=:= 
 
 DN THE NATURE 
 OF LYRIC 
 
 GERALD GOULD 
 
 QUAIN ESSAY 
 
 LONDON : A. C. FIFIELD 
 
 Two Shillings Nett
 
 
 U'< 
 
 AN ESSAY 
 ON THE NATURE OF LYRIC 
 
 Quain Prize Essay 
 
 University College, London 
 
 1908 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 
 CALIFORNIA 
 SAN
 
 An Essay 
 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 Illustrated from the History of English Poetry 
 
 By 
 
 Gerald Gould, B.A. 
 
 Fellow of University College, London 
 Exhibitioner of Magdalen College, Oxford 
 
 London 
 
 A. C. Fifield, 44 Fleet Street, E.G. 
 1909
 
 The historical matter In this essay is largely drawn from two 
 works indispensable in any study of the history of Lyric 
 " Early English Lyrics," edited by Messrs. E. K. Chambers 
 and F. Sidgwick, with Mr. Chambers's essay on " Some 
 Aspects of Mediaeval Lyric " ; and Mr. Sidney Lee's 
 edition of Elizabethan Sonnets, with his introductory essay. 
 Quotations from these and other critical and historical works 
 are referred to their authors in the text as they occur. 
 
 PRINTED BV 
 WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD. 
 
 PLYMOUTH
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 IT may very reasonably be contended that the lyric, 
 as opposed to the epic and dramatic, is the form in 
 which the poetry of to-day tends chiefly to be written, 
 and to which we may expect the poetry of the succeeding 
 age more and more to confine itself ; and this, if true, is 
 in itself sufficient to give a special interest to the question 
 of the nature of lyric. Indeed, the two questions react 
 upon each other ; for if there is such a tendency at work 
 as is here suggested, its connection with the inherent 
 qualities of the lyric as such must be an essential one ; 
 there must be a correspondence between the mood of 
 literature to-day and the mood or moods specially 
 adapted to lyrical expression. We must look to the 
 problem, in what sense lyric can be said to be the pre- 
 vailing form at present, for some light on the larger 
 problem of what we mean by the word. The larger 
 problem is indeed not only the beginning but also the 
 end of this inquiry. Firstly, then, it is clear that the 
 contention here suggested as a reasonable one would be 
 immediately reduced to absurdity by insistence upon 
 any narrow or technical sense of the term lyric. We 
 could not, for instance, profitably accept Wordsworth's 
 analysis of the technical differences in poetic form, 
 though it is of great interest in any critical examination
 
 2 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 of poetry. He distinguishes five " moulds " or " forms " 
 the Narrative, the Dramatic, the Lyrical, the Idyllium, 
 and the Didactic ; and of the third of these he writes 
 that it contains " the hymn, the ode, the elegy, the song, 
 and the ballad ; in all which, for the production of their 
 full effect, an accompaniment of music is indispensable." 
 Now it is obvious that, for our purpose, we must widen 
 these bounds of the term, and alter its meaning also not 
 a little. There is to seek in modern literature that close 
 connection with music which Wordsworth claimed as 
 essential to this particular poetic " mould." It is 
 worth while to notice how far he himself was from in- 
 sisting upon a complete acceptance of his own law. 
 " All poets," he writes, " have been in the practice of 
 feigning that their works were composed to the music 
 of the harp or the lyre : with what degree of affectation 
 this has been done in modern times, I leave to the 
 judicious to determine. For my own part, I have not 
 been disposed to violate probability so far, or to make 
 such a large demand upon the reader's charity. Some 
 of these pieces [the extract is from the preface to the 
 edition of 1815] are essentially lyrical ; and therefore 
 cannot have their due force without a supposed musical 
 accompaniment ; but, in much the greatest part, as a 
 substitute for the classic lyre or romantic harp, I require 
 nothing more than an animated or impassioned recita- 
 tion, adapted to the subject. Poems, however humble 
 in their kind, if they be good in that kind, cannot read 
 themselves : the law of long syllable and short must 
 not be so inflexible, the letter of metre must not be so 
 impassive to the spirit of versification, as to deprive 
 the reader of a voluntary power to modulate, in sub- 
 ordination to the sense, the music of the poem ; in the
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 3 
 
 same manner as his mind is left at liberty, and even 
 summoned, to act upon its thoughts and images. But 
 though the accompaniment of a musical instrument be 
 frequently dispensed with, the true poet does not there- 
 fore abandon his privilege distinct from that of the mere 
 proseman 
 
 ' He murmurs near the running brooks 
 A music sweeter than their own.' ' 
 
 With this quotation we may take leave of any serious 
 idea that the modern lyrist writes definitely to a tune, 
 or that music necessarily suggests itself to him as part 
 of the artistic whole he designs to produce. " What 
 strikes us in the whole of this great mass of lyric poetry," 
 writes J. A. Symonds of the Elizabethan song- books 
 " is its perfect adaptation to music, its limpidity and 
 directness of utterance." " We discover," he says 
 further, " but little of this quality in the lyrics of the 
 Victorian age " ; and he records that when he had read 
 two poems of Shelley, the " Song of Pan " and " Swiftly 
 walk o'er the western wave," to an eminent singer, she 
 " pointed out how the verbal melody seemed intended 
 to be self-sufficing in these lyrics, how full of complicated 
 thoughts and changeful images the verse is, how packed 
 with consonants the words are. ..." Here, as always 
 in art, the external change is but the other side of the 
 internal ; the crowding of consonants is not an unlucky 
 accident, but the expression of a mood. What Words- 
 worth says of the modulation supplied by the reader 
 really supplies an explanation of the divorce between 
 music and poetry. The poem is presented to the reader 
 as a definite and complete appeal ; he is not asked to 
 sing it to a tune, nor should he even be asked to "re-
 
 4 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 cite " it in an " animated and impassioned manner." 
 He is expected to do with it just what he must do with 
 any work of art presented on its merits with a piece 
 of music or a picture no less than with a poem. The 
 mood and suggestion must come home to him as be- 
 longing to himself ; he must be in touch with the effect 
 the poet intended to convey. And it is because the 
 establishing of this relation is the final achievement of 
 the poem, because one can pick up a book, read, and be 
 haunted thenceforward by the way the verses sound 
 and move to oneself, that the poet may well come to be 
 content with this process and this achievement. As a 
 matter of fact, the etymological sense is never what the 
 modern man has in mind when he uses the word " lyric." 
 Nor does he use it in such severe distinction from other 
 terms as Wordsworth would have one do. Victorian 
 poetry abounds, for instance, in the idyll, to which so 
 often a lyrical form, quality, or atmosphere has been 
 given that it would be difficult entirely to dissociate it 
 from the pure lyric in our thoughts. The incursion of 
 the dramatic element amounts to almost the same thing ; 
 the dramatic lyric of Browning has much in common 
 with the idyll of Tennyson. Thus for the moment it 
 may perhaps be safer to mark off what is meant by lyric 
 by laying down what it is not, and to re-state our con- 
 tention in the words that the age of epic is over and 
 poetic drama a less vital form than it was. To quote 
 again from J. A. Symonds: "The Victorian age can 
 boast no national drama. Poetical plays have indeed 
 been produced which do credit to the talents of their 
 authors. Yet the century has not expressed its real 
 stuff, nor shown its actual clairvoyance in that line. 
 We cannot point to a Victorian drama as we do to an
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 5 
 
 Elizabethan drama, and challenge the world to match 
 it. This is due perhaps in part to those incalculable 
 changes which have substituted the novel for the drama. 
 The public of the present time is a public of readers 
 rather than of hearers, and the muster-roll of brilliant 
 novelists, from Scott and Jane Austen, through Thack- 
 eray and Dickens, down to George Eliot and George 
 Meredith, can be written off against the playwrights of 
 the sixteenth century. Poetry, surveyed from a 
 sufficient altitude, claims these imaginative makers, 
 though they used the vehicle of prose." Surely it 
 would be better to give the same simple reason for the 
 neglect of the long narrative poem, rather than to ven- 
 ture as Symonds does on the assertion that "it is not 
 given to any race under the conditions of conscious 
 culture to produce a genuine epic." Indeed the nine- 
 teenth century did of course have its triumphs in 
 narrative poetry too ; but the question is whether these 
 constitute a popular and prevailing type. If neither 
 they nor the achievements of drama do so, then lyric, 
 according to our negative requirement, does. But we 
 cannot for long rest content with a merely negative 
 test ; we need a positive one ; and this we may perhaps 
 find in a certain quality of spontaneity, if we remember 
 at the same time that spontaneity is a term not to be 
 applied in this connection without a careful examination 
 of its meaning. For the modern tendency is in the 
 direction of subtlety, of elaboration, of introspection, 
 of psychological analysis. It is difficult to be simple in 
 a highly self-conscious age ; words have accumulated 
 so embarrassing a connotation, and rules have been so 
 carefully discussed. Of course subjection to law is in 
 artistic composition quite frequently unconscious, and
 
 6 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 does not preclude immediacy of inspiration ; but we 
 comprise too much, as a matter of actual practice, 
 under the head of lyric, to be able to claim for it as 
 a whole what is loosely understood by spontaneity. 
 Few people would quarrel with Palgrave's inclusion of 
 Lycidas in his " Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics "; 
 yet Lycidas is built up with the exactest skill of crafts- 
 manship. We are at any rate free to believe, however, 
 that the phrases came by inspiration ; for though the 
 manuscript shows that they were much polished and 
 altered, that does not interfere with the theory that the 
 poet records what, as it were, he overhears. He may 
 hear wrongly, insufficiently, the first time ; he may listen 
 for months, and insert many stop-gaps of his own, 
 before the right word comes. 
 
 " The statue, Buonarotti said, doth wait 
 Thralled in the block, for me to emancipate : 
 The poem, saith the poet, wanders free 
 Till I betray it to captivity." 
 
