"How necessary is it that one should occasionally place oneself in the midst of those more striking forms of nature in which God has indulged His fantasy! It is very true that the flat land, the bare hillside, the muddy stream comes also directly from the creative hand: but these do not bring one into the sweetness of the heartier moods of God; in the midst of them it is as if one were transacting the business of life with God: whereas, when one has but to lift one's eyes in order to receive the exquisite shocks of thrilling form and color and motion that leap invisibly from mountain and groves and stream, then one feels as if one had surprised the Father in his tender, sportive, and loving moments.
"To the soul then, weak with the long flesh fight and filled with a sluggish languor by those wearisome disappointments which arise from the constant contemplation of men's weaknesses, and from the constant back-thrusting of one's consciousness of impotence to strengthen them — thou, with thy nimble fancy, canst imagine what ethereal and yet indestructible essences of new dignity, of new strength, of new patience, of new serenity, of new hope, new faith, and new love, do continually flash out of the gorges, the mountains, and the streams, into the heart, and charge it, as the lightnings charge the earth, with subtle and heavenly fires.
"A bewildering sorcery seems to spread itself over even those things which are commonplace. The songs and cries of birds acquire a strange sound to me: I cannot understand the little spontaneous tongues, the quivering throats, the open beaks, the small bright eyes that gleam with unknown emotion, the nimble capricious heads that twist this way and that with such bizarre unreasonableness.
"Nor do I fathom this long unceasing monotone of the little shallow river that sings yonder over the rocks in its bosom as a mother crooning over her children; it is but one word the stream utters: but as when we speak a well-known word over and over again until it comes to have a frightful mystery in it, so this familiar stream-sound fills me with indescribable wonder.
"Nor do I comprehend the eloquence of the mountains which comes in a strange `patois' of two tongues; for the mountains speak at once the languages of repose and of convulsion, two languages which have naught in common.
"Wondering therefore, from day to night, with a good wonder which directs attention not to one's ignorance but to God's wisdom, stricken, but not exhausted, by continual tranquil surprises; surrounded by a world of enchantments which, so far from being elusive, are the most substantial of realties, — thou knowest that nature is kind to me."
He went to New York in 1869, 1870, and 1871, now on business and now to consult medical experts. In May, 1869, we find him trying to make the sale of some property on which iron was supposed to be. He writes his father that he has been down on Wall Street all day. There is — now as compared with his 1867 visit — a certain fascination for him in the intense spirit of hurry which displays itself on every side. He finds himself in competition with many Southerners who were at that time projecting similar enterprises. He is also visiting the clients of Lanier and Anderson, and is anxious to extend the firm's name. He is given much social attention, — "teas, dinners, calls, visits, business" consume his time. He visits the superb villa of his cousin on the Hudson near Poughkeepsie. He writes, on May 15, that he is beginning "to feel entirely unflurried in the crowd and to go about business deliberately." He is in New York again in 1871, when the Tweed ring is being exposed, and he cannot but compare the situation there with the reconstruction government that prevails in his own State. "Somehow this isn't a good day for thieves," he says. "Wouldn't it be a curious and refreshing phenomenon if Tweed, Hall, Bullock,* and that ilk should all continue in the service of the State — only changing the scene of their labors from the office to the penitentiary?"
— * Governor of Georgia during reconstruction days. —
Most of all, however, Lanier was interested in the music which he heard on these trips to the metropolis. He had kept up his flute-playing while busy with his law work, frequently playing at charity concerts in Macon and other cities of Georgia. In New York he reveled in the singing of Nilsson, in religious music at St. Paul's Church, but above all in Theodore Thomas's orchestra, then just beginning its triumphant career. He writes, August 15, 1870: "Ah, how they have belied Wagner! I heard Theodore Thomas's orchestra play his overture to `Tannhaeuser'. The `Music of the Future' is surely thy music and my music. Each harmony was a chorus of pure aspirations. The sequences flowed along, one after another, as if all the great and noble deeds of time had formed a procession and marched in review before one's EARS instead of one's EYES. These `great and noble deeds' were not deeds of war and statesmanship, but majestic victories of inner struggles of a man. This unbroken march of beautiful-bodied Triumphs irresistibly invites the soul of a man to create other processions like it. I would I might lead a so magnificent file of glories into heaven!"*
— * `Letters', p. 68. —
And again, in 1871: "And to-night I come out of what might have been heaven. . . .
"'T was opening night of Theodore Thomas's orchestra, at Central Park Garden, and I could not resist the temptation to go and bathe in the sweet amber seas of the music of this fine orchestra, and so I went, and tugged me through a vast crowd, and, after standing some while, found a seat, and the baton tapped and waved, and I plunged into the sea, and lay and floated. Ah! the dear flutes and oboes and horns drifted me hither and thither, and the great violins and small violins swayed me upon waves, and overflowed me with strong lavations, and sprinkled glistening foam in my face, and in among the clarinetti, as among waving water-lilies with flexile stems, I pushed my easy way, and so, even lying in the music-waters, I floated and flowed, my soul utterly bent and prostrate."*
— * `Letters', p. 70. —
In November, 1872, Lanier went to San Antonio in quest of health. In letters to his father giving an account of his trip from New Orleans to Galveston and thence to Austin, he shows keen insight into the life of that State. He sketches many types of character and scenes — sketches that show at once his knowledge of human nature and his ability as a reporter. It may be said here that Lanier always took an interest in the passing show, — he was not a detached dreamer. He arrived at San Antonio in November. On account of his ill health he could write but few letters, although he is "fairly reeking with all manner of quips and quiddities which I yearn to spread for the delectation of such a partial set of people as a home set always is." He writes to his sister: "To-day has been as lovely as any day can hope to be this side of Millennium; and I have been out strolling morning and afternoon, far and wide, ever tempted onward by the delicious buoyant balm in the air and pleasantly surprised in finding what a distance I could accomplish without over fatigue." He rode horseback a great deal — a form of exercise he was especially fond of all his life.
In a letter to his father he refers to some work he is doing in the library: "I have also managed to advance very largely my conceptions of the Jacquerie through a history which I secured from the Library of the Alamo Literary Society, — a flourishing institution here which is now building a hall to cost some thirteen thousand dollars, and of which I have become a literary member." He has been reading Michelet's "History of France" which "gives him the essence of an old book which he had despaired of ever seeing, but which is the only authority extant, — save Froissart and a few others equally unreliable; it is the chronicle of the `Continuator of Guillaume de Nangis'." With Olmsted's book of travels as a model, he planned a series of articles for a New York paper.
