UNIVERSITY C AT LOS MODERN POETS AND CHRISTIAN TEACHING SIDNEY LANIER BY HENRY NELSON L SNYDER NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & GRAHAM Copyright, 1906, by EATON & MAINS. s CONTENTS PAGE o Note ___-_--7 0? t^ I. Sir Galahad -------9 j II. In the Artist's Thought - - - - 28 CO III. The Song of the Poet His Mission and Service 47 IV. With Nature - - 64 V. The Poet and His Age - - - - - 74 VI. God in the World - - 83 VII. The Gospel of Love - io VIII. The Crystal Christ - 122 IX. The Message ------ 126 * 353175 NOTE THIS volume is not to be received as a biogra phy of Sidney Lanier. It is rather an attempt to interpret adequately and sympathetically the mes sage of the man and his works a message sin gularly rich in spiritual values. The quotations from the writings of Sidney Lanier are reprinted from Poems of Sidney Lan ier, Edited by His Wife (copyright 1884, 1891, by Mary D. Lanier), through the courtesy of the publishers, Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons. The author wishes to record here his indebt edness to Professor Mims's excellent Life of the poet for use of hitherto inaccessible letters and papers. SIR GALAHAD THIS chapter is to be no biography. It is meant to touch in outline the character of a singularly beautiful human soul. For in Sidney Lanier we have a knight-errant in the cause of beauty and truth and holiness. No mail-clad warrior out of the shining fields of old romance ever quested for fairer adventures than did this knight of our new days. And the revelation of his high and unbending nobility is to be sought not merely in his message in prose and verse; its steady and winsome radiance is equally revealed in the very character of the man as he opened himself in frank unreservedness to all with whom he came in contact on the common way of life. So his finest poetry and its deepest spiritual mes sage may not be read so much in rhythmic verse as in his brave and inspiringly victorious struggle against the untoward conditions of time and cir cumstance, in the stubborn, cheerful manliness of his combat with disease, and in an unwavering fidelity to high artistic and spiritual ideals. In terms of character and experience he has written perhaps his noblest poem. io SIDNEY LANIER Fittingly has he been called the Sir Galahad of American letters, and this suggests the refined purity of his nature. One who shared with him the horrors of prison life at Point Lookout, in a letter to the poet's eldest son, pays this tribute to him: "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/ }>1 In this whiteness of soul and candor of character is to be found the real source of the spiritual and religious mean ing of his message. With him there is no divorce between the man and his works; as one listens to the clear moral purity of his poetry, there is no need of a blinking apology for any soil of sin or wanderings in dark and forbidden ways on the part of the man. And the high spiritual quality of his song so truly and beautifully expresses his life that one may use his own words to describe the wedding of the two Song and Life which our Sir Galahad sought to compass. Interpreting the artist in music, he queries whether anyone had so lived and sung, that Life and Song Might each express the other's all, 1 From Mims's Life of Lanier. SIR GALAHAD n Careless if life or art were long Since both were one, to stand or fall: So that the wonder struck the crowd, Who shouted it about the land: His song was only living aloud, His work, a singing with his hand! Of the best Southern stock, from a moral stand point anyway, Sidney Lanier was born at Macon, Georgia, on the third of February, 1842. If there is anything in ancestry, he came naturally by both the religious and the artistic qualities of his nature. On his father's side his more remote ancestors had been noted as artists, particularly musicians, en joying the favor of at least four English sovereigns Elizabeth, James I, Charles I, and Charles II. The first Virginia Laniers belonged to a colony of French Huguenots a strain of blood that has touched Southern life with intellectual fineness and fortified it with moral strength. A branch of the family moved to North Carolina, and there we find them Methodists. The poet's grand father, Sterling Lanier, settled at Macon, Georgia, an active Methodist, educating his daughters at the old Wesleyan Female College, and his son Robert Sampson Lanier, the father of the poet, at old Randolph-Macon in Virginia. From col lege Robert Sampson Lanier came to take up the practice of law and to marry Mary Jane Anderson, the daughter of a successful Virginia planter apd 12 SIDNEY LANIER influential politician. The poet's mother was of Scotch-Irish blood and a Presbyterian of the straitest sect, training her children in the stern, stubborn faith of Calvinism. A poet with such currents of blood flowing in his veins must of necessity, it seems, be anchored so strongly to the verities of the moral life that neither the "twist and cross" of things, nor the fiercest storms of circumstance could ever wrench his ship of faith quite from its moorings. Hugue not, Methodist, Scotch-Irish, Presbyterian here are forces dominant enough to fortify and steady a man's religious faith, to set his thinking under the rule and guidance of moral ideas, and, if he be an artist, as Lanier was, to inform his work with a content of spiritual truth and the aspiration to know and interpret the divine meaning in things. And all this, as a matter of fact, can be said of the life and poetry of Lanier. By inheritance, home surroundings, and train ing he might, therefore, be properly called a Puritan as to the essential elements of character and temperament which these things necessarily brought to him. While Puritanism, in a way unbending and compelling, lay at the roots of his nature, yet it was modified by the fact that he was a Southerner by inheritance, by the sur roundings that shaped and colored his life, and SIR GALAHAD 13 by the further fact that he was an artist by tem perament. These influences tended to soften the hardness of his Puritanism, touching with tender ness and beauty its sterner features, without in the least, however, enfeebling its real moral fiber or dulling its sense of spiritual values. His immediate family and community sur roundings in Macon were those of culture, re finement, the social charm, and the gracious atmosphere of hospitality which characterized the old South. Under such influences, with two brothers and a sister who, he says, was a "Vestal Sister, who had, more perfectly than all the men and women of the earth, nay, more perfectly than any star or any dream, the simple majesty and the serene purity of the Winged Folk up Yonder," he passed a happy and wholesome boyhood, and, as a clever lad, took his schooling in books from two or three different teachers. He was already an ardent musician, particularly upon "a simple one-keyed flute," and was immersing himself in the joys of romantic stories those of Sir Walter Scott, Froissart, and Gil Bias, in particular. At sixteen he joined the sophomore class of Oglethorpe University at Milledgeville a small college owned and controlled by the Presbyterian Church. Three or four significant influences here entered to color the temperament and shape the 14 SIDNEY LANIER character of the future poet. The first was the pervasive atmosphere of conservative piety, a bit harsh, perhaps, yet strong in the imperatives of faith and blown through by the stern "north wind of duty" an atmosphere which no impressionable young man could breathe for three years and afterward depart far from its fundamental reli gious ideals. Literature, the world's best, came to vitalize the budding genius of the young poet, and he was able also to indulge his passion for music. Sympathetic friends entered deeply into his life, and one teacher in particular, Dr. Wood- row, brought to him the inspiration of his per sonality, awoke the spirit of scholarship that was always so largely a part of Lanier's nature, and suggested wide fields of study at some university of the Old World. In July, 1860, he graduated, the first in his class, and as a reward for the excellence of his scholarship he was appointed tutor in his Alma Mater. He took up his work gladly, dreaming of success in the world of scholarship and of music. Already he was feeling his way, so to speak, after a career. And even in this the es sentially religious quality of his temperament is revealed. In a notebook of his early student days he is trying "to ascertain God's will" with refer ence to himself. In music, he says, "I have the SIR GALAHAD 15 greatest talent; indeed, not boasting, for God gave it me, I have an extraordinary musical talent, and I feel it within me plainly that I could rise as high as any composer." This simply means that his genius was calling to him, and he was reverently receiving it as the gift of God. But there was another call. It was the clamorous voice of love of state and section shouting to war, and the young poet, with mind charged with glorious dreams of music and schol arship and a heart ready for a kind of divine con secration to both, must hearken and obey. The artist and the scholar are transformed into the soldier. That knightliness of character which was about to devote itself to the shining way of truth and art now poured itself, with all the ardor of his soul, into the grim duties of war. In all its varying experiences it is good to think that our poet comported himself as a knight without fear and without reproach. As private soldier, as scout, as signal officer, as blockade runner, as a prisoner amid the horrors of Point Lookout, in battle and by camp fire, he was still Sir Galahad in conduct and character, hating war yet loving greatly to perform the stern duties it brought him, and loyal through it all to music and poetry. The school of war is the school that tries men's souls; in its fiery furnace the real stuff of their manhood i6 SIDNEY LANIER is tested. Lanier came out of it with the gold of his nature untarnished, and no doubt in the great deeps of his nature he was the richer for its trying experiences. Perhaps the next eight years of Lanier's life, from 1865 to 1873, were even more trying upon him, as they were upon every thoughtful and patriotic Southern man, than the four years of bat tle. Dismissed from prison broken in health, the seeds of consumption already sown, with a single gold coin in his pocket and his beloved flute under his coat, he takes the long, weary journey home. The war is over, but a bitterer struggle is to come. The whole Southern social system has collapsed; trade is paralyzed; the awful dread of negro domi nation grins like a hideous nightmare in the thought of the South; the horrors of reconstruc tion are impending; wreck and ruin and poverty stare the returned soldier cruelly in the face; poignant, unavailing sorrow for a government and a cause lost forever hangs its leaden weight upon every heart; hands unused to the hard toil of the farm, the shop, and the store must, without capital, be set to the painful task of redeeming, as best they could, a destroyed industrial system; the political thinking and acting of the entire section must be led into strangely unfamiliar and devious ways; and, worse perhaps than all, tears SIR GALAHAD 17 for the dead that lie on distant battlefields are yet wet upon the cheeks of woe. How he will meet these conditions will fur nish a test of the quality of Lanier's soul, the fiber of his manhood, and the strength of his faith. He might have sat down in utter despair, nursing a wasted body, and, racked by disease, might have driveled out the morbid poetry of the sick-room, of blasted hopes, and of a languid faith. But this was not the way of our Sir Galahad. In these sad and all but disheartening conditions he saw his duty with unblurred clearness and met it in the spirit of that rare quality of manliness which was his always. With him there was no repining over defeat, no whining in the face of the inevitable, no bitter cherishing of corroding hate. Gladly and unreservedly, with a kind of prophetic wisdom, he received with open arms the new and stronger country rising out of the twilight gloom of war. He had said his word on the horrors of war in his only novel, Tiger Lilies, begun during the struggle and published in 1867. Now he was fully ready, and indeed eager, for every step look ing toward reconciliation. His spirit cannot be better expressed than by quoting from a letter he wrote to a Northern friend of the older days before the disrupting strife. It was written in 1866, hardly a year after the war: "These i8 SIDNEY LANIER 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." 1 But this mood was not momentary, called forth merely by the proffered hand-clasp of friendship. Four years later, in making the address over the Confederate dead in his native city, he closes, in part, with these words : "To-day we are here for love, and not for hate. To-day we are here for harmony, and not for dis cord. 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." 2 In this spirit Lanier faced the new conditions and took up the common duties of life. Broken in health, we first find him teaching thirty classes a day on a plantation near Macon. Then a winter near Mobile, Alabama, in the effort to restore his shattered health, followed by the commonplace 1 From Mims's Life a Ibid. SIR GALAHAD 19 work of a clerk in a hotel at Montgomery. In the spring of 1867 he was in New York finding a publisher for Tiger Lilies, and the next year back to the drudgery of the schoolroom in a small Ala bama town, Prattville. But even this experience and the wasting of his physical forces by his first hemorrhages could not quite daunt him nor keep him from studying and writing. He enters with great enthusiasm into German and a mastery of Lucretius and the writing of essays more or less speculative upon literature and philosophy. In the winter of 1867 he had taken the important step of marriage. In Miss Mary Day he found the chief joy of his life, and, as one has said, it was an "idyllic marriage, which the poet thought a rich compensation for all the other perfect gifts which Providence denied him." To him she is the radiant woman of "My Springs": Dear eyes, dear eyes and rare complete . Being heavenly sweet and earthly sweet, I marvel that God made you mine, For when He frowns, 'tis then ye shine! With wife and child the poet must now address himself to the matter of immediate support. So he takes up the study of law, and in 1870 enters into the practice of it with his father. It is said that he made a careful, intelligent lawyer, perform ing with accuracy and dispatch even its humdrum 20 SIDNEY LANIER duties. Yet all the while the poetic hunger for expression was beating at his heart, and the forces of his genius were persistently calling to him. A word of cheer and encouragement from the poet Paul Hamilton Hayne brings these words from him: "I have not put pen to paper in a literary way for 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." Still the word of his fellow poet was like wine to his thirsty soul. "It gives me great en couragement," he writes, "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." But yet another thing than the sacred duty of providing bread for the beloved of his heart now came to make the possibility of the literary life seem even more remote. He must take up in dead earnest the fight against the dragon of disease. And how valiantly he bore himself through it all belongs to the inspiring romance of human virtue, in the noblest sense of the word. Pain and suffering, baffling weakness, and the con stant threat of untimely death were never ren- SIR GALAHAD 21 dered more beautiful than they were by Lanier's brave and manly cheerfulness, his unfailing trust in his own genius, and his large and buoyant hopefulness. When one tastes the strengthening spiritual tonic of his poetry, one should not forget in what storm and stress of circumstance and experience it was brewed. In the next years of his life, from one standpoint, he was but a wan derer searching for health and the surcease from suffering which never came to the mountains of Tennessee, the springs of Virginia, to Texas, to Pennsylvania, to New York, to Florida, and finally to die in the sweet airs that hover about the moun tains of western North Carolina. But his travels had their compensations; they widened his vision and brought him sympathetic friends, like, for example, Mr. Peacock, of Phila delphia, and Bayard Taylor. Moreover, he came to himself, heard the irresistible voice of genius persuading him to art, and, like Milton of old, consecrated himself to it for weal or woe. His resolve to devote himself to music and poetry came to him in the congenial musical society of San Antonio, Texas, in April, 1873. The com plete surrender, however, was made a few months later in Baltimore. Here he had found not only the inspiring fellowship of artists and an intellec tual atmosphere, but also a means of assured sup- 22 SIDNEY LANIER port as first flutist in the Peabody Orchestra. He must follow his "gleam" now, and the letter which he wrote to his father on November 29, 1873, is a memorable document in the history of American literature. His father naturally had taken the more practical view of his future, and was urging the expediency of his return to Macon and to the law. But the poet, with an abandon of cour age, chose the better part, we must think. His letter concludes: "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 de pressing circumstances, and of a thousand more which I could enumerate, these two figures of music and 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 bitter ness ?" It is to be doubted whether Milton him self accepted his mission with a deeper fervor of consecration. At any rate, when we realize SIR GALAHAD 23 how complete Lanier's consecration was, we un derstand the better the moral earnestness of his poetry and the spiritual quality of his interpre tation of life. But the casting of Sidney Lanier's lot in the city of Baltimore meant even more than the asso ciation with congenial and sympathetic friends, more than the gaining of an assured way of sup port for wife and children, whereby he was enabled also to give himself to the service of the twin arts of music and poetry. It meant to him opportu nity for study and investigation, and furnished a keen, stimulating intellectual atmosphere. Sid ney Lanier always had a quick sense for the facts of knowledge, and he was ever a valiant seeker after truth. The more one studies the make-up of his genius, the more one feels that he might have made a great scholar just as he was a great poet and musician a scholar in the sense of fidel ity to even the minutest details of any field he might be investigating as well as to the meaning of its larger truth. In the nourishment and direction of this qual ity of his nature, Lanier came to Baltimore at a peculiarly auspicious time. The Johns Hopkins University was soon to be inaugurated, the first real American university. Its president, Dr. Gil- man, was wise enough to overcome the temptation 24 SIDNEY LANIER of magnificent buildings and invest his money in magnificent men. So he brought together in his first faculty a remarkable group of productive scholars to furnish the tone and ideals to the new university, and thereby to make of it one of the most significant forces in the