 Lyric is not, then, in its present-day sense, composed 
 necessarily, or primarily, for musical accompaniment, 
 nor is it the spontaneous outburst of the untutored 
 mind, in contradistinction to the severe laws by 
 which tragedy and epic must be constrained. It might 
 indeed be just barely possible to establish a relation 
 between the more undeniably lyrical of modern poems 
 and that kind of poetry which was originally composed 
 to be sung to the strains of the lyre. Yet to do so 
 would be unsatisfactory, for it would ignore difference 
 of conditions. One of Milton's three requirements for 
 a poem was that it should be simple ; and in his sense 
 of simplicity the requirements hold for any work of
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 7 
 
 art. It is indeed but a reassertion of the inviolable 
 principle of unity, which survives the misapprehensions 
 of the classicists and the defiance of the romantics quite 
 unshaken in its validity. A work of art must be a 
 complete, consistent, and satisfying whole ; it must get 
 its own effect. To the ancient Greek the unit of a 
 particular kind of artistic effect comprised the music 
 of the lyre, just as an opera comprises all the arts, with- 
 out being any the less simple and single for that. The 
 obvious difference is that the modern ear, the modern 
 mind, dissociates and takes its pleasures, at any rate in 
 the lyrical sphere, separately. It expects from lyric 
 a particular sensation ; and this sensation is one of 
 spontaneity, as we may easily decide by using Matthew 
 Arnold's famous method of the test passage. Every one 
 surely has in his mind some such passage, which he does 
 in fact instinctively put to this use ; and probably no 
 more generally acceptable test could be found than 
 Shelley's lines : 
 
 " I arise from dreams of thee 
 
 In the first sweet sleep of night, 
 When the winds are breathing low 
 
 And the stars are shining bright : 
 I arise from dreams of thee, 
 
 And a spirit in my feet 
 Has led me who knows how ? 
 
 To thy chamber- window, sweet ! " 
 
 Here breathes the very soul of lyric, seeming scarcely 
 to contaminate itself with mortal speech. But to 
 determine in what sense we may take spontaneity for 
 the main characteristic of poems such as this, we must 
 distinguish their effect upon the reader from their mode
 
 8 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 of composition. The former must be spontaneous, and 
 sudden ; and here perhaps is the test, not only of lyric, 
 the special form, but of artistic expression in general. 
 The mind, in Wordsworth's words, " is left at liberty, 
 and even summoned, to act upon " the thoughts and 
 images of the poem. Poetry is a matter of im- 
 plication ; mind must answer to mind ; what is in one 
 must be contributed to assist in the self-expression of 
 the other. In art, not only creation but also 
 appreciation is, like laughter, " sudden glory." There 
 has to be at some point a discovery suddenly correlat- 
 ing the accumulations of experience, so that one says : 
 " Why was this never thought of before ? " The 
 discovery is made by the poet and recognised by his 
 audience ; and it is from the point of view of the latter 
 that spontaneity is an essential of the lyric ; the poet 
 himself, whether he works quickly or slowly, in either 
 case works within strict rules, which must be consciously 
 or unconsciously mastered beforehand ; even when an 
 inspiration comes, like that of Kubla Khan, mystically 
 in sleep, it passes into a mind possessed of much literary 
 tradition and conversant with the treatment of literary 
 forms. It is difficult to find beginnings ; for a clear 
 distinction must be drawn between the rude compositions 
 of a primitive and untutored race, observing no rules 
 because there are no rules to observe, and the individual 
 swiftness or suddenness or spontaneity of composition 
 in the case of a particular poem. The good poet, how- 
 ever headlong his methods may appear, does not break 
 but utilises laws. It is impossible to get outside or 
 behind tradition ; the poet is made up of the very sub- 
 stance of all preceding ages ; he thinks their thoughts, 
 dreams their dreams ; his simplicity depends for its
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 9 
 
 success on their correlative complexity. No one in an 
 era so sophisticated as the Elizabethan " warbled his 
 native wood-notes wild," except so far as there is in 
 some of the casual lyrics, notably of Shakespeare, a 
 curious quality which does in a way seem to justify the 
 application of the phrase. The same quality is to be 
 found in Blake. It is with these two poets at any rate 
 as though the very possibilities offered them by metre 
 and rule were occasionally rejected in the ardour of a 
 wilful simplicity ; what they have to express is so 
 immediate that even the monosyllables of a child's 
 vocabulary seem to hamper and overweigh it ; they 
 break out into sheer unintelligibility, and are off on the 
 mere tune. So sang perhaps the earliest singers of the 
 folk, but not from choice ; Shakespeare knew what 
 effect he desired, and if his songs do not fail of their 
 effect, it is because they are in harmony with something 
 more important than what they cast away. True as it 
 may be that Shakespeare wrote so in a careless mood, 
 yet there is no reason why metre and rule should not go 
 when the inner meaning of the poem is something which 
 requires them not ; and to be dispensed with so easily 
 is in art to have been from the first external and un- 
 essential. To dispense with externals is by no means, 
 as we shall see in the case of Walt Whitman, to break 
 with tradition or be false to form. Of course to dispense 
 with the essentials, to produce bad art, is a different 
 matter ; this too Shakespeare did on occasion, though 
 perhaps rarely in the pure lyric ; and as for Blake, in 
 so far as he fails to obey certain laws, he fails altogether. 
 He kept the laws that he made for himself ; he was 
 wholly justified in his own eyes ; but in our eyes he can 
 be justified only in those instances where he comes
 
 io On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 under a law that is universal ; when his result is not 
 only such as he would accept himself, but such as we 
 sub- consciously expect. There is a sensation of extra- 
 ordinary acuteness, hard to explain in words, which 
 comes home to any one who watches children at play 
 on summer evenings, as the dusk begins to gather. It 
 is an elusive and profound emotion, and from Blake if 
 from any one we might reasonably expect an adequate 
 interpretation of it. What we get is this : 
 
 " When the voices of children are heard on the green, 
 
 And whisperings are in the dale, 
 The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind, 
 My face turns green and pale." 
 
 Then suddenly the mood changes ; something is re- 
 captured which was out of touch with the poet in that 
 first verse, or at any rate how lamentably ! in the 
 last line of it ; and we get : 
 
 " Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down, 
 
 And the dews of night arise ; 
 Your spring and your day are wasted in play 
 And your winter and night in disguise." 
 
 Here the spontaneity is subdued to law, and the wild 
 wood- notes are warbled to a better tune. But the 
 point is that there is no opposition between the law 
 and the spontaneity ; each without the other has all 
 the harshness of the incomplete ; neither of the two 
 exists in its fulness until the two are one. This union 
 is creation, and is recognised as such. The true lyric 
 comes upon you like the first star in a summer sky ; it 
 is a new light in the mind ; it was not, and it is. Or if 
 in a sense it was already, yet the discovery is new. Can 
 it, however, be claimed for lyric that it possesses this
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 1 1 
 
 quality in a unique degree ? Is there any sense of the 
 words in which it is reasonable to say that lyric is the 
 essential type of poetry ? The weakness of the test- 
 method for distinguishing the lyric note is just that it 
 cannot settle disputes ; it leaves the criterion with the 
 individual. The difficulty of definition is of course 
 the old one ; we collect from all the instances submitted 
 a general idea of what we mean by the term, and then 
 proceed, dubiously, to re-apply. Yet we need not be 
 denied the comfort of belief in an actually essential 
 quality ; there is, could we but capture it in an ex- 
 planation, the lyrical spirit, the authentic tone. The 
 question then becomes complicated with that of the 
 spirit of poetry at large ; how to distinguish that, and, 
 within that, the lyric. What of the great phrases of 
 epic and dramatic literature ? Scattered up and down 
 their pages we find passage after passage with the 
 quality of spontaneity, of sudden and inexplicable 
 illumination ; passage after passage of peculiar value, 
 perhaps, in its setting, yet complete in itself. Is there 
 any difference in kind between the mournful and musical 
 speech of Richard II in the play, and any of Browning's 
 dramatic lyrics ? If there is, it cannot lie in the imagina- 
 tion of circumstances ; that framework has in either 
 case to be presupposed. It cannot lie in the self- 
 abandonment of the expression the outpouring of a 
 personal and intimate emotion, for that also the two 
 have in common. Nor can the mere measure constitute 
 a real difference ; it may be seen from Browning's own 
 works that blank verse is on occasion lyrical. When he 
 breaks out 
 
 " O lyric love, half angel and half bird, 
 And all a wonder and a wild desire ! "
 
 12 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 there is, in swiftness of motion, in fervour of passion, in 
 fineness and delicacy of rhythm, no distinction to be 
 drawn between blank verse such as this and the lyric 
 pure and simple and acknowledged. Or again, in 
 " Any Wife to any Husband " we have a lyric labelled 
 and confessed ; yet it moves slowly, it uses the heroic 
 line, it analyses and considers. 
 
 " Only, why should it be with stain at all ? 
 Why must I, 'twixt the leaves of coronal, 
 
 Put any kiss of pardon on thy brow ? 
 Why need the other women know so much, 
 And talk together, ' Such the look and such 
 
 The smile he used to love with, then as now ' ? " 
 
 Surely this remains lyrical for all that can be urged on 
 the other side. And just as we can detach extracts 
 with the same quality from the drama or narrative of 
 Shakespeare and Browning, so we can understand how 
 Myers came to write that Anticleia " begins 
 
 OUT euey ev jj.eyapoa'iv eovroTro? o\eaipa - 
 
 That is not where Anticleia began ; but it is the begin- 
 ning of a lyric as beautiful as it is brief. True, it owes 
 much of its beauty to its position, to the circumstances 
 that surround its utterance ; but it is to position in 
 one sense or another that we must turn for any explana- 
 tion of poetical quality and effect, nor can we afford to 
 overlook its importance, whatever stress we may lay on 
 the value of the mere phrase. From one point of view 
 the phrase is the real unit, and the poem, at any rate the 
 lyric, does but consist of a phrase extended or elaborated. 
 The very profundity of interpretation can be sounded
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 13 
 
 in a line ; the things we chiefly remember from our 
 
 reading are those 
 
 jewels five- words long 
 
 That on the stretch'd forefinger of all time 
 Sparkle for ever." 
 
