Southern Christian Advocate

LITERARY

The Author of "The Star-Spangled Banner."

The recent unveiling of the statue to Francis Scott Key, in Frederick, Md., is generally regarded as a fitting climax to the war, in which his stirring national anthem has received so many fresh honors.

The New York Home Journal expresses a high appreciation of Mr. Key, both as a poet and as a man. It says of him:

"In Virginia and Maryland, where he was best known, he was famous as the author of hymns as well as ballads--one of which at least, 'Lord, with Glowing Heart I'd Praise Thee,' has much of the richness and glow which made Heber so popular, and is itself as popular as aught that Heber or Wesley ever wrote. Mr. Key was the intimate friend of John Randolph, and of the then youthful William Meade, who became famous as a Bishop. Mr. Key was of the school in Southern verse in which Edward Coatsworth Pinckney, Edgar A. Poe, and, later, Paul Hayne and Henry Timrod were conspicuous, and which, like the Knickerbocker school, was characterized by grace and delicacy, rather than by that somewhat coarse strength which the present decade admires so enthusiastically in Rudyard Kipling. The poetry of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' has touches of delicacy for which one looks in vain in most national odes, and is as near a true poem as any national ode ever was. The picture of the moon's early light' and the tri-color, half concealed, half disclosed, amid the mists that wreathed the battle-sounding Patapsco, is a true poetic concept. If critics had to pronounce upon Mr. Key among Southern poets, or American poets at large, they would not find him, in a technical sense, at all approaching the complexity, power and sweep of Sidney Lanier: just as, possibly, no poet of the Knickerbocker regime would compare with Kipling or Swinburne. But the conviction forces itself upon one's mind all the same that the truest poetic immortality is that which finds its way to the hearts of the people. Judged by this test, Francis Scott Key would be a poet indeed.

"The 'Star-Spangled Banner' has the peculiar merit of not being a tocsin song, like the 'Marseillaise.' Indeed, there is no restful, soothing or even humane sentiment in all that stormy shout. It is the scream of oppressed humanity against its oppressor, presaging a more than quid pro quo; and it fitly prefigured the sight of that long file of tumbrils bearing to the Place de Revolution the fairest scions of French aristocracy. On the other hand, God Save the Queen, in its original, has one or two lines as grotesque as 'Yankee Doodle' itself; yet we have paraphrased it in America, and made it a hymn meet for all our churches. But the 'Star-Spangled Banner' combines dignity and beauty, and would be hard to find a line of it that could be improved upon.

"There is something generic in the American poetry of the age in which Francis Scott Key wrote; and, in speaking of that age, we might extend it so as to take in the age of Willis and Longfellow as well, though in some respects Longfellow's poetry has very little affinity with what we might call the early Knickerbocker or Baltimore school, just as there is no affinity between the genius of Key and Poe and that of Sidney Lanier. The latter, as a native Georgian, has been hailed as a product of the New South, and, as a Baltimorean by rather extended residence, he might be classed with Key and Poe, sectionally, so to say. But Sidney Lanier was an abstract poet, depending not a whit upon popular themes, and catering very little to contemporary movements. Father Ryan gained favor North as well as South from his graceful and pathetic presentment of the feelings of his section in the hour of defeat; but Sidney Lanier was rather a poet in English, without special reference to his habitat. Thus Sidney Lanier has been a close rival of Poe's as a Southern poet, but is really, judged by modern critical standards, of a more complex, and so of a technically higher, order. But the modern poets of England and America do not imitate such poets as Drake, Willis, Poe or Key: it is rather Swinburne, Rossetti, Browning, Emerson, and what we may call, for clearness, the 'introversive' school, that serve as plaster models in modern verse.

"This explains why our modern aesthetic poets could not rise to the height of the occasion and produce a ringing note on Cuba--especially on the stormy scenes at Santiago. They did not feel the thrill; they could not write at white heat. Key, from the British prison ship, saw the flag still there; it was a living inspiration to one of his warm, impassioned nature. But even Mr. Key, with all his devotion and piety, could not save his verse from the profanation of modern American wit. The words, 'In God is our trust,' transcribed upon the silver dollar, have furnished innumerable occasions to witlings to burlesque his exalted faith, as if we indeed beheld the face of divinity when we gazed upon the image and superscription of our national treasury!

"A sweet, noble life was that of the author of our favorite national hymn--a life of ideal refinement, piety, scholarly gentleness. Little did he think that his voice would be the storm-song, the victor-shout, of conquering America to resound down and down the ages!"