The only result, however, from these plans was a picturesque sketch of San Antonio,* afterwards published in the "Southern Magazine". This sketch is at once a history of San Antonio and a description of the scenery and the people of that quaint city. "Over all the round of aspects in which a thoughtful mind may view a city," he says in a typical passage, "it bristles with striking idiosyncrasies and bizarre contrasts. Its history, population, climate, location, architecture, soil, water, customs, costumes, horses, cattle, all attract the stranger's attention, either by force of intrinsic singularity or of odd juxtapositions. It was a puling infant for a century and a quarter, yet has grown to a pretty vigorous youth in a quarter of a century; its inhabitants are so varied that the `go slow' directions over its bridges are printed in three languages, and the religious services in its churches held in four; the thermometer, the barometer, the vane, the hygrometer, oscillate so rapidly, so frequently, so lawlessly, and through so wide a meteorological range, that the climate is simply indescribable, yet it is a growing resort for consumptives; it stands with all its gay prosperity just in the edge of a lonesome, untilled belt of land one hundred and fifty miles wide, like Mardi Gras on the austere brink of Lent; it has no Sunday laws, and that day finds its bar-rooms and billiard-saloons as freely open and as fully attended as its churches; its buildings, ranging from the Mexican `jacal' to the San Fernando Cathedral, represent all the progressive stages of man's architectural progress in edifices of mud, of wood, of stone, of iron, and of sundry combinations of those materials; its soil is in wet weather an inky-black cement, but in dry a floury-white powder; it is built along both banks of two limpid streams, yet it drinks rain water collected in cisterns; its horses and mules are from Lilliput, while its oxen are from Brobdingnag." In the same vivid style he sketches the various characteristics of the city and its people. His account of a Texas "norther", his descriptions of the San Fernando Cathedral and of the Mission San Jose de Aquayo are especially good.
— * `Retrospects and Prospects', p. 34. —
It was on this visit to San Antonio that Lanier resolved finally to devote himself to an artist's career. He came in contact with some of the German musicians of the city and played before the Maennerchor, which received his flute-playing with enthusiastic applause.
San Antonio, Tex., January 30, 1873.
Last night at eight o'clock came Mr. Scheidemantel, a genuine lover of music and a fine pianist, to take me to the Maennerchor, which meets every Wednesday night for practice. Quickly we came to a hall, one end of which was occupied by a minute stage with appurtenances, and a piano; and in the middle thereof a long table, at which each singer sat down as he came in. Presently, seventeen Germans were seated at the singing-table, long-necked bottles of Rhine-wine were opened and tasted, great pipes and cigars were all afire; the leader, Herr Thielepape, — an old man with long, white beard and mustache, formerly mayor of the city, — rapped his tuning-fork vigorously, gave the chords by rapid arpeggios of his voice (a wonderful, wild, high tenor, such as thou wouldst dream that the old Welsh harpers had, wherewith to sing songs that would cut against the fierce sea-blasts), and off they all swung into such a noble, noble old German full-voiced `lied', that imperious tears rushed into my eyes, and I could scarce restrain myself from running and kissing each one in turn and from howling dolefully the while. And so . . . I all the time worshiping . . . with these great chords . . . we drove through the evening until twelve o'clock, absorbing enormous quantities of Rhine-wine and beer, whereof I imbibed my full share. After the second song I was called on to play, and lifted my poor old flute in air with tumultuous, beating heart; for I had no confidence in that or in myself. But, `du Himmel!' Thou shouldst have heard mine old love warble herself forth. To my utter astonishment, I was perfect master of the instrument. Is not this most strange? Thou knowest I had never learned it; and thou rememberest what a poor muddle I made at Marietta in playing difficult passages; and I certainly have not practiced; and yet there I commanded and the blessed notes obeyed me, and when I had finished, amid a storm of applause, Herr Thielepape arose and ran to me and grasped my hand, and declared that he hat never heert de flude accompany itself pefore! I played once more during the evening, and ended with even more rapturous bravos than before, Mr. Scheidemantel grasping my hand this time, and thanking me very earnestly.
My heart, which was hurt greatly when I went into the music-room, came forth from the holy bath of concords greatly refreshed, strengthened, and quieted, and so remaineth to-day. I also feel better than in a long time before.*
— * `Letters', p. 71. —
Again he played for "an elegant-looking company of ladies and gentlemen" in a private home. "I had not played three seconds," he says, "before a profound silence reigned among the people, seeing which, and dreaming wildly, and feeling somehow in an eerie and elfish, and half-uncanny mood, I flew off into all manner of trills, and laments, and cadenza-monstrosities for a long time, but finally floated down into `La Melancolie', which melted itself forth with such eloquent lamenting that it almost brought my tears — and, to make a long story short, when I allowed the last note to die, a simultaneous cry of pleasure broke forth from men and women that almost amounted to a shout."* Two weeks later he wrote: "I have writ the most beautiful piece, `Field-larks and Blackbirds', wherein I have mirrored Mr. Field-lark's pretty eloquence so that I doubt he would know the difference betwixt the flute and his own voice."**
—* `Letters', p. 73.** `Letters', p. 47.—
Inspired by the sympathy of people in whose judgment he had confidence, and impelled by his own genius asserting itself, and realizing that his hold upon life was but slight, he went from San Antonio in April, 1873, with the fixed purpose to give the remainder of his life to music and poetry. The resolution is all the more significant when it is remembered that the year 1873 was one of financial distress, especially in the South. "It was then," says Joel Chandler Harris, "that the effects of war and waste were fully felt, and then that the stoutest heart was tried, labor was restless and hard to control, the planter was out of funds and interest was high, . . . the farmers were almost at the point of desperation."
The formation of this resolution to devote himself to artistic work marks an epoch in Lanier's life so important as to call for further comment. For twelve years he had been deflected out of his true orbit. For seven years he had given his time and talent to pursuits which he did not cherish — writing only now and then with his left hand. Everything had been against him. To preserve unspotted the ideal of his youth — through all the changes and struggles of these years — and now to give himself to it meant heroism of a rare type. It meant that he must seem disobedient to a father with whom his relation had been peculiarly intimate, that he would go in the face of the opinion of friends and relatives, and that he must for a while at least leave behind his family, whom he loved with an unparalleled affection. He was to enter upon a career the future of which was not certain. In spite of all these obstacles, he deliberately made up his mind to give the remainder of his life to the work that he loved. Once again, after he had settled down in Baltimore, his father made a determined effort to induce him to change his mind, but to no avail. Lanier's answer to his father's letter, written November 29, 1873, is really his declaration of independence — the vow of consecration: —
"I have given your last letter the fullest and most careful consideration. After doing so I feel sure that Macon is not the place for me. If you could taste the delicious crystalline air, and the champagne breeze that I've just been rushing about in, I am equally sure that in point of climate you would agree with me that my chance for life is ten times as great here as in Macon. Then, as to business, why should I, nay, how CAN I, settle myself down to be a third-rate struggling lawyer for the balance of my little life, as long as there is a certainty almost absolute that I can do some other thing so much better? Several persons, from whose judgment in such matters there can be no appeal, have told me, for instance, that I am the greatest flute-player in the world; and several others, of equally authoritative judgment, have given me an almost equal encouragement to work with my pen. (Of course I protest against the necessity which makes me write such things about myself. I only do so because I so appreciate the love and tenderness which prompt you to desire me with you that I will make the fullest explanation possible of my course, out of reciprocal honor and respect for the motives which lead you to think differently from me.) My dear father, think how, for twenty years, through poverty, through pain, through weariness, through sickness, through the uncongenial atmosphere of a farcical college and of a bare army and then of an exacting business life, through all the discouragement of being wholly unacquainted with literary people and literary ways, — I say, think how, in spite of all these depressing circumstances, and of a thousand more which I could enumerate, these two figures of music and of poetry have steadily kept in my heart so that I could not banish them. Does it not seem to you as to me, that I begin to have the right to enroll myself among the devotees of these two sublime arts, after having followed them so long and so humbly, and through so much bitterness?"*
— * Quoted by William Hayes Ward in his Introduction to Lanier's `Poems'. —
The letter just quoted needs to be read with caution. It sets in too sharp antagonism his life up to this point and that of his later years. Previous chapters of this book have been written in vain if they have not revealed the fact that Lanier was a much more highly developed man when he left Georgia than the letter would indicate. He wrote it in the first flush of enthusiasm at finding himself among artists. But it is misleading. For instance, he speaks of the "farcical college"; yet in his last days, when he saw his life in its proper perspective, he said that he owed to Dr. Woodrow the strongest and most valuable stimulus of his early life. He was not a raw provincial; he had traveled extensively, had been associated with people of culture, if not of letters, and he had read widely and wisely. His inheritance from Southern people, — their temperament and their civilization, — and his indebtedness to Southern scenery will be the more apparent in later chapters of this book. All the while his genius had been steadily growing. When the time came he was a prepared man — ready to seize with avidity every opportunity that presented itself.