 Granted this granted that the essential of a poem is, 
 if not the phrase, at any rate the grouping of a few 
 phrases round a single idea, and that what we require 
 of the poet is that he should be 
 
 " Stung with the splendour of a sudden thought," 
 
 then in arguing that the lyrical is the typical form we 
 shall be involved in a petitio principii which for all its 
 logical error may indicate the way to truth. To decide 
 that a lyric is anything exhibiting the qualities of good 
 poetry, and to prove it by picking out all the finest 
 passages we can discover and calling them lyrical, is 
 no doubt an unsatisfactory process ; but the bare fact 
 of its possibility within the meaning of the terms as 
 commonly and loosely employed points to a certain 
 probability in the claim that the essence of lyric is one 
 with the essence of poetry. We require of any art a 
 whole that is at once spontaneous and artistic ; and 
 the very brevity of lyric aids it here. Lycidas is per- 
 haps the longest poem in the language of which every 
 line is poetical, and in which no part is thought of as 
 dissociated from the whole. It is not literally in- 
 conceivable that an epic or a drama should be written 
 which should preserve such a level of exaltation and 
 such a unity of effect ; but has it ever been done, or is 
 it likely to be ? In fine, the lyric is the only kind whose 
 length and nature admit of the essentially poetical effect 
 of suddenness being maintained throughout, and all the
 
 14 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 dements of its effect being comprised in an immediate 
 view. To say this is to make a definite assertion as to 
 its nature, but is not to cut it off from that conception 
 of poetry as ultimately a matter of position which is 
 most obviously illustrated in the dramatic kind. The 
 position of the phrase is as essential as the words them- 
 selves ; the two elements become one in the poetic 
 flash ; their union indeed is fundamentally the same 
 as that of matter and form. It is by position that 
 simple language gains expressiveness : Shylock's 
 
 " I pray you, give me leave to go from hence 
 I am not well " 
 
 lays bare in its last four words the incomparable bitter- 
 ness of a base design made pitiful by failure ; Medea's 
 CTIKTOV O.VTOV? spoken with tears of the children she 
 is intent to murder, has the same startling and arresting 
 force. And the point of importance is that this is not 
 a function of drama alone ; the mind always provides 
 a context out of the experience of itself and the race. 
 It would scarcely be too much to say that the context 
 implied is what gives the poetic value. The line 
 
 " Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead " 
 
 needs no exposition of attendant fact ; it is dramatic, 
 it suggests ; yet it is concentrated into the emotion of 
 a moment, and exhorts the reader 
 
 "... pause here upon this strip of time 
 Allotted you out of eternity." 
 
 Emphatically, the poetic value is of the same kind in 
 drama and in lyric ; only what is more explicit in the 
 former is implicit in the latter. And the modernisation of 
 literature lies exactly in the increased possibility of im-
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 1 5 
 
 plication ; the lyric takes advantage of its possibilities 
 and thrives. For every word gains in meaning every time 
 it is used. It has more of the emotion of humanity to 
 illuminate, to use and translate and transfuse. To 
 say this is to raise the question of intrinsic as opposed 
 to historical value, but to show that the opposition is 
 unreal is a task that may be hopefully undertaken. 
 "We tend," says Mr. H. G. Wells, "to accumulate 
 intension in terms." " There is a whole literary 
 past," says Mr. E. K. Chambers, " behind one who 
 endeavours to sum up a thousand poetical introductions 
 in the single line 
 
 ' Lenten ys come with love to toune.' " 
 
 As the man grows, as the race grows, the sounds that 
 stand for things become fuller and fuller of suggestion ; 
 mere syllables call up the past, and bring back the sense 
 of a country known and dear, just as the turning of a 
 road will sometimes confront us with a sight we feel 
 to be not new but already intimate. Only, more than 
 this, the land of poetry is not a mere counterpart of 
 the land we know ; it is an ideal type, which gives 
 meaning and worth and validity to the familiar places, 
 and does not draw its meaning from its similarity to 
 them. When we speak of remembering such a land as 
 this, we are using only a clumsy symbol, working, as 
 prose examination must work, within those limits of 
 time which poetry throws off so easily and so com- 
 pletely ; and yet probably the symbol of memory is 
 the best we can use, for indeed the experience is very 
 similar. The poet comes back like the philosopher of 
 Plato to judge the shadows on the wall by the truth he 
 has known in the sunlight above. And some such
 
 1 6 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 theory as this is strictly necessary to account for the 
 fact that, for all the influence of position, the force of 
 poetry does not in the last resort depend upon the in- 
 tension accumulated in terms. If it did and that it 
 does not goes far to settle the difficulty of actual and 
 historical value nothing would be easier than to 
 write poetry. All men feel a strangeness, an expectancy, 
 in the twilight ; every day they live, every poem they 
 read, adds of necessity to that feeling, so that by now 
 the mere word is rich with the treasures of experience, 
 full of subtle indistinguishable sounds, of fading colours, 
 of shy and tremulous airs. But all the same one cannot 
 write a poem by talking about the twilight. The names 
 themselves, however liberally crowded into the verse, 
 will not do. We require something different, something 
 which only the poet can do for us. A man may throng 
 his verses with stars and flood them with seas, yet leave 
 us cold. Stevenson chose two lines as typical of what 
 poetry can do at its highest 
 
 " And visited all night by troops of stars " 
 
 pirjfl 
 
 " The multitudinous seas incarnadine." 
 
 Few will dispute his judgment. And yet how is it 
 that in these lines, out of all the lines that employ much 
 the same language in but slightly different combinations, 
 we are led to ideal waters and archetypal mountains, 
 confronted with authentic night ? Whence comes 
 
 " The light that never was on sea or land, 
 The consecration and the poet's dream " ? 
 
 Myers has attempted an answer to these questions, and 
 given one which is perhaps as good as an answer to the 
 unanswerable can be. " The range of human thoughts
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 17 
 
 and emotions," he writes, " greatly transcends the 
 range of such symbols as man has invented to express 
 them ; and it becomes, therefore, the business of Art 
 to use these symbols in a double way. They must be 
 used for the direct representation of thought and 
 feeling ; but they must also be combined by so subtle 
 an imagination as to suggest much which there is no 
 means of directly expressing. And this can be done ; 
 for experience shows that it is possible so to arrange 
 forms, colours, and sounds as to stimulate the imagina- 
 tion in a new and inexplicable way. This power 
 makes the painter's art an imaginative as well as an 
 imitative one ; and gives birth to the art of the musician, 
 whose symbols are hardly imitative at all, but express 
 emotions which, till music suggests them, have been 
 not only unknown but unimaginable. Poetry is both 
 an imitative and an imaginative art. As a choice and 
 condensed form of emotional speech, it possesses the 
 reality which depends on its directly recalling our 
 previous thoughts and feelings. But as a system of 
 rhythmical and melodious effects not indebted for 
 their potency to their associated ideas alone it appeals 
 also to that mysterious power by which mere ar- 
 rangements of sound can convey an emotion which no 
 one could have predicted beforehand, and which no 
 known laws can explain. . . . And indeed, in poetry of 
 the first order, almost every word (to use a mathematical 
 metaphor) is raised to a higher power. It continues to 
 be an articulate sound and a logical step in the argument; 
 but it becomes also a musical sound and a centre of 
 emotional force. It becomes a musical sound that is 
 to say, its consonants and vowels are arranged to bear 
 a relation to the consonants and vowels near it a
 
 1 8 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 relation of which accent, quantity, rhyme, assonance, 
 and alliteration are specialised forms, but which may 
 be of a character more subtle than any of these. And 
 it becomes a centre of emotional force, that is to say, 
 the complex associations which it evokes modify the 
 associations evoked by other words in the same passage 
 in a way quite distinct from grammatical or logical 
 connection. The poet, therefore, must avoid two 
 opposite dangers. If he thinks too exclusively of the 
 music and colouring of his verses of the imaginative 
 means of suggesting thought and feeling what he 
 writes will lack reality and sense. But if he cares only 
 to communicate definite thought and feeling according 
 to the ordinary laws of eloquent speech, his verse is 
 likely to be deficient in magical and suggestive power." 
 We have then two facts firstly, that poetry depends 
 on the experience and imagination, hereditary and 
 traditional, of the individual and the race upon all 
 that we have come to connect with certain of the words 
 we use ; and secondly, that poetry is not wrought by 
 the mere using of such words, but by the unique aptness 
 and harmony of their conjunction with certain elusive 
 and profound sentiments, which the reader must in a 
 sense already have before he can recognise them in the 
 poem. So it is, Plato tells us, with all knowledge. 
 Poetry is the identity of the poet's purpose with the 
 form he chooses as its instrument, yet not of these only, 
 but of the soul of the individual with the soul of the 
 world. Nor is it easy on any less mystical assumption 
 than the one here implied to explain why poetry should 
 be dear and delightful in the way in which it is. But 
 it would seem that the poet differs from those who are 
 not poets, not so much by any power of grasping ulti-
 
 On the Nature of Lyric ig 
 
 mates for these by their very nature cannot be 
 grasped, and to touch them we are all fortunately able 
 as in the happy gift of conveying the unintelligible by 
 intelligible language. He loses no doubt something of 
 its essence in the process ; that is the condition of his 
 humanity ; but he gives us something that we can 
 recognise as native to our own vaguest and loveliest 
 emotions, as part of the realisation of our true selves. 
 What it is subjectively to its writer has probably never 
 been better said than in Wordsworth's " spontaneous 
 overflow of powerful feeling." " It takes its origin," 
 he says further, "from emotion recollected in tranquillity; 
 the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, 
 the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, 
 kindred to that which was before the subject of contem- 
 plation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually 
 exist in the mind." It is a commonplace that no one 
 wants to write about what he is actually engaged in 
 doing. " He who can, does ; he who cannot, teaches," 
 says Mr. Bernard Shaw, though in a different connection 
 and evidently with no suspicion of how profound is his 
 remark. We get it explicitly in Browning 
 " What does it all mean, poet ? Well, 
 
 Your brains beat into rhythm, you tell 
 
 What we felt only ; you expressed 
 
 You hold things beautiful the best, 
 And pace them in rhyme so, side by side. 
 
 Tis something, nay 'tis much : but then, 
 
 Have you yourself what's best for men ? 
 
 Are you poor, sick, old ere your time 
 
 Nearer one whit your own sublime 
 
 Than we who never have turned a rhyme ? 
 Sing, riding's a joy ! For me, I ride."
 
 2o On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 Of course, however, poetry does more than record ex- 
 perience. We may doubt whether it is always a result 
 of remembering ; surely some lyrical outbursts 
 notably Shelley's seem to be the immediate expression 
 of the emotion itself. But who shall say what accumu- 
 lation of experience went to make that emotion possible? 
 Individuals, like races, make their art out of their past ; 
 and this is true of the artist and his audience alike. 
 
