A Study of Poetry Part 19

"In Paradise what have I to win? Therein I seek not to enter, but only to have Nicolette, my sweet lady that I love so well. For into Paradise go none but such folk as I shall tell thee now: Thither go these same old priests, and halt old men and maimed, who all day and night cower continually before the altars and in the crypts; and such folk as wear old amices and old clouted frocks, and naked folk and shoeless, and covered with sores, perishing of hunger and thirst and of cold, and of little ease. These be they that go into Paradise; with them I have naught to make. But into h.e.l.l would I fain go; for into h.e.l.l fare the goodly clerks, and goodly knights that fall in tourneys and great wars, and stout men at arms, and all men n.o.ble. With these would I liefly go.

And thither pa.s.s the sweet ladies and courteous that have two lovers or three, and their lords also thereto. Thither goes the gold and the silver, the cloth of vair and cloth of gris, and harpers and makers, and the prince of this world. With these I would gladly go, let me but have with me Nicolette, my sweetest lady."

_5. The Elizabethan Lyric_

The European influence came afresh to England, as we have seen, with those "courtly makers" who travelled into France and Italy and brought back the new-found treasures of the Renaissance. Greece and Rome renewed, as they are forever from time to time renewing, their hold upon the imagination and the art of English verse. Sometimes this influence of the cla.s.sics has worked toward contraction, restraint, acceptance of human limitations and of the "rules" of art. But in Elizabethan poetry the cla.s.sical influence was on the side of expansion. In that release of vital energy which characterized the English Renaissance, the rediscovery of Greece and Rome and the artistic contacts with France and Italy heightened the confidence of Englishmen, revealed the continuity of history and gave new faith in human nature. It spelled, for the moment at least, liberty rather than authority. It stimulated intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm. Literary criticism awoke to life in the trenchant discussions of the art of poetry by Gascoigne and Sidney, by Puttenham, Campion and Daniel. The very t.i.tles of the collections of lyrics which followed the famous _Tottel's Miscellany_ of 1557 flash with the spirit of the epoch: _A Paradise of Dainty Devices, A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions, A Handfull of Pleasant Delights, The Phoenix Nest, England's Helicon_, Davison's _Poetical Rhapsody._

Bullen, Sch.e.l.ling, Rhys, Braithwaite, and other modern collectors of the Elizabethan lyric have ravaged these volumes and many more, and have shown how the imported Italian pastoral tallied with the English idyllic mood, how the study of prosody yielded rich and various stanzaic effects, how the diffusion of the pa.s.sion for song through all cla.s.ses of the community gave a marvelous singing quality to otherwise thin and mere "dildido"

lines. Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch and his friends have revived the music of the Elizabethan song-books, and John Erskine and other scholars have investigated the relation of the song-books--especially the songs composed by musicians such as Byrd, Dowland and Campion--to the form and quality of the surviving lyric verse. But one does not need a knowledge of the Elizabethan lute and viol, and of the precise difference between a "madrigal" and a "catch" or "air" in order to perceive the tunefulness of a typical Elizabethan song:

"I care not for these ladies, That must be woode and praide: Give me kind Amarillis, The wanton countrey maide.

Nature art disdaineth, Here beautie is her owne.

Her when we court and kisse, She cries, Forsooth, let go: But when we come where comfort is, She never will say No."

It is not that the spirit of Elizabethan lyric verse is always care-free, even when written by prodigals such as Peele and Greene and Marlowe. Its childlike grasping after sensuous pleasure is often shadowed by the sword, and by quick-coming thoughts of the brevity of mortal things. Yet it is always spontaneous, swift, alive. Its individual voices caught the tempo and cadence of the race and epoch, so that men as unlike personally as Spenser, Marlowe and Donne are each truly "Elizabethan." Spenser's "vine-like" luxuriance, Marlowe's soaring energy, Donne's grave realistic subtleties, ill.u.s.trate indeed that note of individualism which is never lacking in the great poetic periods. This individualism betrays itself in almost every song of Shakspere's plays. For here is English race, surely, and the very echo and temper of the Renaissance, but with it all there is the indescribable, inimitable _timbre_ of one man's singing voice.

