Even his war poems are gentle and softly poetic. After the war he lapsed into lyrics of retrospect and contemplation with a minor note always of gentle resignation. He lived to write elegies on Timrod and Lanier and to make himself the threnodist of the old South:
A more sensitively imaginative poet was Timrod, yet even he was not strong enough to lead his time and become more than a minor singer. He was of the old South and would have been wholly out of place in the new even had he lived. More fire and Hebraic rage there were in him than in Hayne, indeed than in any other American poet save Whittier. Once or twice when his life was shaken to the center by the brutalities of war he burst into cries that still quiver with passion:
And again at the climax of "The Cotton Boll":
And what other poet save Whittier could after victory burst into Hebraic ecstasy of joy like this?
But it was like pouring molten bullet lead from Satsuma vase. The fragile, beautiful life that should have known nothing harsher than the music of poets and the laughter of children and lovers, broke under the strain of war and poverty and neglect, and his life went out miserably at thirty-eight.
Sidney Lanier's life was as brief as Timrod's and as full of harshness and poverty, but the end of the war found him young enough to have resiliency and the ability to adapt himself to the new régime of which willy-nilly he found himself a part. He was thirteen years younger than Timrod and twelve years younger than Hayne. His temperament was different: he was broader in his sympathies—no man ever threw himself more completely into the cause of the Confederacy, yet a decade after the war we find him with a nation-wide vision of the new era; he was more democratic of soul than Hayne or Timrod—he could worship beauty as passionately as they and he could also write ballads of the Pike County order; he suffered just as acutely from the war as did Timrod, yet one may search long through his poems or his letters for a single despondent note. He was buoyant and impetuous: his winning of literary recognition in the face of physical disabilities seemingly insuperable places him beside Parkman.
In point of time Lanier was the first of what may be called the Georgia school of writers. It is notable that the State most harshly dealt with by the war was the first to arise from its ruins, the first to receive the vision of a new South, and the first to catch the new national spirit. Macon, Lanier's birthplace, had about it all the best elements of the Old South. It was the seat of an influential college for women, it possessed a cultured society, and it had an art atmosphere—music, poetry, literary conversation—unusual in that period outside of New England and some of the larger cities. Lanier's home was in every way ideal: his father, a lawyer of the old Southern type, was "a man of considerable literary acquirements and exquisite taste," and, moreover, like most Southerners of his class, he had a library stocked with the older classics, a treasure-house of which his son, bookish from his earliest childhood, made the fullest use. "Sir Walter Scott, the romances of Froissart, the adventures of Gil Bias," all the older poets—he read them until he seemed to his boyish companions as one who lived apart in a different world from theirs.
His formal schooling was meager, yet at fifteen he was able to enter the sophomore class of Oglethorpe University, a small denominational college at Midway, Georgia, and in 1860 he was ready for graduation with the highest honors of his class. Compared with the larger Northern institutions, the college was pitifully primitive; Lanier in later years could even call it "farcical," nevertheless it is doubtful if any university could have done more for the young poet. It brought him in contact with a man, James Woodrow of the department of science, a man who was to become later the president of the University of South Carolina and the author of the famous book, An Examination of Certain Recent Assaults on Physical Science (1873).
"Such a man," says his biographer, "coming into the life of Lanier at a formative period, influenced him profoundly. He set his mind going in the direction which he afterwards followed with great zest, the value of science in modern life and its relation to poetry and religion. He also revealed to him the meaning of genuine scholarship."[124]
This influence it may have been which made Lanier in later years so tolerant and so broad of view. The attraction between pupil and teacher seems to have been mutual. Through Woodrow it was that Lanier received his appointment as tutor in the college, a position which he held during the year that followed.
