom that one finds a bit of contemporary criticism that hits the mark so well as this. As a story it is a failure — the plot is badly managed and the work is strikingly uneven. Lanier was aware of its defects, and yet pointed out its value to any student of his life. In a letter to his father from Montgomery, July 13, 1866, he says: "I have in the last part adopted almost exclusively the dramatic, rather than the descriptive, style which reigns in the earlier portions, interspersed with much high talk. Indeed, the book which I commenced to write in 1863 and have touched at intervals until now, represents in its change of style almost precisely the change of tone which has gradually been taking place in me all the time. So much so, that it has become highly interesting to me: I seem to see portions of my old self, otherwise forgotten, here preserved."
The note sounded in the preface is characteristic. He professes "a love, strong as it is humble, for what is beautiful in God's Nature and in man's Art." He utters a plea against "the horrible piquancies of quaint crimes and of white-handed criminals, with which so many books have recently stimulated the pruriency of men; and begs that the following pages may be judged only as registering a faint cry, sent from a region where there are few artists to happier lands that own many; calling on these last for more sunshine and less night in their art, more virtuous women and fewer Lydian Guelts, more household sweetness and less Bohemian despair, clearer chords and fewer suspensions, broader quiet skies and shorter grotesque storms; since there are those, even here in the South, who still love beautiful things with sincere passion."
The story may be briefly indicated. The background of the first book is, as has been seen, the mountain scenery of East Tennessee. A party of hunters — including Philip Sterling and Paul Ruebetsahl, two young transcendentalists — are on a stand waiting for deer. Philip Sterling — with "large gray poet's eyes, with a dream in each and a sparkle behind it" — is living in the mountains with his father John Sterling and his sister Felix — their home a veritable palace of art. Ruebetsahl is from Frankfort, Germany, whence he brings an enthusiasm for music and philosophy, into which he inducts his newly found friends. Another companion is John Cranston, a Northerner who had also lived in Frankfort, where he had often been compared to Goethe in his youth. He had Lucifer eyes, he spoke French and German; he "walked like a young god, he played people mad with his violin." These lovers of music and poetry furnish much amusement to the native mountaineers, one of whom, Cain Smallin, becomes one of the prominent characters in the latter part of the book. It is worthy of note that in this character and his brother, who turns out to be a villain, Lanier anticipated some of the sketches by Charles Egbert Craddock. The merry party of hunters retire to Sterling's house, where they enjoy the blessings of good friendship and of music and high thought. They, with other friends from all parts of the South, plan a masquerade party, in which they represent the various characters of Shakespeare's plays and the knights of the Round Table. After a scene of much merriment and good humor, Cranston and Ruebetsahl fight a duel — both of them being in love with Felix Sterling, each knowing the other's history at Frankfort. In the mean time Ottilie with her maid comes from Germany to Chilhowee. She was formerly the lover of Ruebetsahl, and was betrayed by Cranston. She becomes identified with the Sterling family, she herself being a musician, and naturally finding her place among these music-loving people.
The first book is filled with "high talk" on music, poetry, philosophy, and nature. These conversations and masquerade parties, however, are interrupted by war. The author omits the breaking out of the war and the first three years of it. The action is resumed at Burwell's Bay, where we meet the hero again with "a light rifle on his shoulder, with a good horse bounding along under him, with a fresh breeze that had in it the vigor of the salt sea and the caressing sweetness of the spring blowing upon him." With him are "five friends, tried in the tempests of war, as well as by the sterner tests of the calm association of inactive camp life." The story here is strictly autobiographical, and is filled with some stirring incidents taken from Lanier's life as a scout. Perhaps the most striking scene in the book is the one in which Cain Smallin finds out that his brother is a deserter. Never did Lanier come so near creating a scene of real dramatic power.* "We was poor. We ain't never had much to live on but our name, which it was as good as gold. And now it ain't no better'n rusty copper; hit'll be green and pisenous. An' whose done it? Gorm Smallin! My own brother, Gorm Smallin!" When he finds his brother he says to him: "Ef ye had been killed in a fa'r battle, I mought ha' been able to fight hard enough for both of us; for every time I cried a-thinkin' of you, I'd ha' been twice as strong, an' twice as clear-sighted as I was buffore. But — sich things as these burns me an' weakens me and hurts my eyes that bad that I kin scarcely look a man straight furard in the face. Hit don't make much difference to me now whether we whips the Yanks or they whips us. . . . We is kin to a deserter! . . . I cain't shoot ye hardly. The same uns raised us and fed us. I cain't do it; an' I am sorry I cain't." He then makes him swear a vow: "God A'mighty's a-lookin at you out o' the stars yon, an' he's a-listenin' at you out o' the sand here, and he won't git tired by mornin'."