 " The half of music, I have heard men say, 
 Is to have grieved." 
 
 Again, poetry, whether immediate or meditated, must 
 in either case possess the " saving grace " of thought. 
 Emotion as such is inarticulate ; while thought, on the 
 other hand, need not be less spontaneous than feeling 
 the mind may work as vehemently and suddenly as 
 the heart. If poetry must be " simple, sensuous, and 
 passionate," yet it must be much more. We go beyond 
 what is ordinarily understood to be the function of 
 either heart or mind when we speak of poetry as the 
 expression of emotion ; for by expression in this case 
 we mean interpretation ; and were poetry to interpret 
 experience merely in the terms of experience, it would 
 lack that great adequacy and finality of interpretation 
 which is its proper characteristic. We cannot in reading 
 or in criticising poetry keep clear of mysticism ; no 
 academic solution is necessary or possible. Wordsworth, 
 it will be remembered, drew a cogent parallel between 
 the aims and methods of poetry on the one hand and 
 religion on the other. But, as in religion, so in poetry, 
 there is a meeting-place where the planes of reason and 
 faith cut across each other, a starting- place for merely 
 reasonable and uninspired consideration. The supreme
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 2 1 
 
 test of art remains the subjective one ; a man knows a 
 good poem by the fact that it moves him, an unworthily 
 artificial one by the fact that it does not ; but perhaps 
 he should not stop there. We read, " The rest is 
 silence," and shut the book, having arrived at some- 
 thing ultimate in conception and expression. But 
 then in a little while we are driven to ask ourselves why 
 the few syllables mean so much. There is indeed a 
 doubt whether the critics can do more than carry the diffi- 
 culty a step further back, expounding and elucidating 
 with the weapons of the logical process, until at last they 
 bring us to where intuition must step in to explain the 
 explanation. Philosophy appears to deal in much the 
 same way with its votaries ; it can do no more than 
 prepare the ground for faith. So true is it in both 
 spheres that we can learn only what we know already. 
 There is such a thing as illuminating criticism, criticism 
 that does indeed throw light and give help ; but the 
 help and the light are such as can be accepted only by 
 that same faculty by which in the first instance the 
 poetry was known to us for what it was. To illustrate 
 this it is necessary but to turn to a single sentence from 
 that essay of Myers from which quotation has already 
 been made. " What is meant," he writes, " by the 
 vague praise so often bestowed on Virgil's unequalled 
 style is practically this, that he has been, perhaps, more 
 successful than any other poet in fusing together the 
 expressed and the suggested emotion ; that he has 
 discovered the hidden music which can give to every 
 shade of feeling its distinction, its permanence, and its 
 charm ; that his thoughts seem to come to us on the 
 wings of melodies prepared for them from the founda- 
 tions of the world." It is on the conception of criticism
 
 22 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 justified by such a passage as this that poetry is indeed 
 a " criticism of life." Now the meeting-place of the 
 two planes, the place whence criticism must start, lies 
 of necessity where the question of form enters in. It 
 is just with this union of the poet's purpose and the 
 form chosen that the critic has to deal. Wordsworth 
 has shown clearly what is meant by speaking of the 
 poet's purpose. " Each of them," he says of his own 
 poems, " has a worthy 'purpose. Not that I mean to 
 say, I always began to write with a distinct purpose 
 formally conceived, but my habits of meditation have 
 so formed my feelings, as that my descriptions of such 
 objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found 
 to carry along with them a purpose." It is essential to 
 understand the other, the formal side, with equal 
 clearness ; for in a sense all critical distinctions are 
 formal. Impulse and purpose cannot be examined, 
 they must be assumed ; and their union with expression 
 is of the nature of a miracle, not to be explained. How- 
 ever true it may be that spontaneity is the characteristic 
 quality of lyric, and that the form cannot be separated 
 from the natural mode of expression which that quality 
 implies and carries with it, yet it is as form that criticism 
 must accept the work of art submitted to it. The 
 point of view which disparages the formal side is thus 
 put by Professor Raleigh : " The birth speech of faith 
 is the lyric. The purest lyrical utterances do not 
 depend for their beauty on the arrangement of accents 
 and the counting of syllables ; translate them into any 
 language, and they still run straight into song. There 
 is no version of the Magnificat which does not rise 
 lifted on a climbing sea of melody ; it is the voice of 
 the faith of all the women in the world. ' For He hath
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 23 
 
 regarded the lowliness of His handmaiden ' what 
 treatise on metre can explain that rapture of song ? 
 The spontaneity of whole-hearted joy will save it from 
 all essential faults of expression ; its only business is to 
 flow, and it has no choice but to take the easiest outlet." 
 Now it is just this view of lyric utterance, this meaning 
 of the word spontaneity, that has seemed to us in- 
 applicable to the facts. It is very true that no treatise 
 on metre can explain the rapture of any song ; but 
 surely that is no proof of what Professor Raleigh would 
 have it prove. With his theory of translation it is 
 worth while to contrast Shelley's : " Sounds as well as 
 thoughts have relation both between each other and 
 towards that which they represent, and a perception 
 of the order of those relations has always been found 
 connected with a perception of the order of the relations 
 of thought. Hence the language of poets has ever 
 affected a sort of uniform and harmonious recurrence of 
 sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is 
 scarcely less indispensable to the communication of its 
 influence, than the words themselves, without reference 
 to that peculiar order. Hence the vanity of translation ; 
 it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you 
 might discover the formal principle of its colour and 
 odour as seek to transpose from one language into 
 another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring 
 again from its seed, or it will bear no flower and this 
 is the burthen of the curse of Babel." If it be answered 
 that some seeds are common to all races, and that from 
 the emotion of the Magnificat will arise in any language 
 the flower of song, this is no more than to say that there 
 are certain universal subjects of artistic treatment, it 
 is not to justify translation. It would be easy to draw
 
 24 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 from Professor Raleigh's words the conclusion that to 
 have an emotion is to be able to express it ; yet this 
 cannot have been meant. Moreover, in the extract 
 quoted above, it is " the spontaneity of whole-hearted 
 joy " which will save song from " all essential faults of 
 expression " ; yet a little further on in the same work, 
 the introduction to the poems of Blake, Professor 
 Raleigh writes of " the academic processes of verbal 
 education " that " they submit even the imagination 
 to a civil and social discipline, and compel the bard to 
 express himself with a decent respect for the intellectual 
 habits of his fellow men. This classic discipline, which 
 has never yet, by itself, been the making of a good poet, 
 but which has saved the world from the pretentious 
 follies of many a dunce and the brilliant futilities of 
 many a man of genius, was exactly what Blake most 
 needed." It was needed, in fact, to save Blake from 
 " essential faults of expression." No one of course can 
 pretend that " academic processes " of education are 
 necessary to the writing of poetry ; but neither, on the 
 other hand, is the mere emotional instinct sufficient. 
 The artist must be self-sacrificing as well as assertive 
 he must find himself 
 
 " Enamoured of the difficult mountain air 
 Up Beauty's hill of prayer." 
 
 " The dutiful and laborious execution of a long task 
 originally conceived in a happy moment of insight, 
 was impossible to Blake. To continue working when 
 the fever-fit was overblown would have been to work 
 without conviction and possibly without meaning." 
 So Professor Raleigh ; yet surely the condemnation of 
 much of Blake's work lies in that one word " dutiful."
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 25 
 
 Art is a duty, and must be as such regarded. To 
 write a lyric in a swift burst of happy inspiration is no 
 doubt possible ; no doubt lyrics are frequently so 
 written ; yet it is as true of poetry as of life, and perhaps 
 not least of lyric poetry, that 
 
 " tasks in hours of insight will'd 
 Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd." 
 
 It has been said that careful slowness of composition 
 does not preclude immediacy of inspiration. And in 
 any case criticism must stop short of declaring how in- 
 spiration works or what composition is ; probably not 
 even the artist knows his own secret ; it has been written 
 of the muse 
 
 " Somewhat of all things sealed and recondite 
 Save the enigma of herself she knows." 
 
 What criticism is adequate to do has been suggested by 
 the passages quoted from Shelley's "Defence of Poetry" 
 and from Myers's essay on Virgil. There is to be de- 
 termined a certain correspondence of matter and form, 
 of purpose and the means of expression. No one can 
 say precisely what each of these is nor how their cor- 
 respondence is created; how much can be said, however, 
 is defined by Dr. Bradley in his " Poetry for Poetry's 
 Sake." " We have first," he writes, " an antithesis of 
 subject and poem. This is clear and valid ; and the 
 question in which of them does the value lie is intelligible; 
 and its answer is, In the poem. We have next a dis- 
 tinction of substance and form. If the substance means 
 ideas, images, and the like, taken alone, and the 
 form means the measured language taken by itself, this 
 is a possible distinction, but it is a distinction of things 
 not in the poem, and the value lies in neither of them.
 
 26 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 If substance and form mean anything in the poem, then 
 each is involved in the other, and the question in which 
 of them the value lies has no sense. . . . What is the 
 gist of Pater's teaching about style, if it is not that in 
 the end the one value of style is truth or adequacy ; 
 that the word, phrase, sentence, should express perfectly 
 the writer's perception, feeling, image, or thought ; so 
 that, as we read a descriptive phrase of Keats's, we 
 exclaim, ' That is the thing itself ' ; so that, to quote 
 Arnold, the words are ' symbols equivalent with the 
 thing symbolised,' or, in our technical language, a 
 form identical with its content ? Hence in true poetry 
 it is, in strictness, impossible to express the meaning in 
 any but its own words, and to change the words without 
 changing the meaning. A translation of such poetry 
 is not really the old meaning in a fresh dress ; it is a 
 new product, something like the poem, though, if one 
 chooses to say so, more like it in the aspect of meaning 
 than in the aspect of form. . . . And yet, when all is 
 said, the question will recur, though now in quite another 
 sense, What does poetry mean ? This unique expression, 
 which cannot be replaced by any other, still seems to 
 be trying to express something beyond itself. And 
 this we feel is also what the other arts, and religion, and 
 philosophy are trying to express ; and that is what im- 
 pels us to seek in vain to translate the one into the other. 
 About the best poetry, and not only the best, there 
 floats an atmosphere of infinite suggestion. The poet 
 speaks to us of one thing, but in this one thing there 
 seems to lurk the secret of all. He said what he meant, 
 but his meaning seems to beckon away beyond itself, 
 or rather to expand into something boundless which is 
 only focussed in it ; something also which, we feel,
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 27 
 
 would satisfy not only the imagination, but the whole 
 of us ; that something within us, and without, which 
 
 everywhere 
 
 makes us seem 
 
 To patch up fragments of a dream, 
 Part of which comes true, and part 
 Beats and trembles in the heart.' 
 
