Sidney Lanier.
435 North Calvert Street,
Saturday evening.
Lanier's public lectures were largely attended. What has been said of the Peabody lectures applies to the University lectures. Of the effect produced by him in his smaller University classes, one of his students writes: —
"I think that it was in the winter of 1879-80 that I heard that Mr. Lanier was to conduct a class in English Literature at the Johns Hopkins University, where I was then a Fellow. My field of work was Aesthetics and the History of Art, and as I was eagerly searching for chances to broaden and deepen my ideas, I enrolled myself in the class. We were not many, and I have no recollection of individuals in the group. Neither can I distinctly recall either the topics taken up or the method followed, except that most of the hours consisted of extended readings by Mr. Lanier with all sorts of interjected remarks, often setting aside the reading altogether. That the course was a real source of intellectual profit to me I cannot doubt, but not in the form of definite information or systemized opinion. The benefit lay in a subtle expansion of the power of appreciation and an undefinable exaltation of the instincts of taste that I have since learned were more precious than any precise increments of cold knowledge.
"What I do remember vividly is the fact that often, almost regularly, I used to wait for Mr. Lanier after the class (which was held in the evening) and walk home with him a mile or so, sometimes walking up and down for a long time. On these occasions we doubtless talked of all manner of things. I was only a student trying to `find himself' in reference to the vast areas of thought. I was eager for sympathy and for inspiration. My life-work was still unchosen, but I was conscious of an intense drawing toward artistic topics — not much with the creative impulse of the artist, but rather with the analytic and rational desire of the student. I was beginning to have a profound sense of the interrelations of the fine arts with each other and of all of them with the movement of history. I wanted a chance to talk out what I was thinking and to get new lights and promptings. So in our slow strolls homeward I presume that I often babbled freely of my studies in architecture and music, and my inconsequent remarks often led Mr. Lanier to speak somewhat freely, too, of his speculations and fancies. I now recall with wonder how he put me on such a footing of equality that I often quite forgot the difference in age and experience between us and almost felt him to be a companion student. I now see that this was the sign of two notable traits, — the extreme native Southern courtesy that clothed him always in all his dealings with every one, and the essential youthfulness of his mind when moving among his favorite subjects. His was surely one of the finest of sympathies, delicate, sensitive, elastic, vital to the highest degree, the like of which is all too rare among men, though hardly described by the term `feminine'. In it breathed a genuine capacity for love in the most noble sense, for he was ready to identify himself with the interests of another, to etherealize and dignify what he thought he saw in them, and thus absolutely to transform them by the alchemy of his touch. And, the more I think of it, the more I recognize that his soul was incapable of aging. . . . This absolute freshness of heart and spirit seems to me to have been one of the highest notes of Mr. Lanier's genius. Here he was clearly allied to many a more famous poet or painter or musician."*
— * Letter to the author from Professor Waldo S. Pratt, now of Hartford Theological Seminary. —
Among American poets Lanier has the same place with regard to the teaching of English that Lowell and Longfellow have in the study of modern languages. There were, to be sure, some greater English scholars in this country during the seventies than Lanier was, just as there were more scientific students of modern languages in the time of Longfellow and Lowell. Professors Child of Harvard, Lounsbury of Yale, March of Lafayette, Corson of Cornell, and Price of Randolph-Macon College — afterwards of Columbia University — have a commanding place in the development of English teaching which has become such a marked feature of educational progress since, say, 1870. Throughout schools and colleges and universities English is now firmly established as perhaps the most important branch of study. It is to the credit of Lanier that before much had been done in this direction he saw the great need of such work. Indeed, as early as 1868, while examining the catalogue of a Southern university, he jotted down in his note-book a suggestion that the most serious defect in the curriculum was the lack of any English training. It is true that there had been from time immemorial chairs of belles lettres in institutions of learning, but the department had rather to do with things in general. Even where English was studied there was a tendency to use manuals of literature rather than the works of authors themselves; and there is now a tendency to use literature as the basis for philological work. Lanier's ideas strike one as singularly balanced and sane, suggesting a compromise between the warring camps of recent years.
