GERMAN LYRICS.*

THE appearance, some years ago, of Mr. Palgrave's Golden neasury may be said—if the reader will allow us the use of an awkward-looking, but very convenient German compound—to have been " epoch-making" in our selections of poetry. We then saw the difference between a selection and the selection— or say, rather, one of the (few) selections—which our literature needs. Indeed, nothing is more absurd than the common assump- tion that any one and every one is fit for this kind of work. Pro- fessor Owen might find in a quarry a few fossils of the greatest value, where a tyro would bring away a barrow-load of no use except for road-mending. Similarly, in literature, the selector must have some of the highest qualities of the critic. He in effect passes judgment on every poem of a particular class in a language, and decides for ns which are the most precious. And he not only, like other critics, tells us what to admire, but he also puts it before us, gathering the good, or rather the best—or the best, when considered from a particular point of view, for no selector can be sure that his point of view is the only legitimate one, even though it may be one of the most instructive—into his volume, and by this preference necessarily excludes those which, from the same point of view, have not the same merit. To dill- charge this function aright, then, he must carefully winnow the whole literature of the language, and he must have the most delicate discrimination to enable him to decide between a great number of poems at first sight of equal merit, and to choose those which, tried by his standard, will stand the test of familiarity, and like the finer wines, improve by keeping.

The Sage convinced Rasselas that no one could be a poet. We hope we have convinced the reader that not every one can be a good selector of poetry. But in showing the difficulty of the task we have also shown the difficulty of fairly reviewing any attempts to perform it. The critic cannot toil through the literature after the selector, and compare what be has taken with what he has left. In such cases one feels inclined to see whether the book contains one's own especial favourites, and to praise or condemn it according to the results of our search. But this is hardly fair in dealing with the work of such men as M. Masson, who has given us the Lyre Franc:aim, and Dr. Buchheim, to whom we are indebted for the Deutsche Lyrik. They probably are far better judges of their own literatures than the English critic, and if they fail to include all his favourites in their volume, they give him poems equally good, which he has never seen before. In these cases, " time is wisest, for it finds out all things," so we will leave time to deter- mine whether the Deutsche Lyrik is a worthy companion to the Golden Treasury. That it is in itself a delightful little book we can certify, from the pleasure we have derived from it.

We are accustomed to get excellent literary introductions from Dr. Buchheim, and the introduction to this volume is quite worthy of him, but the notes here and there offer the critic a tempting field for fault-finding. We cannot but think that those who, like Dr. Buchheim, have had much experience in teaching are apt to be some- what demoralised as annotators. In his sixty pages of notes he gives much information that really throws light on the passages referred to ; and if in places we find a good deal of " fourth-form learning," we are not at all disposed to quarrel with Dr. Buchheim

• Detasehe Lyrik. Selected and Arranged, with Notes and a Literary Introduction, by 0. A. Bnchhelm, PhilDoc. Loudon: Macmillan. 1875.

on this account. Male readers of ordinary education may feel in- sulted when they are told about Favonius, but then such informa- tion will prove useful to many ladies, at least as well educated as we are. There are some notes, however, which we consider quite superfluous. In these Dr. Buchheim gives us, in English prose, what the reader may easily make out from the poem itself. Take, e.g., Glinther's lines :—

" Konam mit and gib fein Acht, Was dort anf Golgotha fiir Segensst;ome fliessen ! Es ist das rothe Meer in jen' gelobtes Land, Das unser Joshua am Bronze scharf erfochten."

There can surely be no one who needs a paraphrase of this pas- sage, or to be told who is intended by " unser Joshua." In so small a volume, everything should be omitted which is not neces- sary for the elucidation of the poems. This would exclude some of the notes in which Dr. Buchheim quotes criticisms only to laugh at them. If any one has been stupid enough to interpret Goethe's " beide schliffst Du auch,"—" my stormy, poetical mind will be calmed," and even to find fault with Schiller for not men- tioning tea in the Punschlied, all we can say is, the sooner such folly is forgotten, the better.

Another suggestion, and we have done. It is becoming evident to some Germans even that German type is very bad type, and must in the end become as obsolete as " black-letter " is in Eng- lish. We fear Sedan has put off this happy consummation for fifty years at the least. But if there is any meaning to be attached to the word Vernunit, we do not despair. What can be said for a type which makes little distinction between words as different as Ernst and Graft? Now this fault of indistinctness is of course much worse when the type is small than when it is large, and the type of the Deutsche Lyrik is very small. The suggestion we would make might seem so horrible to our German readers that we refrain from putting it plainly, but we hope Dr. Buchheim will guess our meaning.

Dr. Buchheim must have had as pleasing a task in selecting as we have in reviewing a volume of German lyrics. The language is rich in lyrics, and the genuine lyric is one of the most precious things in literature,—

" A. drop of Helicon, a flower

Cull'd from the Muses' favourite bower."