It was a year of close study and of wide reading. Throughout his undergraduate period he had read enormously: often in unusual books: Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Jeremy Taylor, Keats's Endymion, Chatterton, Christopher North, Tennyson, whose Maud he learned by heart, Carlyle, and a long list of others. "Without a doubt it was Carlyle who first enkindled in Lanier a love of German literature and a desire to know more of that language." He studied with eagerness. His dream now was to enter a German university and do scholarly work as Basil Gildersleeve had just done, and Thomas R. Price, two other young men of the new South, but suddenly as he dreamed all his life plans fell in ruins about him. The crash of war resounded in his ears. All in a moment he found himself in an atmosphere of fierce excitement. The college became an armed camp; Macon became a military center. Before he had fairly realized it the young tutor, just turned twenty, had enlisted in the first company to leave the State, and was marching away to the front.
His career as a soldier need not detain us. It was varied and it was four years long and it ended dramatically on the stormy night of November 2, 1864, when the Federal cruiser Santiago-de-Cuba picked up the blockade runner Lucy off Wilmington, North Carolina, and sent her crew, among them signal officer Lanier, to Point Lookout prison. A fellow prisoner and a close friend during the hard days that followed was another Southern poet, John Bannister Tabb (1845–1909), whose brief lyrics as we know them to-day possess beauty and finish and often distinction.
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.
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.
The novel is laid in the Tennessee Mountains in the same region that was to figure a decade later in the stories of Charles Egbert Craddock. The Great Smoky Mountains and Chilhowee Mountain—familiar names now—form the background, but the author puts no individuality into the landscape. It might be Germany. His mountaineers, however, are alive and they are sharply characterized. Gorm Smallin and his brother Cain are among the earliest figures in that vast gallery of realistically portrayed local types that soon was to figure so prominently in American literature. The chapter that records the desertion of Gorm and his arraignment by his brother Cain is worthy of standing with the best work of Charles Egbert Craddock or Octave Thanet. The prison scenes, drawn from the author's own first-hand experience, are documents in the history of the war. On every line is the stamp of reality. Here is a bivouac scene:
Cain Smallin sat, stiff backed upon the ground, sternly regarding his packed circle of biscuits in the skillet.
"How do they come on, Cain? Most done?"...
"Bully! Brownin' a little some of 'em. 'Bout ten minutes yit."
At that moment a shell that has buried itself in the ground explodes in the midst of the group, literally burying the party and scattering havoc. Cain Smallin, unhurt, digs himself from the ruins and scrapes the dirt from his face.
"Boys," said he, in a broken voice of indignant but mournful inquiry, "have any of ye seed the skillet?"
In the words of its preface, the book was a cry, "a faint cry, sent from a region where there are few artists, to happier lands who own many; calling on these last for more sunshine and less night in their art.... There are those even here in the South who still love beautiful things with sincere passion."
But necessity was upon the young dreamer. He was without a profession, and he had married a wife. There was no refuge but his father's profession, which always had been the last as well as the first resort of young Southerners. His father's law firm was glad to employ him, though it could offer but meager compensation. No more novels, no more dreams of the scholar's life, of Heidelberg, and poetry. Until 1873 he was busy, like Cable during the same period, with his conveyances and his bills of sale. The ambitious plan of a long poem of medieval France, "The Jacquerie," he kept in his desk, a beautiful dream that often he returned to. He wrote exquisite little songs for it:
His poetic experiments of this period one may find at the back of the definitive edition of his work. With Timrod and Hayne he was still dreamy and imaginative, more prone to look at the beautiful than at the harsher realities of humanity, yet even as he was dreaming over his "Jacquerie" he was not oblivious to the problems of his own time. He wrote dialect poems: "Jones's Private Argument," "Thar's More in the Man than Thar Is in the Land," "Nine from Eight," and the like, and published them in Southern papers. They deal with the Georgia "Crackers" and with the social and financial conditions of the times, and they were written in 1868, two years before the Pike County balladry. In 1875 with his brother Clifford he published in Scribner's Monthly "The Power of Prayer; or, the First Steamboat up the Alabama," a negro dialect poem adapted undoubtedly from a similar episode recounted in Mark Twain's The Gilded Age, yet original in tone and realistically true. Had it been unsigned we should attribute it without hesitation to Irwin Russell, who by many is believed to have been the first to discover the literary possibilities of the negro, at least in the field of poetic balladry. How like Russell is a stanza like this:
But Russell's first poem, "Uncle Cap Interviewed," appeared in Scribner's almost a year later. The Lanier brothers contributed to the magazine at least one more dialect poem, "Uncle Jim's Baptist Revival Hymn," a product as realistically true to the negro as anything written later by Harris or Page:
Lanier was a pioneer in a rich field.