_6. The Reaction_

If we turn, however, from the lyrics of Shakspere to those of Ben Jonson and of the "sons of Ben" who sang in the reigns of James I and Charles I, we become increasingly conscious of a change in atmosphere. The moment of expansion has pa.s.sed. The "first fine careless rapture" is over. Cla.s.sical "authority" resumes its silent, steady pressure. Scholars like to remember that the opening lines of Ben Jonson's "Drink to me only with thine eyes"

are a transcript from the Greek. In his "Ode to Himself upon the Censure of his _New Inn_" in 1620 Jonson, like Landor long afterward, takes scornful refuge from the present in turning back to Greece and Rome:

"Leave things so prost.i.tute, And take the Alcaic lute; Or thine own Horace, or Anacreon's lyre; Warm thee by Pindar's fire."

The reaction in lyric form showed itself in the decay of sonnet, pastoral and madrigal, in the neglect of blank verse, in the development of the couplet. Milton, in such matters as these, was a solitary survival of the Elizabethans. Metrical experimentation almost ceased, except in the hands of ingenious recluses like George Herbert. The popular metre of the Caroline poets was the rhymed eight and six syllable quatrain:

"Yet this inconstancy is such As thou too shalt adore; I could not love thee, Dear, so much Loved I not Honour more."

The mystics like Crashaw, Vaughan and Traherne wished and secured a wider metrical liberty, and it is, in truth, these complicated patterns of the devotional lyric of the seventeenth century that are of greatest interest to the poets of our own day. But contemporary taste, throughout the greater portion of that swiftly changing epoch, preferred verse that showed a conservative balance in thought and feeling, in diction and versification. Waller, with his courtier-like instinct for what was acceptable, took the middle of the road, letting Cowley and Quarles experiment as fantastically as they pleased. Andrew Marvell, too, a Puritan writing in the Restoration epoch, composed as "smoothly"

as Waller. Herrick, likewise, though fond of minor metrical experiments, celebrated his quiet garden pleasures and his dalliance with amorous fancies in verse of the true Horatian type. "Intensive rather than expansive, fanciful rather than imaginative, and increasingly restrictive in its range and appeal": that is Professor Sch.e.l.ling's expert summary of the poetic tendencies of the age.

And then the lyric impulse died away in England. Dryden could be magnificently sonorous in declamation and satire, but he lacked the singing voice. Pope likewise, though he "lisped in numbers," could never, for all of his cleverness, learn to sing. The age of the Augustans, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, was an age of prose, of reason, of good sense, of "correctness." The decasyllabic couplet, so resonant in Dryden, so admirably turned and polished by Pope, was its favorite measure. The poets played safe. They took no chances with "enthusiasm,"

either in mood or metrical device. What could be said within the restraining limits of the couplet they said with admirable point, vigor and grace. But it was speech, not song.

7. _The Romantic Lyric_

The revolt came towards the middle of the century, first in the lyrics of Collins, then in Gray. The lark began to soar and sing once more in English skies. New windows were opened in the House of Life. Men looked out again with curiosity, wonder and a sense of strangeness in the presence of beauty. They saw Nature with new eyes; found a new richness in the Past, a new picturesque and savor in the life of other races, particularly in the wild Northern and Celtic strains of blood. Life grew again something mysterious, not to be comprehended by the "good sense" of the Augustans, or expressible in the terms of the rhymed couplet. Instead of the normal, poets sought the exceptional, then the strange, the far-away in time or place, or else the familiar set in some unusual fantastic light. The mood of poetry changed from tranquil sentiment to excited sentiment or "sensibility," and then to sheer pa.s.sion. The forms of poetry shifted from the conventional to the revival of old measures like blank verse and the Spenserian stanza, then to the invention of new and freer forms, growing ever more lyrical. Poetic diction rebelled against the Augustan conventions, the stereotyped epithets, the frigid personifications. It abandoned the abstract and general for the specific and the picturesque. It turned to the language of real life, and then, dissatisfied, to the heightened language of pa.s.sion. If one reads Cowper, Blake, Burns and Wordsworth, to say nothing of poets like Byron and Sh.e.l.ley who wrote in the full Romantic tide of feeling, one finds that this poetry has discovered new themes. It portrays the child, the peasant, the villager, the outcast, the slave, the solitary person, even the idiot and the lunatic. There is a new human feeling for the individual, and for the endless, the poignant variety of "states of soul." Browning, by and by, is to declare that "states of soul" are the only things worth a poet's attention.