As to the lyre and its connection with poetry, we leave the reader to " perplex himself as much as he pleases " by turning to the learned works written on that subject. Any short composition that is poetical in feeling and musical in sound is, for us, a lyric.

Poetry generally has been declared to be " musique qui pease," and this is especially true of the lyric. There is, indeed, much resemblance between the perfect song and the perfect melody. Both have been produced by the greatest poets and musicians, or have sprung up, no one knew how, among the people themselves. Both appeal to cultivated tastes and uncultivated alike. The popular character of the song, and its wide-spread influence, have been very conspicuous among the Germans, who have a national interest in the truth of their own adage,-

" Wo man singt, da lass dich rnhig nieder ; Bose Menschen haben keine Lieder."

And just as the high-polite Lord Chesterfield despised proverbs for being in favour with the common people, so have other genteel persons spoken slightingly of the song. It is to this that we probably owe such expressions as " Chansons!" in French, and " I bought it for a song," in English. But another explana- tion is possible, for unfortunately a great many songs are chansons with a vengeance. The poet and the musician have to combine, and occasionally the musician overshadows the poet, so that words ridiculous in themselves are allowed to pass muster in a song. Hence one of the moat quoted of the many brilliant mots in Beaumarchais' Barbier :—" Ce qui ne vaut pas la peine d'être dit, on le chante." If we put this in the form, " We often sing what we should not say," it passes at once from an epigram to a truism. And it is melancholy to reflect that great musicians sometimes confer immortality on such rubbish as " Wenn do fein fromm bist " and " Mit Brunetten," in Don Giovanni.

But the true song has a melody of its own, a melody which is felt by the mind quite independently of the meaning. Who does not feel the melody of such lines as these :—

" Take, 0 take those lips away,

That so sweetly were forsworn I"

and even of songs far inferior to this, such as Sheridan's,— " Mark'd you her eye of heavenly blue ?"

And this melody exists quite apart from meaning ; indeed, Joseph de Maistre says that he learned as a child to love the melody of the verses with which his mother soothed him to sleep, although he attached no meaning to them.

The lyric, then, must be musical in sound, and it must be poetical in feeling. There must be nothing of the epigram about it. The epigram is essentially unlyrical. The writer wishes to astonish by a brilliant performance, and there is always a "plaudits" subauditum at the end. He may, indeed, simulate indignation and deal a well-aimed blow, but if he knocks any one down, it is only as a tour de force,—he wishes the spectators to think not of the effect, but of the blow itself. To change the metaphor, he is not like a man holding a candle for us that we may see our surroundings; he holds a Roman candle, and expects us to look at it. He has therefore of necessity (as a writer in the Pall Mall lately observed) a self- satisfied air ; he assumes that he knows all about his subject, and gives you the gist of it in a nut-shell. Limitation is of the essence of the epigram. But all this is changed when we come to the true lyric poet. He does not collect a crowd, spread his carpet, and proceed to tumble upon it, but he merely gives his thoughts and feelings their natural expression :—

4' Ioh singe wie der Vogel singt,"

says the great German lyricist, Goethe ; similarly Tennyson :—

"I do but sing because I must, And pipe but as the linnets sing."

And in uttering truths, whether of thought or feeling, he does not

attempt to define them. Not limitation, but the very reverse; is the essence of all true poetry. The words are " thrown out " at thoughts and feelings, to which words may bear witness, but which they cannot reveal. They, in fact, do not so much convey a truth as awaken an echo. Hence Goethe, speaking of his early poems, says that already is-

" Verklungen ach ! der orate Wieder-klang." And Tennyson, in one of the most lovely of English lyrics "0 love, they die in you rich sky, They faint on hill or field or river ; Our echoes roll from soul to soul And grow for ever and for ever."

We have strayed from the Germans farther than we intended,. but we cannot conclude without answering a possible objection to the distinction we have endeavoured to point out between the poet and the epigrammatist. Our greatest epigram- matist Pope, is also one of our great poets. Yes, but he was a poet in spite of his being an epigrammatist. His brilliant sayings do not make a poet of him. When we speak of his poetry, our thoughts naturally turn to the Rape of the Lock or Eloisa and Abelard, not to the Arbuthnot Letter or the Characteristics of Women. Pope believed himself a wit, a poet, and a philosopher, and with him the wit came first, hence the following declension :—

" Some have at first for wits, then poets pass'd,

Tarn'd critics next, and proved plain fools at last."

He could, however, forget the wit in the poet, but not in the philosopher ; and to revert to our metaphor, philosophy, like poetry, has nothing to do with intellectual pyrotechnics. It enables us to see, not itself, but the truths which are the subject of it. Pope never understood this, and his philosophy, instead of giving us light, turns out to be a mere bundle of crackers.