 Those who are susceptible to this effect of poetry find 
 it not only, perhaps not most, in the ideals which 
 she has sometimes described, but in a child's song by 
 Christina Rossetti about a mere crown of wind-flowers, 
 and in tragedies like Lear where the sun seems to have 
 set for ever. They hear this spirit murmuring its under- 
 tone through the ./Eneid, and catch its voice in the song 
 of Keats's nightingale, and its light upon the figures on 
 the Urn, and it pierces them no less in Shelley's hopeless 
 lament world, life, time, than in the rapturous 
 ecstasy of his Life of Life. This all-embracing per- 
 fection cannot be expressed in poetic words or in 
 words of any kind, nor yet in music or in colour, but 
 the suggestion of it is in much poetry, if not all, 
 and poetry has in this suggestion, this ' meaning,' a 
 great part of its value. We do it wrong, and we defeat 
 our own purposes when we try to bend it to them : 
 
 ' We do it wrong, being so majestical, 
 To offer it the show of violence ; 
 For it is as the air invulnerable, 
 And our vain blows malicious mockery.' 
 
 It is a spirit. It comes we know not whence. It will not 
 speak at our bidding, nor answer in our language. It 
 is not our servant ; it is our master." How impotent 
 even a profound critic may be to render an account of
 
 28 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 poetic method is illustrated by Wordsworth's 'analysis 
 of his own poetical aims and effects. He comments 
 with a delightful solemnity on his poem to the Cuckoo. 
 Having quoted- ShaU j call thee bird 
 
 Or but a wandering voice ? " 
 
 he proceeds : " This concise interrogation characterises 
 the seeming ubiquity of the voice of the cuckoo, and 
 dispossesses the creature almost of a corporeal existence; 
 the imagination being tempted to this exertion of her 
 power by a consciousness in the memory that the cuckoo 
 is almost perpetually heard throughout the season of 
 spring, but seldom becomes an object of sight." Yes ; 
 but what is it that makes those lines good poetry? 
 The imagination successfully performs the function 
 allotted to it, but it ministers thereby to something 
 greater. Similarly the analysis of purpose which was 
 quoted from Wordsworth leaves something essential 
 unsaid, though it suggests it. Indeed, we are brought 
 back to Matthew Arnold's definition of poetry by revert- 
 ing to the fact that criticism suggests what can never be 
 said about poetry, even as poetry suggests what can 
 never be said about life. Of why ultimately he wants 
 to write, what ultimately he means to say, the poet 
 himself must always remain not quite accurately sure. 
 
 " Alas ! what boots it with incessant care 
 To tend the homely slighted Shepherd's trade, 
 And strictly meditate the thankless Muse ? " 
 
 And so Swinburne to the dead Baudelaire : 
 
 " There is no help for these things ; none to mend 
 And none to mar ; not all our songs, O friend, 
 Will make death clear or make life durable."
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 29 
 
 But on the other hand we have to set that high and 
 conscious purpose 
 
 " To justify the ways of God to men." 
 
 Conscious or not, some such instinct of prophecy is 
 common to all poets a contention that may be sup- 
 ported by an appeal to the subject-matter of poetry. 
 For though in a sense anything may form such subject- 
 matter, it does so, if trivial in itself, only by being 
 brought under the head of some profounder theme. 
 "It is surely true," to quote again from Dr. Bradley, 
 " that we cannot determine beforehand what subjects 
 are fit for Art, or name any subject on which a good 
 poem might not possibly be written. To divide subjects 
 into two groups, the beautiful or elevating, and the 
 ugly or vicious, and to judge poems according as their 
 subjects belong to one of these groups or the other, is 
 to confuse with our preconceptions the meaning of the 
 poet. What the thing is in the poem he is to be judged 
 by, not by the thing as it was before he touched it ; and 
 how can we venture to say beforehand that he cannot 
 make a true poem out of something which to us was 
 merely alluring or dull or revolting ? " But few of 
 the greatest and most memorable poems are as a matter 
 of fact about things trivial in themselves. If seas and 
 stars were going to become hackneyed, they would 
 have done so long ago ; as subjects of poetry they are 
 as eternal as poetry itself, as seas and stars themselves. 
 Originality does not consist in avoiding the known and 
 tried ; it is hard to say in what it does consist in that 
 sense in which it is essential for good art. The 
 quatrains, for instance, of Fitzgerald have the ring of 
 authentic poetry ; their quality of essential originality
 
 30 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 is unaffected by the fact that they are a translation or 
 adaptation. What it is that constitutes the true good- 
 ness, the ultimate originality that is of course the old 
 and permanent question. Browning surely treats the 
 critical difficulty too lightly when he makes Abt Vogler 
 say 
 
 " Had I written the same, made verse still, effect 
 
 proceeds from cause, 
 Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the 
 
 tale is told ; 
 
 It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to 
 laws." 
 
 Surely what is in this poem claimed for music alone is 
 true of all the arts equally ; it is of artistic expression 
 as a whole, not of music only, that Browning, leaving 
 the mystery illumined but unexplained, should say 
 
 " But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that 
 
 can, 
 Existent behind all laws, that made them and lo, 
 
 they are ! 
 And I know not if, save in this, such grace be allowed 
 
 to man, 
 
 That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth 
 sound, but a star." 
 
 Now this permanence throughout literature of one 
 purpose, of one range of subjects, it might almost be 
 said of one point of view, brings us no less than the 
 theory of the accumulated meaning in words as a main 
 factor in literary expression, to a solution of our problem 
 about the relation between actual and historical value. 
 For the problem itself appears to arise from a mis-
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 31 
 
 conception. The fact is that we cannot say, "If So- 
 and-so had lived in a different century he would have 
 written in such-and-such a manner," for he would not 
 have been So-and-so. His literary heritage would 
 have been different, the air he breathed full of different 
 quotations, different thoughts and different ways of 
 expressing them ; the furniture of his mind would have 
 been different. The very being and nature of a man, 
 whether as man or as poet, depends obviously upon the 
 age in which he lives to a large extent at any rate ; 
 whereas in poetry there is something absolute, defying 
 time, as if the laws of environment were broken through 
 and unison with the ultimate effected " the perfect 
 round " attained in the heaven of song. But how far 
 are we to say that this is really to break through 
 materials ? How far is it simply to use them ? The 
 analogy of the freedom of the will would seem to hold. 
 A man's conditions are always given ; but within 
 those conditions he is conscious of free will, of the 
 possibility of a spontaneous, unique, original, and 
 creative act. The borderland is hard to fix. He 
 is not free to add a cubit to his stature, but under 
 certain impulses he can, so to speak, outstrip his possi- 
 bilities. So with poetry the limit of what can be done 
 under given conditions, in a given era, is hard to fix. 
 When we say of a poem early in date that it strikes a 
 modern note, we tend to imply that it would not be so 
 remarkable if written now to lay stress on the historical 
 value. But so long as it is merely that, it is either an 
 accident or a cleverness, a feat of precocity ; the 
 absolute value is all that matters. If that is not there, 
 it cannot to even the smallest extent be replaced by 
 any remark ableness in the poem having been written
 
 32 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 so early. It is not as if the merely being modern were 
 in itself necessarily and wholly good. We have gained, 
 it is true, in experience, in self-criticism, in accumulation 
 of instances ; but we have also lost an indefinable 
 something. 
 
 " It is not now as it hath been of yore." 
 The human race cannot sing " each song twice over," 
 nor " recapture 
 
 The first fine careless rapture." 
 
 If the poet of to-day can write as no Carolan poet could 
 have done, quite as surely have we lost the touch that 
 was theirs. Just as we put down to precocity any 
 instance of writing by an early poet that is only modern 
 in accent and no more, has not that is to say that tone 
 which is modern and classical at once, with all the 
 virtues of both, " not of an age, but for all time " so 
 we talk of affectation and conscious archaism when a 
 modern poet writes like an early one. Not, of course, 
 that it is impossible for a single poet now and then 
 to arise who stands apart from his contemporaries ; 
 some people are born out of their time. But even so 
 the general spirit of the age cannot altogether be avoided 
 by any one. The poet, moreover, is often a conscious 
 critic of present and past movements ; from Sidney to 
 Arnold many great poets have written of their concep- 
 tion of poetry, and this critical and discursive tendency 
 is more than ever active to-day. Originality in the 
 ordinary sense is fast becoming an impossibility ; but 
 we have seen that that is not the sense in which a poem 
 needs to be original. Originality, so far as it consists in 
 not knowing what has been said before, or in the fact of 
 there not having been said anything to know, is not only
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 33 
 
 unattainable in a complex civilisation, but undesirable 
 at all times. Nor i* the true, the requisite, originality 
 only a case of 
 
 " What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed " ; 
 it covers an actual gain in significance through other 
 people having used the language. It is largely through 
 accumulated use that the poet can get his effect ; for 
 the use has been accumulated for the reader also. And 
 so we come back to the truth that in a sense poetry tells 
 us only what we know already, or rather, that the 
 materials of knowledge are within us for the poet to 
 transfuse and illumine. The reader contributes under- 
 standing, acceptance, estimation. Art is thus relative ; 
 no man is an artist by himself and to himself. But 
 none the less the worth and standard of worth in it are 
 objective and absolute ; if this were not so, there would 
 be no possibility of the artist and his audience each 
 going to it for the truth and each finding, within the 
 limitations set by varying personality, the same truth. 
 The special relevance of this study of art in general to 
 the nature of lyric is twofold. In the first place, by 
 its very nature, the lyric illustrates most strikingly those 
 elements of artistic expression on which stress has been 
 laid ; it is splendid and single and wonderful ; but for 
 this reason it lays itself open to a misconstruction of the 
 way in which art necessarily works a misconstruction 
 exemplified in the false use and sense of the term 
 " spontaneity." Just because of its singleness and 
 brightness, the lyric has often been thought of as separate, 
 as impossibly individual, as outside the laws of poetry 
 and the traditions of thought and language. And in 
 the second place, in the history of lyric poetry in England 
 we find as good an example as could be of the contrast
 
