During the winter of 1873-74, the first winter in Baltimore, Lanier had, as has been seen, given his entire time to music. The only poetry he had written had been inspired by love for his absent wife, -- poems breathing of the deepest and tenderest affection. Scarcely less poetical were the letters written to her giving expression to his joy in the large new world into which he was entering, and at the same time to his sense of loneliness and pain at their separation. To her and his boys he went as soon as his engagement with the Peabody Orchestra was ended. In one of his letters he had spoken of himself as "an exile from his dear Land, which is always the land where my loved ones are." He found delight during this summer, as in the following ones, in the renewal of home ties, and in the enjoyment of the natural scenery of Macon and Brunswick, to whose beauty he never ceased to be sensitive.
It was in August, 1874, that he received a fresh impulse towards poetry, or, at least, towards the writing of more important poems than those he had heretofore written. While visiting at Sunnyside, Georgia, some sixty miles from Macon, he was struck at once with the beauty of cornfields and the pathos of deserted farms. Hence arose his first poem that attracted attention throughout the country. He took it to New York with him in the fall. Writing to his friend, Judge Logan E. Bleckley, now Chief Justice of Georgia, who during this summer spoke encouraging words to him about the faith he had in his literary future, he inclosed his recently finished poem with these words: --
195 Dean St., Brooklyn, N.Y.
October 9, 1874.
My dear Sir, -- I could never tell you how sincerely grateful I am to you, and shall always be, for a few words you spoke to me recently.
Such encouragement would have been pleasant at any time, but this happened to come just at a critical moment when, although I had succeeded in making up my mind finally and decisively as to my own career, I was yet faint from a desperate struggle with certain untoward circumstances which it would not become me to detail.
Did you ever lie for a whole day after being wounded, and then have water brought you? If so, you will know how your words came to me.
I inclose the manuscript of a poem in which I have endeavored to carry some very prosaic matters up to a loftier plane. I have been struck with alarm in seeing the number of old, deserted homesteads and gullied hills in the older counties of Georgia; and though they are dreadfully commonplace, I have thought they are surely mournful enough to be poetic. Please give me your judgment on my effort, WITHOUT RESERVE; for if you should say you do not like it, the only effect on me will be to make me write one that you do like.
Believe me always your friend,
Sidney Lanier.
The answer to this letter, giving a detailed criticism of the poem, was very helpful to Lanier. Judge Bleckley is a man of much cultivation, and is widely known throughout Georgia as at once one of the leading lawyers of the State and a man who can in his leisure moments engage in literary work which, though not published, gives evidence of imagination and taste. Lanier was wise enough to accept most of his criticism: the revised form of the poem compared with the first form shows a great many changes, and is striking evidence of Lanier's power to improve his work. Judge Bleckley's characterization of "Corn" so accurately describes it that his words may be quoted here: "It presents four pictures; three of them landscapes and one a portrait. You paint the woods, a cornfield, and a worn-out hill. These are your landscapes. And your portrait is the likeness of an anxious, unthrifty cotton-planter, who always spends his crop before he has made it, borrows on heavy interest to carry himself over from year to year, wears out his land, meets at last with utter ruin, and migrates to the West. Your second landscape is turned into a vegetable person [the cornstalk is Lanier's symbol of the poet], and you give its poetry with many touches of marvel and mystery in vegetable life. Your third landscape takes for an instant the form and tragic state of King Lear; you thus make it seize on our sympathies as if it were a real person, and you then restore it to the inanimate, and contemplate its possible beneficence in the distant future."*
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* Quoted in Callaway's `Select Poems of Lanier', p. 61.
