BOOKS.
LYRIC POETRY.* Lyric Poetry, by Mr. Ernest Rhys, is one of a series of popular books dealing with English literature, in which, the publishers tell us, "literature is to be broken up into its com- ponent parts, and these parts studied analytically along the line of their literary evolution." So the nymph Echo was treated, by frenzied shepherds, at the instigation of Pan. Books of this kind, intended for the general reader, are seldom quite satisfactory ; though there have been some brilliant exceptions, such as Professor Ker's Mediaeval English Literature in the Home University Library, and the volume on French Literature in the same series. Mr. Rhys's book is not exceptional. The author has attempted to cover too much ground, and has not resisted an inclination to deal with merely curious verses, such as spell-rhymes, and with work of a purely antiquarian interest. There is nothing in Anglo-Saxon, not even Deor's Lament or The Sea-farer, which can be properly called lyrical : the earliest examples of English songs in rhyme are Godric's hymns to Our Lady and Saint Anthony, and the song "Merie sungen the muneches binnen Ely." The melodies were commonly derived from ecclesiastical music; and in the case of the Cuckoo Song the music had been composed originally for Latin words. Though rhyme is not essential, these songs represent for us the beginnings of the English lyric, and the type persists, while the Anglo-Saxon element is not simply modified by the action of French and Italian influences, but dissolved by them.
The difference between Anglo-Saxon poetry and English poetry in the fourteenth century is the measure of French influence. The hymns of Godric and the Cuckoo Song, though their melodies are based upon a sound musical canon, are yet popular songs. Professor Ker, in the book which we have mentioned, shows both the need for and the difficulty of making any clear distinction between " popular " and "courtly" lyrics, but he leaves the question undecided. We use both terms rather loosely, but Professor Ker has pro- vided the distinction required, though in an indirect way, for he shows how the introduction of this new form into England was connected with dances and round games, wakes and festivals ; and a broad distinction might thus be drawn between songs which provided the music for dancing, caroles and ballets, and songs which expressed some personal and characteristic emotion. The distinction is not simply one of material, but one of form : the distinction between what can be expressed by a choir of voices and by a single voice. Mr. Rhys says of a passage in Beowulf, "The verse is not mere recitative, and causes the listener to reflect that when the narrator telling -his saga is carried out of himself and takes to dilating with personal feeling about the scene or character in hand he tends to grow lyrical." This only con- fuses the question ; all passionate and emotional language is musical; and in the prose of Plato, Socrates, as be himself remarks ironically, becomes dithyrambic in praise of love. There is no personal feeling in a song like "Come unto these yellow sands," but it is perfectly lyrical. On the other band, if we follow the development of the ballad we find it using epic material, as in Adam Bell, Clym of the Clough, and William of Clowlesley, or a semi-dramatic form, as in The Boly Land and The Nut-Brown Maid. Similarly, in the development of Greek tragedy, as Aristotle describes it, one person, then another, and then a third is detached from what was originally a simple chorus ; and with the emerging of personality the form becomes more complex. The lyrics of Greek tragedy, however, a chorus by Sophocles or Euripides, though later in date, are more simple and primitive than a lyric by Sappho. In the case of the dramatic form the object is the presentation of character in action; in the case of the lyric it is character in emotion.
Lyric Poettib By Ernest rthys. London :-J. M. Dent and Co. [5s. net.]
English literature, always singularly rich in the lesser kind of choral lyric, did not produce any of the more intricate forms until a comparatively late period. Though Chaucer quotes Guido Guinizelli's "Al cor gentilripara sempre amore," he does not attempt to apply the theories of the Bolognese school, or imitate the method of the Provençal troubadours, who composed their own music; and even with the advent of Wyatt and Surrey the personality is only expressed in the lesser lyric forms, in the sonnet, for instance, which is a weak form of the canzone. The thing may become a trumpet in our hands ; but it was not intended to be a trumpet in the first instance; and nothing in English can quite achieve the perfect proportion of form with matter, as is apparent in Guido Cavalcanti's "Chi 6 questa cite van, ch' ogn' om Is mire E fa tremar di claritate 1' a' re."
The love-sonnet in England was later and Petrarchan : it has lost the earlier freshness. The ode has severed its connexion with courtly love, and its English equivalent is to be found in such things as Milton's Nativity Ode or Crashaw's Mary Magdalene, and much second-rate work of the type they set. Or it may follow a classical model : Milton translates Horace's " Quis multa gracilis," and Marvell, adapting the metre and adding rhyme, produces the great Cromwellian Ode; finally Collins, stripping Marvell's metre of rhyme, returns to the Miltonic model, and, filled with the Miltonic spirit, produces the Ode to Evening. Gray's Pindaric Odes, on the other hand, admirably constructed as far as the development of the ideal is concerned, are quite formless : they are saturated with Romantic feeling, they follow what we may call the genealogical idea of a Pindaric ode; but they are neither Pindaric nor Romantic in form, because they lack the "repeat" of the strophe. Wordsworth'a magnificent Immortality Ode follows the model of Gray, the master to whom he professed an absolute opposition. However highly we may rank these masterpieces, the fact remains that as specimens of lyrical form they are deficient : they are not, strictly speaking, lyrical at all, because they are not strophaic. The characteristic English model is too weak and slender to contain them ; and their makers have not been able to fashion an instrument of a sufficiently wide register. It is not that they are not musical, Gray was a perfect musician; but they have forgotten that, with Pindar as well as with the ballad and carols makers, the poem governed the steps and figures of a dance.
Turn back for a moment to some of the early songs which we have mentioned, the Cuckoo Song or " Blow, northerne wind, Blow thou me my suetynge," and remark how consistently every English lyrist has followed the tradition since. The Elizabethan song-books are filled with such music. To some extent it will hold personality, as in "Take, 0 take those lips away," but usually the theme is the same : "When daffodils begin to peer," down to Herrick's "Ye have been fresh and green." In all these poems there is a perfect pro- portion of the means to the end. The greater lyric, after the invention of printing, has practically ceased to exist ; unless, as in Collins's Ode to Evening, it follows a Horatian model. For the rest, much of what we call lyrical poetry, in four-lined stanzas of octosyllabics, rhymed alternately, might more properly be called elegiac. We seek now not so much to invent English forms of classical metres as to employ a well- recognized English stanza, which has "the content" of the stanza in the original language : as the Dantesque utterance in terra rima on the function of lyrical poetry :—
" Ed io a lui Io mi son tin che, quando Amor ml spire, note, ed a qua modo Che ditta dentro, vs significando,"
is rendered by Dr. Shadwell into the Marvellian stanza :—
"I answered: I am one who hark To Love's inspiring, and I mark As he within doth teach
To utter forth my speech?'
But we speak, in this matter, rather of what has been done than of what is yet to do.
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