 34 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 between the true and the false originality. For it 
 presents unity in diversity ; there is the one note, 
 from the earliest to the latest poem, preserved through 
 countless shapes ; there is the single something which 
 accepts influences, uses materials, adapts and yet 
 creates. We can trace up to the point of each act of 
 creation all the preceding thoughts and phrases ; 
 and in each case the act results in a strain inexplicably 
 new. The best text for a consideration of what 
 originality means is the Elizabethan lyric ; but the 
 same lesson is plain throughout our literature. Modes 
 of thought and of expression have come over in waves 
 from the Continent, and origins can be clearly and 
 extensively traced. No doubt in all countries alike 
 the primal impulse to lyrical utterance suffices, without 
 any extraneous aid, to begin ; but it is the groundwork 
 for many modifications. Of the very beginnings of 
 song Mr. E. K. Chambers has the following passage : 
 " The written lyric of the Middle Ages is generally the 
 work of the minstrel or of the trouvere, who represent 
 successive stages in the development of the poet as a 
 self-conscious artist. Both naturally write down their 
 songs ; the minstrel to aid his own memory and to 
 preserve a professional stock-in-trade, which he may 
 wish to sell or lend to another ; the trouvere out of 
 creative vanity, to secure from his friends and from 
 those who come after him the 
 
 ' monumentum aere perennius.' 
 
 But beyond trouvere-song and beyond minstrelsy lies 
 the folk-song out of which they both grew, and which 
 long continues to exist side by side with them. Folk- 
 song is rarely written down, at least until it has already
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 35 
 
 been contaminated with literary elements ; and the 
 reconstruction of its primitive features by the disen- 
 tangling of these elements, with what aid history, 
 psychology, and the comparative study of barbarous 
 peoples may afford, is an important function of the 
 anthropologist. His investigations trace the begin- 
 nings of the lyric to the instinct of emotional self- 
 expression, rhythmic with these quickened dilations 
 and contractions of the heart which are the physiological 
 accompaniments of emotion. Such expression proves 
 to be readily punctuated by the external rhythms of 
 folk- activities which occupy the limbs and leave the 
 spirit free to brood or to exult ; rhythms of labour, in 
 the pulling of the oar, the swing of the sickle or the flail, 
 the rock of the cradle, the rise and fall of the batlet, the 
 twisting of the spindle, the throw of the shuttle in the 
 loom ; or rhythms of play, when the nervous energies, 
 released from the ordinary claims, are diverted into 
 unremunerative channels, and under the rare stimulus 
 of meat and wine the idle feet of the chorus, grouped 
 around the altar of sacrifice or the fruit-laden tree, 
 break into the uplifting of the dance." Gradually the 
 difference arose between the one who leads the song, 
 and the chorus, just as we have it in the history 
 of Greek tragedy ; then the one man begins to make 
 verses of his own personal interests, and the lyric 
 has arisen, retaining for long the refrain as a mark of 
 its origin. " The earliest written love-poetry of the 
 northern trouveres discovers art-song," writes Mr. 
 Chambers further, " in the very act of passing out of 
 the cantica diabolica amatoria et turpia of rustici and 
 rusticance in the ballationes of their holiday chori. . . . 
 The second half of the twelfth century, in which the
 
 36 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 texts begin, already acknowledges the establishment 
 under Provencal influence of that official chanson 
 d'amour or chanson courtois, which ultimately suc- 
 ceeded in impressing itself upon the imagination of 
 the Renaissance no less than upon that of the Middle 
 Ages, and may be said to have fixed the type of romantic 
 sentiment from the Canzoniere of Petrarch to The Angel 
 in the House." This chanson courtois is the basis of 
 all that conventional and Platonic love- making which 
 is traceable through Petrarch and the Elizabethans. 
 Some of the earliest English songs have been preserved 
 with their music, and the connection of singing and 
 dancing with the forms of verse seems to have been 
 close. 
 
 These forms both in France and England were 
 largely determined by the rhyming Latin hymns ; 
 religious and amorous poetry overlap curiously ; the 
 clerici vagantes were largely the authors of both, and we 
 find the Virgin Mary addressed in language closely 
 resembling that used by the trouveres to their mistresses. 
 
 " Of on that is so fayr and bright 
 
 Velud marts stella, 
 Brighter than the day is light, 
 
 Par ens et puella ; 
 Ic crie to the, thou se to me, 
 Levedy, preye thi sone for me, 
 
 Tarn pia, 
 That ic mote come to the, 
 
 Maria ! " 
 
 The Latin tags are a relic of the rhyming verses in that 
 language ; we get also poems that make use of three 
 several tongues
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 37 
 
 "Scripsi hcec carmina in tabulis ; 
 Mon ostel est en mi la vile de Paris. 
 May y sugge namore, so wel me is ! 
 Yef hi deye for love of her, duel hit ys." 
 
 or again 
 
 " A celuy que pluys eyme en mounde, 
 Of alle tho that I have found, 
 
 Carissima, 
 
 Saluz od treye amour, 
 With grace and joye and alle honour, 
 
 Dulcissima." 
 
 Thus already the national need of artistic expression was 
 finding forms, under French and Provencal influence, 
 which bear a striking resemblance to the modern lyric, 
 so much more variously influenced, historically so much 
 more remote from the native impulse of the folk, and 
 yet surely not less national. Two further extracts may 
 be quoted like the three preceding, from the text of 
 Messrs. Chambers and Sidgwick to show how already 
 in these early lyrics the external form, from whatever 
 source derived, has been fused and made one with the 
 native spirit of the folk-song, and how the traces of 
 various influences in metre and in language, though 
 they may be distinguished and noted, are powerless 
 to mar the effect of artistic unity and inspired 
 spontaneity. The first is from a love-song : - 
 " Bytuene Mersh ant Averil, 
 
 When spray biginneth to springe, 
 The lutel foul hath hire wyl 
 On hyre lud to synge. 
 Ich libbe in love-longinge 
 For semlokest of alle thinge ; 
 He may me blisse bringe ;
 
 38 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 Icham in hire baundoun. 
 
 An bendy hap ichabbe yhent ; 
 
 Ichot from hevene it is me sent ; 
 
 From alle wymmen mi love is lent 
 Ant lyht on Alysoun." 
 
 The second combines the imagery of love- poetry with 
 the deep feeling of a religion firmly held and passionately 
 believed : 
 
 " In a valey of this restles minde 
 
 I soughte in mounteine and in mede, 
 Trusting a trewe love for to finde. 
 
 Upon an hill than I took hede ; 
 
 A voice I herde, and neer I yede, 
 In huge dolour complaininge tho, 
 
 ' See, dere soule, how my sides blede, 
 Quid amore langueo.' 
 
 What schall I do with my fair spouse, 
 
 But abide her of my gentilness, 
 Till that sche loke out of her house 
 
 Of fleischly affeccioun ? Love mine sche is. 
 
 Her bed is made, her bolster is bliss, 
 Her chaumber is chosen ; is there none mo ? 
 
 Loke out on me at the window of kindeness, 
 Quia amore langueo." 
 
 " Certainly," says Mr. Chambers, "the English poems 
 have their affinities to the chanson -populaire as well as 
 to the chanson courtois. They derive, indeed, not from 
 the courtly heyday of trouvere poetry so much as from 
 the aftermath, itself touched with popular elements, 
 which was produced amongst the great bourgeois 
 towns of Northern France." But, obscure as the
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 39 
 
 derivation may be, the point is that it is there. The 
 Latin and the Continental influences are at work ; 
 we see where the methods come from. Of course, as 
 has already been insisted, there is in any work of art 
 a novelty, an act of creation, as well as the utilisation 
 of materials to hand but it is a striking fact that the 
 English lyric, a form so vital and so individual, should 
 exhibit during the early centuries of its development 
 an almost shameless willingness to borrow manner alike 
 and matter from abroad, till we are left wondering as to 
 how and where the originality can have entered in. 
 Chaucer and his immediate followers, in so far as they 
 were lyrical, were French. The fifteenth - century 
 ballads and carols are more of the soil ; but, for all the 
 completeness of craftsmanship shown in the middle 
 English lyric, it is with Wyatt and Surrey that the 
 modern lyric begins, and Wyatt and Surrey again drew 
 their inspiration from abroad. " In the latter end of 
 the same King's [Henry VIII] raigne sprang vp a new 
 company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyat 
 th' elder and Henry Earle of Surrey were the two 
 chieftaines, who hauing travailed into Italic, and there 
 tasted the sweete and stately measures and stile of the 
 Italian Poesie as nouices newly crept out of the schooles 
 of Dante Arioste and Petrarch, they greatly pollished 
 our rude and homely maner of vulgar Poesie, from that 
 it had bene before, and for that cause may justly be 
 sayd the first reformers of our English meetre and stile." 
 Mr. Wyndham in his book on the Ple"iade attaches less 
 importance to these poets. " Wyatt and Surrey," he 
 says, " who turned to these Italian models in the earlier 
 years of the sixteenth century, failed to assimilate them, 
 and did little in the way either of remaking the English
 