history of American education. Lanier opened himself to its influ ences with a zestful eagerness, with the result that he all but made up for what he considered the more or less barren years of his life. He drank deep draughts from the wells of knowledge, thus enriching his thought and widening his outlook. This experience helped to put that stamp of sober though tfulness and serious reflection upon most of his poetry, the final impression of which is that he was trying to chant the song of eternal truth in relation to God, to man, and to nature. One need not be told that these eight Baltimore years were the happiest and most fruitful years of the poet's life happiest in surroundings, in the stimulating sympathy and love of friends, in a growing recognition of the value of his poetry on the part of an elect, if not a wide, circle of readers, and most fruitful in the quality and quantity of his work. He filled joyfully these years full of productive effort effort congenial to all sides of his nature to his passion for music, his bent toward pure scholarship, and the call of his SIR GALAHAD 25 genius to poetic expression. In spite of the pain and weakness of the disease that had dogged the days of his life for nearly twenty years, he was now, for the first time, really living. Some of his best poetry found its way into the leading magazines "Corn/* "The Symphony," "Psalm of the West." In 1876, through Bayard Taylor's influence, he was asked to write the Centennial Cantata for the Philadelphia Exposition, and in 1877 published a collected volume of poems. He was also engaged in delivering courses of lectures on English literature, which were afterward col lected in two large volumes under the title of Shakspere and His Forerunners, representing a prodigious amount of labor, and revealing, when all things are considered, a remarkable aptness for scholarly pursuits. In 1879 he was appointed lecturer on English literature in Johns Hopkins University and the fruits of his lectures were brought together in two important volumes The Science of English Verse and The English Novel. In the meantime he had prepared Florida, The Boy's King Arthur, The Boy's Mabinogion, The Boy's Percy, and The Boy's Froissart. The range, variety, and amount of all this work reveal the fiber of energetic manhood that lay in the depths of Lanier's nature. He was no dilettant musician, no mere dreamer of poetic dreams, 26 SIDNEY LANIER but a worker who gave himself without stint to a man's joy in achievement. As rich as any lesson from the message of his poetry is this message of unremitting, uncomplaining toil in the face of all but insuperable difficulties. And this is another element in the fine knightliness of his character. In the winter of 1880 he was delivering the last of his series of lectures on "The Science of English Verse." He had to make the journey from his home to the university all muffled up and in a closed carriage, and was so weak that he had to sit during the delivery of his lectures. It is said that "those who heard him listened with a sort of fascinated terror, as in doubt whether the hoarded breath would suffice to the end of the hour." Grim Death is close upon him, yet his dauntless soul fights on. Four months later he is in New York arranging for the publication of his Boy's King Arthur. Then he goes to the mountains of western North Carolina to make his last fight. How the end came is best spoken by Mrs. Lanier herself: "We are left alone with one another. On the last night of the summer comes a change. His love and immortal will hold off the destroyer of our summer yet one more week, until the forenoon of September 7, and then falls the frost, and that unfaltering will renders SIR GALAHAD 27 its supreme submission to the adored will of God." We began by calling Sidney Lanier the Sir Galahad of American letters. This he is by the purity of heart that brought him to see God, by the unsullied whiteness of his- soul, by a character of singular strength and Christly tenderness, by a life of suffering bravely borne, led by loftiest ideals, devoted to the highest endeavors, beauti fully faithful to every trust, and finally conquering against dire and unrelenting odds. It may be said of him that he walked his way of life as one conscious of spiritual presences round him, and sang his songs as one inspired by them. He saw the Sangreal shining in the murk and gloom of things, and this vision gave him strength and leading. II IN THE ARTIST'S THOUGHT ONE may enter the workshop of the sculptor and watch with entranced interest the marvelous skill of hand and eye by which perfect form is carved from the rude, shapeless mass of marble; one may sit by the painter and find joy in the way he mixes color and applies it to canvas, so that the character-speaking human face or the beau ties of a landscape are called forth under the magic touch of his art; or one may curiously investigate the technique of the poet and find the laws and methods whereby he has shaped the potent har monies of vowels and consonants and stress into the music of rhythmic speech; and all this will be profitable and help to an understanding of the principles of the three great arts. But to stop with an ever so complete and satisfying compre hension of their mere technique is to be yet far from the heart of their mystery. Back of all tech nique, however perfect, lies the thought of the art ist, and into this hidden place we must go if we would fathom the real source of his power. What is the nature of his consecration to his mission, what are his ideals, his aim, his conception of the use of 28 IN THE ARTIST'S THOUGHT 29 his art, his views of life and of truth, his thought of God and his comprehension of spiritual values, these are the things which finally determine the great and permanent qualities of his work, touching the products of his hand and brain with dignity of conception and depth of meaning; or, in default of true and straight thinking on these things, leave statue or picture or poem but a cold, lifeless piece of deft craftsmanship. If it be not profoundly charged with moral truth it is a work of mere preciosity, and lacks the informing spirit that makes it a blessed thing to the heart of humanity through all the ages. For the vital izing power of moral truth is never quite absent from the world's really great art. It is always worth while, then, to get, if possible, within the deepest recesses of the artist's thought with reference to himself and his work. It is no merely morbid curiosity that has caused all the world to search every nook and cranny of con temporary fact and comment and tradition in the hope of finding something more about Shakes peare his life, his character, his thought. Men would feel themselves greatly enriched if they could hear this master interpreter of human life speak in his own voice concerning himself, his art, and his views of men and things. Out of the multitude of voices that speak in his plays the 30 SIDNEY LANIER criticism of each generation has teased itself to construct his philosophy of life, and discover the spirit and aims in which he worked. All this effort is, in its way, a recognition of the import ance of getting within the thought of the artist. Now, in the case of Sidney Lanier this is com paratively easy. In talks with friends, in familiar letters, and in published essays he has frankly opened the door of his thought with reference to himself as an artist and the mission and spirit of art, particularly of music and poetry. From a schoolboy to the very end of his life he con stantly searched himself concerning the mean ing of these two kindred arts, and of his own relation to them. He was no "wild poet work ing without conscience and without aim." But, though an artist with something of the seer's vision, he was yet a thinker sounding the depths of thought and testing principles in the light of spiritual truth. The record of his thinking has been preserved in a volume of Letters, two vol umes of essays Music and Poetry, and Retro spects and Prospects in The Science of English Verse, The English Novel, and two volumes en titled Shakspere and His Forerunners. To follow Lanier's thought through these vol umes might seem somewhat beside the purpose of this study, which has to do, more narrowly, with IN THE ARTIST'S THOUGHT 31 the message of his poetry. Yet, as we found in the previous chapter that his manful way of life had the virtue of an inspiring message, so also the same virtue will shine out of the poet's prose interpretation of art and life, and serve as one other proper introduction to the understanding of the profoundly religious quality of his poetry. Indeed, three things cannot be widely separated his life, his prose, his poetry. The truth of the matter is, his verse is but a rhythmic expression of the ideas found in his prose. Besides, the pedestrian march of the latter now and again soars with the wings of purest poetry. Some one has said that a mere drop of prose in a verse is sufficient to evaporate all the poetic beauty in it; but the drop of poetry in the prose adds, rather than detracts, from its beauty. At any rate, Lanier's prose is the prose of a poet, and the thought and language are both so frequently in the mood and even the manner of his poetry that his prose message must also be included in any treatment of that of his poetry. Now, one need hardly be told that Lanier took his art seriously, nay, even religiously. Whatever his attainment in it, what he thought of it and of his relation to it, is of itself a very noble matter to consider. Indeed, Lanier deserves to be reckoned among those choice spirits who have followed the 32 SIDNEY LANIER beauty of art for its own sake. And so sun-clear is he in the purity of his motive and aim, so high is his conception of the mark toward which he set all his endeavors, so devout and reverent in his prevailing mood, that one may think not so much of what he did as of what he tried to do. In truth, so obvious does this seem that it is a kind of wrong to set against him the reproach of im perfect achievement his heart held so steadily toward the vision of the perfect and his desires owned no other goal. How could it be otherwise in an artist who speaks thus (letter to Judge Bleckley, March 20, 1876): "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 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 /or, in the simple glory of doing what lies immediately before him." 1 It is clear, moreover, that an artist so possessed will at least attempt to rise above the mere tech nique of his art in the brave effort toward some thing great in thought and feeling. He will see his art and its meaning in its larger aspects. In i From Mims's Life. IN THE ARTIST'S THOUGHT 33 a criticism of contemporary poetry (letter to Bayard Taylor, November 24, 1876) Lanier inter prets, by inference, his own purposes: "In looking around at the publications of the younger Ameri can poets I am struck with the circumstance that none of them even attempt anything great. The morbid fear of doing something wrong or unpol ished appears to have influenced their choice of subjects. Hence the endless multiplication of those little feeble magazine lyrics which we all know: consisting of one minute idea, each, which is put in the last line of the fourth verse, the other three verses and three lines being mere sawdust and surplusage." With him, then, art, poetry, is "holy and arduous ground," and "all worthy poets belong substantially to the school of David," where the mere versifier of empty nothings, how ever exquisitely clothed in musically consorted words, has no place. Though, as we well know, he strove with painful labor after technical per fection, no mere prettiness nor finished cleverness could satisfy him, if the deeper currents of thought and feeling were lacking. Lanier's art, then, could be no cold, narrow scheme of technical expertness, and it could not be this because he received his genius as the very gift of God and because he consecrated it to art as if he were obeying a divine call. On one occa- 34 SIDNEY LANIER sion, when he realizes his mastery over the flute and feels himself strengthened and steadied by the joy and comfort it brings, his heart can only utter a prayer, "For these things I humbly thank God." (Letter to his wife, January 30, 1873.) He was, therefore, devoutly religious in the thought of his own genius, and what it brought to him. This essentially spiritual element in Lanier's temperament shows itself again in his conception of the mission and service of both poetry and music. Speaking of the latter in a letter to his wife (March 12, 1875), he says: "It (music) is a gospel whereof the people are in great need. As Christ gathered up the ten commandments and redistilled them into the clear liquid of the won drous eleventh Love God utterly, and thy neigh bor as thyself so I think the time will come when music rightly developed to its now-little-foreseen grandeur, will be found to be a latter revelation of all Gospels in one/' He was constantly refer ring to this supreme use of music in the spiritual life of man, how it was to become the fullest expression of his deepest religious aspiration, how "that finally we are at the very threshold of those sweet appliances of that awful and mysterious power in music to take up our yearnings toward the infinite at a point where words and all articu late utterances fail, and bear them onward often IN THE ARTIST'S THOUGHT 35 to something like a satisfactory nearness to the divine object." (The English Novel, p. 149.) All this is an expression of the profoundly spiritual quality of Lanier's temperament and of his unfailing religious aspiration toward God. As he thought on life and its issues he could be de pended upon to put the stress of his thinking upon soul-values. In an essay written at twenty- five (Retrospects and Prospects, p. 6) he affirms that the progress of humanity is to be measured by how far the "sense-kingdom" yields to the "soul-kingdom"; "as time flows on, the sense- kingdom continually increases, and this not by the destruction of the sense's subjects, but by a system of promotions in which sensuous things, constantly etherealizing, constantly acquire the dignity of spiritual things, and so diminish their own number and increase the other. . . . Over this route nature and art, like a bird's shadow and a bird, have flown up to to-day. By this course politics and religion, which are respectively the body and soul of life, have acquired their present features." This same quality of temperament spiritualizes nature, and makes his communion with her a genuine religious experience. To him nature is no dead thing, no mere specimen for scientific peering and botanizing. Nature is but one other 36 SIDNEY LANIER revelation of God, not simply to the physical sight of man, but to his deepest soul. Who loves her really and can go to her in the proper mood is, according to Lanier, "ever in sight of the morning and within the hand-reach of God/' (Shakspere and His Forerunners, vol. i, p. 73.) God is in all and through all; the great outer world is not only the handiwork of his power and the mighty form of his thought in his shaping of material things; it may even be the expression of the Creator's mood, according to the conception of our spiritually minded poet: "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." 1 (Letter to Mrs. Lanier, July 12, 1872.) So deeply and truly did he realize nature as God's own world that he felt he had but to flee to her in order to find Him when men seemed to 'From Mims's Life. IN THE ARTIST'S THOUGHT 37 be leaving him out of their lives and out of the creeds which professed to interpret him to their thought. In their fierce discussions about God they make it impossible for God to be present with them. "I fled," he says, "in tears from the men's ungodly quarrel about God. I fled in tears to the woods, and laid me down on the earth. Then somewhat like the beating of many hearts came up to me out of the ground, and I looked and my cheek lay close to a violet. Then my heart took courage, and I said: 'I know that thou art the word of my God, dear Violet; And oh, the ladder is not long that to my heaven leads. Measure what space a violet stands above the ground: 'Tis no further climbing that my soul and angels have to do than that.'" If his temperament received nature's message in this mystical mood, it also resented as an af front any artistic interpretation of life which was not clearly and nobly ethical in manner and mat ter. He was tremulously sensitive to the finest, the purest things in art, and equally repellent toward their opposites. Any touch of fleshliness all but sickened him. For example, he could find nothing good in certain "classical novels," those of Sterne and Richardson et id omne genus. "I protest," he says, "that I can read none of these books without feeling as if my soul had been in the rain draggled, muddy, miserable." (The English 353175 38 SIDNEY LANIER Novel, p. 1 80.) Moreover, so lofty is his ethical standard that he holds that the noblest art is the product only of the noblest living, and he has no patience whatsoever with the modern preachment of the unmoral quality of art. "Art for art's sake'* is a doctrine abhorrent to his soul. "One hears all about the world nowadays," he writes (Music and Poetry, p. 21), "that art is wholly un-moral, that art is for art's sake, that art has nothing to do with good or bad behavior. These are the cries of clever men whose cleverness can imitate genius so aptly as to persuade many that they have genius, and whose smartness can preach so incisively about art that many believe them to be artists. But such catchwords will never de ceive the genius, the true artist. The true artist will never remain a bad man; he will always wonder at a wicked artist. The simplicity of this wonder renders it wholly impregnable. The argu ment of it is merely this: the artist loves beauty supremely; because the good is beautiful, he will clamber continuously toward it, through all pos sible sloughs, over all possible obstacles, in spite of all possible falls." To Lanier, therefore, holiness was the most beautiful thing in all the world, and beauty was holiness. He felt that the really great art was shot through and through with the highest moral IN THE ARTIST'S THOUGHT 39 meaning. To show how firm and sincere was his conviction of this, it is worth while to quote once again a part of those nobly eloquent words to the students of the Johns Hopkins University: "So far from dreading that your moral purpose will interfere with your beautiful creation, go forward in the clear conviction that unless you are suffused soul and body, one might say with that moral purpose which finds its largest expression in love; that is, the love of all things in their proper relation; unless you are suffused with this love, do not dare to meddle with beauty; unless you are suffused with truth, do not dare to meddle with goodness; in a word, unless you are suffused with truth, wisdom, good ness, and love, abandon the hope that the ages will accept you as an artist." His first book, Tiger Lilies (1867), repeats in a different way the same attitude toward the moral quality of liter ature and art. He is quite impatient with "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 upon these last for more sunshine and less night in their art, more virtuous women 40 SIDNEY LANIER and fewer Lydian guilts, more household sweet ness and less Bohemian despair, clearer chords and fewer suspensions, broader, quieter skies and shorter grotesque storms; since there are those, even here at the South, who still love beautiful things with a sincere passion." So it is, as we get deepest into the thought of Lanier with reference to art and nature, we find the main-traveled roads of his thinking leading toward God and goodness. But God is also in the personal life of the poet as well as in his thought of nature and art and the larger course of human history. And this faith is one source of Lanier's steadily shining optimism. On one occasion, when things were going hard with him and the future was dark, we hear him saying: "However, the God of the humble poet is very great, and I have had so many signal instances of his upholding grace that I do not now ever quite despair of anything." 