By reason of Lanier's sympathy with the ideals of the University, and his influence over some few students, he has a permanent place in the history of Johns Hopkins. Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman wrote to President Gilman: "It is a fine thing that such an institution as your University should have its shrines — and among them that of its own poet, in a certain sense canonized, and with his most ideal memory a lasting part of its associations." The University has, indeed, kept the fame and the personality of Lanier fresh in its memory. As one enters McCoy Hall and notices the life-size portraits of the first president and the first members of the faculty, he misses the face of Lanier; but on entering Donavan Hall, just at the end of the main hallway, he finds himself in a room dedicated to the highest uses of poetry. There are pictures of men who have delivered lectures on the Percy Turnbull and Donavan foundations, manuscript letters of distinguished American poets and critics, and the bust of Lanier, whose spirit seems to dominate the surroundings. It is the best of the likenesses of the poet, and is the source of admiration to all visitors, as well as an inspiration to all who labor at Johns Hopkins. Those who were never thrilled by the lustre of his dark eyes or never heard the tones of his voice as he interpreted passages of great poetry, may find some satisfaction in such an image.
Chapter X. The New South
While Lanier was finding his place in the larger spheres of scholarship, of music, and of poetry, he constantly returned in thought and imagination to the South. Even after 1877, when he and his family became residents of Baltimore, his correspondence with his father and brother kept him in touch with that section. He continued to read Southern newspapers and to follow with interest Southern development. In his desk he kept a regular drawer for matters pertaining to the South. Both from his experience, which enabled him to enter with unusual sympathy into the life of the South, and from the larger point of view gained from his life in other sections, his observations on Southern life and literature are of special value. They show that he was not such a detached figure as has been frequently thought. He was of the South, and took delight in every evidence of her progress. He sometimes despaired of her future — so much so that he urged his brother to come to Baltimore in 1879. He had little patience with the prevailing type of political leader at the time when the Silver Bill was passed, so he wrote, June 8, 1879, to Clifford Lanier: —
"I cannot contemplate with any patience your stay in the South. In my soberest moments I can perceive no outlook for that land. Our representatives in Congress have acted with such consummate unwisdom that one may say we have no future there. Mr. —— and Mr. —— (as precious a pair of rascals as ever wrought upon the ignorance of a country) have disgusted all thoughtful men of whatever party; while the shuffling of our better men on the question of public honesty, their folly in allowing such people as Blaine and Conkling to taunt them into cheap hurlings back of defiance (as the silly Southern newspapers term it), their inconceivable mistake in permitting the stalwart Republicans to arrange all the issues of the campaign and to bring on the battle, not only whenever they want it, but on whatever ground they choose, instead of manfully holding before the people the real issues of the time, — the tariff, the prodigious abuses clustered about the capitol at Washington, the restriction of granting powers in Congress, the non-interference theory of government, — all these things have completely obscured the admitted good intentions of Morgan and Lamar and their fellows, and have entirely alienated the feelings of men who at first were quite won over to them. The present extra session has been from the beginning a piece of absurdity such as the world probably never saw before. Our men are such mere politicians, that they have never yet discovered — what the least thoughtful statesmanship ought to have perceived at the close of our war — that the belief in the sacredness and greatness of the American Union among the millions of the North and of the great Northwest is really the principle which conquered us. As soon as we invaded the North and arrayed this sentiment in arms against us, our swift destruction followed. But how soon they have forgotten Gettysburg! That the presence of United States troops at the polls is an abuse no sober man will deny; but to attempt to remedy it at this time, when the war is so lately over, when the North is naturally sensitive as to securing the hard-won results of it, when, consequently, every squeak of a penny whistle is easily interpreted into a rebel yell by the artful devices of Mr. Blaine and his crew, — this was simply to invade the North again as we did in '64. And we have met precisely another Gettysburg. The whole community is uneasy as to the silver bill and the illimitable folly of the greenbackers; business men anxiously await the adjournment of Congress, that they may be able to lay their plans with some sense of security against a complete reversal of monetary conditions by some silly legislation; and I do not believe that there is a quiet man in the Republic to whom the whole political caucus at Washington is not a shame and a sorrow.