The turning point came in 1873. The poet's physical condition had become so alarming that he had been sent to spend the winter at San Antonio, Texas. He found what least he was looking for. The German Maennerchor of the city, an unusual circle of musicians, discovered him and asked him to play to them the flute, an instrument that had been his companion since boyhood. "To my utter astonishment," he wrote his wife, "I was master of the instrument. Is not this most strange? Thou knowest I had never learned it; and thou rememberest what a poor muddle I made at Marietta in playing difficult passages; and I certainly have not practised; and yet there I commanded and the blessed notes obeyed me, and when I had finished, amid a storm of applause, Herr Thielepape arose and ran to me and grasped my hand, and declared that he hat never heert de flude accompany itself pefore."[125]
Judging from contemporary testimony, we are compelled to rate Lanier as a musical genius. Though he never had had formal training in the art, from his childhood music had been with him a consuming passion. He had taken his flute to the war, he had smuggled it into the prison, and he had moved all his life amid a chorus of exclamations over the magic beauty of his improvisations. The masters were praising him now: he would be a master himself. He would toil no longer at the task he despised; he would live now for art. In November, 1873, he wrote to his father:
How can I settle myself down to be a third-rate struggling lawyer for the balance of my little life, as long as there is a certainty almost absolute that I can do something so much better? Several persons, from whose judgment in such matters there can be no appeal, have told me, for instance, that I am the greatest flute-player in the world; and several others, of equally authoritative judgment, have given me an almost equal encouragement to work with my pen. My dear father, think how, for twenty years, through poverty, through pain, through weariness, through sickness, through the uncongenial atmosphere of a farcical college and of a bare army and then of an exacting business life, through all the discouragement of being wholly unacquainted with literary people and literary ways—I say, think how, in spite of all these depressing circumstances, and of a thousand more which I could enumerate, these two figures of music and poetry have steadily kept in my heart so that I could not banish them. Does it not seem to you as to me, that I begin to have the right to enroll myself among the devotees of these two sublime arts, after having followed them so long and so humbly, and through so much bitterness?[126]
He gave himself first to music. So perfect was his mastery of his instrument that he secured without difficulty the position of first flute in Hamerik's Peabody Orchestra of Baltimore, and he played at times even with Thomas's Orchestra of New York. It was the opinion of Hamerik, himself a rare artist, that Lanier was a musician of highest distinction:
His human nature was like an enchanted instrument, a magic flute, or the lyre of Apollo, needing but a breath or a touch to send its beauty out into the world.... In his hands the flute no longer remained a mere material instrument, but was transformed into a voice that set heavenly harmonies into vibration. Its tones developed colors, warmth, and a low sweetness of unspeakable poetry—His playing appealed alike to the musically learned and to the unlearned—for he would magnetize the listener; but the artist felt in his performance the superiority of the momentary inspiration to all the rules and shifts of mere technical scholarship. His art was not only the art of art, but an art above art. I will never forget the impression he made on me when he played the flute concerta of Emil Hartman at a Peabody symphony concert, in 1878—his tall, handsome, manly presence, his flute breathing noble sorrows, noble joys, the orchestra softly responding. The audience was spellbound. Such distinction, such refinement! He stood the master, the genius.[127]
His first recognition as a poet came in 1875 with the publication of "Corn" in Lippincott's Magazine. The poem caught the attention of Taylor and brought to the poet the commission to furnish the words for the Cantata to be sung at the Centennial Exposition. After that commission Lanier was a national figure.