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The poem was published in "Lippincott's Magazine", February, 1875, and at once attracted the attention of some discriminating readers of magazines, notably Mr. Gibson Peacock, the editor of the Philadelphia "Evening Bulletin", who reviewed it in a most sympathetic manner, and became one of the poet's best friends during the remainder of his life. It is noteworthy that the scenery of the poem should be so distinctively and realistically Southern. There is in the first part all of Lanier's love of the Southern forest: the shimmering forms in the woods, the leaves, the subtlety of mighty tenderness in the embracing boughs, the long muscadines, the mosses, ferns, and flowers, are all delicately felt and described -- with a suggestion of Keats. As he wanders from this forest to the zigzag-cornered fence, his fieldward-faring eyes take in the beauty of the cornfield, "the heaven of blue inwoven with a heaven of green." One tall corn captain becomes to his mind the symbol of the poet-soul sublime, who takes from all that he may give to all. The picture of the thriftless and negligent Southern farmer, "a gamester's cat'spaw and a banker's slave," shows Lanier's keen insight into Southern conditions, which he had, while living in Macon, studied with much care and which he now lifted into the realm of poetry. The red hills of Georgia, deserted and barren, are presented with true pathos. Nevertheless, like a genuine prophet, the poet looks forward to a better day: -–
Yet shall the great God turn thy fate,
And bring thee back into thy monarch state
And majesty immaculate.
Lo, through hot waverings of the August morn,
Thou givest from thy vasty sides forlorn
Visions of golden treasuries of corn --
Ripe largesse lingering for some bolder heart
That manfully shall take thy part,
And tend thee,
And defend thee,
With antique sinew and with modern art.
This vision of the South's restored agriculture was one that remained with Lanier to the end. He did not properly appreciate the development of manufacturing in the South, but he believed that the redemption of the country would come through the development of agriculture -- not the restoration of the large plantations of the old regime, but the large number of small farms with diversified products. On a later visit to the South he exclaimed to his brother, "My countrymen, why plant ye not the vineyards of the Lord?" and later he wrote in his essay on the "New South" of the actual fulfillment of his prophecy in "Corn".
Encouraged by the success of "Corn", Lanier, while giving a large part of his time to music during the winter of 1874-75, looked more and more in the direction of poetry. He writes again to Judge Bleckley, November 15, 1874: "Your encouraging words give me at once strength and pleasure. I hope hard and work hard to do something worthy of them some day. My head and my heart are both so full of poems which the dreadful struggle for bread does not give me time to put on paper, that I am often driven to headache and heartache purely for want of an hour or two to hold a pen." He then proceeds to outline what is to be his first `magnum opus', "a long poem, founded on that strange uprising in the middle of the fourteenth century in France, called `The Jacquerie'. It was the first time that the big hungers of THE PEOPLE appear in our modern civilization; and it is full of significance. The peasants learned from the merchant potentates of Flanders that a man who could not be a lord by birth, might be one by wealth; and so Trade arose, and overthrew Chivalry. Trade has now had possession of the civilized world for four hundred years: it controls all things, it interprets the Bible, it guides our national and almost all our individual life with its maxims; and its oppressions upon the moral existence of man have come to be ten thousand times more grievous than the worst tyrannies of the Feudal System ever were. Thus in the reversals of time, it is NOW the GENTLEMAN who must rise and overthrow Trade. That chivalry which every man has, in some degree, in his heart; which does not depend upon birth, but which is a revelation from God of justice, of fair dealing, of scorn of mean advantages; which contemns the selling of stock which one KNOWS is going to fall, to a man who BELIEVES it is going to rise, as much as it would contemn any other form of rascality or of injustice or of meanness -- it is this which must in these latter days organize its insurrections and burn up every one of the cunning moral castles from which Trade sends out its forays upon the conscience of modern society. -- This is about the plan which is to run through my book: though I conceal it under the form of a pure novel."*
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* Quoted in part in Callaway's `Select Poems of Lanier', p. 65.
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Lanier never finished this poem, but he was soon hard at work on another which was based on the same idea, "The Symphony". Writing to his newly acquired friend, Mr. Peacock, March 24, 1875, he says: "About four days ago, a certain poem which I had vaguely ruminated for a week before took hold of me like a real James River ague, and I have been in a mortal shake with the same, day and night, ever since. I call it `The Symphony': I personify each instrument in the orchestra, and make them discuss various deep social questions of the times, in the progress of the music. It is now nearly finished; and I shall be rejoiced thereat, for it verily racks all the bones of my spirit." The poem was published in "Lippincott's Magazine", June, 1875; and besides confirming the good opinion of Mr. Peacock, won the praise of Bayard Taylor, George H. Calvert, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Charlotte Cushman, and was copied in full in Dwight's "Journal of Music".
