IN STARRY BYWAYS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2437, 28 November 1900, Page 68

IN STARRY BYWAYS.

By Jessik Mackay.

I.— SIDNEY LANIER,

It is a humbling reflection that the average mortal has only, say, a half dozen stars in his literary firmament, and is scornfully oblivious of the thousand remote suns that irradiate the galaxy of art. When by chance we discern at . last such an unknown luminary, something more than self-esteem is pricked ; we must confess what veering winds blow home the ship of fame — while human pride of judgment would fain believe them fixed as the trade winds. Sidney Lanier was born in Georgia in the year 1842. Of an old Huguenot family long settled in America, and distinguished in many branches of art, he inherited a doubly artistic temperament. His capacity and industry were so great that he not only graduated with honours at 18, but he had mastered six musical instruments — flute, organ, piano, violin, guitar, banjo. Music was his first love. Such I effect had the subtle charm of the violin on his high-strung spirit that often at college he would fall into a trance, and wake spent and weary on the floor of his solitary room. "Soon poetiy claimed him for her 1 own, and the sternly self-disciplined Puritan boy accepted the call in a passion of religious and chivalrous consecration. The Civil War broke rudely across these dreams. At 19 young Laniei went to fight for his country, and so well did he bear himself amid these grim necessities that he was thrice offered promotion, and thrice he refused it, that he might- not be separated from his beloved younger brother. His one novel, "Tiger Lilies," written at 25, contains his experiences of war and captivity. These terrible years brought on the first visible signs of consumption, the dread enemy with which he battled unceasingly for the remainder of his short life. On returning home he took up teaching again, and married' Mary Day in 1857 — a union which brought imclouded happiness to the poet. He studied and practised law for a time with his father. But from 1873 he gave himself wholly to music and literature. He commenced an exhaustive study of English, and his mastery of Anglo-Saxon contributed much to his style, in which startling luminosity is blended with cordial sweetness. In the seven years that followed he earned a precarious living by academy lectures on literature, "by newspaper work, and the sale of his books. He wrote several boys' books of chivalry — "The Boys' Froissart," "The Boys Arthur," etc. Above all, he was writing sunny, dauntless, ringing poetry • that bore •no trace of the bodily pain 'and mental anxiety he suffered. For the disease was fast gaining ground, and he had to, break his engagements again and again, 1 and "wander over the States in search of health, accompanied whenever possible by his devoted wife and little sons. He -was strengthened in these viscissitudes by noble friends and the unfailing kindness of his family. But Sidney Lanier was not the man to spare himself, and to the last he condemned the frail body to exertion it could ill endure, that his dear" ones might not owe anything to others. In 1881 the end came, up in the mountains where he had been sent as a last hope. He was not quite 40 when he died. No poet "ever lived more absolutely in the other-world delight of the Palace of Art ; yet no poet ever -lived in fuller communion with God and man than Sidney Lanier. Art was his joy, because it was Love personified to him. Religion with him was neither a mood nor an obligation : it was the fibre of his being, the breath of his life. He was a man who dwelt on Piagah: life and death, evolution and its goal, lay below him 'like a map. His chivalry was of the new school ; his dragons and minotaurs were dogmas, prejudices, mammonisms ; his lighteous anger had none of the personal rancour of the material socialist. His criticism of other poets was free and searching ; his -appreciation was frank and • cordial. Here are one or two flashes which, -not only enshrine the criticised in a vignette of epigram, but also tellingly" reveal the critic himself : "Whitman is Boetry's butcher. Huge raw collops slashed out of poetry — and never mind the gristle — is what Whitman feeds our souls with." Of Swinburne he says: — "He invited me to eat : the service was pjlver and gold, but no food therein save pepper and salt." And of William Morris: — "He caught a crystal cupful of the yellow light of sunset, and persuading himself to dream it wine, he drank it with a sort of smile." The following lines from 'Sunrise," a magnificent poem, show how Lanier's genius could invest a worn subject with new glamor : — Now a dream of a flame through tlat dream o' a flush is uprolled; To the zenith ascending, a dome of undazzling gold Is buildecl in shape as a bee hive, from out of 4;lie sea; The hive is of gold, undazsling, but, oh! the Bee — The star-fed Bee, the build-fire Bee, Of dazzling gold is the great Sun Bee That shall flash from the hive-hole over the sea. '"The Symphony" is a strange tender fantasy, inviting an intense scorn of modern commercialism with that wealth of personification which distinguishes his poetry. The musician's fond fancy endows each instrument with life and character, 'and through them prophesies against the great mammon cycle: — "O Trade! O Trade! would thon wert dead! The Time needs heart — 'tis tired of heaclj We're all for love," the violins said. « * • • j Sings out the melting clarionet Like as a lady sings, while yet Her eyes with salty tears are wet. "O Trade! O Trade!" the Lady said, "I too will wish thee utterly dead, If all thy heart is in thy head. For, O my God! and O my G-od! What shameful waya have women trod &Ji tockouuig of Trade's golden rodl"