Furthermore, the very struggle he had to maintain his ideal, and it will not do to minimize this struggle, had strengthened and enlarged his soul. One may as well lament Milton's absorption in the conflicts of his country as Lanier's participation in the war and in the stirring events of reconstruction. After the fortitude and endurance manifested in this period of his life, his later sufferings were the more easily borne. One of his favorite theories was that antagonism or opposition either in art or morals is to be welcomed, for out of it comes a finer art and a larger manhood. He developed somewhat at length this theory in his admirable study of Shakespeare's growth. In a passage evidently autobiographical he traces Shakespeare's progress in the three periods of his life, the Dream Period, the Real or Hamlet Period, and the Ideal Period. Lanier, too, passed through his Dream Period, — the college days and the early years of the war. He passed through his Hamlet Period — the years from 1865 to 1873 — years in which he felt the shock of the real, the twist and cross of life. There had been suffering from poverty, drudgery, and disease; there had been also something of the storm and stress of religious and philosophic doubt. With the beginning of his artistic life he passes into his Ideal Period, when by reason of the terrific shock of the real he was able to realize "a new and immortally fine reconstruction of his youth." He was to know what suffering meant in the future; but the serenity and joy of his life from this point are apparent to all who may study it.
Of fret, of dark, of thorn, of chill,Complain no more; for these, O heart,Direct the random of the willAs rhymes direct the rage of art.
With his purpose firmly fixed in his mind he started for New York, which was then fast becoming the musical and literary centre of the country. For three months and more he gave himself unstintedly to the work of perfecting himself in playing the flute, and attended regularly the great concerts then being given by Theodore Thomas. It was an opportune time. The day of the Italian opera, for which Lanier did not care, was past, and orchestral music was beginning its triumphant career in this country. These were months, then, of education in the very music for which Lanier had yearned. He at once attracted musical critics and made a stir in some of the churches and concert-rooms of the city. He had brought along with him two of his own compositions, "Swamp Robin" and "Blackbirds"; and there were some who did not hesitate to prophesy a brilliant career for him as "the greatest flute-player in the world." Lanier did not rely on inspiration, however, nor was he satisfied with the applause of popular audiences; he knew that his course must be one of "straightforward behavior and hard work and steady improvement." He would be satisfied only with the judgment of Thomas or Dr. Leopold Damrosch, then conductor of the Philharmonic Society.
On his way to New York he had stopped at Baltimore, and on the advice of his friend Henry Wysham had played for Asger Hamerik, who was at that time making efforts to have the Peabody Institute establish an orchestra. Hamerik was so attracted by Lanier's playing, both of masterpieces and of his own compositions, that he invited him to become first flute in the prospective orchestra. With even this promise in view, Lanier had written to his wife: "It is therefore a POSSIBILITY . . . that I may be first flute in the Peabody Orchestra, on a salary of $120 a month, which, with five flute scholars, would grow to $200 a month, and so . . . we might dwell in the beautiful city, among the great libraries, and midst of the music, the religion, and the art that we love — and I could write my books and be the man I wish to be."* Hamerik did succeed in getting the orchestra established and Lanier accepted the position — for far less money, however. Lanier settled in Baltimore, in December, and at once attracted the attention of the patrons of the orchestra. In the Baltimore "Sun" of December 8, 1873, his playing was mentioned as one of the features of the opening symphony concert. In the same paper of January 25 occurs this note: "Lanier and Stubbs could not have acquitted themselves better, nor done more justice to their very difficult parts." And so throughout the winter there is contemporary evidence that this "raw provincial, without practice and guiltless of instruction," was holding his own with the finely trained Germans and Danes of Hamerik's Orchestra.
— * `Letters', p. 75. —
The fact is, Lanier was a musical genius. In playing the flute he combined deftness of hand and quick intuitiveness of soul. The director of the Peabody Orchestra, who had been a pupil of Von Buelow, and was a composer of distinction, has left the most authoritative account of Lanier as a performer: —
"To him as a child in his cradle Music was given, the heavenly gift to feel and to express himself in tones. His human nature was like an enchanted instrument, a magic flute, or the lyre of Apollo, needing but a breath or a touch to send its beauty out into the world. It was indeed irresistible that he should turn with those poetical feelings which transcend language to the penetrating gentleness of the flute, or the infinite passion of the violin; for there was an agreement, a spiritual correspondence between his nature and theirs, so that they mutually absorbed and expressed each other. In his hands the flute no longer remained a mere material instrument, but was transformed into a voice that set heavenly harmonies into vibration. Its tones developed colors, warmth, and a low sweetness of unspeakable poetry; they were not only true and pure, but poetic, allegoric as it were, suggestive of the depths and heights of being and of the delights which the earthly ear never hears and the earthly eye never sees. No doubt his firm faith in these lofty idealities gave him the power to present them to our imaginations, and thus by the aid of the higher language of Music to inspire others with that sense of beauty in which he constantly dwelt. His conception of music was not reached by an analytic study of note by note, but was intuitive and spontaneous; like a woman's reason: he felt it so, because he felt it so, and his delicate perception required no more logical form of reasoning. His playing appealed alike to the musically learned and to the unlearned — for he would magnetize the listener; but the artist felt in his performance the superiority of the momentary living inspiration to all the rules and shifts of mere technical scholarship. His art was not only the art of art, but an art above art. I will never forget the impression he made on me when he played the flute concerta of Emil Hartmann at a Peabody symphony concert, in 1878, — his tall, handsome, manly presence, his flute breathing noble sorrows, noble joys, the orchestra softly responding. The audience was spellbound. Such distinction, such refinement! He stood, the master, the genius!"*
— * Quoted in Ward's Introduction to `Poems'. —
He made the same impression on every other artist he ever played for. Badger called his flute-playing "astonishing"; Wehner, the first flute in Thomas's Orchestra, sought every opportunity to play with him. Theodore Thomas planned to have him in his orchestra at the time when Lanier's health failed in 1876; Dr. Damrosch said he played "Wind-Song" like an artist, — that "he was greatly astonished and pleased with the poetry of the piece and the enthusiasm of its rendering."