As in his first poem Lanier had pointed out a defect in Southern life, so in his second long poem he struck at one of the evils of national life. In the South he felt that there was not enough of the spirit of industry; looking at the nation as a whole, however, he exclaims: -
"O Trade! O Trade! would thou wert dead!
The time needs heart -- 't is tired of head:
We are all for love," the violins said.
The germ of this poem is found perhaps in a letter written from Wheeling, West Virginia, where he went with some of his fellow musicians to give a concert, April 16, 1874. It is a realistic picture of a city completely dominated by factory life. What he afterwards called "the hell-colored smoke of the factories" created within him a feeling of righteous indignation akin to that of Ruskin, although it must be said in justice to Lanier that, in combating the evils of industrial life, he never went to the extreme of eccentric passion displayed by the English writer. Nor, on the other hand, could he say with Walt Whitman: "I hail with joy the oceanic, variegated, intense practical energy, the demand for facts, even the business materialism, of the current age. . . . I perceive clearly that the extreme business energy and this almost maniacal appetite for wealth prevalent in the United States are parts of a melioration and progress, indispensably needed to prepare the very results I demand."
Lanier's poem is more applicable to the conditions that prevail to-day than to those of his own time. He shows himself a prophet, the truth of whose words is realized by many of the finer minds of the country. He lets the various instruments of the orchestra utter their protest against the evils of modern trade. The violin, speaking for the poor who stand wedged by the pressing of trade's hand and "weave in the mills and heave in the kilns," protests against the spirit of competition that says even when human life is involved, "Trade is only war grown miserly."
Alas, for the poor to have some part
In yon sweet living lands of art.
Then the flute -- Lanier's own flute, summing up the voices of nature, "all fair forms, and sounds, and lights" -- echoes the words of the Master, "All men are neighbors." Trade, the king of the modern days, will not allow the poor a glimpse of "the outside hills of liberty". The clarionet is the voice of a lady who speaks of the merchandise of love and yearns for the old days of chivalry before trade had withered up love's sinewy prime: --
If men loved larger, larger were our lives;
And wooed they nobler, won they nobler wives.
To her the bold, straightforward horn answers, "like any knight in knighthood's morn." He would bring back the age of chivalry, when there would be "contempts of mean-got gain and hates of inward stain." He voices, too, the idea long ago expressed by Milton that men should be as pure as women: --
Shall woman scorch for a single sin,
That her betrayer may revel in,
And she be burnt, and he but grin
When that the flames begin,
Fair lady?
Shall ne'er prevail the woman's plea,
`We maids would far, far whiter be
If that our eyes might sometimes see
Men maids in purity.'
Then the hautboy sings, "like any large-eyed child," calling for simplicity and naturalness in this modern life. And all join at the last in a triumphant chant of the power of love to heal all the ills of life: --
And ever Love hears the poor-folks' crying,
And ever Love hears the women's sighing,
And ever sweet knighthood's death-defying,
And ever wise childhood's deep implying,
But never a trader's glozing and lying.
And yet shall Love himself be heard,
Though long deferred, though long deferred:
O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred:
Music is Love in search of a word.
By this time Lanier was hard at work for the publishers. Although he never lost his love for music -- he could not -- he began to see that his must be a literary career. In a letter of March 20, 1876, he says to Judge Bleckley that he has had a year of frightful overwork. "I have been working at such a rate as, if I could keep it up, would soon make me the proverb of fecundity that Lope de Vega now is." He refers to the India papers written for "Lippincott's". "The collection of the multitudinous particulars involved in them cost me such a world of labor among the libraries of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore as would take a long time to describe. . . . In addition to these I have written a number of papers not yet published, and a dozen small poems which have appeared here and there.
"Now, I don't work for bread; in truth, I suppose that any man who, after many days and nights of tribulation and bloody sweat, has finally emerged from all doubt into the quiet and yet joyful activity of one who KNOWS exactly what his Great Passion is and what his God desires him to do, will straightway lose all anxiety as to what he is working FOR, in the simple glory of doing that which lies immediately before him. As for me, life has resolved simply into a time during which I must get upon paper as many as possible of the poems with which my heart is stuffed like a schoolboy's pocket." He quotes from "that simple and powerful sonnet of dear old William Drummond of Hawthornden": --
Know what I list, this all cannot me move,
But that, O me! -- I both must write and love.