During the scant six years that followed, the years of his literary life in which he wrote all that is distinctive in his poetry, he lived in a whirlwind of activity, of study in the large libraries to which he now had access, of music, of literary hack-work, or he lay totally incapacitated by sickness that threatened always the speedy termination of all. Poetry he could write only in moments stolen from more imperative things. He compiled a guide book to Florida, he prepared courses of lectures on Shakespeare for clubs of women, he delivered two scholarly courses of lectures at Johns Hopkins University, and he published four juveniles that adapted for boys the old romances of chivalry. He wrote lyrics and songs, but his future as a poet must rest on five poems: "Corn," the first significant poem from the new South; "The Symphony," a latter-day ode to St. Cecilia; "The Psalm of the West," which he intended should do for the centennial year what Taylor had failed so lamentably to do in his Fourth of July ode; "The Marshes of Glynn," a symphony without musical score; and, finally on his death bed, held in life only by his imperious will, "Sunrise," his most joyous and most inspired improvisation of all.
For Lanier was essentially an improvisatore. He left behind him no really finished work: he is a poet of magnificent fragments. He was too excited, too impetuous, to finish anything. Poetry was a thing of rhapsodic outbursts, of tiptoe glimpses: his eager jottings for poems made on the backs of envelopes, scraps of paper, anything that was at hand, fill a volume. He may be likened to a child in a meadow of daisies: he filled his hands, his arms, full of the marvelous things, then threw them aside to gather more and ever more. There was no time to arrange them, no time even to look at them twice. Ideas came in flocks; he lived in a tumult of emotion. His letters quiver with excitement as do those of no other American poet. "All day my soul hath been cutting swiftly into the great space of the subtle, unspeakable deep, driven by wind after wind of heavenly melody." "I cannot tell you with what eagerness I devoured Felix Holt." "My heart was all a-cry." "The fury of creation is on me to-day." "Lying in the music-waters, I floated and flowed, my soul utterly bent and prostrate." "The very inner spirit and essence of all wind-songs, bird-songs, passion-songs, folk-songs, country-songs, sex-songs, soul-songs, and body-songs hath blown me in quick gusts like the breath of passion and sailed me into a sea of vast dreams." One may quote interminably.
Hamerik's characterization of his flute-playing may be taken as the key to all his work: "The artist felt in his performance the superiority of the momentary inspiration to all the rules and shifts of mere technical scholarship." It explains the unevenness of his work and its lack of finish. He had no patience to return to a poem and labor upon it. Other and more rapturous melodies were calling to him. It explains his lack of constructive power: inspiration is a thing of rapturous glimpses, not of long, patient coördinating effort. His poems are chaotic in structure even to the point often of obscurity. "Corn," for example, was intended to be a poem with a message, and that message doubtless the superiority of corn over cotton as a crop for the new South. But half the poem has only the vaguest connection with the subject. One-third of it outlines the duties and privileges of the poet soul. The message is not brought home: one has to labor to find it. There is a succession of beautiful images expressed often with rare melody and distinction, but inconsecutive even to vagueness.
His prose has the same characteristics. The lectures on the English novel seem like the first draft of work rather than like a finished product. He changes his plan as he proceeds. It was to be a study of the novel as a literary form, but as he progresses he changes it into a study of the development of personality in literature, and finally ends it by devoting half his total space to a rhapsody upon George Eliot. The Science of English Verse has the same faults. He rides a pet theory through chapters and dismisses really basic principles with a paragraph. It is a book of magnificent, even at times of inspired sections, but as a complete treatise it has no great value. The same may be said of all his prose work: he had flashes of inspiration but no consecutive message. The cause for it was partly pathological, partly temperamental. He was first of all a musician, a genius, an improvisatore.
