Sidney Lanier

by Edwin Mims

There would come from such study a strengthening of English prose and a deepening of culture. He continues: —

"For the absence of this primal Anglicism from our modern system goes — as was said — to the very root of culture. The eternal and immeasurable significance of that individuality in thought which flows into idiom in speech becomes notably less recognized among us. We do not bring with us out of our childhood the fibre of idiomatic English which our fathers bequeathed to us. A boy's English is diluted before it has become strong enough for him to make up his mind clearly as to the true taste of it. Our literature needs Anglo-Saxon iron, — there is no ruddiness in its cheeks, and everywhere a clear lack of the red corpuscles."

Lanier was more thoroughly at home in the Elizabethan age, however. He reveled in its myriad-mindedness — its adventures and exploits, its chivalry and romance. The sonnets especially appealed to him, for they abounded in conceits. One of the striking characteristics that he noted in the leading men of that age was the union of strength and tenderness. "All this love-making was manly," he says. "It was then as it is now, that the bravest are the tenderest. . . . Stout and fine Walter Raleigh pushes over to America, quite as ready to sigh a sonnet as to plant a colony. Valorous Philip Sidney, who can write as dainty a sonnet as any lover of them all, can at the same time dazzle the stern eyes of warriors with deeds of manhood before Zuetphen and touch their hearts to pity and admiration as he offers the cup of water — himself being grievously wounded and in a rage of thirst — to the dying soldier whose necessity is greater than his. Men's minds in this time were employed with big questions; the old theory of the universe is just losing its long hold upon the intellect, and people are busy with all space, trying to apprehend the relation of their globe to the solar system. To all this ferment the desperate conflict of the Catholic religion with the new form of faith now coming in adds an element of stern strength; men are pondering not only the physical relation of the earth to the heavens, but the spiritual relation of the soul to heaven and hell. This is no dandy period."*

— * `Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. i, p. 168. —

"And if any one should say there is not time to read these poets," he says in a strain of excessive admiration, "I reply with vehemence that in any wise distribution of your moments, after you have read the Bible and Shakspere, you have no time to read anything until you have read these . . . old artists. They are so noble, so manful, so earnest; they have put into such perfect music that protective tenderness of the rugged man for the delicate woman which throbs all down the muscles of the man's life and turns every deed of strength into a deed of love; they have set the woman, as woman, upon such adorable heights of worship, and by that act have so immeasurably uplifted the whole plane upon which society moves; they have given to all earnest men and strong lovers such a dear ritual and litany of chivalric devotion; they have sung us such a high mass of constancy for our love; they have enlightened us with such celestial revelation of the possible Eden which the modern Adam and Eve may win back for themselves by faithful and generous affection; that — I speak it with reverence — they have made another religion of loyal love and have given us a second Bible of womanhood."*

— * `Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. i, p. 7. —

Following his study of the sonnet-writers of the Elizabethan age, comes a somewhat technical study of the pronunciation of Shakespeare's time — a restatement of Ellis's monumental work on that subject. His discussion of music in Shakespeare's time has already been noticed. He next tried to reproduce for his class the domestic life of the age, commenting in full on the sermons, the plays, the customs of the time. In order to give unity to this study, he sketches in a somewhat fanciful way the boyhood of Shakespeare in Stratford and his early manhood in London. The most important part of the lectures, however, is his discussion of the growth of Shakespeare's mind and art, a study made possible by recent publications of the New Shakespeare Society. Lanier never wrote any more vigorous or eloquent prose than these chapters, although it must be said that he makes too much of the dramatist's personality as revealed in his plays. Two passages are quoted to indicate in the first place the standpoint from which he studied the plays, and in the second place to show his conception of the moral height attained by Shakespeare as compared with contemporary dramatists: —

"The keenest scholarship, the freest discussion, the widest search for external evidence, the most careful checking of conclusions by the Metrical Tests one after another, have all been applied to establish this general succession in time of these three plays;* and it is not in the least necessary to commit ourselves to the exact years here given in order to feel sure that these three plays represent three perfectly distinct epochs, separated from each other by several years, in Shakspere's spiritual existence. . . .

— * The `Midsummer Night's Dream', `Hamlet', and `The Tempest'. —

"In short, the young eye already sees the twist and cross of life, but sees it as in a dream: and those of you who are old enough to look back upon your own young dream of life will recognize instantly that the dream is the only term which represents that unspeakable SEEING of things, without in the least REALIZING them, which brings about that the youth admits all we tell — we older ones — about life and the future, and, admitting it fully, nevertheless goes on right in the face of it to ACT just as if he knew nothing of it. In short, he sees as in a dream. It is the Dream Period. But here suddenly the dream is done, the real pinches the young dreamer and he awakes. This, too, is typical. Every man remembers the time in his own life, somewhere from near thirty to forty, when the actual oppositions of life came out before him and refused to be danced over and stared him grimly in the face: God or no God, faith or no faith, death or no death, honesty or policy, men good or men evil, the Church holy or the Church a fraud, life worth living or life not worth living, — this, I say, is the shock of the real, this is the Hamlet period in every man's life.