He had to give much of his time, however, to hack work. During the summer of 1875 he was engaged in writing a book on Florida for the Lippincotts. It is, as he wrote to Paul Hamilton Hayne, "a sort of spiritualized guide-book" to a section which was then drawing a large number of visitors. "The thing immediately began to ramify and expand, until I quickly found I was in for a long and very difficult job: so long, and so difficult, that, after working day and night for the last three months on the materials I had previously collected, I have just finished the book, and am now up to my ears in proofsheets and wood-cuts which the publishers are rushing through in order to publish at the earliest possible moment, the book having several features designed to meet the wants of winter visitors to Florida." It is filled with facts in regard to climate and scenery, practical hints for travelers, and other things characteristic of a guide-book; but it is more than that. Like everything else that Lanier ever did, -- even the dreariest hack work, -- he threw himself into it with great zest. It has suggestions to consumptives born out of his own experience. There are allusions to music, literature, and philosophy. There are descriptions and historical anecdotes of the cities of South Carolina and Georgia; above all, there are descriptions of the Florida country which only a poet could write. Two passages are characteristic: --
"And now it is bed-time. Let me tell you how to sleep on an Ocklawaha steamer in May. With a small bribe persuade Jim, the steward, to take the mattress out of your berth and lay it slanting just along the railing that incloses the lower part of the deck in front and to the left of the pilot-house. Lie flat on your back down on the mattress, draw your blanket over you, put your cap on your head, on account of the night air, fold your arms, say some little prayer or other, and fall asleep with a star looking right down on your eye. When you wake in the morning you will feel as new as Adam."
"Presently we abandoned the broad highway of the St. Johns, and turned off to the right into the narrow lane of the Ocklawaha. This is the sweetest water-lane in the world, a lane which runs for more than one hundred and fifty miles of pure delight betwixt hedgerows of oaks and cypresses and palms and magnolias and mosses and vines; a lane clean to travel, for there is never a speck of dust in it save the blue dust and gold dust which the wind blows out of the flags and lilies."
In the discussion of "The Symphony", emphasis was laid upon Lanier's national point of view. The opportunity soon came to him of giving expression to his love of the Union. At Bayard Taylor's suggestion he was appointed by the Centennial Commission to write the words for a cantata to be sung at the opening exercises of the exposition in Philadelphia. Taylor, in announcing the fact, on December 28, 1875, said: "I have just had a visit from Theodore Thomas and Mr. Buck, and we talked the whole matter over. Thomas remembers you well, and Mr. Buck says it will be especially agreeable to him to compose for the words of a Southern poet. I have taken the liberty of speaking for you, both to them and to General Hawley, and you must not fail me. . . .
"Now, my dear Lanier, I am sure you CAN do this worthily. It's a great occasion, -- not especially for poetry as an art, but for Poetry to assert herself as a power."* To this letter Lanier replied: "If it were a cantata upon your goodness, . . . I am willing to wager I could write a stirring one and a grateful withal.
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* `Letters', p. 136.
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"Of course I will accept -- when 't is offered. I only write a hasty line now to say how deeply I am touched by the friendly forethought of your letter."*
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* `Letters', p. 137.
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He announces the fact to his wife in a jubilant letter of January 8, 1876: "Moreover, I have a charming piece of news which -- although thou art not yet to communicate it to any one except Clifford -- I cannot keep from thee. The opening ceremonies of the Centennial Exhibition will be very grand; and among other things there are to be sung by a full chorus (and played by the orchestra, under Thomas's direction) a hymn and a cantata. General Hawley, President of the Centennial Commission, has written inviting me to write the latter (I mean the POEM; Dudley Buck, of New York, is to write the music). Bayard Taylor is to write the hymn.* This is very pleasing to me; for I am chosen as representative of our dear South; and the matter puts my name by the side of very delightful and honorable ones, besides bringing me in contact with many people I would desire to know.
