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shown in "The Crystal," in which is wrought out, with telling phrases that are marvels of criticism, the bold and refreshing idea that all the masters of song, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, have much to be forgiven. That is a great poem in which a poet adequately praises another, in which he does not droop upon a greater strength, but stands, for one song's duration at least, the equal of his adored. Such poem is that "To Our Mocking-Bird," where the bird and Keats are identified and the Cat and Death are rebuked together.

Lanier, like all his race of poets, sang praises to his fathers in melody. Yet he does not smell of the library. He is a poet of nature and of things, of the meaning of central

present things that harry and strengthen the heart of man. 1

In "Corn" for once an American poet strode into our splendid native golden fields and sang what his eyes saw, and deeper, what the harvests of the fields can be for man. "The Symphony," in which the instruments he knew so well are soundingly suggested, is no mere interplay of melodies, but the cry of the old-new spirit of brotherhood against the debauchery of trade. By it Lanier becomes one of the goodly band of modern men dissatisfied with man's violations of man, and his voice is strong enough to admit him to the still smaller band of poets who are the voices of the present life, of these very times — with Morris and Whitman, whom, alas, he did not like! Oddly enough, he, the devotee of pure music, dared the historic theme which so many Americans have tried, ever since the absurd Columbiads of the early years of the nation, and in the "Psalm of the West"

he did make a chant of America and Freedom which has in its short compass something like epic vision and is, if not the noblest of Lanier, far above most patriotic verse, and artistically excellent.

Lanier stands alone in that era of American poetry which is chiefly marked by a false post-Tennysonism, an era of nicely made lyrics that have neither passion nor an individual sense of beauty. There are to-day signs of something better, nay, distinguished specimens of something better, in such work as Mrs. Marks's "The Singing Man," which it is a pleasure to name again, and in Mr. R. H. Schauffler's "Scum o' the Earth." If Lanier had no equal contemporaries, he may have successors, for when an age is shuddering on its first gray verge and its day-facts lie in the future, it is permitted to be hopeful for it.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Sidney Lanier was born at Macon, Georgia, February 3, 1842. He died at Lynn, North Carolina, September 7, 1881. He learned as a boy to play several musical instruments, which instead of delighting his friends and parents, alarmed them! At the age of eighteen he graduated from Oglethorpe College, a Presbyterian institution in Georgia, which he later called "farcical." In April, 1861, he enlisted in the Confederate Army and served through the war. It is a picturesque fact that he carried his flute with him through battle and imprisonment. The war broke his health, and he was never afterward free from consumption. Until 1872 he was in business and in the practice of law. In 1873 he

settled in Baltimore and supported himself as flute-player in the Peabody Orchestra. He lived the rest of his life in Baltimore, except for vain excursions in quest of health. Some public lectures on literature and some of his poems brought him to the notice of President D. C. Gilman, who appointed him lecturer on English Literature at Johns Hopkins University. In 1867 he married Mary Day.

His books are: Tiger Lilies: A Novel, 1867; Florida: Its Scenery, History and Climate, 1876; Poems, 1876; The Boy's Froissart, 1878; The Science of English Verse, 1880; The Boy's King Arthur, 1880; The Boy's Mabinogion, 1881; The Boy's Percy, 1882; The English Novel and the Principles of Its Development, 1883; Poems, 1884, 1891; Letters, 1899; Shakespeare and His Forerunners, 1902; Poem Outlines,

1908.

The Life of Lanier in American Men of Letters is by Edwin Mims.

CHAPTER XVII

HENRY JAMES

THERE is a sort of poetic justice in the fact that Mr. James, a fine and exacting critic, should have evoked from other critics an interesting and provocative variety of opinion. Both for him and against him, people whose business it is to write about literature, have put their best brains forward; those who attend to him at all sit on the edge of their chairs, and thereby agree, however otherwise they may differ, that they are in the presence of an unusual mind. He is already a celebrated argument, and there are accepted clichés of him, some complimentary, some not quite just. In the minor humours of the press, undoubtedly vulgar, as he would hasten to tell us if he had occasion to animadvert on it, his name is, like Browning's, synonymous with obscurity, with all that suggests height of brow and a liking for the raffiné. It is not quite appropriate that such notoriety should attend the work of a man who has pursued his career in modest retirement, who has never stood out and fought for his public, like Ibsen, and who has not been rewarded by the popularity which helps to make notoriety palatable. He has won and held a small public, creating in it a taste for himself, as Meredith did, and being, like Meredith again, a fine example of the man of letters who follows his

own course and lets the people talk. The people, or at least the critics, have talked, whether they have read him or not. In a way some of his friendliest critics have done less good than harm, for they have a habit of assuming that to understand him one has to be a very unusually intelligent person, which is like the fundamental fallacy of the Browning societies.

Mr. James is an American only in the sense that he was born and passed part of his youth in this country. For forty years he has lived in Europe, and he does not know much about America. It is a visitor and not a native who writes "The American Scene." The characters in his novels are individuals selected out of their habitual environment/ and without much of any soil clinging to their boots. The world is small nowadays, and since Mr. James does not deal with rooted people, but with persons, whatever their nationality, who are in social circumstances which permit them to travel freely, he carries his country under his hat: and he can study it just as well in London as in Florence, in Rome as in Chicago. His expatriation is really less significant than Washington Irving's long sojourn abroad.

His attitude, however, is rather British than American. For he takes British people more for granted. Any American reader feels at home with the English characters in English novels. Miss Austen's country families, the people of Trollope, of Mr. Arnold Bennett, of Mr. H. G. Wells, sit beside our fires and talk and smoke, make love and trouble, just like our neighbours. But when an American character walks into an English novel, the novelist infallibly tells you

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