His own compositions, too, appealed to men. At times the "fury of creation" was upon him. During the first winter in Baltimore he wrote a midge dance, the origin of which he thus gives in a letter to his wife: "I am copying off — in order to try the publishers therewith — a `Danse des Moucherons' (midge dance), which I have written for flute and piano, and which I think enough of to let go forward as Op. 1. Dost thou remember one morning last summer, Charley and I were walking in the upper part of the yard, before breakfast, and saw a swarm of gnats, of whose strange evolutions we did relate to thee a marvelous tale? I have put the grave oaks, the quiet shade, the sudden sunlight, the fantastic, contrariwise, and ever-shifting midge movements, the sweet hills afar off, . . . all in the piece, and thus -I- like it; but I know not if others will, I have not played it for anybody."*
— * `Letters', p. 98. —
During this winter and the succeeding one Lanier gave almost his entire time to music. He practiced assiduously, took every opportunity to play with the best musicians, — both those of his own orchestra and of Theodore Thomas's, — and often spent evenings with three or four of the choicest spirits he could command. Hamerik was of special inspiration to him, bringing to him as he did much of the spirit of music that prevailed in German cities. Lanier studied the technique of the flute, mastering his new silver Boehm, which "begins to feel me," he writes. "How much I have learned in the last two months!" he exclaims. "I am not yet an artist, though, on the flute. The technique of the instrument has many depths which I had not thought of before, and I would not call myself a virtuoso within a year." He suffers agony because he does not attain a point in harmony which the audience did not notice. Writing of the temptation of flute soloists, he once said: "They have rarely been able to resist the fatal facility of the instrument, and have usually addressed themselves to winning the applause of concert audiences by the execution of those brilliant but utterly trifling and inane variations which constitute the great body of existing solos for the flute."* He fretted because "the flute had been the black beast in the orchestra." With his mastery of its technique and his own marvelous ability to bring new results from it, he looked forward to the time when it would have a far more important place therein.
— * `Music and Poetry', p. 38. —
Lanier played not only for the Peabody Orchestra, but for the Germania Maennerchor Orchestra, — one of the many companies of Germans who did so much to develop music in different parts of the country, — the Concordia Theatre, charity concerts, churches, and in private homes. He was very popular in Baltimore. Most of the musicians were Germans, but Lanier was an American and a Southerner, who had graces of manner and goodness of soul. He was a close friend of the Baltimore musicians, such as Madame Falk-Auerbach, a pupil of Rossini's and a teacher in the Conservatory of Music, "a woman who plays Beethoven with the large conception of a man, and yet nurses her children all day with a noble simplicity of devotion such as I have rarely seen," said Lanier. Outside of musical circles he had access to the homes of the most prominent people of Baltimore, in which he frequently played the flute or piano, while members of the family accompanied him. "Memory pictures," says one of his admirers, "that frail, slender figure at the piano, touching with white, shapely hands the chords of Chopin's `Nocturne'." "He was a frequent visitor to our house," says another, "and would often play for us on his beautiful silver flute. The image of him standing in his rapt passion, while he poured forth the entrancing sound, I remember most distinctly."
And while he grew in his mastery of the flute he grew, too, in discriminating study of the orchestra. His first interpretations of orchestral music are rather impulsive — he goes off into raptures without restraint, even when the occasion is not really of the highest sort. It is altogether unfair to him to confuse his earlier with his later letters. As in every other respect, Lanier was growing in intellectual power. "I am beginning," he writes, "in the midst of the stormy glories of the orchestra, to feel my heart sure, and my soul discriminating. Not less do I thrill to ride upon the great surges; but I am growing calm enough to see the star that should light the musician, and presently my hand will be firm enough to hold the helm and guide the ship that way. NOW I am very quiet; I am waiting."* And again, after he has heard Thomas's Orchestra; "I can preserve my internal dignity in great measure, free from the dreadful distractions of solicitude, and thus my soul revels in the midst of the heaven of these great symphonic works with almost unobstructed freedom."**
—* `Letters', p. 91.** `Letters', p. 110.—
One of the plans proposed by Lanier for helping people to understand better the meaning of orchestral music should be mentioned in this connection. He was always anxious to take every one with him into his kingdom of beauty. He proposed that, for people living in cities of from three to twenty thousand inhabitants, there should be organized "a Nonette Club, consisting of himself for flute, oboe, clarionet, bassoon, and French horn, and a string quartette. This club would travel through the smaller cities, performing original compositions as well as excerpts from the greatest symphonic orchestral works, and thus educating the masses to an understanding of orchestral tonal color, and the relations, in an analytical form, which the wood wind instruments bore to the stringed family. . . . It was his purpose, after each movement of a composition, to lecture on the same, with special reference to the function performed by each instrument, and in the formation of harmonious tonal color."*
— * Letter from Mr. F. H. Gottlieb to the author. —
While Lanier was giving his time to the perfection of his flute-playing and to the study of the orchestra, he became interested in the science of music. Helmholtz's recent discoveries in acoustics inspired him to make research in that direction. He ransacked the Peabody Library for books on the subject, many of them yet not unpacked.
While few people ever appreciated more the art of music and its spiritual message to men, he realized that there was a science of music as well, "embodying a great number of classified facts, and presenting a great number of scientific laws which are as thoroughly recognized among musicians as are the laws of any other sciences among their professors. There is a science of harmony, a science of composition, a science of orchestration, a science of performance upon stringed instruments, a science of performance upon wind instruments, a science of vocalization; not a branch of the art of music but has its own analogous body of classified facts and general laws. Music is so much a science that a man may be a thorough musician who has never written a tune and who cannot play upon any instrument."* Some of these investigations he afterwards used to good effect in his "Science of English Verse".
— * `Music and Poetry', p. 50. —
Furthermore, Lanier became interested in the history of music. In his valuable monograph on "Music in Shakespeare's Time"* he shows a minute knowledge of Elizabethan music, — madrigals, dances, catches, and other forms of instrumental and vocal music. He took great delight in following out through Shakespeare's plays the dramatist's knowledge and appreciation of the art of music. Indeed, all the people of that time were "enthusiastic lovers of the art. There were professorships of music in the universities, and multitudes of teachers of it among the people. The monarch, the lord, the gentleman, the merchant, the artisan, the rustic clown, all ranks and conditions of society, from highest to lowest, cultivated the practice of singing or of playing upon some of the numerous instruments of the time." For the class to which he was then lecturing in the Peabody Institute he was able to point out and illustrate various forms of music and to give biographical sketches of the English musicians of Shakespeare's age.