That his conception of the poet's office was a broader and saner and more modern one than that of most of his contemporaries was undoubtedly true. In "Corn" he addresses thus the stalk that stands high above its fellows:
The poet then is not to be a mere dreamer of beauty, a dweller in the clouds apart from the men of his time. He is to stand squarely on the earth:
But despite his conception of the poet's office, Lanier himself is not often a leader and a prophet. He had ceased to be Georgia-minded and he had felt the national thrill that was making a new America, but it was not his to be the strong voice of the new era. "The Psalm of the West," which casts into poetic form certain vital episodes of American history, has no message. One searches it in vain for any interpretation of the soul of the great republic, or any forecasting of the future years, or any passages expressing what America is to stand for among the nations. It is a fragment, the introduction to what should have been the poem.
In "The Symphony" more than elsewhere, perhaps, he is the poet of his period. The poem is a cry against the materialism that Lanier felt was crushing the higher things out of American life:
Each instrument in the orchestra joins in the argument. "A velvet flute note" followed the passion of the violins, the reeds whispered, "the bold straightforward horn" spoke out,
The solution of the problem was the same that Shelley had brought. Love alone could master the evils of the time:
And love was to come through music:
The poem is indeed a symphony. One feels that the poet is composing rather than writing, that he is thinking in terms of orchestration, balancing parts and instruments, and working out tone values. The same is true of "The Marshes of Glynn" and "Sunrise": they are symphonies.
One must appreciate fully this musical basis of Lanier's art if one is to understand him. He thought in musical forms. The best illustration, perhaps, may be found in his Centennial Cantata. To the average man the poem meant little. One must read it and reread it and study it if one is to get any consecutive thought from it. But read after Lanier's explanation, it becomes not only clear but illuminating:
The principal matter over which the United States can legitimately exult is its present existence as a Republic, in spite of so much opposition from Nature and from man. I therefore made the refrain of the song—about which all its train of thought moves—concern itself wholly with the Fact of existence: the waves cry "It shall not be"; the powers of nature cry "It shall not be"; the wars, etc., utter the same cry. This Refrain is the key to the whole poem.
A knowledge of the inability of music to represent any shades of meaning save those which are very intense, and very highly and sharply contrasted, led me to divide the poem into the eight paragraphs or movements which it presents, and make these vividly opposed to each other in sentiment. Thus the first movement is reflection, measured and sober: this suddenly changes into the agitato of the second: this agitato, culminating in the unison shout "No! It shall not be," yields in the third movement to the pianissimo and meager effect of the skeleton voices from Jamestown, etc.: this pianissimo in the fourth movement is turned into a climax of the wars of armies and of faiths, again ending in the shout, "No!" etc.: the fifth movement opposes this with a whispered chorus—Huguenots whispering Yea, etc.: the sixth opposes again with loud exultation, "Now praise," etc.: the seventh opposes this with the single voice singing the Angels' song; and the last concludes the series of contrasts with a broad full chorus of measured and firm sentiment.
The metrical forms were selected purely with reference to their descriptive nature: the four trochaic feet of the opening strophe measure off reflection, the next (Mayflower) strophe swings and yaws like a ship, the next I made outre and bizarre and bony simply by the device of interposing the line of two and a half trochees amongst the four trochee lines: the swift action of the Huguenot strophe of course required dactyls: and having thus kept the first part of the poem (which describes the time before we were a real nation) in meters which are as it were exotic to our tongue, I now fall into the iambic meter—which is the genius of English words—as soon as the Nation becomes secure and firm.