 40 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 language or reviving lyrics. The poets who effected 
 these objects for England, as the Pleiade had effected 
 them for France, praised and dismissed Surrey and 
 Wyatt, the ' courtly makers,' just as Ronsard had 
 bowed out his precursors of Frangois I's court. But 
 they were familiar alike with the Pleiade's practice 
 and with their preaching. They proceeded to a study 
 of Italian from a knowledge of French, and received 
 Italian poetry through the medium of French art. 
 Thus transmuted it could be assimilated, and this was 
 done by English poets, who echo the music of the 
 Pleiade's verse and repeat their critical conclusions in 
 literary manifestoes." What Mr. Wyndham means 
 by the praise bestowed on Wyatt and Surrey by their 
 successors is illustrated in Sidney's Apologie, where it 
 is said of Surrey's lyrics that they contain " many 
 things tasting of a noble birth, and worthie of a noble 
 mind." It is noticeable that there are very few other 
 poets exempted by Sidney from his general attack ; 
 he approves Chaucer, the " Mirour of Magistrates," 
 the " Shepheard's Kalender," and Gorboduc, besides 
 Surrey himself ; and of these five only Surrey and 
 Spenser are lyrical. The latter was of course very 
 largely under French influence, conspicuously that of 
 Marot ; but Surrey's masters were Italian, and to 
 Italy therefore we must confess a considerable debt, 
 even apart from its indirect working through the 
 French. Professor Raleigh speaks in a tone not quite 
 reconcilable with Mr. Wyndham's : " The strength of 
 the school of Surrey lay in its songs, which never miss 
 the essentials of verse that is to be wedded to music. 
 Even the dullest of the poets of that school understand 
 a lyrical movement, while the best of them can breathe
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 4.1 
 
 such strains as Wyatt's ravishing song, with the burden 
 ' My lute, be still, for I have done/ or Gascoigne's 
 beautiful Lullaby." " The University wits," writes 
 Professor Raleigh further, "... maintained the lyrical 
 tradition in all its fulness " ; and indeed the tradition 
 is clearly traceable as one : for all the importation of new 
 forms of thought and language, there is something which 
 binds together the verses quoted above from medieval 
 lyric with Wyatt and Surrey, with Sidney and Spenser, 
 with Milton and with the moderns ; there is the un- 
 mistakable and single note. The variety and multitude 
 of sources that went to make up the Elizabethan lyric, 
 and be in it subdued to agreement with the whole 
 stream of English song, may be suggested by a quotation 
 from Mr. Wyndham's account of the sources drawn upon 
 by the Pleiade ; for that in its turn, as he has shown, 
 was drawn upon very largely by the Elizabethans. 
 " In the first place, they valued the best of mediaeval 
 French verse. They knew their thirteenth century . . . 
 they enjoyed the heritage of mediaeval French verse, 
 which, as Matthew Arnold has truly said, ' took posses- 
 ion of the heart and imagination of Europe in the 
 twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and taught Chaucer 
 his trade, words, rhyme, and metre.' . . "."In the second 
 place, coming to French poetry which immediately 
 preceded their own, they knew and appreciated Clement 
 Marot, Mellin de St. Gellais, Hoeret, and Maurice Sceve. 
 In the third place, having travelled much in Italy, they 
 knew Petrarch by heart, and helped themselves, no 
 doubt freely, to his material. But du Bellay wrote 
 ' centre les Petrarquists ' ; Ronsard attacked courtiers 
 ' qui n'admirent qu'un petit sonnet Petrarquise 1 ' ; 
 and both were justified in this repudiation. The method
 
 42 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 of their verse was distinct from the method of Italian 
 verse, and, passing from form to matter, they strike 
 a note of plaintive mystery, which is not to be heard 
 in Petrarch. In the fourth place, besides the direct 
 influence from Italy, they receive an indirect influence 
 already transfigured by the School of Lyons, and 
 notably by Maurice Sceve, whose Delie is rather an 
 anagram of 1'Idee, the Platonic idea of beauty, than a 
 title borrowed from the Delia whom Tibullus loved. . . . 
 In the fifth place, they had all the Latin authors at 
 their finger-ends. Yet they knew them for literary 
 echoes . . . and so, lastly, they deliberately sought their 
 inspiration in the fullest measure from the Greeks. . . . 
 Since their main intention was lyric, their chief model 
 was Pindar." A full account of how much English 
 literature owes to these multitudinous sources is given 
 in Mr. Sidney Lee's Introduction to his edition of 
 Elizabethan sonnets. " One is accustomed," he says, 
 " to regard the literary energy of sixteenth- century 
 England as mainly a national movement, as an out- 
 burst of original thought which owed little to foreign 
 influence or suggestion. No student can advance far 
 in his investigation in any direction, least of all in the 
 direction of the Elizabethan lyric, without seriously 
 qualifying this impression. As soon as one closely 
 compares the tone and language of the Elizabethan 
 lyric with those of the lyric in France and Italy during 
 the same epoch, or in the epoch immediately preceding 
 the Elizabethan, as soon as one realises the persistent 
 intercourse between Elizabethan England and the 
 cultivated nations of Europe, one is brought to the 
 conclusion that the Elizabethan lyric, in nearly all its 
 varied shapes of song and sonnet, was, to a very large
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 43 
 
 extent, directly borrowed from foreign lands. It may 
 be safely predicated that, had not foreign literature 
 supplied the initiative and the example, the Elizabethan 
 lyric would not have come into being, at any rate in 
 the shape which is familiar to us. Our ancestors often 
 improved conspicuously on their foreign models ; they 
 gave fuller substance, fuller beauty to the poetry which 
 they adapted to their own tongue from Latin or Greek, 
 from French or Italian. But the inspiration, the in- 
 vention, is no purely English product. The English 
 renderings are as a rule too literal borrowings to be 
 reckoned, in a justly critical estimate, among wholly 
 original compositions." Again, Mr. Lee refers to 
 " the familiar conceits how the lady's lips make the 
 roses red, how the eye and heart accuse each other of 
 causing Love's wounds, how verse has the faculty of 
 immortalising its hero or heroine." A much longer list 
 could be made ; England took over from France and 
 Italy a whole equipment of literary phraseology. The 
 Elizabethans wrote of little but love, and their love was 
 almost entirely a pose. It needed not Mr. Lee's re- 
 searches into origins to prove the conventional nature of 
 all this verse ; we have Sidney's express testimony, 
 recorded at the time both in his prose and in his poetry. 
 " That Lyricall kinde of songs and Sonnets, which, Lord, 
 if he gaue vs so good mindes, how well it might be em- 
 ployed, and with how heauenly fruites, both priuate and 
 publike, in singing the prayses of the immortall beautie, 
 the immortall goodnesse of that God, who giueth vs 
 hands to write, and wits to conceiue ; of which wee 
 might well want words, but neuer matter : of which 
 wee could turne our eyes to nothing, but wee should 
 euer have new budding occasions. But truly many
 
 44 O n the Nature of Lyric 
 
 such writings as come vnder the banner of vnresistable 
 loue, if I were a mistresse, would neuer perswade mee 
 they were in loue : so coldly they apply fiery speeches, 
 as men that had rather read louers writings, and so 
 caught vp certaine swelling phrases, which hang together, 
 like a man that once told me the wind was at North- 
 west and by South, because hee would bee sure to name 
 winds enow, then that in truth they feele those passions, 
 which easily as I thinke, may be bewrayed by that 
 same forcibleness or Energia (as the Greekes call it) of 
 the writer." And so in his poetry more familiar 
 perhaps in modernised spelling: 
 
 " Some lovers speak when they their Muses entertain, 
 Of hopes begot by fear, of wot not what desires, 
 Of force of heavenly beams infusing hellish pain, 
 Of living deaths, dear wounds, fair storms and freezing 
 
 fires. 
 Some one his song, in Jove and Jove's strange tales 
 
 attires ; 
 Bordered with bulls and swans, powdered with golden 
 
 rain : 
 
 Another humbler wit to shepherd's pipe retires, 
 Yet hiding royal blood full oft in rural vein. 
 To some a sweetest plaint, a sweetest style affords ; 
 While tears pour out his ink, and sighs breathe out his 
 
 words : 
 
 His paper, pale despair ; and pain, his pen doth move. 
 I can speak what I feel, and feel as much as they ; 
 But think that all the map of my state I display, 
 When trembling voice brings forth, that I do Stella 
 
 love."
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 45 
 
 Or again : 
 
 " You that do search for every purling spring 
 Which from the ribs of old Parnassus flows : 
 And every flower, not sweet perhaps, which grows 
 Near thereabouts, into your poesy wring : 
 You that do dictionary's methods bring 
 Into your rhymes running in rattling rows ; 
 You that poor Petrarch's long-deceased woes, 
 With new-born sighs and denizened wit do sing : 
 You take wrong ways ! Those far-fet helps be such 
 As do bewray a want of inward touch ; 
 And sure at length, stolen goods do come to light. 
 But if (both for your love and skill) your name 
 You seek to nurse at fullest breasts of Fame : 
 Stella behold ! and then begin to endite." 
 
 Mrs. Meynell has set forth and interpreted the con- 
 vention : " The lady of the lyrics was not loved in 
 mortal earnest, and her punishment now and then for 
 her ingratitude was to be told that she was loved in jest. 
 She did not love ; her fancy was fickle ; she was not 
 moved by long service, which, by the way, was evidently 
 to be taken for granted precisely like the whole long 
 past of a dream. She had not a good temper. When 
 the poet groans it seems that she has laughed at him ; 
 when he flouts her, we may understand that she has 
 chidden her lyrist in no temperate terms. In doing 
 this she has sinned not so much against him as against 
 Love. With that she is perpetually reproved. The 
 Lyrist complains to Love, pities Love for her scorning, 
 and threatens to go away with Love, who is on his 
 side. The sweetest verse is tuned to love when the 
 loved one proves worthy." It was from her close 
 
 D
 
 46 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 dependence upon musical setting, too, that the lady 
 of the lyrics got much of her unreality as well as much 
 of her charm. Says Mrs. Meynell again : " Fair as a 
 lily, hard to please, easily angry, ungrateful for in- 
 numerable verses, uncertain with the regularity of 
 the madrigal, and inconstant with the punctuality of a 
 stanza, she has gone with the arts of that day ; and 
 neither verse nor music will ever make such another 
 lady. She refused to observe the transiency of the 
 rose ; she never really intended much as she was 
 urged to be a shepherdess ; she was never persuaded 
 to mitigate her dress. In return, the world has let 
 her disappear. She scorned the poets until they turned 
 upon her in the epigram of many a final couplet ; and 
 of these the last has long been written. Her ' No ' 
 was set to counter- point in the part-song, and she 
 frightened Love out of her sight in the ballet. Those 
 occupations are gone, and the lovely Elizabethan has 
 slipped away. She was something less than mortal." 
 But to say that the age was conventional is not to say 
 that it lacked ardour, youth, spontaneity. If its art 
 is conscious in the sense of being carefully imitative, at 
 any rate there is none of that self-consciousness which 
 prevents the meagrely - gifted from trying their hand 
 at the prevailing fashion. " Every youth of ordinary 
 education," says Mr. Lee, " was moved to woo the 
 muses in a sequence of sonnets." And again : " In 
 spite of the wide dissemination of literary interest and 
 literary feeling in Elizabethan England, the average 
 level of literary capacity was not much higher than 
 that of other epochs. It was consequently inevitable 
 that, when the rage for sonneteering set in among the 
 Elizabethans, the mass of their sonneteering efforts
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 47 
 
 should be bad." But to write sonnets at all at any 
 rate for " every youth of ordinary education " to do so 
 is a sign that the nation itself is vigorous and young, as 
 yet untroubled by any excess of the critical spirit ; 
 the writers do not understand 
 
 How hard it is to write." 
 