1 (Letter to his wife, March 12, 1875.) In the larger matter of general human life, moreover, he felt the presence of God and recognized his providence. We get this nobly and notably expressed in a criticism of the musi cian Schumann. "What I do mean," he writes (letter to his wife, October 18, 1874), "is that his sympathies were not big enough, he did not go 1 From Mims's Life. IN THE ARTIST'S THOUGHT 41 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 appre ciate (if even without understanding) the mag nificent designs of God, and tall enough to stand in the trough of the awful cross-waves of circum stance and look over their heights along the whole sea of God's manifold acts, and deep enough to ad mit the peace that passeth understanding." Truly is Lanier, in his own words, the catholic man who hath mightily won God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain, And sight out of blindness and purity out of stain. But Sir Galahad kept also before him the vision of the Sangreal as the symbol of love. It was the master-light of all his seeing, the master-force of all his being. It typed for him the very love of Love, which is Christ. With the power of this love he solved the tangled riddles of life, eased its pain, found his own most abiding comfort, and made his final test of the glory and preciousness of art and literature. Holding his own child in his strong arms, he pores upon his face. "The intense repose," he writes (letter to Paul Hamilton Hayne, March 15, 1869), "pene trated somehow with a thrilling mystery of poten tial activity, which dwells in his large open eyes, 42 SIDNEY LANIER teaches me new things. I say to myself, Where are the strong arms in which I, too, might lay me, and repose, and be full of the fire of life ? And always through the twilight comes answer from the other world: Master, Master, Master; there is one, one Christ: in His Arms we rest!" And from His outflowing love has gone the potency that binds all the universe together in the beauti ful fellowship of neighborliness. "One has ap peared," he says again (Music and Poetry, p. 103)* "who continually cried love, love, love love God, love neighbors, and these 'neighbors' have come to be not only men-neighbors, but tree-neighbors, river-neighbors, star-neighbors." In art as in life this power of love is the saving force, the one really constructive, creative force. "The great artist can never work in haste, never in malice, never in even the subacid mood of Thackeray: in love, in love only, can great work, the work that not only pulls down but builds, be done: it is love, and love only, that is truly constructive in art." (The English Novel, p. 203.) This lamp he kept steadily burning in heart and thought, and he permitted nothing to dim it, neither per sonal suffering nor disappointment, nor the time's tangled confusions nor its dark uncertainties. He was ever led by this light of love, and it held his faith secure. IN THE ARTIST'S THOUGHT 43 However, it must not be thought that Lanier was a kind of pietistic dreamer, a mystic with drawn into some hermit-cave, detached and apart from the whirl and din of common life and everyday interests and activities. He was far from being one who would divorce the life of the spirit from that of the senses. It is to be insisted that his ethical idealism and spiritual aspiration were never, in his thinking, quite removed from the practical problems and daily concerns of the immediate world in which he lived. These things appealed to him greatly, and his thought moved in their deepest and most vital currents. He knew modern life through the insight of the poet and the knowledge of the student and thinker. And one is far from understanding the real significance of this ever-aspiring religious spirituality of his, if one considers him as a mere mystic dreaming dreams unbidden. His message out of the soul to the soul in his prose, as in his poetry, has the added virtue of being his way, from a genuine knowledge, accurate and broad, of affirming the time's greatest need. Indeed, he belongs to the race of preachers, sent to proclaim a gospel of faith, of holiness, of love. To be sure, he takes no specific text, and develops no formal sermon. Nevertheless, in the wilderness of crass materi alism, of heartless trade, or a godless philosophy, 44 SIDNEY LANIER he is as one calling to repentance. He calls in his own way, it is true, the way of the artist and the poet. Yet the call is from one who tried to see life steadily and to see it whole, who was in it and of it. And yet withal he was bravely and cheerfully optimistic. He quested for truth and wisdom and goodness and love and God, and he thought he found them. They may have been but the inner beauty of his own soul, which he was projecting over the world. Yet be believed in them, and his belief, so clearly and resonantly expressed, has the virtue of touching into active life the dormant and languid nobilities of other natures. So the word out of Lanier's thought, as that out of his life and character, is a message from the spirit to the spirit. He is of the rare and radiant company of those whose mission is to nourish and forward the spiritual life of humanity. Beautifully and nobly he lived; bravely and keenly he searched for the truth of things; the power of a great consecration rested upon him; "with toil of heart and knees and hands" he struggled upward "through the long gorge to the far light," and prevailed, rinding the topmost crags of Duty Scaled Are close upon the shining table-lands To which our God himself is moon and sun. IN THE ARTIST'S THOUGHT 45 Beauty, truth, wisdom, goodness, love, God these, we repeat, were the abiding presences of his thought and soul, the ideals that strengthened and cheered him in many a gray and haggard day of wasting weakness, that lighted with a great light the gloom of untoward and all but baffling circumstances, that led him straight and sure through disappointment, bitter trial, and a long lack of recognition. Granted, if one will, that the poetry is imperfect, that the singer fails to catch the immortal note, that what the poet would do is far short of what the poet has done, and that his ideals of both truth and experience are yet a long, long way off from his actual utterance of them still his unshaken faith in them, his unbending fidelity to whatsoever things are lovely and of good report, the undrooping wing of his aspiration, and the white and chivalrous quality of his manhood under all experiences, furnish a story exceedingly rich in the poetry of human life, and constitute one of the precious possessions of American letters. Once more we say, his actual achievement in verse was not all of him; the measure of the value of his message is not to be found wholly in the songs he sang. He was not "that low man" who seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it, 46 SIDNEY LANIER but the "high man" who, with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it. He belongs with those who nobly lived and loftily aspired: Here here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, Lightnings are loosened, Stars come out and go! Let joy break with the storm, Peace let the dew send! Lofty designs must close in like effects: Loftily lying, Leave him still loftier than the world suspects, Living and dying. 1 J This quotation from Browning has also been used, in part, by Dr. Mims in his Life of Lanier. It is so apt that one cannot resist using it again. Ill THE SONG OF THE POET HIS MISSION AND SERVICE To a poet, genuinely called, his art in itself is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Aside, indeed, from the imperious compulsion of self-expression and the beauty of the truth which he means to utter through art, it gleams before him as a radiant ideal, a sort of divinity to which he bows himself in devoted and reverent loyalty and undivided love. Any man who has given himself whole-heartedly to any pursuit or pro fession is impelled by this spirit and holds some what of this attitude to the particular activity that commands his thought and absorbs his energy. If he sees his pursuit as a mere gain- getting occupation he will miss the greatest joy of his life. But if his pursuit stands out before him as a thing to which he has been called, for which he has been wholly set apart by tempera ment, aptitude, and inclination, it is transformed into a ideal, evoking the strongest love of his na ture and gripping his allegiance with hooks of steel. It thus ceases to be the means of simply living and becomes his life. Moreover, from this 47 48 SIDNEY LANIER viewpoint, even the prosaic humdrum daily toil of shop and store and office is touched with the joy of a kind of idealism, which has in it something of the beauty of spiritual things. The worker sees his work in the light of the vision of the Perfect, and is moved by impulses finer than those that drive men to toil for food and shelter and raiment and that crude product which the coarse hand of the world adjudges success. If he is fully possessed by this idealism of work, whatever hand or brain turns out will have upon it the stamp and super scription of his character; it will bear the very image of his soul. For it comes out of the deeps of his nature where the ethical forces are active, and more or less creative and original will be such products of head and hand. It is this that gives such a rich value to the work of some men engaged in what we call the ordinary pursuits of life to the work of the great craftsman, the great merchant, the great organizer of large industrial enterprises, to the work of the great lawyer, or preacher, or teacher. We but superficially explain the high quality of their work when we say they have a genius for it. For this is only another way of saying that they are passionately in love with what they do, and that they are beckoned al ways on by the imperious power of the ideal. And the lesson of the lives of those who have THE SONG OF THE POET 49 really wrought greatly in any pursuit is the lesson of those who follow undauntedly and unwaver ingly the gleam of the Perfect for its own sake in whatsoever hand or brain finds to do. If all this is generally true of the world's great workers in the more prosaic ways of life, it is more essentially true of the work, spirit, and achievement of the poet, or indeed of the artist who expresses himself in any of the manifold forms of beauty. From primitive times the poet has been looked upon as a man set apart, divinely called to a mission. The breath of the gods in spired him, and he was their appointed spokes man. His words, indeed, were not his own. He was but the mouthpiece of the divine wisdom, rebuke, and prophecy. His office was a sacred one, and he was the first preacher to interpret spiritual things to the sons of men. The sacredness of the poet's call and the more or less spiritual character of the poet's message have never quite left the thought of the world, even long after the poet has stepped from the inner sanctuary of religious ceremonial into the broad light of common day simply a man among his fellows. If the feeling that he is possessed by a power not himself has passed away, the concep tion that his is a mission peculiarly devoted to the highest things of life and nature still persists. 50 SIDNEY LANIER At any rate, the true poet himself has this concep tion. His aim is beauty, his service to interpret spiritual truth and to charm the world to the vision of the ideal. It is no wonder, then, that the mere thought of his art is, to the poet, a thing in itself transcendently beautiful, and that he will not only ponder it within himself and bow rever ently at its sacred altars, but will also share with the world his own loving thought of the greatest of arts, the art which, above all others, nourishes and fortifies and guides the life of the spirit. And the great poets have loved to chant the beauty and glory and sacred purpose of their divine calling. We have already found this particularly true of Lanier's attitude and devotion to his art. As his prose, so his poetry shows how constantly he was searching its meaning and mission and serv ice. Indeed, no little of his verse is but a turning into rhythmic form ideas and ideals already ex pressed in the soberer garb of prose. But these ideals and ideas are so lofty and stimulating, so truly an expression of the poet's real character, that, in spite of the danger of repetition, they are quite worthy of a second study. They get a new emphasis, however, by passing into poetic form and by the beauty of the symbolism with which he clothes them. Moreover, as one listens to the poet's song of THE SONG OF THE POET 51 his art one gets a fresh impression of the spiritual quality of Lanier's nature and of the religious mood of his attitude toward it. When he sings of his art one has the feeling that the song comes out of his very soul, and that his mood is akin to that of the consecrated priest when he approaches the inner sanctuary of the temple. With Lanier none but the pure should enter this sacred temple of Song; the ministrants at her altars are first of all to be clean of hand and heart. To be a poet is to be not merely a worshiper at the shrine of beauty. It is also to be an ordained priest in the service of spiritual truth, and to this service to bring unsullied purity of soul. Yonder is the virgin whiteness of the tuberose, and this is the symbol of the poet's soul: Soul, get thee to the heart Of yonder tuberose : hide thee there There breathe the meditations of thine art Suffused with prayer. Of spirit grave yet light, How fervent fragrances uprise Pure-born from these most rich and yet most white Virginities! Mulched with unsavory death, Grow, Soul! unto such white estate, That virginal-prayerful art shall be thy breath, Thy work, thy fate. It is to be doubted whether any other poet, English or American, ever uttered a truer prayer 52 SIDNEY LANIER of consecration to the finer spiritualities of his art. And this is not a vagrant, passing mood of Lanier's, coming in fitful gusts from dim, far-off heights of spiritual aspiration. Such a prayer represents the persistent mood of his thought as he chanted the song of the poet and his art. Now, a man possessed by such a mood, and ap proaching his art as a priest entering into the holy of holies, must be conscious of the awful responsi bilities that rest upon him as the oracle of beauty and the announcer of the deep truths of the spirit. Of this responsibility he cannot rid himself. He cannot shift it to the unbidden voice of the Muse speaking through him, nor to any vague, mystic power not himself, to which the poet may some times attribute the message he utters. The va grant, uninvited inspirations of genius, though they must come, in no wise relieve the poet of his personal, individual responsibility for the char acter of his song. He may not quite say with Emerson, The hand that rounded Peter's dome And groined the aisles of Christian Rome Wrought in a sad sincerity: Himself from God he could not free ; or that The passive Master lent his hand To the vast soul that o'er him planned. THE SONG OF THE POET 53 No; the artist works under the compulsion of his own separate, responsible individuality, and in the awful freedom of his own will. What he does is his own, and not another's. Yonder floating cloud, the poet sings, is moved blindly, not by the force of any power of its own, but under the irre sistible compulsion of a law without itself. It possesses no "I," but, on the other hand, Awful is Art because 'tis free. The artist trembles o'er his plan Where man his Self must see. Who made a song or picture, he Did it, and not another, God nor man. Yet this conception of the individual responsi bility of the artist does not sever his work from all relationship to God. For God is above the artist, the object of his worship and praise, not, however, the maker of his poem or picture. These represent the artist's praise of him, wrought in the fullness of love : My Lord is large, my Lord is strong: Giving, He gave: my me is mine. How poor, how strange, how wrong, To dream He wrote the little song I made to Him with love's unforced design! So, reverently, devoutly, in this faith the artist works. The products of hand and heart and brain are sacredly his own his own, however, for 54 SIDNEY LANIER loving praise and dutiful service. In a humble yet strong recognition of his gift, he may claim, I work in freedom wild, But work, as plays a little child, Sure of the Father, Self, and Love, alone. "Sure of the Father, Self, and Love" here we have the poet's statement of the three elements in his creed as an artist. These represent the verities of his thinking. To them he owned and kept allegiance. They were the fundamental articles in the creed of his faith, and of them he never lost sight. His work as an artist was done in the consciousness of the presence of the Father in the world and in the heart of man, in a lofty conception of the dignity and importance of the service of poetry, in a devout, unshaken aim to be the best and do the best in order that his song might possess at least the beauty of holiness; and, finally, underlying his thought of the Father, his conception of his art, his own high resolve to live and sing nobly, was a love, tender and deep for all things fair, and large enough to take to its heart God and man and nature, with all that concerned them. When one considers this phase of Lanier's genius, its passionate spiritual yearning, one feels how easy it would have been for him to have interpreted the poet as a kind of mystic, darkly THE SONG OF THE POET 55 brooding the dim-hidden problems of the soul, a dreamer of strange spiritual dreams, living wholly in a kind of realm of spiritual shadows. Not so, however. His own art as well as his conception of art in general was closely related to life to that phase of life immediately around him. More over, he was essentially modern in the nature of his thought, and consequently in the meaning of his message. He was not even a singer of Old, unhappy, far-off things And battles long ago. His world was the busy world of everyday men and things, and he was never very far from the interests that most deeply concerned them. Hence his art appeals to us not only as the rich flowering of his own strong and beautiful per sonality, but also as the voice of the spiritual idealist calling men now and here to the eternal verities in the life they are actually living. Besides, he tried to see the whole of life. His faith looked out upon the world with undissem- bling eyes. And he would have the great artist take no one-sided view of life the whole of it is to be the artist's material. From this standpoint he interprets the significance of Beethoven's message: O Psalmist of the weak, the strong, O Troubadour of love and strife, Co-Litanist of right and wrong, Sole Hymner of the whole of life. 56 SIDNEY LANIER Following this poem through, one discovers that, from Lanier's standpoint, the really great artist is to be no spiritual prude shrinking squeamishly from the sin and evil of life, nor an intellectual coward holding to his faith by blinking life's dark and ugly facts. With unabashed eyes he looks steadily at it all, and because he knows its contra dictions, its confusions, its hard-to-reconcile con ditions, the triumphantly assertive "Everlasting Yea" of his faith sounds like the trumpet blast of one who has gained his victory through real strug gle. He sees that truth suffers on the cross, that nature smiles indifferently on Judas and Jesus, that saints are cut off at their prayers, that babes and widows starve and freeze, that there is no mercy in nature's laws; yet in all the broil and bitter confusion of things the message of the great artist, who sees life steadily and sees it whole, interpreting its contradictions with the vision of faith, brings order out of chaos and harmony out of discord: I know not how, I care not why, Thy music brings this broil at ease, And melts my passion's mortal cry In satisfying symphonies. Yea, it forgives me all my sins, Fits life to love like rhyme to rhyme, And tunes the task each day begins By the last trumpet-note of Time. If he saw his art in this light, if it was to paint THE SONG OF THE POET 57 the whole of life, and reconcile its discords through the power of a large and vital faith, what was its special mission and service ? One time the poet was pacing at pleasant morn A deep and dewy wood. He marked a blossom shiver to and fro With dainty inward storm; and there within A down-drawn trump of yellow jessamine A bee Thrust up its sad-gold body lustily, All in a honey madness hotly bound On blissful burglary. And thus, in terms of the bee's rifling the flower of its nectar, he symbolizes the mission of the poet in the world, gathering its fair and noble sweets. Yet he must not be understood as an idle singer of beautiful things, a flitting butterfly seeking only the earth's sweets. To the world's sharp inquiry, What profit e'er a poet brings? the poet answers much: He beareth starry stuff about his wings To pollen thee and sting thee fertile : nay, If still thou narrow thy contracted way, Worldflower, if thou refuse me Worldflower, if thou abuse me, And hoist thy stamen's spear-point high To wound my wing and mar mine eye Nathless I'll drive me to thy deepest sweet, Yea, richlier shall that pain the pollen beat From me to thee, for oft these pollens be Fine dust from wars that poets wage for thee. 58 SIDNEY LANIER Now, it is true that, when we try to get beneath the poetic beauty of these lines and this quaint conceit of imagery to set down in plain prose just what the poet means to say, just what measurable profit the poet is, we shall be hard put to for a statement. But it is hardly necessary to phrase his meaning in exact words. It is enough to think that our poet himself is deeply conscious that he has a place and a use in the world, that he brings to men some high and noble and even necessary thing a thing, indeed, which they can not well do without and that in the pollen that he bears there is the fertilizing virtue of the truth of the spirit, out of which bloom the fair blos soms of the soul-life. A trifle more definite is his interpretation of the poet's service and mission in the poem entitled "Clover." Lying one summer day in a clover field, the poet fain would fancy the fair blossoms to be Sweet visages of all the souls of time Whose loving service to the world has been In the artist's way expressed and bodied. Reverently and lovingly he clasps them to his heart; they are the bright throngs Of workers, worshipful nobilities In the Court of Gentle Service, silent men, Dwellers in woods, brooders on helpful art, And all the press of them, the fair, the large, That wrought with beauty. THE SONG OF THE POET 59 But here comes the dull browsing ox, the cruel "Course-of-things," and clips in his "slantly- churning jaws" each dear head, and forward advances one inch. Now, asks the poet, for what have all these artists, These masters wrought, and wept, and sweated blood? Was it only to be swallowed up by the course of things ? "Not so!" a thousand voices shout in his ear. The artist and his work fit into God's larger plan by feeding the best life of His course of things, and learn this: The artist's market is the heart of man; The artist's price, some little good of man. Tease not thy vision with vain search for ends. The End of Means is art that works by love. So if the artist works in love, carving his statue, painting his picture, composing his symphony, creating his poem, he works in the conscious ness that he is a ministrant at the altar of goodness and a contributor to man's spiritual progress. But even more specifically in that fine poem with such an unpoetic title, "Corn," does he unfold in different symbolism his high conception of the poet his nourishment, his nature, and his service. The one "tall corn-captain" that stands out in the foremost ranks, challenging and bat- 60 SIDNEY LANIER tling against the uncultivated forces of hedge and thicket, becomes the type of the poet-soul sublime That leads the vanward of his timid time And sings up cowards with commanding rhyme. Moreover, as the corn-captain sends his roots down deep into the common mold of earth, and yet rises gracefully to take all that the free winds and warm sun and soft showers have to give, aspiring ever toward the heights of the far-off heavens, so the true poet himself must grow "by double increment, above, below," touching the great common heart of humanity, in order that, thus being thoroughly democratic, he may teach the yeomen selfless chivalry That moves in gentle curves of courtesy. But also his soul must be filled like the "long veins" of the corn-captain with sweetness tense, By every godlike sense drawn from the four elements. He is committed to high plans and lofty purposes. No narrowness of life, or knowledge, or experi ence, or vision can be his. All he must appro priate and transmute into a new fineness and nobility by the spiritual alchemy of his genius. The corn-captain becomes again the symbol of the poet: As poets should, Thou hast built up thy hardihood THE SONG OF THE POET 61 With universal food, Drawn in select proportion fair From honest mold and vagabond air; From darkness of the dreadful night, And joyful light; From antique ashes, whose departed flame In thee has finer life and longer fame. So thou dost mutually leaven Strength of earth with grace of heaven; So thou dost marry new and old Into a one of higher mold ; So thou dost reconcile the hot and cold, The dark and bright, And many a heart-perplexing opposite, And so, Akin by blood to high and low, Fitly thou playest out thy poet's part, Richly expending thy much-bruised heart In equal care to nourish lord in hall Or beast in stall : Thou took'st from all that thou might'st give to all. Thus in manifold symbolism, a bit overwrought, perhaps, at times, Lanier touched with beauty his various conceptions of his art, what its quality and what the nature of its message to the world. But it should be remembered that the emphasis of his thought is not so much upon what the artist should say, much less upon how he should say it, as it is upon the essential nature of the artist himself and his aims. He must first live nobly and broadly and deeply before the qualities of breadth and depth and nobility will appear in his singing. This was the lesson of Lanier's own 62 SIDNEY LANIER brave and manful life; this was the clearest mes sage from all his prose discussions of art; and now, when the poet chants the song of art, one catches the same choral note. It is this that makes the reading of this phase of his poetry a wholesome spiritual tonic. One feels that, with Lanier, any way, poetry is the handmaid of religion and a nourisher of the soul. Then, we should insist once again that his high aiming has a spiritual value. He had better, perhaps, stuck to plain prose in his interpretation of art; maybe his views are all wrong anyway. Besides, his own actual achievement in poetry was far short of his ideals and standards. Still, after making all allowances, one must say that Lanier is to be counted among those to whom the world will render loving homage as much for what they tried to do as for what they actually accomplished. He thought always on the highest things, he set before himself the noblest standards, and he ever strove toward them with all the force of his nature. The inspirational value of this high-aiming of his comes to the drooping soul like the breath of the salt sea to the weaned body or the healing of mountain airs to worn nerves. We ourselves are won, under his influ ence, to a kind of spiritual heroism, and are lifted by his steady passion for the fair nobilities of art THE SONG OF THE POET 63 and life. This virtue of his high artistic ideals and of the unflagging ardor with which he sought to attain them has been beautifully and fittingly interpreted in verse by Mr. John William Jenkins (Outlook, April 21, 1906): He loved his art and freely spent himself, Counting no cost, nor measuring his days; Nor turned aside by misinterpreters Nor halted for the sweet incense of praise. But, even amid the darkness, his fair face Ever turned eager toward the eternal light; He saw the bright beams of the coming day Far through the blackness of th' enshrouding night. Wounded and fallen, still he struggled on, Brave-hearted, valiant to his latest breath: With cypress mourners came; but, laurel-crowned, They found him smiling in the arms of Death. IV WITH NATURE THE great god Pan has been dead these ages long, and with him have gone all those beautiful and gracious creations with which the imagination of the childhood of the race teemed as it tried to interpret the relation of man to the great outer world on which and with which he lived. Divin ities no longer dwell by grove and stream and fountain; the rustling leaves no more betoken the presence of the quaint god Pan; Jove's voice has vanished from the rolling thunder, and Neptune's rule over the gray wastes of the sounding seas is at an end. With the spread of knowledge and the advance of science these all have left forever the haunts of nature. We now know her for what she is, have revealed her mysteries, have learned her ways, mastered her forces, and bent them to the common uses of daily service. Now, with the reducing of nature to a kind of servant to drudge for us, there is the danger that the beauty and charm and mystery of God's world may vanish from the imagination of men. What ever the influence, therefore, that helps to keep these things alive, it is performing a distinct and 6 4 WITH NATURE 65 important service. And this service it has been the great function of art, particularly poetry and painting, to render. Gods and goddesses, nymphs and fauns, may have all entirely vanished, but modern art, while looking at nature with quite other eyes than those of the elder days of child like fancy, has yet preserved for the children of the Great Mother her loveliness and manifold spiritual suggestiveness. In reverence the painter has drawn the ever-fresh, ever-entrancing beauty and impressive grandeur of her form and face; and, working in words, the poet, too, has filled the galleries of the imagination with imperishable pictures, and by symbolism, analogy, and parable has interpreted her moods in terms of human moods, keeping the heart and soul of man close to the heart and soul of the Great Mother. To the poet nature is no dead thing, but a living reality, informed with the breath of the divine life and one other revelation of the divine mind. Rich, therefore, is she in healing for the soul and deeply fraught with spiritual symbolism. Since Wordsworth no English poet of any consequence has failed to bring us a new sense of the beauty of the world, its power to inform the mind and reflect and nourish the spiritual moods. So essentially is this true that we really have a cult of nature, whose members are a kind of priesthood worship- 66 SIDNEY LANIER ing at a shrine and striving to interpret the mes sage of nature as one of the oracles of God. So, if the old attitude of approach is no longer pos sible, the new is equally potent in the thought and imagination of men to keep fresh the beauty and charm and mystery of this wonderful back ground of human life. Now, Sidney Lanier is thoroughly modern in his own attitude toward nature. All that it meant to Wordsworth it means to him. Indeed, that large vein of mysticism in him brought him into such intimacy of communion that his very being seems, at times, to merge itself completely into its all-embracing life. And this blending is con siderably more than the result of the mere artist's worship of the manifold phases of her beauty. It is a genuine love, deep, tender, absorbing. To this sentiment he gives himself with such an abandon of ardor that to our ordinary feelings it seems much like a conceit of love or a flame of poetic extravagance. It is unlike the mood of Wordsworth, who, with all his priestly worship, is marked by a certain sober restraint. Lanier's terms of endearment for nature are more like those of a lover for his beloved, and when thus applied at least suggest affectation. It is not so, however. His character was too genuine for that. It is rather the overflow from those large depths WITH NATURE 67 of tenderness for all things great and beautiful which underlay his temperament. From this standpoint, one feels that he is perfectly sincere in those apparently overwrought expressions of love for nature. Such a passage as the following is thoroughly characteristic: I have waked, I have come, my beloved! I might not abide: I have come ere the dawn, O beloved, my live-oaks, to hide In your gospeling glooms, to be As a lover in heaven, the marsh my marsh and the sea my sea. Or again to the leaves: Ye lispers, whisperers, singers in storms, Ye consciences murmuring faiths under forms, Ye ministers meet for each passion that grieves Friendly, sisterly, sweetheart leaves. We shall not wonder if such a lover has eager, O ' wide eyes for all the rare and radiant beauty of the world of nature, and also a heart open to its deep and manifold message. So to him she unfolds her hidden mysteries, and becomes the healer and the teacher. Her voices speak to his soul in no uncertain tones, and everywhere, an obedient, loving scholar, he learns her lessons. Silence and patience he needs, and he turns to the leaves: Teach me the terms of silence, preach me The passion of patience, sift me, impeach me, And there, oh there As ye hang with your myriad palms upturned in the air, Pray me a myriad prayer. 68 SIDNEY LANIER Out of the intense religiousness of his tempera ment, in the presence of nature he felt that he was really in the presence of God's world a world which was not only a revelation of the divine power, but also which itself returned back to its Creator a kind of worship: Now in each pettiest personal sphere of dew The summ'd morn shines complete as in the blue Big dewdrop of all heaven : with these lit shrines O'er-silvered to the farthest sea-confines, The sacramental marsh one pious plain Of worship lies. Of course, such a conception as this is but a notable example of Ruskin's "pathetic fallacy," and its significance consists rather in the revela tion it makes of Lanier's own spirituality. He touched nothing without adorning it with a quality of spiritual meaning and beauty. He did not confine his moods of reverence and worship to the cabined formality of a definitely stated creed; but God he tried to see everywhere, and nowhere more really than in the beauty and glory and power of nature's manifold phases. Moreover, so intimate is his feeling of fellow ship with nature, so sensitive is he to its various aspects, that he readily translates his own mental and spiritual moods in terms of what he sees. For example, as the vision of the marsh touches the heart and soul of him, it pours into the one WITH NATURE 69 the quiet joy of peace and rest, and liberates the other into the breadth of its wide spaces: Ay, now, when my soul all day hath drunken the soul of the oak, And my heart is at ease from men, and the wearisome sound of the stroke Of the scythe of time and the trowel of trade is low, And belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know, And my spirit is grown to a lordly great compass within, That the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn Will work me no fear like the fear they have wrought me of yore When length was fatigue, and when breadth was but bitter ness sore, And when terror and shrinking and dreary unnamable pain Drew over me out of the merciless miles of the plain, Oh, now, unafraid, I am fain to face The vast sweet visage of space. But nature pours into his soul not only healing and consecration, offers not only an altar from which the incense of his worship may ascend, but she brings to him her strength as well. As the sun rises in lordly majesty in the silentness of irresistible might over the wide expanse of sea and marsh and forest, something of its power enters also into the heart of the poet, and whatever the on-coming day may hold in store for him, whether it be the burden of toil or the anguish of sorrow, still with a new courage he can say: But I fear not, nay, I fear not the thing to be done ; I am strong with the strength of my Lord the Sun : How dark, how dark soever the race that must needs be run. I am lit with the sun. 70 SIDNEY LANIER And the memory of its light and power shall not leave him; trade and commerce and politics may all be but a tangled web of confusion, cruel and unjust and shot through with deepest wrong, yet the Sun, dissipating the low-hung mists of the morning, and driving with his lances of light the hosts of darkness, becomes a kind of symbol of his own luminous faith: Oh, never the mast-high run of the seas Of traffic shall hide thee, Never the hell-colored smoke of the factories Hide thee, Never the reek of the time's fen-politics Hide thee, And ever my heart through the night shall with knowledge abide thee, And ever by day shall my spirit, as one that hath tried thee, Labor, at leisure, in art, till yonder beside thee My soul shall float, friend Sun, The day being done. Once more in terms of nature he expresses the sureness of his faith. The thought of the marsh- hen setting up her tiny home on the bosom of the limitless spaces of nature seems to have the virtue of freeing his soul from all disturbing doubts and disheartening fears, from all the teasing, per plexing problems of life, and of anchoring his faith securely in the boundless goodness of God. And few poets have more nobly sung this final achievement of the spirit's loftiest aspira- WITH NATURE 71 tion when, eased of the pain of its struggle, it rests after victory: Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal sea? Somehow my soul seems suddenly free From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion of sin, By the length and the breadth and the sweep of the marshes of Glynn. Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea! Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun, Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain, And sight out of blindness and purity out of stain. As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod, Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God: I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the skies: By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God: Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness within The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn. Perhaps, however, the religiousness of Lanier's attitude toward nature, his sense of her virtue to infuse strength into the o'erwearied soul, her subtle power to calm the troubled heart, and her mystic spiritual influences, reach their climax in those exquisite verses entitled "A Ballad of Trees and the Master." Here we have a deeply reverential recognition of all these gentle yet 72 SIDNEY LANIER strong powers of nature, and a perfectly sincere expression of the intense spirituality of the poet: Into the woods my Master went, Clean forspent, forspent. Into the woods my Master came, Forspent with love and shame. But the olives they were not blind to Him, The little gray leaves were kind to him: The thorn-tree had a mind to Him When into the woods He came. Out of the woods my Master went. And He was well content. Out of the woods my Master came, Content with death and shame. When Death and Shame would woo Him last, From under the trees they drew Him last : 'Twas on a tree they slew Him last When out of the woods He came. Thus Lanier turned a loving gaze upon the beauty of nature, and reverently endeavored to help other eyes to see that beauty. But more than this: he carried his heart and soul with him as to a kind of shrine whereon he might offer wor shipful sacrifice to Him who made it all. And this act brought not only rest and healing and consecration, but also opened doors through which he might see the face of God and hear the divine voice. In the light of such an attitude and under the influence of such a mood the great outer world was not merely a material thing touching the senses and satisfying the purely aesthetic demands WITH NATURE 73 for beauty and variety of form. To be sure, its loveliness appealed to him overwhelmingly, and his expression of it was all but ecstatic in its appreciation. But deeper than this he felt the presence of the very Spirit of God, and through the symbolism of nature's various moods and forms he interpreted the truths of the life of the soul to the soul. In this way the reader of his poetry gets not only a fresh appreciation of the beauty of the world of nature, but also a winsome invitation into the spiritual suggestiveness and significance of that world, and, withal, an impres sive revelation of the spiritual quality of Lanier's own temperament. And this all contributes again no little to the essentially religious character of his message to the heart of man. THE POET AND HIS AGE THE truly representative poet speaks out of his age and to it. Criticism sets itself the task of discovering and emphasizing what it calls the uni versal elements in all the forms of arts those ele ments that somehow have the virtue of appealing to the men and women of no particular time, but of all time. But the artist himself is modified by the passing conditions of his own age, and to it he delivers his message as if there were no after time. This is not to say that the poet, for exam ple, is not conscious that his utterance, if it have the quality of permanence, must be illuminated with the steady light of universal truth. His highest mission is, by the penetrative power of the imagination, to seek to get beneath the pass ing show of things to brush aside, so to speak, the merely contemporary, and interpret to his own generation the truth which abides through all generations. But his accent is that of his own age, and the general interests that come within the range of his vision and thought are those that most deeply concern the men and women of his own time. He breathes their atmosphere, thinks 74 THE POET AND His AGE 75 their thoughts, lives their life, and speaks their language. Hence, in a very true sense, Chaucer is a child of the fifteenth century, Shakespeare of the sixteenth, Milton of the seventeenth, and Tennyson, Arnold, and Browning of the nine teenth. So also is Sidney Lanier a genuine pro duct of the nineteenth century in the conditions and experiences that nourished and directed his genius and determined the essential nature and service of his message. Now, there were three or four great movements which absorbed the interests and dominated the thought of the century. These furnished the atmosphere and inspired its thinking. The first was a social and political movement. Democ racy came not only to bring about a fresh read justment of our thinking with reference to po litical rights and privileges, but also to set a new social passion in the hearts of men and to inspire new standards and set up new laws for all human relationships. The entire literature of the age, directly or indirectly, is a literature of social record and interpretation. Through it runs the consciousness of fellowship and brotherhood, and it is vital with a sense of social obligation and helpfulness. If out of this fresh study of man in society and the passion to ameliorate human conditions there should be born a new science, 76 SIDNEY LANIER Sociology, the novelists from George Eliot and Dickens to Mrs. Humphry Ward make of their art a human document of social interpretation, and the poets from Wordsworth to Tennyson find their finest ideals in visions of social better ment. The industrial and commercial transformation of human conditions also inevitably forced the thought of the century into social channels. With the discovery of the uses of the physical forces of nature and their practical application to the service of industry and trade there came a marvelously rapid conquest of material conditions and an equally marvelous expansion of commerce and the accumulation of wealth. With passion ate, all-absorbing energy the English-speaking races gave themselves to manufacture and com merce. The smoke of the factory darkened all the landscape, and the clangor of machinery drowned all other noises. The hot pursuit of wealth threatened to deaden the conscience and wholly to destroy the life of the spirit. A gospel of mammon-worshiping materialism reared its huge altars, and the fairest and best things were ruthlessly sacrificed. It is no wonder, therefore, that the literature of the period is a literature of protest, and poet and essayist, Tennyson and Browning, Carlyle and Ruskin, play the role of THE POET AND His AGE 77 the prophet, now calling men back to the eternally beautiful idealism of the spirit, now flaming forth in the righteous wrath of moral rebuke. And when we consider that other dominant movement of the century, the scientific, we shall realize that the century had all the more need of the idealist and the prophet in literature. Science brought to the age not only its methods of dis covering the physical laws of the universe and the means of applying them to daily use, but also that which is far more important a spirit of inquiry and an attitude of mind toward all things. It taught the world to see things as they are, and to be satisfied with nothing else. It brought to men a new sense of the beauty and value of truth, and gave them a method for discovering it. It widened with astonishing, not to say dazing, rapidity the bounds of knowledge, and enthroned the facts of visible, tangible life as the chief goal of effort and the final achievement of thought. Reason based upon observation and knowledge laboriously gathered by the slow, relentless pro cesses of the laboratory were to furnish the one sure basis for all thinking. The only results to be trusted were to be those thus arrived at, and nothing was truth till it had been tested in the crucible of the scientific method and sub jected to the fires of the scientific spirit. The 78 SIDNEY LANIER purely intellectual became once more lord over life. ' All this had a tremendously disturbing influence upon religion and morals and the faith-founda tions of each. So a religion and a morality resting in things not seen had to be justified afresh to the consciousness of men. Never before, perhaps, in the history of religious thought were the founda tions of faith so keenly searched and tested. And what made the searching and the testing all the more significant, and, in a way, perilous, was that it came no longer from the flippant brutality of an unthinking infidelity, but from a painstaking, reverent search after truth. The general result was that the age went into the shadow of hesi tancy and doubt, not to say into the complete dark ness of unfaith, and the life of the spirit was at its ebb tide. Some of the finest minds of the century were sorely perplexed, and drifted rudderless upon a sea of doubt. With the possible exception of Browning, none of the leading men of letters are quite free at times from a hesitant mood, and give themselves over to, if not actual unbelief, at least to a more or less flabby uncertainty. Dr. Lyman Abbott in a spoken address fittingly illustrates with Saint George and the dragon the three representative types of nineteenth century men of letters. In the case of Matthew Arnold THE POET AND His AGE 79 as Saint George, the dragon of unfaith has won in the contest, and his feet are upon the neck of the champion; with Tennyson it is a drawn con test; but it is only Browning who is triumphantly victorious, standing erect with the dragon under his feet. Nevertheless, it should be remembered that the leading men of letters, however far they may seem to have departed from generally accepted views of religious truth, were yet steadily on the side of faith, and strove to keep spiritual aspiration with its eyes fixed on God. Arnold, with all his hesitancy, is a genuinely religious soul, and even though he may not have found God by way of the church, his face was set toward Him; Tenny son's noblest poetry contributes to the nourish ment of the spiritual life of the age; Ruskin is an interpreter of art in terms of ethical standards; Thomas Carlyle flames forth with all the right eous wrath of a prophet of old against shams and sin and unbelief; while Browning's poetry is a poetry of a faith as fixed and as unquestioning as of one who had really walked with God. At least it can be said that these all are religious thinkers, and their deepest thought seeks to know and utter the truth of the spirit. Naturally, therefore, the poetry of the century was the poetry of thought. In symbolic terms of 8o SIDNEY LANIER beauty the artist in verse sought to interpret the deepest currents of the thought of his age. "Phil osophical" is really the word which best describes the general nature of the poetic output. Tenny son's most characteristic poem, as perhaps the most genuinely representative poem of the cen tury, is not "Enoch Arden" nor "The Lady of Shalott," as beautiful as these are. It is the "In Memoriam," a poem which discusses questions belonging to the region of philosophical inquiry. And Browning's most characteristic mood is also revealed when, with curious psychological analy sis, he is representing states of the soul and unfolding the processes of the mind's quest after spiritual truth. Moreover, the profound signifi cance of Emerson's poetry is to be discovered not in its beauty of style and manner so much as in its bare thought-content, in the quality of its message through the mind into the souls of men. It is necessary to remind ourselves afresh of all these matters with reference to the literature of the nineteenth century in order adequately to understand the message of Lanier's poetry and rightly to value its spiritual meaning. For the mark of modernness is upon all he wrote. The great currents of the thought of the century beat in upon his mind and heart its social pain and passion, its tendency toward hard and cruel mate- THE POET AND His AGE 81 rialism, its worship of Mammon, the arrogant lordship of mere knowledge and the tyrannical dominance of pure intellect, the inspiring zest of its search after truth, the bitter trial of its faith, and, with all its doubt, the upward cry of its heart after God. These are the things over which he brooded most deeply, and these are the things that influenced most persistently the meaning of his message. His verse, too, is heavy with thought so weighted that, at times, one feels that the poet gives way quite to the philoso pher and thinker. Nevertheless, whatever his actual achievement as a poet, one does not hesitate to say that, taking his aspiration into consideration, at least in aim he fulfilled the high mission of poetry as stated in those noble words of Principal Shairp : "The true end (of poetry) is to awaken men to the divine side of things, to bear witness to the beauty that clothes the outer world, the nobility that lies hid, often obscured, in human souls, to call forth sym pathy for neglected truths, for noble but oppressed persons, for downtrodden causes, and to make men feel that, through all outward beauty and all pure inward affection, God himself is addressing them." And this is the general nature of all Lanier's message to the souls of men. If he spoke out of his age and its experiences, he spoke also to it as 82 SIDNEY LANIER a sincere seeker after spiritual truth and a devout interpreter of the mind of God. The loud noises of the passing hour did not deafen his ears to the words that last through all the hours, nor did the dust of shifting changes obscure from his eyes those foundations which abide. And this is all the more remarkable when we remember that he emerged out of the conservative South, with its ruins crashing about him, into a strange new day for which his past had, apparently, not prepared him. Yet he realized the modern world, compre hended the great currents of its life, and sought, to the full limit of his ability, to hold it true to the things really permanent and worth while. VI GOD IN THE WORLD IT should be remembered that we are not to ask that the poet always state his faith in terms of hard and fast exact phrasing. We are not to put upon him the compulsion of expressing his credo in the verbal clearness that we demand of the theologian and the philosopher. The very nature of his mood of mind and the essential character of his manner of utterance are polar in their distance from the methods of both the phi losopher and the theologian. He may be a truth- seeker equally as earnest, equally as conscientious, as they are. His search to know the things of God may be fully as keen and as unremitting as theirs, and the voices of the spirit may ring just as resonantly in his soul as in theirs. But, while they debate and discuss truth, and strive to express their conclusions in such intellectual clearness and definiteness of phrase as to appeal wholly to the mind and win its assent, he, on the other hand, is an announcer of truth, and endeavors, if he have any conscious purpose, to transfer a mood of mind and soul to the mind and soul of the reader. Hence, one may rather expect from 83 84 SIDNEY LANIER the poet a certain quality of vagueness, be aware rather of the presence of the truth in its power than of a purely intellectual comprehension of it. But this lack of definiteness of statement and this indirect rather than direct appeal to the intellect in no wise diminish the force of the poet's call to the spiritual nature, nor detract from the essen tial value of his message as a revelation of spiritual truth. All the world's great teachers of spiritual truth have uttered their thought more or less in this way. The truth has been so clear to them, they have been so completely possessed by its radiant power, it has burst in upon them with such a shining glory as if the very God spoke to them with his own voice and honored them with his presence, that they have not halted to question and discuss, nor to follow the plodding paths of slow-footed logic, but have shouted aloud what they saw in their moods of mystical spiritual exaltation. But if there is this wide difference in the mood of mind and the general nature of the utterance of the poet as compared with that of the theolo gian and philosopher, the difference is even greater when we come to compare the technical form and the verbal manner of his utterance with theirs. By the penetrative insight of the imagination he sees truth rather than discovers it by the patient GOD IN THE WORLD 85 processes of thought. It bursts on him as a kind of revelation, and his high task is to light the same fires in the imagination of the reader. Conse quently, his vision of truth takes on the form of symbolism. A purely intellectual view of it is to him a lifeless skeleton, and his mission is to clothe it with warm and rounded flesh, and breathe into it the breath of life. "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw his glory," represents fittingly and nobly the final achievement of the poet at his best in the handling of truth. His method, therefore, is to make it vital in the form of a symbol which the imagination can seize. So when one studies a poem as an expres sion of truth, one must realize that it is brought home to us by hint and suggestion through the form of the story, the allegory, or the parable. This was the method of the Great Teacher. Moreover, to the poet truth is beauty and beauty is truth. His message comes to the world in all loveliness of form and melody. It sings its way into the hearts of men, and lives in their imaginations a joy forever because it is a thing of beauty. It thus satisfies the emotions and com forts the spirit as no purely intellectual appeal can possibly do. Now, this power quite vanishes when we demand of the poet a clear-cut definition of the exact nature of the truth he utters and a 86 SIDNEY LANIER logical statement of his faith. We must accept what he says in his own mood and manner the mood of a soul aflame with the light of spiritual truth expressed in the symbolic terms of beauty. Vague and mystical it may be, and hard to set down in such prosaic definiteness as will satisfy the demands of the mind, yet none the less strong is it to fortify the soul and direct it along the ways that lead to God. It is necessary to keep all this in mind when we attempt to express in plain prose, with more or less clearness, the nature of Lanier's faith and his thought of God in the world. For his faith is sure and strong, and in his most serious inter pretation of life he never left out an abiding consciousness of the divine planning and pres ence. From this standpoint he is to be reckoned among those sons of spiritual light who, in an age of faith sorely tried and darkened, yet heard the voice of God and saw him in all the tangled confusions of life and thought. This is his pre vailing mood. It is the finer breath of all his poetry, touching it with a heartening sense of faith and lighting it with a steady spiritual radi ance. However hard we might find it to state in definite terms just what Lanier believed, one is unfailingly conscious that his face was toward God, wistful yet trustful, and that his soul was GOD IN THE WORLD 87 strong with the sense of divine communion. To him this was no godless world; but it was a God-informed, a God-directed world. And it is the greatness