My business as member of the orchestra for three years having caused me to sit immediately in front of the bassoons, I had often been struck with the possibility of producing the ghostly effects of that part of the bassoon register so well known to students of Berlioz and Meyerbeer—by the use of the syllable ee sung by a chorus. With this view I filled the ghostly Jamestown stanza with ee's and would have put in more if I could have found them appropriate to the sense.[128]
No one can read this without thinking of Poe's "Philosophy of Composition." It explains much of Lanier's work.
Had Lanier lived a decade longer, had he had time and strength to devote himself completely to his poetry, had his impetuous soul had time to gain patience and poise, and divest itself of florid extravagance and vague dithyramb, he might have gained a much higher place as a poet. He was gaining in power: his last poem is his greatest. He was laying plans that would, we feel sure, have worked themselves out to high poetic achievement. For at least four books of poetry he had already selected titles: Hymns of the Mountains, Hymns of the Marshes, Songs of Aldheim, and Poems on Agriculture. What they were to be we can judge only from "The Marshes of Glynn" and "Sunrise."
In these two poems we have work that is timeless and essentially placeless. There is a breadth and sweep about it that one finds only in the greater poets:
The jottings that he made in his notebooks and the fragments of poems that he noted down as the inspiration came to him remind us often of Whitman. They have sweep and range:
I fled in tears from the men's ungodly quarrel about God: I fled in tears to the woods, and laid me down on the earth; then somewhat like the beating of many hearts came up to me out of the ground, and I looked and my cheek lay close by a violet; then my heart took courage and I said:
"I know that thou art the word of God, dear violet.
And, oh, the ladder is not long that to my heaven leads!
Measure the space a violet stands above the ground,
'Tis no farther climbing that my soul and angels have to do than that!"
I went to the church to find my Lord.
They said He is here. He lives here.
But I could not see him
For the creed-tables and bonnet flowers.
Lanier is essentially a poet of unfulfilled promise. He seems always about to do greater things than in reality he ever does. His lyrics like "Evening Song," and "The Trees and the Master" and "The Song of the Chattahoochee," have strains in them almost Shelley-like, but there is always the fatal defect somewhere. Nothing is perfect. It seems strange sometimes that one who could at moments go so far could not go the whole way and remain long. He must hold his place among the American poets by virtue of a few fragments. A few times was he rapt into the pure ether of poetry, but he was allowed to catch only fleeting glimpses.
The period may be said to have produced in the South two inspired poets, Lanier and Irwin Russell, and in many ways the two were alike. Both were frail of body and sensitive of temperament, both were passionately given to music and found their poetic field by means of it, both were educated men, eager students of the older literatures, both discovered the negro as poetic material, and both died when their work was just beginning, Russell, like Keats, at the boyish age of twenty-six. But Russell added what Lanier had no trace of, a waywardness of character and a genius for goodfellowship that wrecked him even earlier than it did Burns.
The life of Russell is associated with four cities: Port Gibson, Mississippi, where he was born in 1853; St. Louis, where he spent the earlier years of his life and where later he completed the course at the Jesuit University; Port Gibson again, where he studied law and was admitted to the bar; New York City, of which he was a resident from January until July, 1879; and New Orleans, where he died in December of the same year. His life was fitful and restless. He did little with his profession, turning from it to learn the printer's trade, and then after a few listless months, drifting into other things. He had dreams of California and wandered on foot in its direction as far as Texas; he attempted to run away to sea, and he spent much time on the river boats making jovial friends of the captains and the pilots. His banjo assured him of a welcome wherever he might go.
