M 1U S I V.

MUSIC IN THE POETS.

THE scheme of an anthology in praise of music, if not new, has at least been carried out in a novel and ingenious fashion by Mr. George Hyde Wollaston.* He calls his collection The Poets' Symphony, and has grouped the poems in sections named after the movements of a symphony, prefixing a "Preludio" and inserting three "Intermezzi," thus providing

a useful basis of classification for a work which will appeal alike to lovers of music and poetry. But when full recognition has been made of the skill and discretion with which he has per- formed his task, the limitations and difficulties under which he labours still remain apparent. There is, first of all, what may be called the economic difficulty -which confronts all anthologists who wish to include in their collections poems still in copyright. This presses with peculiar force on the compiler of a musical anthology in virtue of the facts that music is the youngest of the arts, and that a great deal of the greatest poetry was written when music, as we now under- stand it, hardly existed at all, or was still in an embryonic or primitive stage of development. These facts suggest the second difficulty : that music and poetry have not advanced on parallel lines, and that even when music had already reached a high level of achievement, the literary appreciation of it was quite inadequate. This, of course, did not affect the poetic quality of the references to music, many of which, like Dryden's "So Love was crowned, but Music won the cause," will live as long as language endures.

The earlier writers, who belonged to the golden age of the Madrigal, when music formed an integral part of a liberal education, were even happier in their homage: there is no better summary of the service rendered to man by Music than in Sir John Davies's noble hymn where he discourses on the text : "Then Musicke may of hearts a Monarch be Wherein prayse, pleasure, profite so agree."

In the same poem also occurs the charming reference to " Sweet birds (poor men's Musitians)." But in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries tributes to the virtues of music were too often disfigured by conventional eulogy, and hampered by ignorance or disregard of its higher develop- ments. The lyre remained for a long time almost the only instrument of which any account was taken by the poets. One must make an exception in favour of Collins, who in his " Ode to the Passions " has a happy reference to "Pale Melancholy," who

" from her wild sequester'd seat, In notes by distance made more sweet, Pour'd through the mellow horn her pensive soul."

But music for Collins was essentially solo music : he regrets the passing of the ancient lyre, and pleads for a return to the "simple state " of Greece, when

"Thy humblest reed could more prevail, Had more of strength, diviner rage, Than all which charms this laggard age, E'en all at once together found

Cecilia's mingled world of sound."

Dryden, it is true, set "bright Cecilia" above Orpheus, and extolled the "sacred organ" above all other instruments, but his reference to "sharp violins "—he used the epithet to mean " piercing "—is, as we say nowadays, altogether unconvincing. Samuel Bishop, in his poem on " Musical Instruments," calls the fiddle "sprightly," which may pass; but we boggle at "the bagpipe's mellow minstrelsy," while freely admitting its

stimulating quality. The orchestra still lacks a vates weer, and the inadequacy of earlier poets in this regard can

best be illustrated by the fact that even after Mozart and Haydn and Gluck had passed away, and while Beethoven was at the'summit of his creative activity, Shelley wrote a charm- ing poem in which he attributed "all harmonies of the plains and of the skies " to—a guitar, while Coleridge wrote a poem in

praise of an ../Eolian harp, immortalized the dulcimer in his magical " Kubla Khan," and has for all time attached the wholly inappropriate epithet of " loud" to the bassoon. Later

on Leigh Hunt composed quite a long poem on a musical box.

• rho Poets' Symphony : Being a Collection of Verses Written by Some of Those islio in Time Past have Loved Music. Arranged for the present time by George Avds Wollaston. Bristol: J. W. Arrowswith, Ltd. [ e. net.]

The specific references of poets to music have almost invariably been unfortunate. . One of the oddest is the passage iu Tennyson's Maud :—

" All night have the roses heard

The flute, violin, bassoon ; All night has the casement jessamine stirr'd To the dancers dancing in tune "-

certainly a most unusual combination for a dance-band, though the words and the picture called up are exquisite. Tennyson's case was peculiar, but not without parallel. No one wrote more melodious verse, and yet he knew nothing of music—technically, at least—and was quite incapable of dis- criminating between fine and commonplace settings of his own poems. Swinburne, for all his amazing skill as a metrist,

was equally unversed in the practice of music. Browning, though he cannot be called a musical writer, in spite of inter- mittent bursts of melody, was not only a devotee but a student of the art, and made it the theme of some of his greatest poems. It is pleasant to know that the present Laureate belongs to the rare tribe of musician poets. His absence from this collection is regrettable, but is inevitable in a scheme which excludes living writers.

But if poets have as a rule exposed their ignorance in their direct references to music, they have made ample amends by

their indirect service in inspiring composers, a service the nobility of which has been expressed with incomparable majesty of diction in Milton's Ode to the "sphere-born

harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse." Milton, " God-gifted organ voice of England," never made a mistake when he

wrote of music, and his homage to the art may well outweigh all the examples of its literary maltreatment, many of which are to be found in an amusing article in Macmillan's Magazine for April, 1876 (Vol. XXXIII., p. 552). English poets are not the only offenders. Victor Hugo in Les Miserables tells us that on the occasion of Valjean's banquet "three violins and a flute played in an undertone quatuors of Haydn." As for the

novelists, the name of their solecisms is legion. One of the most amusing is to be found in "Ouida," who, "in a lively account of the sufferings to which the officers of Her Majesty's Brigade of Guards are exposed during the London season, makes one of these unfortunate gentlemen so far

forget himself at an evening party as to propose to a young lady ' between two movements of a symphony.' Ouida or her hero may have had peculiarly bad luck ; but as a rule nothing so formidable as a symphony is presented at an evening party." Again, in Mr. William Black's Three Feathers "a perfect accord of descending fifths" is dwelt upon with a sort of rapture, and this, be it noted, some forty

years before the exploits of Debussy, Ravel, Scriabine, or Schonberg.

The third difficulty connected with poetical comment on, or

interpretation of, music is excellently expressed in a passage from Professor Andrew Bradley's Oxford Lectures on Poetry, quoted by Mr. Wollaston himself in a note on the Lime " What do you mean by your mountainous fugues ?" in Browning's "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha":- " What Beethoven meant by the symphony, or Turner by the picture, was not something which you can name, but the picture and the symphony. Meaning they have, but what meaning can be said in no language but their own ; and we know this, though some strange delusion makes us think the meaning has less worth because we cannot put it into words."

Browning perhaps comes nearer achieving the impossible than anyone else, but in the main poets are on safer ground when they deal in general terms with the delight, the solace, or the stimulus we derive from music. Poems which celebrate great musicians worthily, such as T. E. Brown's brilliant fantasy on Samuel Sebastian Wesley—" The Organist in Heaven"—are all too rare, though Milton set a splendid example in his sonnet to Harry Lewes, who was also honoured by Herrick and Waller. Holcroft's poem on Haydn is an

unconscious burlesque of the worst frigidities of the Popian method, and Bowles's lines on Mozart are quite unworthy of the doctor seraphicus of music. As a rule the more specific poets become in their treatment of music the less likely are they to satisfy musicians. The frank distaste for music

expressed in Lamb's delightful "Free Thoughts on Several Eminent Composers" is altogether preferable to the con- ventional eulogies of the lyre, the lute, and St. Cecilia which recur with wearisome iteration in the poetry of the