of this conception that gives to Lanier's poetry its loftiness of mood aside from any technical value it may or may not have, and the unwavering strength of it acts like a spiritual tonic upon the drooping soul. Perhaps in no other single poem does Lanier express so clearly and with so deep a passion of aspiration as in "A Florida Sunday" the essential nature of his religious faith. There is no narrow ness to it; it is all-embracing in its compass. In the "divine Tranquillity" of that sunny land, kissed and wooed by softest airs, God, of His most gracious friendliness, Hath wrought that every soul, this loving morn, Into all things may be new-corporate born, And each live whole in all. Thus the poet's soul melts into loving com munion with all nature with bird, and flower, and tree, the "long lissome coast," the bending sky overhead, the wide expanse of the sounding sea, and All riches, goods, and braveries never told Of earth, sun, air, and heaven now I hold Your being in my being. But more than this, all leads toward God, and all is God. Nothing is detached from this blessed 88 SIDNEY LANIER fellowship of spiritual oneness; each has its place in the all-encompassing wholeness of the divine plan; and the poet's personality blends completely and tenderly into this larger wholeness with a mystical passion of piety: I am ye, And ye myself; yea, lastly, Thee, God, whom my roads all reach, howe'er they run, My Father, Friend, Beloved, dear All-One. Thee in my soul, my soul in Thee, I feel, Self of my self. Lo, through my sense doth steal Clear cognizance of all selves and qualities, Of all existence that hath been or is, Of all strange haps that men miscall of chance, And all the works of tireless circumstance. So perfect is the spiritual harmony of this mood, and so clear is this vision of his faith in the divine ordering of all things, that even the dis cords of life, clashing and clanging here and there, cannot disturb the harmony, nor all the low- hanging darkness blind the vision of faith. Into that still air may break unseemly noises; the world may be apparently going quite awry; yet he is not moved: Out of the North come quarrels, and keen blare Of challenge by the hot-breath'd parties blown; Yet break they not this peace with alien tone, Fray not my heart, nor fright me for my land. To one without spiritual insight and under standing the sounds of the present are but jan gling noises, out of tune and harsh. But in it all GOD IN THE WORLD 89 the poet hears a deeper melody. For between her wings the "great bird Purpose" bears him, and I am one with all the kinsmen things That e'er my Father fathered. Oh, to me All questions solve in this tranquillity: E'en this dark matter, once so dim, so drear, Now shines upon my spirit heavenly-clear: Thou Father, without logic, tellest me How this divine denial true may be, How All's in each, yet every one of all Maintains his Self complete and several. With the pure spiritual quality of the message of such a faith ringing in one's thought one must set Lanier, at least in purpose, high among those seers of the race whose clear eyes of vision for the larger Purpose nothing could blur, and among the sons of light whose walk was close with God. The quality of his utterance may not have that all but clamorous assertiveness and loud resonance that belong to Browning's militant expression of faith. Yet it is none the less strong and clear. If his eyes look with a kind of wistfulness to find the law and the very presence of God in the apparent chaos of human life and destiny, they are yet unblurred and are lighted with the steady radiance of a perfect trust. To his ears the clang ing din and the clashing discords of the confused world about him resolved themselves into an harmonious symphony, directed by the Divine Mind and the Divine Love. He trusted, there- 90 SIDNEY LANIER fore, the Larger Hope in the wider course of human events, and rested securely upon the beneficence of the one increasing Purpose. Moreover, as the poet thus faced the huge teas ing problem of the general life and dauntlessly trusted the Larger Hope, so also he faced the shadow that sits and waits by all life, individual and collective Death. In its presence he lived, and one wonders increasingly at the brave joy- ance of his song when one considers how that it all might have been darkened by the murky gloom of ever-impending death. But not so. Reso lutely he turned his eyes upon it, and with the vision of faith saw quite through the shadow into the glory beyond it. In a curious little poem he fancies Death to be "a huge omnivorous Toad grim squatting on a twilight road," He catcheth all that Circumstance Hath tossed to him. He curseth all who upward glance As lost to him. He was in the garden in the fair morning of time, and strange was it that he was present to mar that perfect loveliness: O dainty dew, O morning dew That gleamed in the world's first dawn, did you And the sweet grass and manful oaks Give lair and rest To him who toadwise sits and croaks His death-behest? GOD IN THE WORLD 91 But still, "Who fears the hungry Toad?" the poet asks. Not II He but unfetters me to fly. And Pilgrims, Christ will walk ahead And clear the road. Moreover, when the "Raven days" of the sor row of bereavement came croaking stridently in the gloom of death, whither shall we turn ? Out of despair and anguish upward shall we look, and behold, High above a glittering calm Of sea and sky and kingly sun, the one who was taken shines and smiles, and waves a palm And now we wish Thy will be done! But we pass with the poet from the more per sonal aspects of the presence of death in life to view it in relation to the larger course of human experience. It then becomes the great transform ing, renovating power, healing the world's old scars, curing its manifold diseases, and washing it clean of its sins. At first along the stream of life Light winds from over the moorland sink and shiver And sigh as if just blown across a grave. And then I pause and listen to this sighing. I look with strange eyes on the well-known stream. I hear wild birth-cries uttered by the dying. I know men waking who appear to dream. 92 SIDNEY LANIER Then from the water-lilies slow uprises The still vast face of all the life I know, Changed now, and full of wonders and surprises, With fire in eyes that once were glazed with snow. Fair now the brows old Pain had erewhile wrinkled, And peace and strength about the calm mouth dwell. Clean of the ashes that Repentance sprinkled, The meek head poises like a flower-bell. All the old scars of wanton wars are vanished ; And what blue bruises grappling Sense had left And sad remains of redder stains are banished, And the dim blotch of heart-committed theft. O still vast vision of transfigured features Unvisited by secret crimes or dooms, Remain, remain amid these water-creatures, Stand, shine among yon water-lily blooms. For eighteen centuries ripple down the river, And windy times the stalks of empire wave, Let the winds come from the moor and sigh and shiver, Fain, fain am I, O Christ, to pass the grave. Whatever this curious and strangely wrought poem may mean, we are sure, from it, that the poet's faith had found the Resurrection and the Life. Lanier is thus a bearer of spiritual light and a genuine apostle of optimism. While he is rarely ever a strenuous fighter for the faith that is in him, yet now and again he takes his cast at the pessimism of doubt and death and the darkness of unfaith. Sometimes his method is fantastical and his manner of utterance a bit whimsical. Nevertheless, his voice rings clear enough and his GOD IN THE WORLD 93 intent is true and brave. For example, in "Owl against Robin" we have a fine piece of satire, in which the philosophy of gloom is stated from the standpoint of the owl. The moping bird of night complains that the robin does wrong to sing so joyfully in the bright light of day; night is the time for both work and play; why should Sir Robin keep up his perpetual song of cheer ? How can we owls sleep ? Peep! you whistle, and cheep! cheep! cheep! Oh, peep, if you will, and buy, if 'tis cheap, And have done; for an owl must sleep. Are ye singing for fame, and who shall be first? Each day's the same, yet the last is worst, And the summer is cursed with the silly outburst Of idiot redbreasts peeping and cheeping By day, when all honest birds ought to be sleeping. Lord, what a din! And so out of all reason. Have ye not heard that each thing hath its season? Night is to work in, night is for playtime; Good heavens, not daytime! It is far better To flit down the shadow-shot- with-gleam, Betwixt hanging leaves and starlit stream, Hither, thither, to and fro, Silent, aimless, dayless, slow (Aimless? Field-mice? True, they're slain; But the night-philosophy hoots at pain, Grips, eats quick, and drops the bones In the water beneath the bough, nor moans At the death life feeds on). Robin, pray Come away, come away To the cultus of night. 94 SIDNEY LANIER But for such a philosophy there can be no place in the clear light of Lanier's soul. His is the philosophy of Day, a philosophy lit with the light of faith. Even as he looked toward the future out of the gloom of a baffling and shadow-hung experience, the bird that he loosened from the ark of his life upon the gray wastes of the present was a bird of promise ("A Song of the Future") : Go, trembling song, And stay not long; oh, stay not long: Thou'rt only a gray and sober dove, But thine eye is faith and thy wing is love. Moreover, to the eye of faith even the dark of life has its ennobling uses, and we need not com plain at it nor of it. In such an attitude one discovers the surest test of the genuinely spiritual quality of a poet's temperament and the clearest revelation of the strength of his faith. If he mopes and whines, one may be sure that there is languor of spirit and feebleness of faith. Nobly, however, does Lanier stand this final test. Hear him sing the uses of the dark of life ("Opposition") : The dark hath many dear avails; The dark distills divinest dews; The dark is rich with nightingales, With dreams, and with the heavenly muse. Of fret, of dark, of thorn, of chill, Complain thou not, O heart; for these Bank-in the current of the will To uses, arts, and charities. GOD IN THE WORLD 95 To these high uses, therefore, of the pain and sorrow and disappointments of life he shut not his eyes, but received them as a part of the neces sary discipline for the ennobling and enriching of character. The very splendor of the rose brings some such conception to his mind ("Rose- Morals"): Would that my songs might be What roses make by day and might Distillments of my clod of misery Into delight. It must be remembered, too, when we consider the brave quality of Lanier's large faith and the triumphant courage of his optimism, that he knew in very truth the dark of life. To get anything like the full and rare beauty of his hold on God in all the concerns of his own personal experience and in his interpretation of the wider course of human history, we need always to hold in mind some of those grim comrades that walked ever with him along the way of life wasting disease, cramping conditions, disappointments without number, lack of recognition, and a dire poverty that threatened at times to transform the soaring poet into a plodding hackwriter. "June Dreams, in January" gives us a hint of how fierce, at times, the battle in the poet's soul was to hold himself true to his faith in the highest within and without. g6 SIDNEY LANIER He could not always fight off "old Scorn and Bitterness," who, Like Hunnish kings out of the barbarous land, came And camped upon the transient Italy That he had dreamed to blossom in his soul. The poet sees wealth and luxury and avarice on every hand; but he and his sit in poverty, and he is unable to transmute dreams of beauty into bread for wife and little ones. These are conditions that test the quality of his faith and optimism : "Read me," he cried, and rose, and stamped his foot Impatiently at Heaven, " read me this " (Putting th' inquiry full in the face of God) "Why can we poets dream us beauty, so, But cannot dream us bread? Why, now, can I Make, aye, create this fervid throbbing June Out of the chill, chill matter of my soul, Yet cannot make a poorest penny loaf Out of this same chill matter, no, not one For Mary though she starved upon my breast?" And then he fell upon his couch, and sobbed, And, late, just when his heart leaned o'er The very edge of breaking, fain to fall, God sent him sleep. Thus there is no doubt but that in the very depth of his soul he questioned God of the sharp and bitter contrast between his high aiming and the low, baffling circumstances that beat him persist- GOD IN THE WORLD 97 ently from his goal. It is worth while to repeat his own lines, for surely he is that catholic man who hath mightily won God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain. All the more heartening, therefore, is the quality of the faith and the optimism that throb in his message when we realize out of what experiences they came and how they were tested and steadied and disciplined. It is well to set here a prose- fragment of his to help us realize vividly how that, to whatever fixedness of faith he may have arrived, he arrived by the hard road of question ing the very ways of God. "In the lily, the sun set, the mountain, and the rosy hues of all life, it is easy," he says, "to trace God. But it is in the dust that goes up from the unending battle of things that we lose him. Forever through the ferocities of storms, the malice of never-glut ted oceans, the savagery of human wars, the in exorable barbarities of accident, of earthquake, and mysterious disease, one hears the voice of man crying, 'Where art, thou, my dear Lord and Master?'" Besides, it must not be forgotten that his faith and optimism came not of a temperament so essentially mystic that it yielded easily to a more or less blind pious musing on God and Providence, or from a cast of mind that blinked the intellectual 98 SIDNEY LANIER side of the spirit's quest to realize God in itself and to accept him in the ordering of human history and the general progress of the race. As we have seen, he had, to a remarkable degree, the modern passion of intellectual inquiry and an equally stubborn sense of the sheer facts of life. He hid himself in no land-locked, storm-protected haven of thought, but sought bravely to launch out into the tidal movement of the mystery and complexity of things; with wide, eager eyes for truth, dauntlessly he fared to find God for him self, and to discover him and his ways in the wild and confused tangle of modern conditions. Hence it is that the mere story of his life, the bare record of his thought, the final message of his poetry, all represent the inspiring struggle upward, through dark and devious ways, of a soul to the far, fair heights where God is Sun and King. All the more stimulating, therefore, we repeat, is the quality of his faith and optimism. For we know that he is of those who have come up into the light through much trial and tribulation; we know that he had his grim specters of the mind, and van quished them. How truly and sternly he set his inquiring face toward all that might enfeeble faith and blur and distort the vision as to the actual presence of God in the world may be seen in these verses from the poem to Bayard Taylor: GOD IN THE WORLD 99 The cross of love, the wrench of faith, the shame Of science that cannot prove proof is, the twist Of blame for praise and bitter praise for blame, The silly stake and tether round the wrist By fashion fixed, the virtue that doth claim The gains of vice, the lofty mark that's missed By all the mortal space 'twixt heaven and hell, The soul's sad growth o'er stationary friends Who hear us from our height not well, not well, The slant of accident, the sudden bends Of purpose tempered strong, the gambler's spell, The son's disgrace, the plan that e'er depends On other's plots, the tricks that passion plays (I loving you, you him, he none at all), The artist's pain to walk his blood-stained ways, A special soul, yet judged as general The endless grief of art, the sneer that slays, The war, the wound, the groan, the funeral pall Not into these, bright spirit, do we yearn To bring thee back, but oh, to be, to be Unbound of all these gyves, to stretch, to spurn The dark from off our dolorous lids, to see Our spark, Conjecture, blaze and sunwise burn, And suddenly to stand again by thee ! And thus the message of his song throughout is, he tried to see all, he trusted God, and was not afraid. This is the masterword out of the deeps of his soul; this is the clear, quiet harbor of faith in which the ship of his thought finally anchors after all the storms have beaten upon it and all the cross-currents have tried to shift it from its true course. VII THE GOSPEL OF LOVE WE have seen with what resolute courage Lanier faced the teasing problems of life, how that he blinked none of its ugly facts, nor shut his eyes to its confusing contradictions. We have found that he was no mere purist withrawing him self into a kind of moral hermitage, blind to life's sin and shame and wrong; nor was he wholly a mystical idealist, dreaming in a fair but shadowy world of pure and perfect beauty. He was rather, in a sense, with all his passion for the utter love liness of spiritual truth, a realist who, within his limitations, saw life steadily, and saw it whole. But, seeing it steadily and seeing it whole, he sought also to reconcile its contradictions, discover order in its apparent chaos, find a plan in its wild confusion, and resolve its discords into harmony. In it all he heard the voice of God and realized his presence. The truth thus revealed he an nounced with the ardor of a faith that was strong and an optimism that was unshaken. But the faith and the optimism that come even from a realized sense of God in the individual soul and in the larger life and plan of the world THE GOSPEL OF LOVE 101 do not of themselves quite satisfy. They do not wholly solve the problems of life. They may bring a kind of comfort to a sorely troubled soul, or simply hold it secure to its anchorage in the storms and cross-currents of circumstance. It is not enough that we shall merely realize God in the world. We shall go even further, and boldly assume to assert how he works, affirming by what law or laws of his we may best solve the problems of the world, or get closest to the purpose of the Divine Mind in carrying out his plans for the amelioration and progress of the race. In this attitude we are leaving the passive side of faith and becoming active agents in making the will of God prevail. Now, with Tennyson and Brown ing, Lanier found the one sure expression of the divine will to be in the law of love. In its appli cation all problems, if solved at all, were to be solved. Lanier, then, becomes one more beautiful apos tle of the gospel of love. We know that in his soul there was ever an unquenched yearning toward the highest things. Nothing seemed quite to daunt this passionate aspiration of his. Whatever he touched, if he did not adorn it, he made at least vital with an upward-tending energy. But this spiritual idealism never got far from his thought of love as the cure for all diseases, IO2 SIDNEY LANIER the balm for every ill, the reconciler of all contra dictions, and the perfect solvent of every dark problem. We know with what gracious and