The writing of poetry was never to him a serious occupation. He composed with abandon when the mood was on him, he seldom revised, and he cared little for the finished product save as it might please his friends. One finds many evidences in his work that he learned his art from Burns, whom he considered the greatest poet the world had ever produced. He had saturated himself too with the English balladists and the genuine old poets of the early periods. The poetry of his own time angered him. In "The Hysteriad" (Scribner's, 16:759) he satirizes with bitterness the contemporary product. "A poem of the period," he said, "or a periodical poem, is a thing that is altogether emotional, and is not intended to convey any idea in particular." To him poetry meant something not esoteric and idealized, but something that lay very close to the life of every day, something redolent of humanity, like Burns's songs. He maintained that his own inspiration had come not at all from other poets, but from actual contact with the material that he made use of. His own words concerning the composition of his first poem have a peculiar value. They are a part of the history of the period:
You know I am something of a banjoist. Well, one evening I was sitting in our back yard in old Mississippi "twanging" on the banjo, when I heard the missis—our colored domestic, an old darkey of the Aunt Dinah pattern—singing one of the outlandish camp-meeting hymns of which the race is so fond. She was an extremely "'ligious" character and, although seized with the impulse to do so, I hesitated to take up the tune and finish it. I did so, however, in the dialect I have adopted, and which I then thought and still think is in strict conformity to their use of it, I proceeded, as one inspired, to compose verse after verse of the most absurd, extravagant, and, to her, irreverent rime ever before invented, all the while accompanying it on the banjo and imitating the fashion of the plantation negro.... I was then about sixteen and as I had soon after a like inclination to versify, was myself pleased with the performance, and it was accepted by a publisher, I have continued to work the vein indefinitely.[129]
To what extent the poet was indebted to the Pike balladry that had preceded his first work, at least so far as wide publication in Northern magazines was concerned, is not easily determined. It seems extremely probable that he had seen it. Lanier, as has been shown, had published negro dialect poetry in Scribner's nearly a year before Russell, but whoever was pioneer, the author of "Christmas-night in the Quarters" was the one who first caught the attention of the reading public and exerted the greatest influence upon the period. He undoubtedly was the leading pioneer. Page and Gordon dedicated their Befo' de War "To Irwin Russell, who awoke the first echo," and Joel Chandler Harris, manifestly an authority, declared that "Irwin Russell was among the first—if not the very first—of Southern writers to appreciate the literary possibilities of the negro character, and of the unique relations existing between the two races before the war, and was among the first to develop them."[130]
In the last year of his life Russell, encouraged by the reception of his magazine poems, went to New York to make literature his profession. Bunner, the editor of Puck, and Gilder and Robert Underwood Johnson of the Century staff, and others, recognized his ability, and gave him every encouragement possible. One of the most prominent of the poets of the older school, it may be remarked, also became interested in him and urged him to drop the ephemeral type of verse to which he had addicted himself and devote his talents to really serious work. For a brief period he obeyed, with what success one may judge from the poems at the end of his volume.
Success came too late. His friends were powerless to control his wayward genius. His frail constitution gave way. From a bed of fever he arose still half delirious, staggered to the docks, engaged to work his way on a New Orleans boat as a coal-heaver, and in New Orleans secured a position on the Times. But the end was near. To a member of the Times staff he opened his heart in words that might have come from Poe:
It has been the romance of a weak young man threaded in with the pure love of a mother, a beautiful girl who hoped to be my wife, and friends who believed in my future. I have watched them lose heart, lose faith, and again and again I have been so stung and startled that I have resolved to save myself in spite of myself.... I never shall.[131]
He died a few weeks later.
The value of Russell's work depends not so much upon the poetic quality of it as upon the faithfulness and the skill with which he has portrayed the negro. Within this narrow field he has had no superior. Harris has summed it up thus:
The most wonderful thing about the dialect poetry of Irwin Russell is his accurate conception of the negro character. The dialect is not always the best—it is often carelessly written—but the negro is there, the old-fashioned, unadulterated negro, who is still dear to the Southern heart. There is no straining after effect—indeed the poems produce their result by indirection; but I do not know where could be found to-day a happier or a more perfect representation of negro character.[132]
Russell is less romantic in his picture of the negro than are Page and Harris. Once in a while he throws the mellow light over the old days, as in "Mahsr John," where he represents the freed slave dwelling in imagination upon the glories that he has once known, but he holds the strain not long: