"And finally, — to finish this outline, — just as the man settles all these questions shocked upon him by the real, will be his Ideal Period. If he finds that the proper management of these grim oppositions of life is by goodness, by humility, by love, by the fatherly care of a Prospero for his daughter Miranda, by the human tenderness of a Prospero finding all his enemies in his power and forgiving their bitter injuries and practicing his art to right the wrongs of men and to bring all evil beginnings to happy issues, then his Ideal Period is fitly represented by this heavenly play, in which, as you recall its plot, you recognize all these elements. Shakspere has unquestionably emerged from the cold, paralyzing doubts of Hamlet into the human tenderness and perfect love and faith of `The Tempest', a faith which can look clearly upon all the wretched crimes and follies of the crew of time, and still be tender and loving and faithful. In short, he has learned to manage the Hamlet antagonisms, to adjust the moral oppositions, with the same artistic sense of proportion with which we saw him managing and adjusting the verse-oppositions and the figure-oppositions."*
— * `Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. ii, p. 260. —
"Surely the genius which in the heat and struggle of ideal creation has the enormous control and temperance to arrange and adjust in harmonious proportions all these aesthetic antagonisms of verse, surely that is the same genius which in the heat and battle of life will arrange the moral antagonisms with similar self-control and temperance. Surely there is a point of technic to which the merely clever artist may reach, but beyond which he may never go, for lack of moral insight; surely your Robert Greene, your Kit Marlowe, your Tom Nash, clever poets all, may write clever verses and arrange clever dramas; but if we look at their own flippant lives and pitiful deaths and their small ideals in their dramas, and compare them, technic for technic, life for life, morality for morality, with this majestic Shakspere, who starts in a dream, who presently encounters the real, who after a while conquers it to its proper place (for Shakspere, mind you, does not forget the real; he will not be a beggar nor a starveling; we have documents which show how he made money, how he bought land at Stratford; we have Richard Quincy's letter to `my lovveinge good frend and contreyman Mr. Wm. Shakspere, deliver thees,' asking the loan of thirty pounds `uppon Mr. Bushells and my securytee,' showing that Shakspere had money to lend), and finally turns it into the ideal in `The Tempest'; if we compare, I say, Greene, Marlowe, Nash, with Shakspere, surely the latter is a whole heaven above them in the music of his verse, as well as in the temperance and prudence of his life, as well also as in the superb height of his later moral ideals. Surely, in fine, there is a point of mere technic in art beyond which nothing but moral greatness can attain, because it is at this point that the moral range, the religious fervor, the true seership and prophethood of the poet, come in and lift him to higher views of all things."*
— * `Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. ii, p. 324. —
Lanier frequently indulged in little homilies, — "preachments" Thackeray would call them. They were lectures on life as well as on literature in its more technical sense. Two passages indicate a poet's feeling for nature, especially his love of trees: —
"But besides the phase of Nature-communion which we call physical science, there is the other, artistic phase. Day by day we find that the mystic influence of Nature on our human personality grows more intense and individual. Who can walk alone in your beautiful Druid Hill Park, among those dear and companionable oaks, without a certain sense of being in the midst of a sweet and noble company of friends? Who has not shivered, wandering among these trees, with a certain sense that the awful mysteries which the mother earth has brought with her out of the primal times are being sucked up through those tree-roots and poured upon us out of branch and leaf in vague showers of suggestions that have no words in any language? Who, in some day when life has seemed TOO bitter, when man has seemed too vile, when the world has seemed all old leather and brass, when some new twist of life has seemed to wrench the soul beyond all straightening, — who has not flown, at such a time, to the deep woods, and leaned against a tree, and felt his big arms outspread like the arms of the preacher that teaches and blesses, and slowly absorbed his large influences, and so recovered one's self as to one's fellow-men, and gained repose from the ministrations of the Oak and the Pine?"*
— * `Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. i, p. 72. —
"In the sweet old stories of ascetics who by living pure and simple lives in the woods came to understand the secrets of Nature, the conversation of trees, the talk of birds, do we not find but the shadows of this modern communion with Nature to keep ourselves simple and pure, to cultivate our moral sense up to that point of insight that we see all Nature alive with energy, that we hear the whole earth singing like a flock of birds, yet so that we remember Death with Mr. Darwin, so that nothing is any more commonplace, so that death has its place and life its place, so that even a hasty business walk along the street to pay a bill is a walk in fairyland amidst unutterable wonders as long as the sky is above and the trees in sight, — in other words, to be natural . . . natural in our art, natural in our dress, natural in our behavior, natural in our affections, — is not that a modern consummation of culture? For to him who rightly understands Nature she is even more than Ariel and Ceres to Prospero; she is more than a servant conquered like Caliban, to fetch wood for us: she is a friend and comforter; and to that man the cares of the world are but a fabulous `Midsummer Night's Dream', to smile at — he is ever in sight of the morning and in hand-reach of God."*
— * `Shakspere and His Forerunners', vol. i, p. 73. —
The lectures close, as they began, with an estimate of the value of the poet to the world and with a word of greeting to his audience: —