Now this new individuality of themes, of language, of moods, a.s.sisted in the free expression of lyricism, the release of the song-impulse of the "single, separate person." The Romantic movement was revelatory, in a double sense. "Creation widened in man's view"; and there was equally a revelation of individual poetic energy which gave the Romantic lyric an extraordinary variety and beauty of form. There was an exaggerated individualism, no doubt, which marked the weak side of the whole movement: a deliberate extravagance, a cultivated egoism. Vagueness has its legitimate poetic charm, but in England no less than in Germany or France lyric vagueness often became incoherence. Symbolism degenerated into meaninglessness. But the fantastic and grotesque side of Romantic individualism should not blind us to the central fact that a rich personality may appear in a queer garb. Victor Hugo, like his young friends of the 1830's, loved to make the gray-coated citizens of Paris stare at his scarlet, but the personality which could create such lyric marvels as the _Odes et Ballades_ may be forgiven for its eccentricities.

William Blake was eccentric to the verge of insanity, yet he opened, like Whitman and Poe, new doors of ivory into the wonder-world.

Yet a lyrist like Keats, it must be remembered, betrayed his personality not so much through any external peculiarity of the Romantic temperament as through the actual texture of his word and phrase and rhythm. Examine his brush-work microscopically, as experts in Italian painting examine the brushstrokes and pigments of some picture attributed to this or that master: you will see that Keats, like all the supreme masters of poetic diction, enciphered his lyric message in a language peculiarly his own. It is for us to decipher it as we may. He used, of course, particularly in his earlier work, some of the stock-epithets, the stock poetic "properties" of the Romantic school, just as the young Tennyson, in his volume of 1827, played with the "owl" and the "midnight" and the "solitary mere," stock properties of eighteenth-century romance. Yet Tennyson, like Keats, and for that matter like Shakspere, pa.s.sed through this imitative phase into an artistic maturity where without violence or extravagance or eccentricity he compelled words to do his bidding. Each word bears the finger-print of a personality.

Now it is precisely this revelation of personality which gave zest, throughout the Romantic period, to the curiosity about the poetry of alien races. It will be remembered that Romanticism followed immediately upon a period of cosmopolitanism, and that it preceded that era of intense nationalism which came after the Napoleonic wars. Even in that intellectual "United States of Europe," about 1750--when nationalistic differences were minimized, "enlightenment" was supreme and "propria communia dicere" was the literary motto--there was nevertheless a rapidly growing curiosity about races and literatures outside the charmed circle of Western Europe. It was the era of the Oriental tale, of Northern mythology. Then the poets of England, France and Germany began their fruitful interchange of inspiration. Walter Scott turned poet when he translated Burger's "Lenore." Goethe read Marlowe's _Dr. Faustus_.

Wordsworth and Coleridge visited Germany not in search of general eighteenth-century "enlightenment," but rather in quest of some peculiar revelation of truth and beauty. In the full tide of Romanticism, Protestant Germany sought inspiration in Italy and Spain, as Catholic France sought it in Germany and England. A new sense of race-values was evident in poetry. It may be seen in Southey, Moore, and Byron, in Hugo's _Les Orientales_ and in Leconte de Lisle's _Poemes Barbares_.

Modern music has shown the same tendency: Strauss of Vienna writes waltzes in Arab rhythms, Grieg composes a Scotch symphony, Dvorak writes an American national anthem utilizing negro melodies. As communication between races has grown easier, and the interest in race-characteristics more intense, it would be strange indeed if lovers of lyric poetry did not range far afield in their search for new complexities of lyric feeling.

_8. The Explorer's Pleasure_

This explorer's pleasure in discovering the lyrics of other races was never more keen than it is to-day. Every additional language that one learns, every new sojourn in a foreign country, enriches one's own capacity for sharing the lyric mood. It is impossible, of course, that any race or period should enter fully into the lyric impulses of another.

Educated Englishmen have known their Horace for centuries, but it can be only a half-knowledge, delightful as it is. France and England, so near in miles, are still so far away in instinctive comprehension of each other's mode of poetical utterance! No two nations have minds of quite the same "fringe." No man, however complete a linguist, has more than one real mother tongue, and it is only in one's mother tongue that a lyric sings with all its over-tones. And nevertheless, life offers few purer pleasures than may be found in listening to the half-comprehended songs uttered by alien lips indeed, but from hearts that we know are like our own.

"This moment yearning and thoughtful sitting alone, It seems to me there are other men in other lands yearning and thoughtful, It seems to me I can look over and behold them in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Or far, far away, in China, or in Russia or j.a.pan, talking other dialects, And it seems to me if I could know those men I should become attached to them as I do to men in my own lands, O I know we should be brethren and lovers, I know I should be happy with them."

