III. LOOKING FOR A VOCATION

1865-1873

It took some courage for a young man in the South to face either the present or the future in 1865. The war had changed comfort or wealth into poverty. Four million slaves, suddenly freed, were without provisions, and without prospect of labor in a land where employers were impoverished. Forty thousand Confederate soldiers had been disbanded after their terrible four years' struggle, at best to begin life over. Colleges, universities, and libraries were a thing of the past. The old governments were gone, and the new military rule was still chaotic. Every American can be proud of the way in which the mass of these men set to work to build upon the ruins.

Lanier's mind was full of poetry and music that clamored to be written down. But with his usual cheerful acceptance of life, he set about making a living in any way that offered. He tutored at a plantation near his home, thirty classes a day; he became clerk in a hotel in Montgomery, Ala., describing humorously to a friend the paralyzing deadness of business and of mental life; he buckled down to writing poems, essays, and his novel, Tiger Lilies, making a trip North in 1867 to arrange for the publication of the latter.

In December of that year he was married to Miss Mary Day, whom he had met in Macon during his stay there on furlough in 1863; and that winter

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was spent as principal of an academy in Prattville, Ala., where drudgery and the first signs of his fatal disease, and the disheartening events of Reconstruction alike failed to keep him from his studies in German and Latin literature, or from pouring out his thoughts in essays on current happenings and metaphysical ideas, as well as in occasional poems.

But

Under his father's urging he went into the latter's law office late in 1868. Throwing his whole heart into the task, as usual, he was admitted to the bar, and for over three years he devoted himself to the intricacies of real estate titles, building and loan advances, trust estates, and other matters of legal principles and records. It was not work that would be chosen by a poet, musician and dreamer, longing for the field of scholarship and literature. Chancellor Walter B. Hill, who joined the law firm later, declares: "I have had occasion to go over much work of that sort which he did, and I have been struck with its uniform correctness and carefulness. I never saw deeds better drawn than his;" and the other members of the firm said that he introduced a system of order into the office which made it a different place.

During these years ill health drove him away several times for short changes of climate. Three trips of business and health, to New York, opened to him glimpses of a world toward which his deepest nature strained. He heard Nilsson sing, and Thomas's orchestra play the "Tannhäuser" overture; and there kept growing in his mind a feeling

that only in these fields of music and poetry and study could he fulfil his true reason for existence.

This belief, which was but the recognition of creative powers demanding expression, deepened to conviction in 1873. Consumption, contracted at Point Lookout and fought against ever since, became so serious that he was forced to try a change to the dry air of Texas; and at San Antonio he was so near death that the facts of life ranged themselves before him in unmistakable values.

All the while, he had been keenly observing the new people and places about him, developing his Jacquerie by study of Michelet's France, reading and planning for a series of travel articles— one of which, on San Antonio, appears in his book, Retrospects and Prospects. His health presently improved under influences of the air and of a rigorously followed course of medical treatment. He experienced the joy of a musical triumph, his flute solo before the Männerchor producing a storm of applause amid which the leader, "an old man with long white beard and mustache,” ran to him, grasped his hand and declared that he "hat never heert de flude accompany itself pefore!" He wrote down one of the musical improvisations on nature themes with which he was wont to delight his friends, "Field-larks and Blackbirds." And when he returned to Macon in April his mind was made up.

That September he set out for the North, with flute and pen as weapons. He was thirty-one years old; a wife and three children were to be provided for; his first efforts in literature offered little encour

agement financially; his family and friends thought that in his state of health such a hazard of new fortunes was folly. But he had faced all the facts and was sure. He writes his father from New York, November 29, 1873:

"I have given your last letter the fullest and most careful consideration. After doing so, I feel sure that Macon is not the place for me. If you could taste the delicious crystalline air, and the champagne breeze that I've just been rushing about in, I am equally sure that in point of climate you would agree with me that my chance for life is ten times as great here as in Macon. Then, as to business, why should I, nay, 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 some other thing so much better? Several persons, from whose judgment 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. (Of course I protest against the necessity which makes me write such things about myself. I only do so because I so appreciate the love and tenderness which prompt you to desire me with you that I will make the fullest explanation possible of my course, out of the reciprocal honor and respect for the motives which lead you to think differently from me.) 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?"

IV. WRITER, MUSICIAN, AND LECTURER 1874-1881

LANIER's undoubted musical genius won for him immediate recognition. On his way to New York he stopped in Baltimore and met Asger Hamerik, director of the Peabody Conservatory of Music. This distinguished leader and composer was so delighted with his playing of his own "Blackbirds" that he at once offered him the position of first flute in the new orchestra being formed at the Peabody, which position Lanier filled through this and succeeding seasons. He told a friend that when he entered the orchestra he actually did not know the value of a dotted note; yet his musical instinct not only enabled him to hold his own with trained musicians, but he was repeatedly assured by experts that he was the best sight reader they had ever met.