— * `Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. ii, p. 1. —
Lanier was most of all interested, however, in the development of modern music, and especially in orchestral music. He underrated some of the classical composers, notably Mozart. He was familiar with the biographies of Chopin, Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner. He left behind a translation of Wagner's "Rheingold". His poems on Beethoven and Wagner indicate his appreciation of their music, while his essays "From Bacon to Beethoven" and "The Modern Orchestra" show minute knowledge of their work and of the significance of the orchestra in modern life. A better description of Theodore Thomas as the leader of an orchestra has not been written than Lanier's: —
"To see Thomas lead . . . is music itself! His baton is alive, full of grace, of symmetry; he maketh no gestures, he readeth his score almost without looking at it, he seeth everybody, heareth everything, warneth every man, encourageth every instrument, quietly, firmly, marvelously. Not the slightest shade of nonsense, not the faintest spark of affectation, not the minutest grain of EFFECT is in him. He taketh the orchestra in his hand as if it were a pen, — and writeth with it."*
— * `Letters', p. 92. —
If Lanier had been only a successful virtuoso with the flute, the tradition of his playing would have lingered in the minds of at least two generations. Through the reminiscences of college mates, of soldiers and of frequenters of the Peabody concerts, the memory of this genius with the flute would have remained like that of some troubadour of the Middle Ages. It is unfortunate that he left no compositions to indicate a musical power sufficient to give him a place in the history of American music. It cannot be controverted, however, that he is the one man of letters in America who has had an adequate appreciation of the value of music in the culture of the modern world. To him music was a culture study as much as the study of literature. It was an education to him to hear the adequate representation of modern orchestral works. Hamerik's plan of giving separate nights to the music of various nationalities was calculated to emphasize this phase of musical culture. To Lanier, who had never traveled abroad and who did not have time to read the literatures of foreign nations, such musical programmes had the effect of enabling him to divine the places and the life from which the music had come. "I am just come from Venice," he says, "and have strolled home through the moonlight, singing serenades. . . . I have been playing `Stradella' and I am full of gondellieds, of serenades, of balconies with white arms leaning over the balustrades thereof, of gleaming waters, of lithe figures in black velvet, of stinging sweet coquetries, of diamonds, daggers, and desperadoes. . . . I cannot tell the intense delight which these lovely conceptions of Flotow gave me. The man has put Venice, lovely, romantic, wicked-sweet Venice, into music, and the melodies breathe out an eloquence that is at once sentimental and powerful, at once languid and thrilling."*
— * `Letters', p. 98. —
A description of the "Hunt of Henry IV" shows how Lanier associated nature, music, and poetry with each other. He was an ardent advocate of "programme-music". He saw music as he heard poetry. He felt the musical effects in poetry and the poetical effects in music: "Then, the `Hunt of Henry IV'! . . . It openeth with a grave and courteous invitation, as of a cavalier riding by some dainty lady, through the green aisles of the deep woods, to the hunt, — a lovely, romantic melody, the first violins discoursing the man's words, the first flute replying for the lady. Presently a fanfare; a sweet horn replies out of the far woods; then the meeting of the gay cavaliers; then the start, the dogs are unleashed, one hound gives tongue, another joins, the stag is seen — hey, gentlemen! away they all fly through the sweet leaves, by the great oaks and beeches, all a-dash among the brambles, till presently, bang! goeth a pistol (it was my veritable old revolver loaded with blank cartridge for the occasion, the revolver that hath lain so many nights under my head), fired by `Tympani' (as we call him, the same being a nervous little Frenchman who playeth our drums), and then the stag dieth in a celestial concord of flutes, oboes, and violins. Oh, how far off my soul was in this thrilling moment! It was in a rare, sweet glen in Tennessee; the sun was rising over a wilderness of mountains, I was standing (how well I remember the spot!) alone in the dewy grass, wild with rapture and with expectation. Yonder came, gracefully walking, a lovely fawn. I looked into its liquid eyes, hesitated, prayed, gulped a sigh, then overcame with the savage hunter's instinct, fired; the fawn leaped convulsively a few yards, I ran to it, found it lying on its side, and received into my agonized and remorseful heart the reproaches of its most tender, dying gaze. But luckily I had not the right to linger over this sad scene; the conductor's baton shook away the dying pause; on all sides shouts and fanfares and gallopings `to the death', to which the first flute had to reply in time, recalled me to my work, and I came through brilliantly."*
— * `Letters', p. 85. —
Because of its culture value, Lanier believed that music should have its place in every college and university. As far back as 1867 — in "Tiger Lilies" — he had advocated the appointment of professors of music in American colleges of equal dignity with other specialists. He himself hoped that he might be appointed to such a chair, first in the College of Music in New York and later in Johns Hopkins University. It is easy to conceive that he might have become an expert teacher in the science of music, but it is more probable that if he had held a chair in an academic institution he would have forwarded the work that has now become a distinct feature of all the larger universities. He would have made an excellent "literary" teacher of music, interesting men in the biographies of great musicians, and interpreting for them the mysteries of orchestra and opera. He conceived of music as one of the humanities, and would have agreed with President Eliot that "music is a culture study, if there is one in the world." In his life it took the place that travel and many literatures held in the lives of Longfellow and Lowell. He believed with Theodore Thomas that Beethoven's music is "something more than mere pleasure; it is education, thought, emotion, love, and hope."
Furthermore, Lanier believed in the religious value of music; it was a "gospel whereof the people are in great need, — a later revelation of all gospels in one." "Music," he says, "is to be the Church of the future, wherein all creeds will unite like the tones in a chord." He was one of "those fervent souls who fare easily by this road to the Lord." Haydn's inscription, "Laus Deo", was in Lanier's mind whenever he listened to great music; for it tended to "help the emotions of man across the immensity of the known into the boundaries of the Unknown." He would have composers to be ministers of religion. He could not understand the indifference of some leaders of orchestras, who could be satisfied with appealing to the aesthetic emotions of an audience, while they might "set the hearts of fifteen hundred people afire." The final meaning of music to him was that it created within man "a great, pure, unanalyzable yearning after God."
Holding this exalted view of music, he believed that its future was immense and that in America its triumphs were to be greater than they had been elsewhere. At a time when musical culture was rare in this country, he looked forward with hope and expectation to the time when America would become a patron of the best music. "When Americans," he said, "shall have learned the supreme value and glory of the orchestra, . . . then I look to see America the home of the orchestra, and to hear everywhere the profound messages of Beethoven and Bach to men." And again: "All the signs of the times seem to point to this country as the scene of the future development of music. . . . It only needs direction, artistic atmosphere, and technique in order to fill the land with such orchestras as the world has never heard. When our so-called conservatories and music schools, instead of straining every nerve to outdo each other in turning out hosts of bad piano-players, shall address themselves earnestly to the education of performers upon all the orchestral instruments; when our people shall have become aware of the height and glory of the orchestra, as the only instrument for the deepest adorations in man; . . . when our young women shall ask themselves for any serious reason why they should all, with one accord, devote themselves to the piano instead of to the flute, the violin, the hautboy, the harp, the viola, the violoncello, the horn instruments which pertain to women fully as much as to men, and some of which actually belong by nature to those supple, tactile, delicate, firm, passionate, and tender fingers with which the woman is endowed; when our young men shall have discovered that the orchestral player can so exercise his office as to make it of far more dignity and worth than any political place in the gift of the people, and that the business of making orchestral music may one day become far higher in nobility than the ignoble sentinelship over one's pocket to which most lawyers are reduced, or the melancholy slaveries of the shop and the counting-room and the like `business' which is now paramount in esteem; when — I will not say when we have a new music to perform, but when we shall have played Beethoven's symphonies as they should be played, and shall have revealed to us all the might, all the faith, all the religion, the tenderness, the heavenly invitation, the subtle excursions down into the heart of man, the brotherhood, the freedom, the exaltation, the whisperings of sorrow unto sorrow, the messages of God which these immortal and yet unmeasured compositions embody,"* then will America give to music the place it deserves. Music will be one of the redeemers of the people from crass commercialism.