9. _A Test_

If the reader is willing to test his own responsiveness, not to the alien voices, but to singers of his own blood in other epochs, let him now read aloud--or better, recite from memory--three of the best-known English poems: Milton's "Lycidas," Gray's "Elegy" and Wordsworth's "Ode to Immortality." The first was published in 1638, the second in 1751, and the third in 1817. Each is a "central" utterance of a race, a period and an individual. Each is an open-air poem, written by a young Englishman; each is lyrical, elegiac--a song of mourning and of consolation. "Lycidas" is the last flawless music of the English Renaissance, an epitome of cla.s.sical and pastoral convention, yet at once Christian, political and personal. Beneath the quiet perfection of Gray's "Elegy" there is the undertone of pa.s.sionate sympathy for obscure lives: pa.s.sionate, but restrained. Wordsworth knows no restraint of form or feeling in his great "Ode"; its germinal idea is absurd to logic, but not to the imagination. This elegy, like the others, is a "lyric cry" of a man, an age, and a race; "enciphered" like them, with all the cunning of which the artist was capable; and decipherable only to those who know the language of the English lyric.

There may be readers who find these immortal elegies wearisome, staled by repet.i.tion, spoiled by the critical glosses of generations of commentators. In that case, one may test his sense of race, period and personality by a single quatrain of Landor, who is surely not over-commented upon to-day:

"From you, Ianthe, little troubles pa.s.s Like little ripples down a sunny river; Your pleasures spring like daisies in the gra.s.s, Cut down, and up again as blithe as ever."

Find the cla.s.sicist, the aristocrat, the Englishman, and the lover in that quatrain!

Or, if Landor seems too remote, turn to Amherst, Ma.s.sachusetts, and read this amazing elegy in a country churchyard written by a New England recluse, Emily d.i.c.kinson:

"This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies, And Lads and Girls; Was laughter and ability and sighing, And frocks and curls.

This pa.s.sive place a Summer's nimble mansion, Where Bloom and Bees Fulfilled their Oriental Circuit, Then ceased like these."

CHAPTER X

THE PRESENT STATUS OF THE LYRIC

"And the same may be said of l.u.s.t and anger and all the other affections, of desire and pain and pleasure which are held to be inseparable from every action--in all of them poetry feeds and waters the pa.s.sions instead of withering and starving them; she lets them rule instead of ruling them as they ought to be ruled, with a view to the happiness and virtue of mankind."

PLATO'S _Republic_, Book 10

"A man has no right to say to his own generation, turning quite away from it, 'Be d.a.m.ned!' It is the whole Past and the whole Future, this same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very wretched generation of ours."

CARLYLE _to_ EMERSON, _August 29, 1842_

Let us turn finally to some phases of the contemporary lyric. We shall not attempt the hazardous, not to say impossible venture of a.s.sessing the artistic value of living poets. "Poets are not to be ranked like collegians in a cla.s.s list," wrote the wise John Morley long ago.

Certainly they cannot be ranked until their work is finished. Nor is it possible within the limits of this chapter to attempt, upon a smaller scale, anything like the task which has been performed so interestingly by books like Miss Lowell's _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_, Mr.

Untermeyer's _New Era in American Poetry_, Miss Wilkinson's _New Voices_, and Mr. Lowes's _Convention and Revolt_. I wish rather to remind the reader, first, of the long-standing case against the lyric, a case which has been under trial in the court of critical opinion from Plato's day to our own; and then to indicate, even more briefly, the lines of defence. It will be clear, as we proceed, that contemporary verse in America and England is ill.u.s.trating certain general tendencies which not only sharpen the point of the old attack, but also hearten the spirit of the defenders of lyric poetry.

1. _Plato's Moralistic Objection_

Nothing could be more timely, as a contribution to a critical battle which is just now being waged, [Footnote: See the Introduction and the closing chapter of Stuart P.

Sherman's _Contemporary Literature_. Holt, 1917.]

than the pa.s.sage from Plato's _Republic_ which furnishes the motto for the present chapter. It expresses one of those eternal verities which each generation must face as best it may: "Poetry feeds and waters the pa.s.sions instead of withering and starving them; she lets them rule instead of ruling them." "Did we not imply," asks the Athenian Stranger in Plato's _Laws_, "that the poets are not always quite capable of knowing what is good or evil?" "There is also," says Socrates in the Phoedrus, "a third kind of madness, which is the possession of the Muses; this enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric and all other members." This Platonic notion of lyric "inspiration" and "possession" permeates the immortal pa.s.sage of the _Ion_:

"For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not as works of art, but because they are inspired and possessed.