Then thrust the bold, straightforward horn To battle for that lady lorn. "Now comfort thee," said he, "Fair Lady, For God shall right thy grievous wrong, And man shall sing thee a true love song Voiced in act, his whole life-long — Yea, all thy sweet life long, Fair Lady \" And then the hautboy played and smiled, And sang like any large-eyed child. ''Huge Trade," he said, "Would thoti wouldst lift me on thy head, And run where'er my finger led." The ancient wise bassoons, Like weird Greybeard, Old harpers sitting on the high sea dunes Chanted runes. ■'Life! Life! Thou sea-fugtie writ from east to west, . Love alone can pore On thy dissolving score. And ever Love hears the poor folk's crying; And ever Love hears the women's sighing; And ever sweet Kaighthood's death-defying, And ever wise childhood's deep implying, But never a trader's glozing and lying. O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred : Music is Love in search of a word." "Street Cries," a title that recalls Browning, is a series of poems against the cruel narrowness of dogma and prejudice. The most remarkable is- perhaps "How Love Looked for Hell." Just as the human loA^es of Lanier were ethereal; yet lasting and deep, so. his triotism burned with a flame purified of all self-seeking and bravado. In "The Psalm of the West," a noble, if somewhat unequal poem, he sees America wedded to Freedom and becoming the hope of the world : — * w Land of ihe wilful Gospel, thou worst and thou best, „ Tall Adam of lands, new-made of the dust of the West. Thou wroughtest a.one in the Garden of God ' imblest, Till He fashioned lithe Freedom to lie for thine Eve on. thy breast. Lo! Freedom reached forth, where the world as an apple hung red : / "Let us taste tha whole radiant round of it,'"' gaily she said; "II we die, at the worst we shall lie as the first of the dead. ' Then before the psalmist passes the whole history of America, from the time when Bjorne's pallid sail Into the Sea of the Dark did break, The beautifully balanest! humanity of Lanier would not be perfectly mirrored in Ms writings without the gentle humour that lights up the dialect poems and ''Hard Times in England." We suspect the "Baptiss" communion does not cover all the j congregations of whom it might be sung : — Dey's mightily in de grass, grass; Dey's mightily in de grass. The typical unis,on of Life and Nature ever apparent to the true poet, is grandly proclaimed in "The Marshes of Glynn"' : — -Ye marshes, how candid and simple, and no- ■ thing withholding and free, Ye publish yourselves to the sky, and offer yourselves to the sea! ■Tolerant plains that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun, "" Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain, And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain. Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness within The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn! I cannot but conclude with^the "Ballad of Trees and the Master." In this tiny pearl of poesy Lanier surpasses himself. The exuberant fantasy, the bewildering arrow flight of thought upon thought is curbed; it is a pure primeval Saxon waft from the days of Hild and Aidan, yet subtly touched with the Oriental" perception of the All Soul:— . Into the woods my Master went, olean forspent, -forspent; Into the woods my Master came, Forspent with love a,nd shame. But the olives w«re not blind to Him ; The little grey leaves were kind to Him; The thorn tree had a mind to Him, • When into the woods. He went. Out of the woods my Master went, And. He was well content; Out of the woods my Master came, Content with death and shame. When death and shame would woo Him last — 'Twas out^of the woods they drew hirr last- . 'Twas on a tree they slew Him— last. When, out of .the woods He came.