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English Verse, which tells us that the educated love of beauty is the artist's only law, and from this other motto, from Sir Philip Sidney: A Poet, no industrie can make, if his owne Genius bee not carried unto it."

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In the third place, Lanier holds that a moral intention on the part of an artist does not interfere with the naturalness or intrinsic beauty of his work; that in art the controlling consideration is rather moral than artistic beauty; but that moral beauty and artistic beauty, so far from being distinct or opposed, are convergent and mutually helpful. This thesis he upholds in the following eloquent and cogent passage: Permit me to recall to you in the first place that the requirement has been from time immemorial that wherever there is contest as between artistic and moral beauty, unless the moral side prevail, all is lost. Let any sculptor hew us out the most ravishing combination of tender curves and spheric softness that ever stood for woman; yet if the lip have a certain fulness that hints of the flesh, if the brow be insincere, if in the minutest particular the physical beauty suggest a moral ugliness, that sculptor-unless he be portraying a moral ugliness for a moral purpose-may as well give over his marble for paving-stones. Time, whose judgments are inexorably moral, will not accept his work. For indeed we may say that he who has not yet perceived how artistic beauty and moral beauty are convergent lines which run back into a common ideal origin, and who therefore is not afire with moral beauty just as with artistic beauty-that he, in short, who has not come to that stage of quiet

and eternal frenzy in which the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty mean one thing, burn as one fire, shine as one light, within him; he is not yet the great artist.' By copious quotations Lanier then shows that "many fine and beautiful souls appear after a while to lose all sense of distinction between these terms, Beauty, Truth, Love, Wisdom, Goodness, and the like," and concludes thus: "And if this be true, cannot one say with authority to the young artist,—whether working in stone, in color, in tones, or in character-forms of the novel: so far from dreading that your moral purpose will interfere with your beautiful creation, go forward in the clear conviction that unless you are suffused— soul and body, one might say—with that moral purpose which finds its largest expression in lovethat is, the love of all things in their proper relation -unless you are suffused with this love, do not dare to meddle with beauty; unless you are suffused with beauty, do not meddle with love; unless you are suffused with truth, do not dare to meddle with goodness;-in a word, unless you are suffused with beauty, truth, wisdom, goodness, and love, abandon the hope that the ages will accept you as an artist.”*

1 The English Novel, p. 272 f.

The English Novel, p. 280. Of the numerous discussions of this thesis, the student should consult at least those by Matthew Arnold (Preface to his edition of Wordsworth's Poems), John Ruskin (Stones of Venice, vol. iii., chap. iv.), and Victor Hugo (William Shakespeare, Book VI.).

VI. CONCLUSION

.

the Lady of

Indeed, he

MILTON has somewhere said that in order to be a great poet one must himself be a true poem, a dictum none the less trustworthy because of its inapplicability to its author along with several other great poets. Now of all English poets, I know of none that came nearer being a true poem than did Lanier. He was as spotless as Christ's," and infinitely more lovable. seems to me to have realized the ideal of his own knightly Horn, who hopes that some day men will be "maids in purity." I will not recall his gentle yet heroic life amid drawbacks almost unparalleled ; for it is even sadder than it is beautiful. It is my deliberate judgment that, while, as the poet says in his Life and Song, no singer has ever wholly lived his minstrelsy, Lanier came so near it that we may fairly say, in the closing lines of the poem,

"His song was only living aloud,

His work, a singing with his hand."

And, for my part, I am as grateful for his noble private life as for his distinguished public work.

And yet I will not close with this picture of the man; for my purpose is rather to present the poet. Hampered though he was by fewness of years, by feebleness of body, by shortness of bread, and, most of all perhaps, by over-luxuriance of imagination, Lanier was yet, to my mind, indisputably a

1 The Symphony, l. 302.

great poet. For in technique he was akin to Tennyson ; ' in the love of beauty and in lyric sweetness, to Keats and Shelley; in the love of nature, to Wordsworth; and in spirituality, to Ruskin, the gist of whose teaching is that we are souls temporarily having bodies; to Milton, "God-gifted organvoice of England;" and to Browning, "subtlest assertor of the soul in song." To be sure, Lanier's genius is not equal to that of any one of the poets mentioned, but I venture to believe that it is of the same order, and, therefore, deserving of lasting remembrance.

1 Mr. Thayer puts it stronger : "As a master of melodious metre only Tennyson, and he not often, has equalled Lanier." Mr. F. F. Browne, Editor of The Dial (Chicago), compares the two poets in another aspect: " The Symphony of Lanier may recall some parts of Maud; but the younger poet's treatment is as much his own as the elder's is his own. The comparison of Lanier with Tennyson will, indeed, only deepen the impression of his originality, which is his most striking quality. It may be doubted if any English poet of our time, except Tennyson, has cast his work in an ampler mould, or wrought with more of freedom, or stamped his product with the impress of a stronger personality. His thought, his stand-point, his expression, his form, his treatment, are his alone; and through them all he justifies his right to the title of poet."