— * Part ii, chapter vi. —
The coming of gunboats up the river scatters the party in all directions, some to prison and others to the final scenes around Richmond, with the burning of which the story closes, not, however, before the palace in the mountains — where John Sterling and his wife, Felix and Ottilie, have spent the intervening time — is set fire to by Gorm Smallin. The story is scarcely significant enough to follow all the threads.
"Tiger Lilies" has the same place in Lanier's life that "Hyperion" has in Longfellow's. They are both failures as novels or romances, but they are valuable as autobiographies. Instead of laying the scene in Germany, which he had never seen and yet yearned for, Lanier brings Germany to America. There are long disquisitions on the place of music and science in the modern world, many crude fancies, some striking descriptions of nature, some of which have already been quoted. Above all, there is Lanier's idea of what a musician or a poet ought to be, — a study, therefore, of himself.
Perhaps the best single passage on music is that describing Phil's playing of the flute. "It is like walking in the woods, amongst wild flowers, just before you go into some vast cathedral. For the flute seems to me to be peculiarly the woods-instrument: it speaks the gloss of green leaves or the pathos of bare branches; it calls up the strange mosses that are under dead leaves; it breathes of wild plants that hide and oak fragrances that vanish; it expresses to me the natural magic of music. Have you ever walked on long afternoons in warm, sunny spots of the woods, and felt a sudden thrill strike you with the half fear that a ghost would rise out of the sedge, or dart from behind the next tree, and confront you?"*
— * `Tiger Lilies', p. 28. —
Two passages may be cited to show the author's tendency to use personifications and his insight into the "burthen of the mystery of all this unintelligible world": —
"A terrible melee of winged opposites is forever filling the world with a battle din which only observant souls hear: Love contending with Impurity; Passion springing mines under the calm entrenchment of Reason; scowling Ignorance thrusting in the dark at holy-eyed Reverence; Romance deathfully encountering Sentimentality on the one side and Commonplace on the other; young Sensibility clanging swords with gigantic maudlin Conventionalities. . . . I have seen no man who did not suffer from the shock of these wars, unless he got help from that One Man whom it is not unmanly to acknowledge our superior."*
— * `Tiger Lilies', p. 41. —
"Nature has no politics. She'll grow a rose as well for York as Lancaster, and mayhap beat both down next minute with a storm!
"She has no heart; else she never had rained on Lear's head.
"She has no eyes; for, seeing, she could never have drowned that dainty girl, Ophelia.
"She has no ears; or she would hear the wild Sabian hymns to Night and prayers to Day that men are uttering evermore.
"O blind, deaf, no-hearted Beauty, we cannot woo thee, for thou silently contemnest us; we cannot force thee, for thou art stronger than we; we cannot compromise with thee, for thou art treacherous as thy seas; what shall we do, we, unhappy, that love thee, coquette Nature?"*
— * `Tiger Lilies', p. 178. —
When "Tiger Lilies" appeared it was very favorably received. Lanier writes to his brother of the "continual heavy showers of compliment and congratulation" that he has received in Macon; that the Macon paper had an editorial on his novel, and that a book firm in the town had already disposed of a large number of copies. Writing to Northrup, March 8, 1868, he says: "My book has been as well received as a young author could have expected on his first plunge, and I have seen few criticisms upon it which are not on the whole favorable. My publishers have just made me an offer to bring out a second edition on very fair terms; from which I infer that the sale of the article is progressing."* At twenty-five, then, he was recognized as one of the promising writers of the South; a biographical article referring to his recent success, the "Tiger Lilies", was written by J. Wood Davidson for his "Living Writers of the South", which appeared in 1869, and his name was sought by ambitious editors of mushroom magazines that sprang up in abundance after the war.
— * There was never a second edition, however. —
Lanier was not destined, however, to begin his literary career as yet, nor was the South to have such an easy way out of her disaster as he had hoped. He had made only one reference to politics in his romance, and that was his manly utterance in behalf of Jefferson Davis, who was then confined in prison under rather disagreeable circumstances at Fortress Monroe. He said, "If there was guilt in any, there was guilt in nigh all of us, between Maryland and Mexico; Mr. Davis, if he be termed the ringleader of the Rebellion, was so, not by virtue of any instigating act of his, but purely by the unanimous will and appointment of the Southern people; and the hearts of the Southern people bleed to see how their own act has resulted in the chaining of Mr. Davis, who was as innocent as they, and in the pardon of those who were guilty as he."
The Davis incident was an indication that forces other than those which one might have hoped to see were in the air. By the fall of 1867 the reaction against the magnanimous policy of Lincoln had come in the North. Reconstruction governments were being inaugurated throughout the South. This was due in part to the lack of wisdom displayed by Southern legislatures under the Johnson governments, — a "disposition on the part of the Southern States to claim rights instead of submitting to conditions," and harsh laws of Southern legislatures concerning the freedmen. It must be confessed that the extreme men of the South were in some localities as rash, unreasonable, and impracticable as the radicals of the North. The magnanimous spirit of Lincoln and the heroic, chivalric spirit of Lee could not prevail in the two sections; hence followed a direful period in American history. As E. L. Godkin said, "That the chapter which tells the story of reconstruction should have followed in American history the chapter which tells the story of the war and emancipation, is something over which many a generation will blush."
Again it must be said, as was said of the effect of the war on the South, that reconstruction was something more than excessive taxation, grinding and unjust as that was, something more than the fear of black domination, as unthinkable as that is. There was the uncertainty of the situation, the sense of despair that rankled in the hearts of men, with the knowledge that nothing the South could do could have any influence in deciding its fate. It was the closing of institutions of learning, or running them under such circumstances that the better element of the South could have nothing to do with them. Lanier, writing about a position in the University of Alabama which he very much desired, said: "The trustees, who are appointees of the State, are so hampered by the expected change of State government that nothing can be certainly predicated as to their action."
Lanier felt the effect of reconstruction at every point, — he was baptized with the baptism of the Southern people. The weight of that sad time bore heavily upon him. As he had during the war touched the experience of his people at every point, so now he went down with them into the Valley of Humiliation.
Under these circumstances his friend Northrup wrote him, inviting him to go to Germany with him. He replied: "Indeed, indeed, y'r trip-to-Europe invitation finds me all THIRSTY to go with you; but, alas, how little do you know of our wretched poverties and distresses here, — that you ask me such a thing. . . . It spoils our dreams of Germany, ruthlessly. I've been presiding over eighty-six scholars, in a large Academy at Prattville, Ala., having two assistants under me; 't is terrible work, and the labor difficulties, with the recent poor price of cotton, conspire to make the pay very slim. I think y'r people can have no idea of the slow terrors with which this winter has invested our life in the South. Some time I'm going to give you a few simple details, which you must publish in your paper."
Prattville, where he spent the winter of 1867-68, was a small manufacturing town, with all the crudeness of a new industrial order and without any of the refinement to which Lanier had been accustomed in Macon and elsewhere. Perhaps there was never a time when drudgery so weighed upon him, although his usual playfulness is seen in the remark: "There is but one man in my school who could lick me in a fair fight, and he thinks me at once a Samson and a Solomon." He worked for people who thought that he was defrauding them if he did not work from "sun up to sun down", as one of his patrons expressed it. It was here, too, that he suffered from his first hemorrhages. His poetry written at this time was an expression of the despair which prevailed throughout the South. He whom the Civil War had not inspired to speech, and who had kept silent under the suffering of the days after the war, now gave expression to his disgust and his indignation. It is not great poetry, for Lanier was not adapted to that kind of poetry, and consequently neither he nor his wife ever collected all the poems. "Laughter in the Senate", published in the "Round Table", is typical of a group, several of which he left in an old ledger: —
Comes now the Peace, so long delayed?Is it the cheerful voice of aid?Begins the time, his heart has prayed,When men may reap and sow?
Ah, God! back to the cold earth's breast!The sages chuckle o'er their jest!Must they, to give a people rest,Their dainty wit forego?
The tyrants sit in a stately hall;They gibe at a wretched people's fall;The tyrants forget how fresh is the pallOver their dead and ours.
Look how the senators ape the clown,And don the motley and hide the gown,But yonder a fast rising frownOn the people's forehead lowers.
To the same effect he wrote in unpublished poems, "Steel in Soft Hands" and "To Our Hills": —
We mourn your fall into daintier handsOf senators, rosy fingered,That wrote while you fought,And afar from the battles lingered.
And again in "Raven Days" and "Tyranny": —
Oh, Raven days, dark Raven days of sorrow,Will ever any warm light come again?Will ever the lit mountains of To-morrowBegin to gleam athwart the mournful plain?
Young Trade is dead,And swart Work sullen sits in the hillside fernAnd folds his arms that find no bread to earn,And bows his head.
In a letter to his father, January 21, 1868, he wrote: "There are strong indications here of much bad feeling between the whites and blacks, especially those engaged in the late row at this place; and I have fears, which are shared by Mr. Pratt and many citizens here, that some indiscretion of the more thoughtless among the whites may plunge us into bloodshed. The whites have no organization at all, and the affair would be a mere butchery. . . . The Canton imbroglio may precipitate matters." Writing of laws passed by Congress, he said: "Who will find words to express the sorrowful surprise at their total absence of philosophical insight into the age which has resulted in those hundreds of laws recently promulgated by the reigning body in the United States; laws which, if from no other cause, at least from sheer multiplicity, are wholly at variance with the genius of the time and of the people, laws which have resulted in such a mass of crime and hatred and bitterness as even the four terrible years of war have entirely failed to bring about."*
— * `Retrospects and Prospects', p. 31. —
He recognized the need of some great man.
A pilot, God, a pilot! for the helm is left awry.
Years later, when the end of the reconstruction period had come, he described a type of man that was needed for this emergency: whether he realized it or not, it was a wish that Abraham Lincoln might have been spared to meet the situation. "I have been wondering where we are going to get a GREAT MAN, that will be tall enough to see over the whole country, and to direct that vast undoing of things which has got to be accomplished in a few years. It is a situation in which mere cleverness will not begin to work. The horizon of cleverness is too limited; it does not embrace enough of the heart of man, to enable a merely clever politician, such as those in which we abound, to lead matters properly in this juncture. The vast generosities which whirl a small revenge out of the way, as the winds whirl a leaf; the awful integrities which will pay a debt twice rather than allow the faintest flicker of suspicion about it; the splendid indignations which are also tender compassions, and will in one moment be hustling the money-changers out of the Temple, and in the next be preaching Love to them from the steps of it, — where are we to find these? It is time for a man to arise who is a man."*
— * Letter to Judge Logan E. Bleckley, Nov. 15, 1874. —
This state of affairs here set forth in Lanier's words caused many to leave the South in absolute despair of its future. It drove Maurice Thompson from Georgia to Indiana, and the Le Conte brothers from Columbia to California. It caused the middle-aged Lamar to stand sorrowfully at his gate in the afternoons in Oxford, Mississippi, gazing wistfully into the west, while young men like Henry Grady — naturally optimistic and buoyant — wondered what could be the future for them. There is no better evidence of the heroism of Lanier than the way in which he met the situation that confronted him. He found refuge in intellectual work. In a letter to his father he urges him to send him the latest magazines and books. June 1, 1868, he writes from Prattville: "I shall go to work on my essays, and on a course of study in German and in the Latin works of Lucretius, whom I have long desired to study." In another letter he said: "I have been deeply engaged in working out some metaphysical ideas for some time, — an application which goes on all the time, whether I sit at desk or walk the streets." The volume of essays referred to was never published, but we have some of them in the essays "Retrospects and Prospects", "Nature-Metaphors", and some unpublished ones in an old ledger in which he wrote at this time, such as "The Oversight of Modern Philosophy", "Cause and Effect", "Time and Space", "The Solecisms of Mathematics", "Devil's Bombs", and other essays, which reveal Lanier's tendency to speculative philosophy and his exuberant fancy. In this same ledger he wrote down many quotations, which show that at the time he was not only keeping up with contemporary literature, but continuing his reading in German poetry.
In the meantime, December 21, 1867, Lanier had married Miss Mary Day. "Not even the wide-mouthed, villainous-nosed, tallow-faced drudgeries of my eighty-fold life," he wrote his father, "can squeeze the sentiment out of me." From the worldly standpoint it was a serious mistake to marry, with no prospect of position and in the general upheaval of society about them. But to the two lovers no such considerations could appeal, and with his marriage to this accomplished woman came one of the greatest blessings of Lanier's life. It was "an idyllic marriage, which the poet thought a rich compensation for all the other perfect gifts which Providence denied him." She was a sufferer like himself, but her accuracy and alertness of mind, her rare appreciation of music, and her deep divining of his own powers, made her the ideal wife of the poet. Those who know "My Springs" and the series of sonnets which he wrote to her during their separation when he was spending the winters in Baltimore, need not be told of the part that this love played in his life. Perhaps there are no two single lines in American poetry which express better the deeper meaning of love than these: —
I marvel that God made you mine,For when He frowns 't is then ye shine.
In his later lectures at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, contrasting the heroines of epic poetry with the lyric woman of modern times, — the patient wife in the secure home, — he said: "But the daily grandeurs which every good wife, no matter how uneventful her lot, must achieve, the secret endurances which not only have no poet to sing them, but no human eye even to see them, the heroism which is as fine and bright at two o'clock in the morning as it is at noonday, all those prodigious fortitudes under sorrows which one is scarcely willing to whisper even to God Almighty, and of which probably every delicate-souled woman knows, either by intuition or actual experience, — this lyric heroism, altogether great and beautiful as it is, does not appear, save by one or two brief glimpses, in the early poetry of our ancestors."* He could not have described better his own wife and all that she was to be in the years to come. Her fame is linked with his as is Clara Schumann's with that of the great German musician.
— * `Shakspere and his Forerunners', i, 99. —
Unable to secure a position in a Southern college or to make a living by literary work, Lanier decided at the end of 1868 to take up the profession of law. He was led to do so by the earnest solicitation of his father. With his mind once made up in that direction, he went to the work with characteristic zeal. He displayed a business-like and methodical spirit which at once attracted attention. On November 19, 1869, he wrote to his brother, who was urging him to go into the cotton-mill business: "I have a far more feasible project, which I have been long incubating: let us go to Brunswick. We know something of the law, and are rapidly knowing more; it is a business which is far better than that of any salaried officer could possibly be. . . . It is best that you and I make up our minds immediately to be lawyers, NOTHING BUT LAWYERS, GOOD lawyers, and SUCCESSFUL lawyers; and direct all our energies to this end. We are too far in life to change our course now; it would be greatly disadvantageous to both of us. Therefore, to the law, Boy. It is your vocation; stick to it: It will presently reward you for your devotion." The scheme did not materialize, however; he remained at Macon in the office of Lanier and Anderson. He writes to Northrup, who has again held out to him a plan for going to Germany: —
"As for my sweet old dreams of studying in Germany, EHEU! here is come a wife, and by'r Lady, a boy, a most rare-lung'd, imperious, world-grasping, blue-eyed, kingly Manikin;* and the same must have his tiring-woman or nurse, mark you, and his laces and embroideries and small carriage, being now half a year old: so that, what with mine ancient Money-Cormorants, the Butcher and the Baker and the Tailor, my substance is like to be so pecked up that I must stick fast in Georgia, unless litigation and my reputation should take a simultaneous start and both grow outrageously. For, you must know, these Southern colleges are all so poor that they hold out absolutely no inducement in the way of support to a professor: and so last January I suddenly came to the conclusion that I wanted to make some money for my wife and my baby, and incontinently betook me to studying Law: wherein I am now well advanced, and, D.V., will be admitted to the Bar in May next. My advantages are good, since my Father and uncle (firm of Lanier and Anderson) are among the oldest lawyers in the city and have a large practice, into which I shall be quickly inducted.
