One would misjudge him entirely
if he took into account only the highly wrought letters on music
or the great majority of his poems. From one standpoint
he seems a burning flame. As a matter of fact, however, his enthusiasm
for anything that was fine and the ecstatic rapture into which he passed
under the spell of great music or nature or poetry, were balanced by humor
that was playful and delicate and at times irresistible.
His pranks as a college boy and as a soldier have already been noted.
His enjoyment of the negro and of the Georgia "Cracker" may be seen
in his dialect poems, "A Florida Ghost", "Uncle Jim's Baptist Revival Hymn",
"Jones's Private Argument", and others. With his children
his spirit of fun-making knew no bounds. The point may still further be seen
by any one who reads his lectures, and especially those letters to his friends
in which he constantly indulged in playful conceits and fine humor.
He even laughed at his poverty, and got off many a jest
in the very face of death. In this respect, as in others,
he was strikingly like Robert Louis Stevenson.
Lanier's modernness of mind has already been illustrated in his attitude
to music and to scholarship. Asked one time what age he preferred, he said,
"the Present," and the answer was typical of his whole attitude to things.
He did not rail at his age. He was a close student of current events.
He spoke strongly sometimes, as did Wordsworth and Ruskin,
against the materialism of the nineteenth century; he delivered
his protest against it in many of his poems; and yet he never lost his faith
that all material progress would eventually contribute
to the moral and artistic needs of man.
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