—* An uncollected essay by Lanier, "Mazzini on Music", `The Independent',June 27, 1878.—
While Lanier held before the American people the vision of what they might accomplish in music, he held up to musicians the high ideal of what they should be. In the essay just quoted, he indorses the saying of Mazzini's that "musicians may become a priesthood and ministry of moral regeneration. . . . Why rest contented with stringing notes together — mere trouveres of a day — when it remains with you to consecrate yourselves, even on earth, to a mission such as in the popular belief only God's angels know?" With his high ideal of what a musician should be, he could not but be disgusted at times with the Bohemianism of the men who played with him, and with the loose moral life of many more eminent musicians. "Ah, these heathenish Germans!" he exclaims, as he sees some of the orchestra at a church service making fun of the communion service: "Double-bass was a big fellow, with a black mustache, to whom life was all a joke, which he expressed by a comical smile, and Viola was a young Hercules, so full of beer that he dreamed himself in heaven, and Oboe was a young sprig, just out from Munich, with a complexion of milk and roses, like a girl's, and miraculously bright spectacles on his pale blue eyes, and there they sat — Oboe and Viola and Double-bass — and ogled each other, and raised their brows, and snickered behind the columns, without a suspicion of interest either in the music or the service. Dash these fellows, they are utterly given over to heathenism, prejudice, and beer."*
— * `Letters', p. 88. —
The best expression of his ideal of what a great composer should be, is in a letter written to his wife just after he had read the life of Robert Schumann: —
New York, Sunday, October 18, 1874.
I have been in my room all day; and have just concluded a half-dozen delicious hours, during which I have been devouring, with a hungry ferocity of rapture which I know not how to express, "The Life of Robert Schumann", by his pupil, von Wasielewski. This pupil, I am sure, did not fully comprehend his great master. I think the key to Schumann's whole character, with all its labyrinthine and often disappointing peculiarities, is this: That he had no mode of self-expression, or, I should rather say, of self-expansion, besides the musical mode. This may seem a strange remark to make of him who was the founder and prolific editor of a great musical journal, and who perhaps exceeded any musician of his time in general culture. But I do not mean that he was confined to music for self-expression, though indeed, the sort of critical writing which Schumann did so much of is not at all like poetry in its tranquillizing effects upon the soul of the writer. What I do mean is that his sympathies were not BIG enough, he did not go through the awful struggle of genius, and lash and storm and beat about until his soul was grown large enough to embrace the whole of life and the All of things, that is, large enough to appreciate (if even without understanding) the magnificent designs of God, and tall enough to stand in the trough of the awful cross-waves of circumstance and look over their heights along the whole sea of God's manifold acts, and deep enough to admit the peace that passeth understanding. This is, indeed, the fault of all German culture, and the weakness of all German genius. A great artist should have the sensibility and expressive genius of Schumann, the calm grandeur of Lee, and the human breadth of Shakespeare, all in one.
Now in this particular, of being open, unprejudiced, and unenvious, Schumann soars far above his brother Germans; he valiantly defended our dear Chopin, and other young musicians who were struggling to make head against the abominable pettiness of German prejudice. But, withal, I cannot find that his life was great, as a whole; I cannot see him caring for his land, for the poor, for religion, for humanity; he was always a restless soul; and the ceaseless wear of incompleteness finally killed, as a maniac, him whom a broader Love might have kept alive as a glorious artist to this day.
The truth is, the world does not require enough at the hands of genius. Under the special plea of greater sensibilities, and of consequent greater temptations, it excuses its gifted ones, and even sometimes makes "a law of their weakness". But this is wrong: the sensibility of genius is just as much greater to high emotions as to low ones; and whilst it subjects to stronger temptations, it at the same time interposes — if it WILL — stronger considerations for resistance.
These are scarcely fair things to be saying APROPOS of Robert Schumann; for I do not think he was ever guilty of any excesses of genius — as they are called: I only mean them to apply to the UNREST of his life.
And yet, for all I have said, how his music does burn in my soul! It stretches me upon the very rack of delight; I know no musician that fills me so full of heavenly anguish, and if I had to give up all the writers of music save one, my one should be Robert Schumann. — Some of his experiences cover some of my own as aptly as one half of an oyster shell does the other half.*
— * `Letters', p. 103. —
During the winter of 1873-74, the first winter in Baltimore, Lanier had, as has been seen, given his entire time to music. The only poetry he had written had been inspired by love for his absent wife, — poems breathing of the deepest and tenderest affection. Scarcely less poetical were the letters written to her giving expression to his joy in the large new world into which he was entering, and at the same time to his sense of loneliness and pain at their separation. To her and his boys he went as soon as his engagement with the Peabody Orchestra was ended. In one of his letters he had spoken of himself as "an exile from his dear Land, which is always the land where my loved ones are." He found delight during this summer, as in the following ones, in the renewal of home ties, and in the enjoyment of the natural scenery of Macon and Brunswick, to whose beauty he never ceased to be sensitive.
It was in August, 1874, that he received a fresh impulse towards poetry, or, at least, towards the writing of more important poems than those he had heretofore written. While visiting at Sunnyside, Georgia, some sixty miles from Macon, he was struck at once with the beauty of cornfields and the pathos of deserted farms. Hence arose his first poem that attracted attention throughout the country. He took it to New York with him in the fall. Writing to his friend, Judge Logan E. Bleckley, now Chief Justice of Georgia, who during this summer spoke encouraging words to him about the faith he had in his literary future, he inclosed his recently finished poem with these words: —
195 Dean St., Brooklyn, N.Y.October 9, 1874.
My dear Sir, — I could never tell you how sincerely grateful I am to you, and shall always be, for a few words you spoke to me recently.
Such encouragement would have been pleasant at any time, but this happened to come just at a critical moment when, although I had succeeded in making up my mind finally and decisively as to my own career, I was yet faint from a desperate struggle with certain untoward circumstances which it would not become me to detail.
Did you ever lie for a whole day after being wounded, and then have water brought you? If so, you will know how your words came to me.
I inclose the manuscript of a poem in which I have endeavored to carry some very prosaic matters up to a loftier plane. I have been struck with alarm in seeing the number of old, deserted homesteads and gullied hills in the older counties of Georgia; and though they are dreadfully commonplace, I have thought they are surely mournful enough to be poetic. Please give me your judgment on my effort, WITHOUT RESERVE; for if you should say you do not like it, the only effect on me will be to make me write one that you do like.
Believe me always your friend,Sidney Lanier.