— * Charles Day Lanier. See poem, "Baby Charley". —
"I have not, however, ceased my devotion to letters, which I love better than all things in my heart of hearts; and have now in the hands of the Lit. Bureau in N.Y. a vol. of essays. I'm (or rather have been) busy, too, on a long poem, yclept the `Jacquerie', on which I had bestowed more REAL WORK than on any of the frothy things which I have hitherto sent out; tho' this is now necessarily suspended until the summer shall give me a little rest from the office business with which I have to support myself while I am studying law."*
— * `Lippincott's Magazine', March, 1905. —
Lanier's work as a lawyer was that of the office, as he never practiced in the courts. To the accuracy and fidelity of this work the words of his successor, Chancellor Walter B. Hill of the University of Georgia, bear testimony: —
"About 1874 or 1875 I became associated as partner with the firm of Lanier and Anderson, in whose office Sidney Lanier practiced law up to the time he left Macon [1869-1873] — I do not know whether he was a partner in the firm or whether he merely used the same office. At any rate, it seems that the greater part of his work consisted in the examination of titles. The firm of Lanier and Anderson represented several building and loan associations and had a large business in this line of work. To examine a title, as you know, requires a visit to what Oliver Wendell Holmes calls `that cemetery of dead transactions', the place for the official registry of deeds and other muniments of title, called in Georgia the office of the Clerk of the Superior Court. One cannot imagine work that is more dry-as-dust in its character than going over these records for the purpose of tracing the successive links in a chain of title. When I came into the firm I had occasion frequently to examine the letter-press copybook in which Lanier's `abstracts' or reports upon title had been copied. Not only were the books themselves models of neatness, but all his work in the examination of titles showed the utmost thoroughness, patience, and fidelity. The law of Georgia in regard to the registration of titles was by no means perfect at that time; so imperfect, indeed, that I have known prominent lawyers to refuse to engage in the work on account of the risk of error involved. I remained a member of the firm for some time afterwards, but during the whole period of my residence in Macon I never heard any question raised as to the correctness and thoroughness of Lanier's work in this difficult and intricate department of practice. In going over some of his work I have often keenly felt the contrast between such toil and that for which Lanier's genius fitted him. To find that the poet spent many laborious days in such uninspiring labor was as great an anomaly as it would be to see a fountain spring from a bed of sawdust and `shake its loosened silver in the sun'."*
— * Letter to the author. —
While engaged in the practice of law, Lanier now and then made public addresses. The most important of these was the Confederate Memorial Address, April 26, 1870.* The spirit and the language of it are equally admirable. He who had suffered all that any man could suffer during the Civil War and during the reconstruction period shows that he has risen above all bitterness and prejudice. There is no threshing over of dead issues. The spirit of the address is more like that seen in the letters of Robert E. Lee than any other thing written by Southerners during this period. Lanier is not yet national in his point of view, but he represents the best attitude of mind that could be held by the most liberal of Southerners at that time. Standing in the cemetery at Macon, — one of the most beautiful in the Southern States, — he begins: "In the unbroken silence of the dead soldierly forms that lie beneath our feet; in the winding processions of these stately trees; in the large tranquillity of this vast and benignant heaven that overspreads us; in the quiet ripple of yonder patient river, flowing down to his death in the sea; in the manifold melodies drawn from these green leaves by wandering airs that go like Troubadours singing in all the lands; in the many-voiced memories that flock into this day, and fill it as swallows fill the summer, — in all these, there is to me so voluble an eloquence to-day that I cannot but shrink from the harsher sounds of my own human voice." Taking these as a text, he comments first on the necessity for silence in an age when "trade is the most boisterous god of all the false gods under heaven." The clatter of factories, the clank of mills, the groaning of forges, the sputtering and laboring of his water power, are all lost sight of in contemplating the august presence of the dead, who speak not. He speaks next of the stateliness of the trees, which suggests to him the stateliness of the two great heroes of the Confederacy, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, — "bright, magnificent exemplars of stateliness, — those noble figures that arose and moved in splendid procession across the theatre of our Confederate war!" The patience of the river suggests the soldiers who walked their life of battle, "patient through heat and cold, through rain and drought, through bullets and diseases, through hunger and nakedness, through rigor of discipline and laxity of morals, ay, through the very shards and pits of hell, down to the almost inevitable death that awaited them."
— * `Retrospects and Prospects', p. 94. —
The most significant passage, however, is his appeal to the men and women of the South to rise to the plane of tranquillity and magnanimity: —
"I spoke next of the tranquillity of the over-spanning heavens. This, too, is a noble quality which your Association tends to keep alive. Who in all the world needs tranquillity more than we? I know not a deeper question in our Southern life at this present time, than how we shall bear our load of wrong and injury with the calmness and tranquil dignity that become men and women who would be great in misfortune; and believe me, I know not where we will draw deeper inspirations of calm strength for this great emergency than in this place where we now stand, in the midst of departed heroes who fought against these things to death. Why, yonder lies my brave, brilliant friend, Lamar; and yonder, genial Robert Smith; and yonder, generous Tracy, — gallant men, all, good knights and stainless gentlemen. How calmly they sleep in the midst of it! Unto this calmness shall we come, at last. If so, why should we disquiet our souls for the petty stings of our conquerors? There comes a time when conqueror and conquered shall alike descend into the grave. In that time, O my countrymen, in that time the conqueror shall be ashamed of his lash, and the conquered shall be proud of his calm endurance; in that time the conqueror shall hide his face, and the conquered shall lift his head with an exultation in his tranquil fortitude which God shall surely pardon!
"For the contemplation of this tranquillity, my friends of this Association, in the name of a land stung half to madness, I thank you.
. . . . .
"To-day we are here for love and not for hate. To-day we are here for harmony and not for discord. To-day we are risen immeasurably above all vengeance. To-day, standing upon the serene heights of forgiveness, our souls choir together the enchanting music of harmonious Christian civilization. To-day we will not disturb the peaceful slumbers of these sleepers with music less sweet than the serenade of loving remembrances, breathing upon our hearts as the winds of heaven breathe upon these swaying leaves above us."
Lanier did not abandon altogether his ideal of doing literary work. He was much encouraged at this time by a sympathetic correspondence with Paul Hamilton Hayne, who, after the Civil War, had settled in a little cottage near Augusta. His beautiful home in Charleston had been burned to the ground and his large, handsome library utterly lost. With heroic spirit at a time when, as Lanier said of him, "the war of secession had left the South in a condition which appeared to render an exclusively literary life a hopeless impossibility, he immured himself in the woods of Georgia and gave himself wholly to his pen." When Simms visited him here in 1866, the poet had for supplies "a box of hard tack, two sides of bacon, and fourscore, more or less, of smoked herring, a frying-pan and a grid-iron." He and his wife lived as simply as the Hawthornes did in the Old Manse. His writing desk was a carpenter's work-bench. He wrote continually for the magazines, corresponded with the poets of England and New England, received visitors, with whom he talked about the old days in Charleston when he and Timrod and Simms had projected "Russell's Magazine", and held out to young Southern writers the encouragement of an older brother.
It was this man who, at a critical time in Lanier's life, inspired him to believe that he might succeed in a literary career. "I have had constantly in mind the kindly help and encouragement which your cheering words used to bring me when I was even more obscure than I am now," wrote the younger poet at a later time. He did not have time, however, to act on this encouragement. He wrote now and then a dialect poem which was printed in the Georgia dailies and attracted attention by its humor and its insight into contemporary life, and occasionally an exquisite lyric like "Nirvana". In the main he had to say: —
"I have not put pen to paper in a literary way in a long time. How I thirst to do so, — how I long to sing a thousand various songs that oppress me, unsung, — is inexpressible. Yet the mere work that brings me bread gives me no time. I know not, after all, if this is a sorrowful thing. Nobody likes my poems except two or three friends, — who are themselves poets, and can supply themselves!" And yet he writes, "It gives me great encouragement that you think I might succeed in the literary life; for I take it that you are in earnest in saying so, believing that you love Art with too genuine affection to trifle with her by bringing to her service, through mere politeness, an unworthy worker."*
— * `Letters', passim. —
Hayne was impressed with Lanier's intimate knowledge of Elizabethan and older English literature, as displayed in his letters of this period. He says: —
"He had steeped his imagination from boyhood in the writings of the earlier English annalists and poets, — Geoffrey of Monmouth, Sir Thomas Malory, Gower, Chaucer, and the whole bead-roll of such ancient English worthies. I was of course a little surprised during our earlier epistolary communion to perceive, not only his unusually thorough knowledge of Chaucer, for example, whose couplets flowed as trippingly from his pen as if `The Canterbury Tales' and `The Romaunt of the Rose' were his daily mental food, but to find him quoting as naturally and easily from `Piers Plowman' and scores of the half-obsolete ballads of the English and Scottish borders.
