Lanier was released in March, 1865, and after incredible hardships succeeded in reaching his home in Macon more dead than alive to find his mother dying of consumption. The poet's tendency to the disease was congenital; the prison hardships and exposure had broken down his physical vigor; and two years later while teaching a small country school in Prattville, Alabama, as he was forced to do by the poverty of the South and his own lack of money or profession, hemorrhages from the lungs began, and the rest of his life, like Stevenson's under the same conditions, was a fight with tuberculosis, a perpetual changing from place to place that he might find some climate that would afford relief. With unparalleled heroism he fought off the disease for fifteen years, and under physical weakness that would have sent the average man to his bed and his grave he made himself recognized as the leading poetic voice of the new South, and one of the few poetic voices of his era.
His life divides itself into three periods: the first one his time of dreaming, as he himself styled it—his boyhood, ending with the call to arms in 1861; the second his period of storm and stress, his period of struggle and uncertainty and final adjustment, ending in 1873 with his determination to devote his life to music and poetry; and finally the seven or eight years in which eagerly and unremittingly, with failing health and long periods of total incapacity, he wrote all those books and poems for which he is now known.
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.