generous tenderness his heart took to itself all that was beautiful in nature and art, and all that was fair in human fellowship. In his intercourse with men, of both high and low degree, he loved and was lovable. And when he turned his deep est thought upon the world it was to pour out a nothing-withholding largess of affection, and to plead in love for love. To him, it is not knowl edge that the world needs, but love; not head, but heart. The time in which he lived was a period in which men where turning with an all-absorb ing zeal to the endeavor to know things, and the accumulation of facts was the chief intellectual goal. Cold, keen, analytical mind sat enthroned as lord over all, and heart, tender with love, was shut out of the house of life. It was a part of Lanier's mission as a poet to plead with generous ardor the cause of love, to call the time away from its worship of knowledge, and emancipate it from the tyranny of mind. Love, therefore, he would restore to all human relationships social, politi cal, commercial, and industrial. In this effort one finds his most dominant passion; with it his song is always warm and vital. If he saw God in nature and recognized him in the larger plan THE GOSPEL OF LOVE 103 of the world, if he felt that all was law, even more deeply he felt that all was love. Now let us draw from the poet his more or less definite and specific interpretation of his concep tion of love as applied to the problem of life. We begin with one of his very earliest poems, a poem written in 1862 in the midst of the blood shed and necessary horrors of war. The young poet saw in vision a tournament. It was a joust to the death between two gallant knights, Heart and Brain: Bright shone the lists, blue bent the skies, And the knights still hurried amain To the tournament under the ladies' eyes, Where the jousters were Heart and Brain. The one was a youth clad in "crimson and gold"; the other, Brain, "stood apart, steel-armored, dark and cold." It was a bitter, cruel combat in which both must suffer, as must always be the case when heart and brain, mind and love, are at war: They charged, they struck; both fell, both bled. Brain rose again, ungloved, Heart, dying, smiled and faintly said, " My love to my beloved! " This is the poet's quaintly beautiful and pa thetic protest against the unseemly strife then on between brothers. Though a soldier, gallant and true, he felt that the political theories born in 104 SIDNEY LANIER the minds of men had slain the very love of their hearts; and, wholly loyal in meeting his every duty as a patriotic son of his section, yet nothing could make war seem to him other than the overthrow of that love which should rule the world. This is the mood and attitude which he expresses elsewhere in prose: "The early spring of 1 86 1 brought to bloom, besides innumerable violets and jessamines, a strange, enormous, and terrible flower! This was the blood-red flower of war, which grows amid thunders; a flower whose freshening dews are blood and hot tears, whose shadow chills a land, whose odors strangle a people, whose giant petals droop downward, and whose roots are in hell. It is a. species of the great genus, sin-flower, which is so conspicuous in the flora of all ages and all countries, and whose multifarious leafage and fruitage so far overgrow a land that the violet, or love genus, has often small chance to show its quiet blue." His protest, therefore, is that it dwarfs or destroys the "love genus." Let us return to the little poem. Three years go by. The grim death-grapple of brothers is at an end, and the young soldier-poet, fresh from the pain and the bitterness of it, broken in health, facing the dread blackness of ruin and walking blindly in the devious paths of strange and unfa- THE GOSPEL OF LOVE 105 miliar conditions, sees yet another tournament. This time the two knights are Love and Hate. Hate spurs furiously on to meet his gentle antag onist. But Love's gray eyes glow with a heaven-heat, Love lifts his hand in a saintly prayer; Look! Hate hath fallen at his feet! Look! Hate hath vanished in the air! Then all the throng looked kind on all; Eyes yearned, lips kissed, dumb souls were freed; Two magic maids' hands lifted a pall And the dead knight, Heart, sprang on his steed. Then Love cried, "Break me his lance, each knight! Ye shall fight for blood-athirst Fame no more!" And the knights all doffed their mailed might And dealt out dole on dole to the poor. Then dove-flights sanctified the plain, And hawk and sparrow shared a nest. And the great sea opened and swallowed Pain, And out of this water-grave floated Rest! Thus in the beautiful conception of these two early companion-poems we have the keynote of much of Lanier's philosophy of life. What the sad old world most needed was Heart, not Head, and the balm of the sweet gospel of love. In this it should find its only healing. Out of this thought grows the poet's finest and noblest sing ing. His song is the very chant of love, reaching its climacteric note, as we shall see, in that love which the Christ himself brought. io6 SIDNEY LANIER We know with what all but ecstatic affection he loved the fair mute things of nature. He entered into fellowship with them as blood of their blood and spirit of their spirit. The float ing, far-off cloud he called "kinsman cloud"; he was "cousin" to the crimson clover blossoms bow ing in the soft summer breeze; the very leaves on the trees were taken to his heart as "friendly, sis terly, sweetheart leaves"; he begs the meadows to "speak" to him as to a "lover"; and he comes into the "gospeling glooms" of the live-oaks exclaiming, I have waked, I have come, my beloved! I might not abide: I have come ere the dawn, O beloved, my live-oaks, to hide In your gospeling glooms, to be As a lover in heaven, the marsh my marsh and the sea my sea. Thus his gospel .of love was wide enough and deep enough to take into its tender compass all of God's world. A cloud floating overhead, warm in the sunset's glow, becomes for him a kind of messenger of love, an Ariel to do his bidding of forgiveness : Over the humped and fishy sea, Over the Caliban sea, O cloud in the West, like a thought in the heart Of pardon, loose thy wing, and start, And do a grace for me. Over the huge and huddling sea, Over the Caliban sea, Bring hither my brother Antonio, Man, My injurer: night breaks the ban: Brother, I pardon thee. THE GOSPEL OF LOVE 107 When, in the "Psalm of the West," he essays to interpret the real significance of his own land, America, he sees freedom not only in law and in political and social relationships, but as the in spiring and nourishing atmosphere in which love shall live its largest life and do its greatest work. The crowning consummation of all the slow-won progress of the ages shall be that here, under the beneficent influence of love, binding men together at last into a bond of brotherhood, Science shall be known as the sense making love to the All, And Art be known as the soul making love to the All, And Love be known as the marriage of man with the All, Till Science to knowing the Highest shall lovingly turn, Till Art to loving the Highest shall consciously burn, Till Science to Art as a man to a woman shall yearn, Then morn! When Faith from the wedding of Knowing and Loving shall purely be born. Indeed, the very land itself is the final home of faith and love; out of these it was born, and for these in God's good providence it was conse crated. These constitute the blessed, precious cargo the Mayflower brought: Mayflower, Ship of Faith's best Hope! Thou art sure if all men grope; Mayflower, Ship of Hope's best Faith! All is true the great God saith; Mayflower, Ship of Charity! Love is Lord of land and sea. io8 SIDNEY LANIER Oh, with love and love's best care Thy large godly freightage bear Godly Hearts that, Grails of gold, Still the blood of Faith do hold. This is the poet's way of interpreting the found ing and mission of his country. Others may interpret it in terms of political equality and of a free play for social and industrial opportunity, and in these things may see its chief glory when com pared with other lands. But Lanier recognizes all this and more. To him the spiritual values of the American experiment appeal. It is above all lands the land where a man has a better chance to work out his largest destiny as a citizen and a worker, and express to the fullest possible degree the quality and quantity of his manhood. But best of all, it is the land of brothers, of faith, and of love. And these things give it its chief glory, and touch its progress and its future destiny with the radiance of the noblest idealism. Amer ica may not be what the poet dreams it is; tested by his thought, it may be a stupendous failure. Nevertheless, the beauty of his conception still abides at least as a revelation of his own fine visioning of what it ought to be, and a rebuke to any whose low-thoughted estimate leaves out of their idea of freedom the power of love and faith. Lanier would have us believe that here Love is Lord of land and sea. THE GOSPEL OF LOVE 109 Thus he saw his land lit with the light of the gospel of love and her institutions made noble and beautiful by its power. So largely was he himself possessed in his own life by this same power that he tested the value of everything by its presence or absence. Where love was not there could be neither sweetness nor light, but all discord and bitterness and darkness. The faith of his own heart centered in one woman, and their love became the symbol of the power of love everywhere to transform into the perfection of relationship all men and all human experience. It had the further virtue of so clarifying his thought of life that, in the dissolving light of love, if he could not quite understand its confu sions and contradictions, he could yet trust the God of love for the final perfecting of the imper fect and a clear reading of all the dark riddles. In this doubting age, for example, the heart, the home of love, tries to keep within the temple door, while the head is ever peering without, with its eyes ranging curiously up and down the time ("Acknowledgment") : Blinking at o'er-bright science, smit with desire To see and not to see. Hence, crime on crime. Yea, if the Christ (called thine) now paced yon street, Thy half ness hot with His rebuke would swell; Legions of scribes would rise and run and beat His fair intolerable Wholeness twice to hell. no SIDNEY LANIER But to it all the voice of love, and faith through love, replies: Nay (so, dear Heart, thou whisperest in my soul) , ' Tis a half time, yet Time will make it whole. Faith is yet subjected to a harder test, and love again brings the victory. God seems to rest silent "while Sin creeps grinning through His house of Time," and vice and crime stalk their grim, destroying way unhindered and unrebuked, and wholeness and perfection are found nowhere. Still, Somehow by thee, dear Love, I win content: Thy Perfect stops th' Imperfect's argument. And resting firmly in the faith which this love gives a love which is the shining type of the larger love of God the poet reaches the sure and fixed heights where he can sing: Not hardest Fortune's most unbounded stress Can blind my soul nor hurl it from on high, Possessing thee, the self of loftiness, And very light that Light discovers by. Howe'er thou turn'st, wrong Earth! still Love's in sight: For we are taller than the breadth of night. As one reads such a poem a poem in which love is not only the reconciler but also the power that lifts the soul to the larger divine love one wonders whether to any other American poet the love of one woman ever meant so much, ever so thoroughly spiritualized his emotions. Such a love THE GOSPEL OF LOVE in is polar in its remove from both the romantic sentimentalism of most poets and the more or less sensual worship of the eternally feminine of some poets. We must take it as one more expres sion of the essentially spiritual quality of Lanier's temperament and one more note in the spiritual message of his song. It becomes to the poet a symbol of the all-embacing, all-penetrating divine love, and anchors his thought of life steadily to faith amid the storm and stress and confusion of circumstance. In "My Springs*' one gets a nobly beautiful chanting of this mood of Lanier's : O Love, O Wife, thine eyes are they, My springs from out whose shining gray Issue the sweet celestial streams That feed my life's bright Lake of Dreams. Oval and large and passion-pure And gray and wise and honor-sure; Soft as a dying violet-breath Yet calmly unafraid of death; Thronged, like two dove-cotes of gray doves, With wife's and mother's and poor-folk's loves, And home-loves and high glory-loves And science-loves and story-loves, And loves for all that God and man In art and nature make or plan, And lady-loves for spidery lace And broideries and supple grace And diamonds and the whole sweet round Of littles that large life compound, And loves for God and God's bare truth, And loves for Magdalen and Ruth, H2 SIDNEY LANIER Dear eyes, dear eyes and rare complete Being heavenly-sweet and earthly-sweet, I marvel that God made you mine, For when He frowns, 'tis then ye shine! Yet with all the soaring strength of a faith impelled by love, if one were to seek to know just what definite form of creed the poet professed, into what pew of faith, so to speak, he might be set most comfortable, one would, perhaps, be offend ing his deepest thought of God and love. To him it seemed that formal hard and fast state ments of creed and dogma, which separated men into sects and schisms, were the products of the wars of unloving opinion and of the strifes of the analytical intellect. His spiritual visioning, see ing in love the power to dissolve all differences, swept these limitations swiftly away, and his heart refused its loyalty to the rule of mere opinion, as he conceived it, in matters of faith. Indeed, he keenly resents "prim creed's'* way of defining and measuring, of trying to reduce to a formula the high things of his thought and love. In "Remonstrance" he cries: Opinion, let me alone : I am not thine. Prim Creed, with categoric point, forbear To feature me my Lord by rule and line. Thou canst not measure Mistress Nature's hair, Not one sweet inch : nay, if thy sight is sharp, Would'st count the strings upon an angel's harp? Forbear, forbear. THE GOSPEL OF LOVE 113 Oh, let me love my Lord more fathom deep Than there is line to sound with : let me love My fellow not as men that mandates keep: Yea, all that's lovable, below, above, That let me love by heart, by heart, because (Free from the penal pressure of the laws) I find it fair. Further, opinion is the squinting shadow that darkens the banquet of love, and sunders men from sweet, brotherly, religious fellowship. It cruelly says that Religion hath blue eyes and yellow hair: She's Saxon, all, and the rest are shut out of the temple of faith; or else Religion hath black eyes and raven hair: Naught else is true, and one half the world knocks in vain at the temple doors. This is the way of opinion, all through history, ever dividing men into hostile sects, slaying love, and sending to stake and gibbet and cross the fairest and the best of the sons and daughters of time. Assassin! Thief! Opinion, 'tis thy work. By Church, by throne, by hearth, by every good That's in the Town of Time, I see thee lurk, And e'er some shadow stays where thou hast stood. Thou hand'st sweet Socrates his hemlock sour; Thou sav'st Barabbas in that hideous hour, And stabb'st the good SIDNEY LANIER Deliverer Christ; them rack'st the souls of men; Thou tossest girls to lions and boys to flames ; JThou hew'st Crusader down by Saracen; Thou buildest closets full of secret shames; Indifferent cruel, thou dost blow the blaze Round Ridley or Servetus; all thy days Smell scorched. So he would be let alone by this baseborn bigot Pretender to Judgment's throne, this cunning, false claimant of Those rights the true, true Son of Man doth own By Love's authority. Out of his heart rises the cry to be permitted to live his life in the larger freedom of love love for his kind, love for nature, love for all the dear things that have come from the hand of God, and unrestricted love for the Lord of Love himself: I would thou left'st me free, to live with love, And faith, that through the love of love doth find My Lord's dear presence in the stars above, The clods below, the flesh without, the mind Within, the bread, the tear, the smile. What more definite statement of the poet's passionate faith in the power of love might we ask ? His only impatience, his only anger, is against anything or anybody that would limit in any way its free course. Out of its deepest depths, steadied by its tender might, and illumi nated by its gracious radiance, rises Lanier's THE GOSPEL OF LOVE 115 faith in God faith in God in relation to his world and to the life of man and his final destiny. Under the leading of such a faith, love may go to the farthest limit. And what may be the miracu lous reach of its power is given imaginative treat ment in that curious allegory of "How Love Looked for Hell." In the poet's faith, Hell is the last stronghold which must yield to the irresistible might of Love. In this poem, therefore, we have Love's alleviating, transforming energy stretched to its last limit, and one feels that even Love can do no more. It is a fanciful, perhaps overwrought kind of allegory; yet the meaning is clear enough. Prince Love, the story runs, was fain to travel apace with those two ministers of Life, Mind and Sense. They are to be his guides along the way, and each would show him the strangest thing he desired to see. And Love would glimpse that, to him, most curious thing Hell, with its torture and torment and hideous horror of punish ment. This he had long heard of, but could not comprehend. So Sense takes him in charge, tell ing him that Hell was found by the Black River, overblown by cold, moldy winds, and crowded with "an endless wrack and rabble of souls," Their eyes upturned and begged and burned In brimstone lakes, and a Hand above Beat back the hands that upward yearned. n6 SIDNEY LANIER But nay, when Prince Love comes there the very magic of his presence has wrought a wonder: instead of the black, hideous river and rabble of tortured souls there is a living rill, banked with the rose and the lily, the violet and the fern, and For lakes of pain, yon pleasant plain Of woods and grass and yellow grain Doth ravish the soul and sense : And never a sigh beneath the sky, And folk that smile and gaze above. Thus love transmutes the pain and sorrow and suffering of even the senses into joy, and where love is there can be no hell. However, Minister Mind is nothing discour aged: he can show Love where Hell is. It is not without, he says, but lieth within the heart of man; it is discovered in the inner torture of the individual soul. Off yonder under the willow sits the murderer chained to the corpse of the enemy he has slain. There in the conscience- stricken breast you will find Hell, urges Minister Mind. So Love wanders thither, still a-seeking. But lo! again the magic of his power works a wonder. Instead of the slayer and the slain, by the gently hanging willow and the flowing stream two spirits walk in friendly, happy fellowship. Love, the reconciler of the bitterest hates, has been there, and Minister Mind "suffered shame" for his wrong report of what and where Hell was. THE GOSPEL OF LOVE 117 "Now strange," quoth Sense, and "Strange," quoth Mind, "We saw it, and yet 'tis hard to find, But we saw it," quoth Sense and Mind. But, under the poet's gospel, where Love is these things cannot be the Hell of hate and crime, of sin and remorse and torment. Love is the gra cious Prince, at whose healing touch these hideous moral diseases of both Mind and Sense are cured quite, and the tenderness and strength of spiritual health and happiness come as if by magic. But if through love he could find his way to the all-embracing, all-penetrating love of God; if by it he could bring man and nature into fellowship with himself; if looking with love's wistful eyes he could see a larger divine harmony beneath all the discords of human experience a harmony that somehow, at some time, a perfectly beneficent plan should cause to be realized in the ever- forward-moving destiny of man; if under love's tender healing the red scars of hate and strife should quite vanish and the cruel wars of opinion yield to the peace of God in which all worshipers might sit together in the same temple; if, in deed, through its miracle-working might even the thought of the torment of Hell that monstrous nightmare which haunts the consciences of men o and will not let them sleep in their sins will fade away, leaving not a memory behind if love will n8 SIDNEY LANIER do all this, it is the one cure for the diseases of present conditions, social, industrial, and political, and out of the heart of love only can the world be remade and the joy of life brought to the troubled sons of men. I/ It is in "The Symphony" that Lanier chants this superlative reach of the power of love. With all the fervor and high indignation of a prophet he indicts the cruelty, the brutality, and harsh unlovingness of the time the heartlessness of trade, its inhuman oppression of the poor, its ruthless slaying of tender, sweet human fellowship and service, its shutting man out from the healing influences of nature and the Temple of Art, and the shriveling and death, under its power, of the finer nobilities and lofty chivalries of life. But chiefly Trade, the new idol of the Times, greedy of material wealth and blindly careless of the souls of men, is the mighty force that works so much ill. All the instruments of the great or chestra in turn utter their protest against the bitter wrongs of trade, of industrial conditions, and the lust for gold, and chant the might of love as the one antidote for the time's disease. This is the appealing message of the violin, the flute, the horn, the hautboy, and their choral cry is: "O Trade! O Trade! would thou wert dead! The Time needs heart 'tis tired of head." . THE GOSPEL OF LOVE 119 In unison they take up the cause of the poor of the poor who stand Wedged by the pressing of Trade's hand Against an inward-opening door That pressure tightens evermore: They sigh a monstrous foul-air sigh For the outside leagues of liberty, Where Art, sweet lark, translates the sky. "In the same old year-long, drear-long way," they toil and moil in mill and mine; like beasts "they hunger and eat and die"; and we may say that all "the world's a sty," and "swinehood hath no remedy." But nay; under the prompting of love we hear the voice of the Lord of Love, in spite of Trade's preaching and practice, saying: "Men shall not live by bread alone, But all that cometh from the Throne." In this thought the problem is to be solved and the ills cured. The solution and the curing are not to be had so much from the wise in head as from the loving in heart: Vainly might Plato's brain revolve it: Plainly the heart of a child could solve it. We must heed the voice of the most loving of men he who said : "Never shalt thou the heavens see, Save as a little child thou be." And love, then, the poet repeats again and again, is the one thing needful, as he chants in winning I2O SIDNEY LANIER phrase the divinely approved conception that it is out of the heart that the issues of life are: Sweet friends, Man's love ascends To finer and diviner ends Than man's mere thought e'er comprehends. But it is to be the love that Christ himself brought, the love of which he is the source and pattern. He gave it its nature, its depth, and breadth when he said, "Love thy neighbor": Then first the bounds of neighborhood outspread Beyond all confines of old ethnic dread. Vainly the Jew might wag his covenant head : ''All men are neighbors,'" so the sweet Voice said. So, when man's arms had circled all men's race, The liberal compass of his warm embrace Stretched bigger yet in the dark bounds of space ; With hands a-grope he felt smooth Nature's grace, Drew her to breast and kissed her sweetheart face: Yea, man found neighbors in great hills and trees And streams and clouds and suns and birds and bees, And throbbed with neighbor-loves in loving these. And gloriously in the end all the mighty sym phony chants the power of this love, and all the clanging discords of life are hushed. If cruel wrong and oppression, if hate and inhuman unbrotherliness, are to disappear from the world of men, if even the hard, soulless materialism of trade is to be spiritualized, it must be through the presence of the Incarnate Love working in the heart of man. Hear, then, the symphonic har- THE GOSPEL OF LOVE 121 mony as all the instruments of divine melody blend together: Life! Life! thou sea-fugue, writ from east to west, Love, love alone can pore On thy dissolving score Of harsh half-phrasings, Blotted ere writ, And double erasings Of chords most fit. Yea, Love, sole music-master blest, May read thy weltering palimpsest. To follow Time's dying melodies through, And never to lose the old in the new, And ever to solve the discords true Love alone can do. 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. VIII THE CRYSTAL CHRIST Now, all this high passion of love must attach itself to a reality indeed, must grow out of a reality. This confident faith in its gracious yet irresistible power must root itself in the clear-seen vision of that power living and walking among men. It is not enough to think of God as the God of love, and to conceive of the law of life as the law of love; it is not enough to feel that the sad old earth needs heart, not head, to cure its ills its ills of politics, of trade, of society, of opinion, of wrong, of sin. All this may be but an application of intellectual ideas and spiritual ideals to human conditions, exceptionally beauti ful in themselves and illustrating the lofty aiming of the poet's thought and the pure spirituality of the poet's character. But he did not stop with this. He who saw the holiness of beauty saw also the beauty of holiness saw it in its perfect incar nation in the Christ himself. To him has the poet's thought and aspiration been leading; in him has his faith fixed itself; from him has pro ceeded his gospel of love. Lanier was of those who, turning from a faith "all vague and un- THE CRYSTAL CHRIST 123 sweet" because it centered nowhere, saw with unblurred eyes that the Word had flesh and dwelt and dwells among us, and we may see his glory. It was in the Love that passeth all un derstanding that his soul rested and his thought of God and man and nature found its chief com fort and satisfaction. The Christ, then, represented the consumma tion of Lanier's deepest religious thought, the highest reach of his spiritual aspiration, and even received the most generous response of his artis tic sensibility. But it should be insisted that this attitude of his was no mere mood of an artist, appreciating the unapproachable loveliness of Christ's matchless character. There have been those, smeared in the mire of vice and corroded with hideous sin, as Oscar Wilde, for example, whose keen sense of beauty has paid ecstatic tribute to the unflecked fairness of the perfect character of Jesus of Nazareth. With Lanier, we must believe, it is a far profounder emotion than an aesthetic response to the radiant beauty of unalloyed holiness. Of course, this is not to say that there was not something of this element in Lanier's worshipful look toward the Master's completely rounded goodness. Artist that he was, the poet must have caught much of the merely aesthetic significance of that flawless life, illus- 124 SIDNEY LANIER trating as it did the shining heights of moral attainment. Nevertheless, he gave to the Christ his tribute of adoration, worship, love, and this tribute was the outward expression of a faith securely anchored in the Incarnate Love. If, therefore, his attitude was naturally artistic, it was more truly, more essentially religious, or spiritual. The beauty, goodness, truth, wisdom, and love fleshed in Christ com pletely satisfied his own soul's passion for these high things of the moral life. It is in the poem entitled "The Crystal" that Lanier reveals the climax of his thought in an interpretation of Christ. At the hour of mid night, "truth's unlocking time," far within his spirit he hears the roll and The great soft rumble of the course of things. He calls the muster roll of all the great ones of earth companies of governor-spirits grave, Bards, and old bringers-down of flaming news From steep-wall'd heavens, holy malcontents, Sweet seers, and stellar visionaries, all That brood about the skies of poesy. Yet, after looking at each with loving eyes and a heart swift to pardon every fault, he finds not one But hath some heinous freckle of the flesh Upon his shining cheek, not one but winks THE CRYSTAL CHRIST 125 His ray, opaqued with intermittent mist Of defect; yea, you masters all must ask Some sweet forgiveness, which we leap to give, We lovers of you, heavenly-glad to meet Your largesse so with love, and interplight Your geniuses with our mortalities. Shakespeare, Homer, Socrates, Dante, Buddha, Milton, ^Eschylus, Lucretius, Caedmon, Aurelius, a Kempis, Langland, Emerson, Keats, Tenny son ye all have your little mole that marks You brother and your kinship seals to man. They each are of the fellowship of those who sin; they are human with all their inspired endow ment of genius. But here is One upon whose immaculateness there is no soil or fleck or stain. He stands apart in the perfect purity of his divine holiness. No need of pardon here; to his com plete goodness mind and heart and soul render their homage of worship : But Thee, but Thee, O sovereign Seer of time, But Thee, O poets' Poet, Wisdom's Tongue, But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love, O perfect life in perfect labor writ, O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest, What if or yet, what mole, what flaw, what lapse, What least defect or shadow of defect, What rumor, tattled by an enemy, Of inference loose, what lack of grace Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's, Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee, Jesus, good Paragon, thou Crystal Christ? IX THE MESSAGE IN this conception of the Crystal Christ we have come to the goal of the poet's faith, the finest spiritual note, perhaps, in all his singing, the noblest chanting of his credo, and the centering of his thought of the highest good and the largest love in Him who was the very Beauty of Holiness and the Love of Love. To this end have all the roads of his interpretation of life led him; from the light of the personality of the Christ gleams the radiance that has shone in the singularly beautiful character of the man and the utter spirituality of his message. This radiance noth ing was able to dim; it illuminated the dark places of his personal experience; by it he saw his way in the night of the time's unfaith; it was the polestar by which he guided his ship of life, beat upon by the stormy headwinds of untoward con ditions and all but twisted at times from its true course by the strong cross-currents of circum stance; and this, too, was the master truth of all his seeking. Thus in our search for the spiritual meaning of Lanier's message to the world we have found it 126 THE MESSAGE 127 in the purity of his soul, in the cheerful man liness and high nobility of his character, and in his knightly struggle against disease and condi tions that tended to hold him back and retard his development. Read from this standpoint alone, the story of his life is rich in the imperish able wealth of human virtue, and is a romance of character that touches with charm and even glory the history of American letters. It does more than this: the mere record of this man's life has also the inestimable value of transferring something of his own unbending yet winning morality to the character of those who thus come into vital contact with him and what he was. A precious possession, therefore, is the man Sidney Lanier in the history of American life, and it is good to think that this life has been able to grow such as he. Then, too, we shall gladly remind ourselves afresh, as a part of his spiritual message, not only of the beauty of his life and of the inspiring chivalry of his character, but also of his unfalter ing loyalty to his art and of his unshaken fidelity to ethical and spiritual ideals and principles as giving the real value to all art. Measured from a utilitarian standard, it may have been an unwise thing for our poet to have committed himself so unreservedly to the pursuit of mere beauty in the 128 SIDNEY LANIER realm of poetry and music. This would not bring food and raiment and shelter for wife and little ones. Still it was a great thing; all will agree that, the committal once made, this reli gious consecration of Lanier's to a faith in the power of music and poetry to make life sweeter and to direct men along the road that leads to God was an inspiringly noble thing, and as such is a contribution to the spiritual possessions of the race. But greater even than this: he sought with all the strength and ardor of his soul to hold in indissoluble wedlock beauty and morality, love liness of form and holiness of content. In an age when art was peering with pruriently curious gaze into the hidden sewers of human experience and character, and, without blinking its eyes or holding its nose, was uncovering the foulness and stench of a degenerate morality, excusing itself, withal, with the cry of art for art's sake, and the necessity of a scientific recording of life, it is a joy to the soul and a tonic to the whole moral nature to hear Lanier pleading for the holiness of beauty as well as for the beauty of holiness. At a time when the literature of the moral dissecting room and spiritual hospital was darkening the earth with the philosophy of spiritual disease and death, it is good to have Lanier's voice proclaim- THE MESSAGE 129 ing in verse and prose that that art is not only unwholesome, but that also it dies swiftly out of the memory of men, which has not before it the highest ethical ideals, and which is not informed through and through with spiritual values. For such ideals and such values winningly he pleaded, in season and out; and so long as these things shall be held precious among men, so long will they count the poet's interpretation among their spiritual treasures. Moreover, in an age of doubt and unfaith, in an age when the lamp of the spirit burned languid and low, when men found it hard to see God in the darkness and tangle and confusion of things, he at least kept his faith steady and sure, the light of his spirit suffered no dimness, and he saw God in the individual life and in the larger course of human history. His way of going was no blind, aimless groping in the starless night of pessimism. It led rather out into the broad, open path toward God the path lit by the love and light of the Divine Father's purpose and providence. As he walked it, if he did not always understand, through faith he could at least find his way and trust the larger Hope. It was God's world anyway through which he was journeying, and in this conviction he interpreted nature and art and human life in all its relationships. So his 130 SIDNEY LANIER poetry, whatever its value as a purely artistic product, is rich in nourishment for the soul because, indeed, it is the fair flower of a soul rooted in the eternal verities of faith. But he saw God not only as the Divine Mind shaping and directing the complicated forces of human life, individual and collective; he saw him also as the God of Love, and hence love as the one solvent for all problems. So the poet took to his own heart the fair and sweet nobilities of life and nature; under the wonder working power of love the ills of the world might vanish, its diseases be cured, its sorrows healed, and war and hate and cruel wrong disappear. In this sense, through the beautiful medium of his art, he becomes a valiant apostle of the gospel of love, calling men not only to repentance but also to the Crystal Christ he who was all holiness and all love. Finally, when there rises before us the fair chivalry of Lanier's life and character, his lofty conception of his art and its mission, his unwaver ing devotion and consecration to it, his fusing into it the noblest ethical ideals, the shining heights to which his faith led him, the sweet and winsome gospel of love which he would translate into all things, we have not even yet quite summed up the spiritual meaning of his message. We shall THE MESSAGE 131 be far from saying enough if we fail once again to bring before us the unflagging ardor of his aspira tion and the constant presence of an upward- tending energy that throbs in all he did and said and thought. He may not have expressed any profoundly great thoughts; he may have been far from creating any supremely great poem; as far as actual achievement is concerned he may have been but a thinker about art, a man of keen artistic temperament, and no artist. Yet, after all has been said and every allowance been made, no one who touches even superficially the man and his poetry can fail to feel the inspiring potency of the upward look that shines from Lanier's eyes. One knows that he lived for the best, strove for the best, and aspired to the best. He is no man of low degree, walking contentedly the commonplace paths along the mere levels of life. His face is toward the heights always, and the road he is on is an ascending one. And this impression of spiritual uplook and uplift, of the ever-aspiring energy of a soul seeking to realize the very truth of God, is that virtue in the spir itual message of Sidney Lanier upon which all the world will agree. He missed, no doubt, the perfect which he sought; but we are sure that his eye was ever set upon it, that it was ever present in his thought, that it ever disturbed his 132 SIDNEY LANIER spirit with its divine discontent. His hand, we know, was no "low-pulsed forthright craftsman's," and we know that his reach exceeded his grasp. As we think of his forward-striving manliness, of his unbending nobility of life and purpose, of his passionate love of all things fair and good, of his beautiful and lofty conception of his art and its mission, of his heartening faith in the God of Love as well as the God of Power, may we not, in conclusion, call him One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better f Sleep to wake? UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY This book is DUE on the last date stamped below i JAN 2 7 1950 'OCT 24 19W> REC'O IWLD NOY2 I960 PS 2213 Snyder - S67 Sidney Lanier. UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY JAW 1 7 1950 - i*IM IBM III II HIM UNI III || Mill HIM HI 1 1 III || III A A 000034499 4 PS 2213 S67