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* Whittier wrote this hymn and Bayard Taylor wrote the Ode for the Fourth of July celebration.
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"Mr. Buck has written me that he wants the poem by January 15, which as I have not yet had the least time for it, gives me just seven days to write it in. I would much rather have had seven months; but God is great. Remember, thou and Cliff, that this is not yet to be spoken of at all."*
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* Quoted in Baskervill's `Southern Writers', p. 200.
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With enthusiasm the poet entered upon the task assigned him. The progress of the Cantata from the time when it first presented itself to his mind to the time when he completed it, may be traced in the letters to Bayard Taylor and Gibson Peacock, which have already been published.* Writing to Mr. Dudley Buck, January 15, 1876, he said: --
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* See `Letters', passim.
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Dear Mr. Buck, -- I send you herewith the complete text for the Cantata. I have tried to make it a genuine Song, at once full of fire and of large and artless simplicity befitting a young but already colossal land.
I have made out a working copy for you, with marginal notes which give an analysis of each movement (or rather MOTIVE, for I take it the whole will be a continuous progression; and I only use the word "movement" as indicating the entire contrast which I have secured between each two adjacent MOTIVES), and which will, I hope, facilitate your labor by presenting an outline of the tones characterizing each change of idea. One movement is placed on each page.
Mr. Thomas was kind enough to express himself very cordially as to the ideas of the piece; and I devoutly trust that they will meet your views. I found that the projection which I had made in my own mind embraced all the substantial features of the Scheme which had occurred to you, and therefore, although greatly differing in details, I have not hesitated to avail myself of your thoughtful warning against being in any way hampered. It will give me keen pleasure to know from you, as soon as you shall have digested the poem, that you like it.
God send you a soul full of colossal and simple chords, -- says
Yours sincerely,
Sidney Lanier.
In another letter, of February 1, 1876, he wrote: "I will leave the whole matter of the publication of the poem in the hands of Mr. Thomas and yourself; only begging that the inclosed copy be the one which shall go to the printer. The truth is, I shrank from the criticism which I fear my poem will provoke, -- not because I think it unworthy, but because I have purposely made it absolutely free from all melodramatic artifice, and wholly simple and artless; and although I did this in the full consciousness that I would thereby give it such a form as would inevitably cause it to be disappointing on the first reading to most people, yet I had somewhat the same feeling (when your unexpected proposition to print first came) as when a raw salt spray dashes suddenly in your face and makes you duck your head. As for my own private poems, I do not even see the criticisms on them, and am far above the plane where they could possibly reach me; but this poem is NOT mine, it is to represent the people, and the people have a right that it should please them."
In this letter Lanier anticipates the criticism that was sure to come upon the poem when printed without the music. It was at once received with ridicule in all parts of the country. The leading critical journal of America exclaimed: "It reads like a communication from the spirit of Nat Lee, rendered through a bedlamite medium, failing in all the ordinary laws of sense and sound, melody and prosody." It urged the commissioners to "save American letters from the humiliation of presenting to the assembled world such a farrago as this." For several weeks Lanier could not pick up a newspaper without seeing his name held up to ridicule, the Southern papers alone, out of purely sectional pride and with "no understanding of the PRINCIPLES involved," coming to his rescue. The spirit in which he received this criticism may be seen in a letter written to his brother: --
This is the sixth letter I've written since nine o'clock to-night, and it is like saying one's prayers before going to bed, to have a quiet word with you.
Your letter came to-day, and I see that you have been annoyed by the howling of the critics over the Cantata. I was greatly so at first, before I had recovered from my amazement at finding a work of art received in this way, sufficiently to think, but now the whole matter is quite plain to me and gives me no more thought, at all. . . .
The whole agitation has been of infinite value to me. It has taught me, in the first place, to lift my heart absolutely above all EXPECTATION save that which finds its fulfillment in the large consciousness of beautiful devotion to the highest ideals in art. This enables me to work in tranquillity.
In the second place, it has naturally caused me to make a merciless arraignment and trial of my artistic purposes; and an unspeakable content arises out of the revelation that they come from the ordeal confirmed in innocence and clearly defined in their relations with all things. . . .