The answer to this letter, giving a detailed criticism of the poem, was very helpful to Lanier. Judge Bleckley is a man of much cultivation, and is widely known throughout Georgia as at once one of the leading lawyers of the State and a man who can in his leisure moments engage in literary work which, though not published, gives evidence of imagination and taste. Lanier was wise enough to accept most of his criticism: the revised form of the poem compared with the first form shows a great many changes, and is striking evidence of Lanier's power to improve his work. Judge Bleckley's characterization of "Corn" so accurately describes it that his words may be quoted here: "It presents four pictures; three of them landscapes and one a portrait. You paint the woods, a cornfield, and a worn-out hill. These are your landscapes. And your portrait is the likeness of an anxious, unthrifty cotton-planter, who always spends his crop before he has made it, borrows on heavy interest to carry himself over from year to year, wears out his land, meets at last with utter ruin, and migrates to the West. Your second landscape is turned into a vegetable person [the cornstalk is Lanier's symbol of the poet], and you give its poetry with many touches of marvel and mystery in vegetable life. Your third landscape takes for an instant the form and tragic state of King Lear; you thus make it seize on our sympathies as if it were a real person, and you then restore it to the inanimate, and contemplate its possible beneficence in the distant future."*
— * Quoted in Callaway's `Select Poems of Lanier', p. 61. —
The poem was published in "Lippincott's Magazine", February, 1875, and at once attracted the attention of some discriminating readers of magazines, notably Mr. Gibson Peacock, the editor of the Philadelphia "Evening Bulletin", who reviewed it in a most sympathetic manner, and became one of the poet's best friends during the remainder of his life. It is noteworthy that the scenery of the poem should be so distinctively and realistically Southern. There is in the first part all of Lanier's love of the Southern forest: the shimmering forms in the woods, the leaves, the subtlety of mighty tenderness in the embracing boughs, the long muscadines, the mosses, ferns, and flowers, are all delicately felt and described — with a suggestion of Keats. As he wanders from this forest to the zigzag-cornered fence, his fieldward-faring eyes take in the beauty of the cornfield, "the heaven of blue inwoven with a heaven of green." One tall corn captain becomes to his mind the symbol of the poet-soul sublime, who takes from all that he may give to all. The picture of the thriftless and negligent Southern farmer, "a gamester's cat'spaw and a banker's slave," shows Lanier's keen insight into Southern conditions, which he had, while living in Macon, studied with much care and which he now lifted into the realm of poetry. The red hills of Georgia, deserted and barren, are presented with true pathos. Nevertheless, like a genuine prophet, the poet looks forward to a better day: —
Yet shall the great God turn thy fate,And bring thee back into thy monarch stateAnd majesty immaculate.Lo, through hot waverings of the August morn,Thou givest from thy vasty sides forlornVisions of golden treasuries of corn —Ripe largesse lingering for some bolder heartThat manfully shall take thy part,And tend thee,And defend thee,With antique sinew and with modern art.
This vision of the South's restored agriculture was one that remained with Lanier to the end. He did not properly appreciate the development of manufacturing in the South, but he believed that the redemption of the country would come through the development of agriculture — not the restoration of the large plantations of the old regime, but the large number of small farms with diversified products. On a later visit to the South he exclaimed to his brother, "My countrymen, why plant ye not the vineyards of the Lord?" and later he wrote in his essay on the "New South" of the actual fulfillment of his prophecy in "Corn".
Encouraged by the success of "Corn", Lanier, while giving a large part of his time to music during the winter of 1874-75, looked more and more in the direction of poetry. He writes again to Judge Bleckley, November 15, 1874: "Your encouraging words give me at once strength and pleasure. I hope hard and work hard to do something worthy of them some day. My head and my heart are both so full of poems which the dreadful struggle for bread does not give me time to put on paper, that I am often driven to headache and heartache purely for want of an hour or two to hold a pen." He then proceeds to outline what is to be his first `magnum opus', "a long poem, founded on that strange uprising in the middle of the fourteenth century in France, called `The Jacquerie'. It was the first time that the big hungers of THE PEOPLE appear in our modern civilization; and it is full of significance. The peasants learned from the merchant potentates of Flanders that a man who could not be a lord by birth, might be one by wealth; and so Trade arose, and overthrew Chivalry. Trade has now had possession of the civilized world for four hundred years: it controls all things, it interprets the Bible, it guides our national and almost all our individual life with its maxims; and its oppressions upon the moral existence of man have come to be ten thousand times more grievous than the worst tyrannies of the Feudal System ever were. Thus in the reversals of time, it is NOW the GENTLEMAN who must rise and overthrow Trade. That chivalry which every man has, in some degree, in his heart; which does not depend upon birth, but which is a revelation from God of justice, of fair dealing, of scorn of mean advantages; which contemns the selling of stock which one KNOWS is going to fall, to a man who BELIEVES it is going to rise, as much as it would contemn any other form of rascality or of injustice or of meanness — it is this which must in these latter days organize its insurrections and burn up every one of the cunning moral castles from which Trade sends out its forays upon the conscience of modern society. — This is about the plan which is to run through my book: though I conceal it under the form of a pure novel."*
— * Quoted in part in Callaway's `Select Poems of Lanier', p. 65. —
Lanier never finished this poem, but he was soon hard at work on another which was based on the same idea, "The Symphony". Writing to his newly acquired friend, Mr. Peacock, March 24, 1875, he says: "About four days ago, a certain poem which I had vaguely ruminated for a week before took hold of me like a real James River ague, and I have been in a mortal shake with the same, day and night, ever since. I call it `The Symphony': I personify each instrument in the orchestra, and make them discuss various deep social questions of the times, in the progress of the music. It is now nearly finished; and I shall be rejoiced thereat, for it verily racks all the bones of my spirit." The poem was published in "Lippincott's Magazine", June, 1875; and besides confirming the good opinion of Mr. Peacock, won the praise of Bayard Taylor, George H. Calvert, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Charlotte Cushman, and was copied in full in Dwight's "Journal of Music".
As in his first poem Lanier had pointed out a defect in Southern life, so in his second long poem he struck at one of the evils of national life. In the South he felt that there was not enough of the spirit of industry; looking at the nation as a whole, however, he exclaims: —
"O Trade! O Trade! would thou wert dead!The time needs heart — 't is tired of head:We are all for love," the violins said.
The germ of this poem is found perhaps in a letter written from Wheeling, West Virginia, where he went with some of his fellow musicians to give a concert, April 16, 1874. It is a realistic picture of a city completely dominated by factory life. What he afterwards called "the hell-colored smoke of the factories" created within him a feeling of righteous indignation akin to that of Ruskin, although it must be said in justice to Lanier that, in combating the evils of industrial life, he never went to the extreme of eccentric passion displayed by the English writer. Nor, on the other hand, could he say with Walt Whitman: "I hail with joy the oceanic, variegated, intense practical energy, the demand for facts, even the business materialism, of the current age. . . . I perceive clearly that the extreme business energy and this almost maniacal appetite for wealth prevalent in the United States are parts of a melioration and progress, indispensably needed to prepare the very results I demand."
Lanier's poem is more applicable to the conditions that prevail to-day than to those of his own time. He shows himself a prophet, the truth of whose words is realized by many of the finer minds of the country. He lets the various instruments of the orchestra utter their protest against the evils of modern trade. The violin, speaking for the poor who stand wedged by the pressing of trade's hand and "weave in the mills and heave in the kilns," protests against the spirit of competition that says even when human life is involved, "Trade is only war grown miserly."
Alas, for the poor to have some partIn yon sweet living lands of art.
Then the flute — Lanier's own flute, summing up the voices of nature, "all fair forms, and sounds, and lights" — echoes the words of the Master, "All men are neighbors." Trade, the king of the modern days, will not allow the poor a glimpse of "the outside hills of liberty". The clarionet is the voice of a lady who speaks of the merchandise of love and yearns for the old days of chivalry before trade had withered up love's sinewy prime: —
If men loved larger, larger were our lives;And wooed they nobler, won they nobler wives.
To her the bold, straightforward horn answers, "like any knight in knighthood's morn." He would bring back the age of chivalry, when there would be "contempts of mean-got gain and hates of inward stain." He voices, too, the idea long ago expressed by Milton that men should be as pure as women: —
Shall woman scorch for a single sin,That her betrayer may revel in,And she be burnt, and he but grinWhen that the flames begin,Fair lady?
