III
Lanier's work more than that of any other writer of his time illustrates the difference between the mid-century literature and that of the later national period. He is distinctively a transition figure: he heard both voices and he obeyed both. Until after the war he was what Hayne and Timrod had been, and Taylor and Stoddard—a disciple of Keats, a poet of merely sensuous beauty. But for the war he would have been a Longfellow bringing from Germany Hyperions and Voices of the Night. The four vital years in the camps, on the blockade runner, in the military prison, with their close contact with life in its elemental conditions, was a university course far different from any that he had dreamed of in his college days. It was this that differentiates him from Hayne and Timrod and that brings him into our period.
Tiger Lilies, his first published book (1867), is a document not only in the life of Lanier but also in the transition period of the sixties. It is a crude first novel full of a strange mixture of weakness and strength. It has been likened to Longfellow's Hyperion, but the likeness extends no further than this: Tiger Lilies is the novel transitional to the seventies as Hyperion was transitional to the romantic thirties and forties. In parts it belongs completely to the older period. It opens with this outburst, not by Paul Fleming, but by Paul Rübetsahl:
"Himmel! Cospetto! Cielo! May our nests be built on the strongest and leafiest bough of the great tree Ygdrasil! May they be lined with love, soft and warm, and may the storms be kind to them: Amen and Amen!" said Paul Rübetsahl.
The first part is florid in the extreme and artificial, full of literary affectations and conceits:
On the last day of September, 1860, huntsman Dawn leapt out of the East, quickly ran to earth that old fox, Night, and sat down on the top of Smoky Mountain to draw breath, etc.
Its discussions of poetry, of music, of the meaning of art and of life generally are all in the dream-world of German romance, and its chaotic plot and its impossible characters and happenings are in full keeping. But with part two the book comes suddenly to life. The hero enters the war and all at once there is realism, passages like this as graphic even as Whitman:
The wounded increase. Here is a musket in the road: there is the languid hand that dropped it, pressing its fingers over a blue edged wound in the breast. Weary pressure, and vain—the blood flows steadily.
More muskets, cartridge-boxes, belts, greasy haversacks, strew the ground.
Here come the stretcher-bearers. They leave a dripping line of blood. "Walk easy as you kin, boys," comes from the blanket which the men are carrying by the corners. Easy walking is desirable when each step of your four carriers spurts out the blood afresh or grates the rough edges of a shot bone in your leg.
The sound of a thousand voices, eager, hoarse, fierce, all speaking together yet differently, comes through the leaves of the undergrowth. A strange multitudinous noise accompanies it—a noise like the tremendous sibilation of a mile-long wave just before it breaks. It is the shuffling of two thousand feet as they march over dead leaves.
The novel is laid in the Tennessee Mountains in the same region that was to figure a decade later in the stories of Charles Egbert Craddock. The Great Smoky Mountains and Chilhowee Mountain—familiar names now—form the background, but the author puts no individuality into the landscape. It might be Germany. His mountaineers, however, are alive and they are sharply characterized. Gorm Smallin and his brother Cain are among the earliest figures in that vast gallery of realistically portrayed local types that soon was to figure so prominently in American literature. The chapter that records the desertion of Gorm and his arraignment by his brother Cain is worthy of standing with the best work of Charles Egbert Craddock or Octave Thanet. The prison scenes, drawn from the author's own first-hand experience, are documents in the history of the war. On every line is the stamp of reality. Here is a bivouac scene:
Cain Smallin sat, stiff backed upon the ground, sternly regarding his packed circle of biscuits in the skillet.
"How do they come on, Cain? Most done?"...
"Bully! Brownin' a little some of 'em. 'Bout ten minutes yit."
At that moment a shell that has buried itself in the ground explodes in the midst of the group, literally burying the party and scattering havoc. Cain Smallin, unhurt, digs himself from the ruins and scrapes the dirt from his face.
"Boys," said he, in a broken voice of indignant but mournful inquiry, "have any of ye seed the skillet?"
In the words of its preface, the book was a cry, "a faint cry, sent from a region where there are few artists, to happier lands who own many; calling on these last for more sunshine and less night in their art.... There are those even here in the South who still love beautiful things with sincere passion."
But necessity was upon the young dreamer. He was without a profession, and he had married a wife. There was no refuge but his father's profession, which always had been the last as well as the first resort of young Southerners. His father's law firm was glad to employ him, though it could offer but meager compensation. No more novels, no more dreams of the scholar's life, of Heidelberg, and poetry. Until 1873 he was busy, like Cable during the same period, with his conveyances and his bills of sale. The ambitious plan of a long poem of medieval France, "The Jacquerie," he kept in his desk, a beautiful dream that often he returned to. He wrote exquisite little songs for it:
May the maiden,
Violet-laden
Out of the violet sea,
Comes and hovers
Over lovers,
Over thee, Marie, and me,
Over me and thee.
His poetic experiments of this period one may find at the back of the definitive edition of his work. With Timrod and Hayne he was still dreamy and imaginative, more prone to look at the beautiful than at the harsher realities of humanity, yet even as he was dreaming over his "Jacquerie" he was not oblivious to the problems of his own time. He wrote dialect poems: "Jones's Private Argument," "Thar's More in the Man than Thar Is in the Land," "Nine from Eight," and the like, and published them in Southern papers. They deal with the Georgia "Crackers" and with the social and financial conditions of the times, and they were written in 1868, two years before the Pike County balladry. In 1875 with his brother Clifford he published in Scribner's Monthly "The Power of Prayer; or, the First Steamboat up the Alabama," a negro dialect poem adapted undoubtedly from a similar episode recounted in Mark Twain's The Gilded Age, yet original in tone and realistically true. Had it been unsigned we should attribute it without hesitation to Irwin Russell, who by many is believed to have been the first to discover the literary possibilities of the negro, at least in the field of poetic balladry. How like Russell is a stanza like this:
It 'pear to me dis mornin' I kin smell de fust o' June.
I 'clar', I b'lieve dat mockin'-bird could play de fiddle soon!
Dem yonder town-bells sounds like dey was ringin' in de moon.
But Russell's first poem, "Uncle Cap Interviewed," appeared in Scribner's almost a year later. The Lanier brothers contributed to the magazine at least one more dialect poem, "Uncle Jim's Baptist Revival Hymn," a product as realistically true to the negro as anything written later by Harris or Page:
Sin's rooster's crowed, Ole Mahster's riz,
De sleepin'-time is pas';
Wake up dem lazy Baptissis,
Chorus. Dey's mightily in de grass, grass,
Dey's mightily in de grass.
De Meth'dis team's done hitched; O fool,
De day's a-breakin' fas';
Gear up dat lean old Baptis' mule,
Dey's mightily in de grass, grass,
Dey's mightily in de grass. Etc.
Lanier was a pioneer in a rich field.