The commotion about the Cantata has not been unfavorable, on the whole, to my personal interests. It has led many to read closely what they would otherwise have read cursorily, and I believe I have many earnest friends whose liking was of a nature to be confirmed by such opposition. . . .
And now, dear little Boy, may God convoy you over to the morning across this night, and across all nights, Prays your
S. L.
That the poem was misjudged cannot be denied. Lanier's defense published in the New York "Tribune" must be taken as a justification, in part at least, of the principles he had in mind.* It was not written as a poem, -- and Mrs. Lanier has wisely put it as an appendix to her edition of the poems, -- but as the words of a musical composition to be rendered by a large orchestra and chorus. It compares, therefore, with a lyric very much as one of the librettos of a Wagner drama would compare with a genuine drama. It serves merely to give the ideas which were to be interpreted emotionally through the forms of music. Lanier knew well the requirements of an orchestra. He knew the effect of contrasts and of short, simple words which would suggest the deeper emotions intended by the author. He thought of Beethoven's "large and artless forms" rather than that of formal lyric poetry. He had heard Von Buelow conduct the Peabody Orchestra in a symphony based on one of Uhland's poems, in which only the simple elemental words were retained, "leaving all else to his hearers' imaginations." This served as a model for his Cantata.
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* `Music and Poetry', p. 80.
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That the Cantata was a success is borne out by contemporary evidence. The very paper which had criticised Lanier most severely said, in giving an account of the opening exercises, "The rendering of Lanier's Cantata was exquisite, and Whitney's bass solo deserves to the full all the praise that has been heaped upon it." Ex-President Gilman thus writes of the effect produced on the vast audience assembled in Philadelphia:
"As a Baltimorean who had just formed the acquaintance of Lanier (both of us being strangers at that time in a city we came to love as a most hospitable and responsive home), -- I was much interested in his appointment. It was then true, though Dr. Holmes had not yet said it, that Baltimore had produced three poems, each of them the best of its kind: the `Star-Spangled Banner' of Key, `The Raven', of Poe, and `Maryland, My Maryland', by Randall. Was it to produce a fourth poem as remarkable as these? Lanier's Cantata appeared in one of the daily journals, prematurely. I read it as one reads newspaper articles, with a rapid glance, and could make no sense of it. I heard the comments of other bewildered critics. I read the piece again and again and again, before the meaning began to dawn on me. Soon afterwards, Lanier's own explanation, and the dawn became daylight. The ode was not written `to be read'. It was to be sung -- and sung, not by a single voice, with a piano accompaniment, but in the open air, by a chorus of many hundred voices, and with the accompaniment of a majestic orchestra, to music especially written for it by a composer of great distinction. The critical test would be its rendition. From this point of view the Cantata must be judged.
"I remember well the day of trial. The President of the United States, the Emperor of Brazil, the governors of States, the judges of the highest courts, the chief military and naval heroes, were seated on the platform in the face of an immense assembly. There was no pictorial effect in the way they were grouped. They were a mass of living beings, a crowd of black-coated dignitaries, not arranged in any impressive order. No cathedral of Canterbury, no Sanders Hall, no episcopal or academic gowns. The oratory was likewise ineffective. There were loud voices and vigorous gestures, but none of the eloquence which enchants a multitude. The devotional exercises awakened no sentiment of reverence. At length came the Cantata. From the overture to the closing cadence it held the attention of the vast throng of listeners, and when it was concluded loud applause rang through the air. A noble conception had been nobly rendered. Words and music, voices and instruments, produced an impression as remarkable as the rendering of the Hallelujah Chorus in the nave of Westminster Abbey. Lanier had triumphed. It was an opportunity of a lifetime to test upon a grand scale his theory of verse. He came off victorious."*
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* `South Atlantic Quarterly', April, 1905.
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The most important thing, however, about the writing of the Cantata was that it gave expression to a strong faith in the nation as felt by one who had been a Confederate soldier. The central note of the poem is the preservation of the Union. In spite of all the physical obstacles that had hindered the early settlers, in spite of the distinct individualities of the various people of the sections, in spite of sectional misunders