"He gloried in antiquarian lore and antiquarian literature. Hardly `Old Monkbarns' himself could have pored over a black-letter volume with greater enthusiasm. Especially he loved the tales of chivalry, and thus, when the opportunity came, was fully equipped as an interpreter of Froissart and `King Arthur' for the benefit of our younger generation of students. With the great Elizabethans Lanier was equally familiar. Instead of skimming Shakespeare, he went down into his depths. Few have written so subtly of Shakespeare's mysterious sonnets. Through all Lanier's productions we trace the influence of his early literary loves; but nowhere do the pithy quaintnesses of the old bards and chroniclers display themselves more effectively — not only in the illustrations, but through the innermost warp and woof of the texture of his ideas and his style — than in some of his familiar epistles."*
— * `Letters', p. 220. —
That Lanier kept in touch, too, with contemporary literature is shown by an acute criticism of Browning's "The Ring and the Book", then recently published: "Have you seen Browning's `The Ring and the Book'? I am confident that, at the birth of this man, among all the good fairies who showered him with magnificent endowments, one bad one — as in the old tale — crept in by stealth and gave him a constitutional twist i' the neck, whereby his windpipe became, and has ever since remained, a marvelous tortuous passage. Out of this glottis-labyrinth his words won't, and can't, come straight. A hitch and a sharp crook in every sentence bring you up with a shock. But what a shock it is! Did you ever see a picture of a lasso, in the act of being flung? In a thousand coils and turns, inextricably crooked and involved and whirled, yet, if you mark the noose at the end, you see that it is directly in front of the bison's head, there, and is bound to catch him! That is the way Robert Browning catches you. The first sixty or seventy pages of `The Ring and the Book' are altogether the most doleful reading, in point either of idea or of music, in the English language; and yet the monologue of Giuseppe Caponsacchi, that of Pompilia Comparini, and the two of Guido Franceschini, are unapproachable, in their kind, by any living or dead poet, `me judice'. Here Browning's jerkiness comes in with inevitable effect. You get lightning glimpses — and, as one naturally expects from lightning, zigzag glimpses — into the intense night of the passion of these souls. It is entirely wonderful and without precedent. The fitful play of Guido's lust, and scorn, and hate, and cowardice, closes with a master stroke: —
"Christ! Maria! God! . . .POMPILIA, WILL YOU LET THEM MURDER ME?
"Pompilia, mark you, is dead, by Guido's own hand; deliberately stabbed, because he hated her purity, which all along he has reviled and mocked with the Devil's own malignant ingenuity of sarcasm."*
— * `Letters', p. 206; letter to Hayne, April 13, 1870. —
On account of ill health Lanier frequently had to leave Macon and go to places better suited to his physical temperament. At Brunswick, Georgia, — the scene of the Marsh poems, — at Alleghany Springs in Virginia, and at Lookout Mountain in Tennessee, he spent successive summers. In all of these places he reveled in the beauty and grandeur of the scenery. His letters written to his wife and his father during his absences from Macon are evidence that he was at this time developing steadily in that subtle appreciation of nature which was afterwards to play such an important part in his poetry. In fact, the letters themselves, when published, as they will be some time, show artistic growth when compared with the writings already noted. He was all his life a prolific letter-writer — and a great one. Writing from Alleghany Springs, July 12, 1872, he says to his wife: —