V
For Lanier was essentially an improvisatore. He left behind him no really finished work: he is a poet of magnificent fragments. He was too excited, too impetuous, to finish anything. Poetry was a thing of rhapsodic outbursts, of tiptoe glimpses: his eager jottings for poems made on the backs of envelopes, scraps of paper, anything that was at hand, fill a volume. He may be likened to a child in a meadow of daisies: he filled his hands, his arms, full of the marvelous things, then threw them aside to gather more and ever more. There was no time to arrange them, no time even to look at them twice. Ideas came in flocks; he lived in a tumult of emotion. His letters quiver with excitement as do those of no other American poet. "All day my soul hath been cutting swiftly into the great space of the subtle, unspeakable deep, driven by wind after wind of heavenly melody." "I cannot tell you with what eagerness I devoured Felix Holt." "My heart was all a-cry." "The fury of creation is on me to-day." "Lying in the music-waters, I floated and flowed, my soul utterly bent and prostrate." "The very inner spirit and essence of all wind-songs, bird-songs, passion-songs, folk-songs, country-songs, sex-songs, soul-songs, and body-songs hath blown me in quick gusts like the breath of passion and sailed me into a sea of vast dreams." One may quote interminably.
Hamerik's characterization of his flute-playing may be taken as the key to all his work: "The artist felt in his performance the superiority of the momentary inspiration to all the rules and shifts of mere technical scholarship." It explains the unevenness of his work and its lack of finish. He had no patience to return to a poem and labor upon it. Other and more rapturous melodies were calling to him. It explains his lack of constructive power: inspiration is a thing of rapturous glimpses, not of long, patient coördinating effort. His poems are chaotic in structure even to the point often of obscurity. "Corn," for example, was intended to be a poem with a message, and that message doubtless the superiority of corn over cotton as a crop for the new South. But half the poem has only the vaguest connection with the subject. One-third of it outlines the duties and privileges of the poet soul. The message is not brought home: one has to labor to find it. There is a succession of beautiful images expressed often with rare melody and distinction, but inconsecutive even to vagueness.
His prose has the same characteristics. The lectures on the English novel seem like the first draft of work rather than like a finished product. He changes his plan as he proceeds. It was to be a study of the novel as a literary form, but as he progresses he changes it into a study of the development of personality in literature, and finally ends it by devoting half his total space to a rhapsody upon George Eliot. The Science of English Verse has the same faults. He rides a pet theory through chapters and dismisses really basic principles with a paragraph. It is a book of magnificent, even at times of inspired sections, but as a complete treatise it has no great value. The same may be said of all his prose work: he had flashes of inspiration but no consecutive message. The cause for it was partly pathological, partly temperamental. He was first of all a musician, a genius, an improvisatore.
That his conception of the poet's office was a broader and saner and more modern one than that of most of his contemporaries was undoubtedly true. In "Corn" he addresses thus the stalk that stands high above its fellows:
Still shalt thou type the poet-soul sublime
That leads the vanward of his timid time
And sings up cowards with commanding rime—
Soul calm, like thee, yet fain, like thee, to grow
By double increment, above, below;
Soul homely, as thou art, yet rich in grace like thee,
Teaching the yeomen selfless chivalry.
The poet then is not to be a mere dreamer of beauty, a dweller in the clouds apart from the men of his time. He is to stand squarely on the earth:
Thou lift'st more stature than a mortal man's,
Yet ever piercest downward in the mold
And keepest hold
Upon the reverend and steadfast earth
That gave thee birth.
But despite his conception of the poet's office, Lanier himself is not often a leader and a prophet. He had ceased to be Georgia-minded and he had felt the national thrill that was making a new America, but it was not his to be the strong voice of the new era. "The Psalm of the West," which casts into poetic form certain vital episodes of American history, has no message. One searches it in vain for any interpretation of the soul of the great republic, or any forecasting of the future years, or any passages expressing what America is to stand for among the nations. It is a fragment, the introduction to what should have been the poem.
In "The Symphony" more than elsewhere, perhaps, he is the poet of his period. The poem is a cry against the materialism that Lanier felt was crushing the higher things out of American life:
"O Trade! O, Trade! Would thou wert dead!
The Time needs heart—'t is tired of head:
We're all for love," the violins said.
Each instrument in the orchestra joins in the argument. "A velvet flute note" followed the passion of the violins, the reeds whispered, "the bold straightforward horn" spoke out,
And then the hautboy played and smiled
And sang like any large-eyed child.
The solution of the problem was the same that Shelley had brought. Love alone could master the evils of the time:
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.
And love was to come through music:
Music is love in search of a word.
The poem is indeed a symphony. One feels that the poet is composing rather than writing, that he is thinking in terms of orchestration, balancing parts and instruments, and working out tone values. The same is true of "The Marshes of Glynn" and "Sunrise": they are symphonies.
One must appreciate fully this musical basis of Lanier's art if one is to understand him. He thought in musical forms. The best illustration, perhaps, may be found in his Centennial Cantata. To the average man the poem meant little. One must read it and reread it and study it if one is to get any consecutive thought from it. But read after Lanier's explanation, it becomes not only clear but illuminating:
The principal matter over which the United States can legitimately exult is its present existence as a Republic, in spite of so much opposition from Nature and from man. I therefore made the refrain of the song—about which all its train of thought moves—concern itself wholly with the Fact of existence: the waves cry "It shall not be"; the powers of nature cry "It shall not be"; the wars, etc., utter the same cry. This Refrain is the key to the whole poem.
A knowledge of the inability of music to represent any shades of meaning save those which are very intense, and very highly and sharply contrasted, led me to divide the poem into the eight paragraphs or movements which it presents, and make these vividly opposed to each other in sentiment. Thus the first movement is reflection, measured and sober: this suddenly changes into the agitato of the second: this agitato, culminating in the unison shout "No! It shall not be," yields in the third movement to the pianissimo and meager effect of the skeleton voices from Jamestown, etc.: this pianissimo in the fourth movement is turned into a climax of the wars of armies and of faiths, again ending in the shout, "No!" etc.: the fifth movement opposes this with a whispered chorus—Huguenots whispering Yea, etc.: the sixth opposes again with loud exultation, "Now praise," etc.: the seventh opposes this with the single voice singing the Angels' song; and the last concludes the series of contrasts with a broad full chorus of measured and firm sentiment.
The metrical forms were selected purely with reference to their descriptive nature: the four trochaic feet of the opening strophe measure off reflection, the next (Mayflower) strophe swings and yaws like a ship, the next I made outre and bizarre and bony simply by the device of interposing the line of two and a half trochees amongst the four trochee lines: the swift action of the Huguenot strophe of course required dactyls: and having thus kept the first part of the poem (which describes the time before we were a real nation) in meters which are as it were exotic to our tongue, I now fall into the iambic meter—which is the genius of English words—as soon as the Nation becomes secure and firm.
My business as member of the orchestra for three years having caused me to sit immediately in front of the bassoons, I had often been struck with the possibility of producing the ghostly effects of that part of the bassoon register so well known to students of Berlioz and Meyerbeer—by the use of the syllable ee sung by a chorus. With this view I filled the ghostly Jamestown stanza with ee's and would have put in more if I could have found them appropriate to the sense.[128]
No one can read this without thinking of Poe's "Philosophy of Composition." It explains much of Lanier's work.