Shall ne'er prevail the woman's plea,`We maids would far, far whiter beIf that our eyes might sometimes seeMen maids in purity.'
Then the hautboy sings, "like any large-eyed child," calling for simplicity and naturalness in this modern life. And all join at the last in a triumphant chant of the power of love to heal all the ills of life: —
And ever Love hears the poor-folks' crying,And ever Love hears the women's sighing,And ever sweet knighthood's death-defying,And ever wise childhood's deep implying,But never a trader's glozing and lying.
And yet shall Love himself be heard,Though long deferred, though long deferred:O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred:Music is Love in search of a word.
By this time Lanier was hard at work for the publishers. Although he never lost his love for music — he could not — he began to see that his must be a literary career. In a letter of March 20, 1876, he says to Judge Bleckley that he has had a year of frightful overwork. "I have been working at such a rate as, if I could keep it up, would soon make me the proverb of fecundity that Lope de Vega now is." He refers to the India papers written for "Lippincott's". "The collection of the multitudinous particulars involved in them cost me such a world of labor among the libraries of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore as would take a long time to describe. . . . In addition to these I have written a number of papers not yet published, and a dozen small poems which have appeared here and there.
"Now, I don't work for bread; in truth, I suppose that any man who, after many days and nights of tribulation and bloody sweat, has finally emerged from all doubt into the quiet and yet joyful activity of one who KNOWS exactly what his Great Passion is and what his God desires him to do, will straightway lose all anxiety as to what he is working FOR, in the simple glory of doing that which lies immediately before him. As for me, life has resolved simply into a time during which I must get upon paper as many as possible of the poems with which my heart is stuffed like a schoolboy's pocket." He quotes from "that simple and powerful sonnet of dear old William Drummond of Hawthornden": —
Know what I list, this all cannot me move,But that, O me! — I both must write and love.
He had to give much of his time, however, to hack work. During the summer of 1875 he was engaged in writing a book on Florida for the Lippincotts. It is, as he wrote to Paul Hamilton Hayne, "a sort of spiritualized guide-book" to a section which was then drawing a large number of visitors. "The thing immediately began to ramify and expand, until I quickly found I was in for a long and very difficult job: so long, and so difficult, that, after working day and night for the last three months on the materials I had previously collected, I have just finished the book, and am now up to my ears in proof-sheets and wood-cuts which the publishers are rushing through in order to publish at the earliest possible moment, the book having several features designed to meet the wants of winter visitors to Florida." It is filled with facts in regard to climate and scenery, practical hints for travelers, and other things characteristic of a guide-book; but it is more than that. Like everything else that Lanier ever did, — even the dreariest hack work, — he threw himself into it with great zest. It has suggestions to consumptives born out of his own experience. There are allusions to music, literature, and philosophy. There are descriptions and historical anecdotes of the cities of South Carolina and Georgia; above all, there are descriptions of the Florida country which only a poet could write. Two passages are characteristic: —
"And now it is bed-time. Let me tell you how to sleep on an Ocklawaha steamer in May. With a small bribe persuade Jim, the steward, to take the mattress out of your berth and lay it slanting just along the railing that incloses the lower part of the deck in front and to the left of the pilot-house. Lie flat on your back down on the mattress, draw your blanket over you, put your cap on your head, on account of the night air, fold your arms, say some little prayer or other, and fall asleep with a star looking right down on your eye. When you wake in the morning you will feel as new as Adam."
"Presently we abandoned the broad highway of the St. Johns, and turned off to the right into the narrow lane of the Ocklawaha. This is the sweetest water-lane in the world, a lane which runs for more than one hundred and fifty miles of pure delight betwixt hedge-rows of oaks and cypresses and palms and magnolias and mosses and vines; a lane clean to travel, for there is never a speck of dust in it save the blue dust and gold dust which the wind blows out of the flags and lilies."
In the discussion of "The Symphony", emphasis was laid upon Lanier's national point of view. The opportunity soon came to him of giving expression to his love of the Union. At Bayard Taylor's suggestion he was appointed by the Centennial Commission to write the words for a cantata to be sung at the opening exercises of the exposition in Philadelphia. Taylor, in announcing the fact, on December 28, 1875, said: "I have just had a visit from Theodore Thomas and Mr. Buck, and we talked the whole matter over. Thomas remembers you well, and Mr. Buck says it will be especially agreeable to him to compose for the words of a Southern poet. I have taken the liberty of speaking for you, both to them and to General Hawley, and you must not fail me. . . .
"Now, my dear Lanier, I am sure you CAN do this worthily.It's a great occasion, — not especially for poetry as an art,but for Poetry to assert herself as a power."* To this letter Lanier replied:"If it were a cantata upon your goodness, . . . I am willing to wagerI could write a stirring one and a grateful withal.
— * `Letters', p. 136. —
"Of course I will accept — when 't is offered. I only write a hasty line now to say how deeply I am touched by the friendly forethought of your letter."*
— * `Letters', p. 137. —
He announces the fact to his wife in a jubilant letter of January 8, 1876: "Moreover, I have a charming piece of news which — although thou art not yet to communicate it to any one except Clifford — I cannot keep from thee. The opening ceremonies of the Centennial Exhibition will be very grand; and among other things there are to be sung by a full chorus (and played by the orchestra, under Thomas's direction) a hymn and a cantata. General Hawley, President of the Centennial Commission, has written inviting me to write the latter (I mean the POEM; Dudley Buck, of New York, is to write the music). Bayard Taylor is to write the hymn.* This is very pleasing to me; for I am chosen as representative of our dear South; and the matter puts my name by the side of very delightful and honorable ones, besides bringing me in contact with many people I would desire to know.
— * Whittier wrote this hymn and Bayard Taylor wrote the Ode for the Fourth of July celebration. —
"Mr. Buck has written me that he wants the poem by January 15, which as I have not yet had the least time for it, gives me just seven days to write it in. I would much rather have had seven months; but God is great. Remember, thou and Cliff, that this is not yet to be spoken of at all."*
— * Quoted in Baskervill's `Southern Writers', p. 200. —
With enthusiasm the poet entered upon the task assigned him. The progress of the Cantata from the time when it first presented itself to his mind to the time when he completed it, may be traced in the letters to Bayard Taylor and Gibson Peacock, which have already been published.* Writing to Mr. Dudley Buck, January 15, 1876, he said: —
— * See `Letters', passim. —
Dear Mr. Buck, — I send you herewith the complete text for the Cantata. I have tried to make it a genuine Song, at once full of fire and of large and artless simplicity befitting a young but already colossal land.
I have made out a working copy for you, with marginal notes which give an analysis of each movement (or rather MOTIVE, for I take it the whole will be a continuous progression; and I only use the word "movement" as indicating the entire contrast which I have secured between each two adjacent MOTIVES), and which will, I hope, facilitate your labor by presenting an outline of the tones characterizing each change of idea. One movement is placed on each page.
Mr. Thomas was kind enough to express himself very cordially as to the ideas of the piece; and I devoutly trust that they will meet your views. I found that the projection which I had made in my own mind embraced all the substantial features of the Scheme which had occurred to you, and therefore, although greatly differing in details, I have not hesitated to avail myself of your thoughtful warning against being in any way hampered. It will give me keen pleasure to know from you, as soon as you shall have digested the poem, that you like it.