 That the lyrists were almost wholly, in a sense, un- 
 original, has been conclusively proved by Mr. Lee. It 
 may be noted in connection with this fact that many of 
 them wrote merely for their own pleasure, not for 
 profit or for the praise of the multitude ; they did it 
 because they liked doing it, and if they published, it 
 was because apparently the public liked the result, or, 
 as in several instances it certainly was, because piratical 
 publishers forestalled them and forced their hands. 
 Such was the case with Sidney and with Daniel ; thus 
 were the sonnets of Shakespeare given to the world. 
 But beyond doubt in the Elizabethan lyric we have 
 the question of originality in its acutest form. The 
 very fact that people did write to please themselves 
 calls attention to another fact, one of profound im- 
 portance, which underlies much literary activity. It 
 is that, as has been said above, the difference between 
 the poet and the layman is not in understanding so much 
 as in power of expression. True, in poetry the very 
 power of expression becomes one, as it were, with under- 
 standing ; it is just because he cannot express ar- 
 ticulately what he understands that we say of a man 
 that he does not understand it. But this does not affect 
 the immediate issue. It has already been urged that 
 there are very few things in life which, in the last resort, 
 inspire poetry ; they might perhaps all be summed up
 
 4.8 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 under the two words " love " and " death." At any 
 rate, so to sum them up would be justifiable to the ex- 
 tent implied by admitting the essential relation of love 
 and death with everything for which we greatly care ; 
 for it is only of the things for which we greatly care that 
 we want poetry. If we run over in our minds what is 
 nearest to our memories in the poetry we know, those 
 two ideas will be immanent in all the passages we re- 
 member. It is equally true and not in the least con- 
 tradictory to say what Dr. Bradley has been quoted 
 above as saying that poetry can be written of any- 
 thing ; for to write poetry of the meanest thing is to 
 bring it into immediate touch with the great, the em- 
 bracing things. This is the truth behind all Words- 
 worth's critical writing. " Poetry," he says, " is the 
 first and last of all knowledge it is as immortal as the 
 heart of man." It is the poet's business, like the 
 philosopher's, to discover the universal in the particular; 
 like Wordsworth's child, he is 
 
 " Haunted for ever b}^ the eternal mind " ; 
 like Vaughan's, he feels 
 
 " through all this fleshly dress 
 Bright shoots of everlastingness." 
 
 But and here is the point every one is in touch with 
 that eternal mind, conscious in pangs and moments of 
 that everlastingness. Hence the desire to produce 
 poetry. Writing may of course be a merely academic 
 exercise ; and when it repeats old thoughts in familiar 
 figures, it is readily perhaps too readily taken to be 
 merely that. But the impulse to write is something 
 bigger and more profound, if not in every particular
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 49 
 
 case, at least in a nation great and lusty like the England 
 of the sixteenth century. Men had to be doing, for 
 that was in the air, it was the spirit of the age ; equally 
 little did they tire of writing. Every one is familiar with 
 moments when the desire to write something which shall 
 " all-express " him is terribly and insistently strong, but 
 is baffled by the inability to think out with clearness 
 anything but what he knows to be written down else- 
 where, adequate in black and white. But that was 
 not going to check the Elizabethans ; they would not 
 be reconciled with their own- inability. There is justi- 
 fication for the way in which they approached this 
 matter. Over and above that broad truth of the ulti- 
 mate fewness of real subjects for artistic treatment, we 
 find the narrower and more surprising truth, that the 
 same minor sentiment is capable of worthy reproduction, 
 over and over again, in one period or in various periods 
 that the same little thought may be constantly 
 caught up, and embodied in words that no doubt vary 
 in their beauty and sufficiency, and yet in some cases 
 at any rate justify themselves on more occasions than 
 one. There are some thoughts which of their nature 
 we should expect to put on many beautiful forms, each 
 of course in a sense new and original ; the pathos of 
 mortality is so urgent and omnipresent that it presses 
 for expression even after the incomparable verses of 
 Catullus : 
 
 " Soles occidere et redire possunt : 
 Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux 
 Nox est perpetua una dormienda." 
 
 This, we recognise, is one of those more majestic and far- 
 reaching sentiments to which we should expect the Muse
 
 50 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 to recur ; but we often find a slighter thought, scarcely 
 more than a conceit, repeated times without number 
 in the poets even when one might have supposed it to 
 have attained a final expression. Such is the idea which 
 found one of its singers in Campion : 
 " There is a garden in her face 
 Where roses and white lilies blow " ; 
 
 so with Davenant's 
 
 " He takes your chamber for the East 
 And to implore your light he sings " ; 
 
 and again with Herrick's 
 
 " Gather ye rose-buds while ye may." 
 
 Countless poets both before and after have found in- 
 spiration in the idea that prompted Dekker's touching 
 and consoling line : 
 
 " Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers ? " 
 
 Another fact which justifies that attitude of refusing 
 to be discouraged by any suspicion of impotence is that 
 there are many instances in literature of how some one 
 obscure, and apparently for years uninspired, may light 
 for once, as though by accident, on the true note or 
 the great phrase, and become the artist of a single 
 achievement. Such are the justifications ; the draw- 
 backs are no less apparent. The conventions tend to 
 harden; the repetition of the old phrases becomes a 
 matter of reproach, and eccentricity in consequence 
 an object of search. Where conceit was the recognised 
 medium of poetical expression, it was natural that a 
 false conception of originality should lead men towards 
 extravagance of conceit, should entice them ever further 
 and further afield in their search for novel effects ; it
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 51 
 
 was natural that there should arise a " metaphysical ' 
 school. But this so-called school was not strictly a 
 school at all ; it did not consist of a number of men all 
 consciously writing in a similar manner under compulsion 
 of a similar creed. Besides extravagance, there was at 
 work another tendency altogether. It has been said 
 that the art of the Elizabethans, conscious and elaborate 
 as it was, was possible only because of the ingenuousness 
 and artlessness of the national mind that engaged in it ; 
 and as succeeding lyrists sought after the extremes of 
 conceit on the one hand, so on the other they came 
 under the influence of a mood which carped at the 
 artlessness, which refused to take playthings seriously, 
 which criticised and delayed instead of pouring forth. 
 We have seen Sidney's sarcasm, his plea for simplicity 
 and sincerity ; but to become aware of the need for 
 simplicity is a sign that introspection has begun ; it 
 is the modern note. Sidney was too early to be at all 
 free from the very faults he was so quick to discern ; 
 with the reaction came a definite attempt to find a new 
 field of thought. There was a school to be counter- 
 acted the school of Spenser, culminating later in 
 Milton ; it partook very largely of course of the French 
 and Italian temper, and it used conceits that exceeded 
 the limited artificiality of the Elizabethans. Phineas 
 Fletcher is a conspicuous example ; Milton was far 
 from escaping the taint ; he was capable of writing 
 
 ' For sure so well-instructed are my tears 
 That they would fitly fall in ordered characters." 
 
 The strongest force in the reaction was Donne ; he is 
 usually classed as " metaphysical," but at any rate his 
 conceits were of an individual kind, so that there was
 
 52 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 presumably more reason for them than can be allowed 
 to the conventional ones of his contemporaries. " Some- 
 thing new," writes Mr. Gosse, " in English literature 
 begins in Donne, something which proceeded, under his 
 potent influence, to colour poetry for nearly a hundred 
 years. . . . The imitation of Donne's style begins so 
 early, and becomes so general, that several critics have 
 taken for granted that there must have been editions 
 of his writings which have disappeared." And again : 
 " Donne was, I venture to suggest, by far the most 
 modern and contemporaneous of the writers of his 
 time. He rejected all the classical tags and imagery 
 of the Elizabethans, he borrowed nothing from French 
 or Italian tradition. . . . His poems are full of images 
 taken from the life and habits of the time. Where 
 earlier poets have summoned the myths of Greece to 
 adorn their verse, Donne weaves in, instead, the false 
 zoology, the crude physics and philosophy, of his own 
 fermenting epoch." Donne perhaps more than any 
 other author forces confession of the truth that conceit 
 is not a bad thing in itself ; it can be as much as any- 
 thing else an instrument for the self-expression of 
 genius. There is no essential antagonism between 
 simplicity and conceits ; both are legitimate means, 
 and both produce on occasion beautiful results. Both 
 can at times be ugly when, as Wordsworth said, " the 
 matter is contemptible." Pope, for instance, though 
 often most poetical when simplest, is often again simple 
 enough without conveying the impression of poetical 
 inspiration and that not with any laboured or ob- 
 viously artificial simplicity, but by a straightforward 
 handling of commonplace themes. Conceit may be 
 regarded as of two kinds it is either a convention
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 53 
 
 deteriorating into an excess, or the attempt of the active 
 mind to come to close quarters with its thought. This 
 latter and more essential kind shows the connection 
 with a wider question. Of all literary eccentricity and 
 mannerism it may be said that where it is consciously 
 assumed as such, it is vicious ; where it fits the thought, 
 it is none the worse for being different and unusual. 
 Meredith is the most consistent example of this in 
 English prose ; nor is it less true of his poetry, though 
 both he and Browning give rise to the suspicion that 
 perhaps at their simplest they are best. Meredith 
 can be sweet and direct when he chooses as for ex- 
 ample in " Love in the Valley." So could Crashaw and 
 Cowley, Herbert and Vaughan. Perhaps out of every 
 violent or obscure poet it is the sudden clarity and the 
 obvious beauties that endure ; what remains to the ear 
 and the soul out of the absorbing intricacies of " The 
 Sage Enamoured and the Honest Lady " is the pure and 
 liquid line 
 
 " Her eyes were the sweet world desired of souls " ; 
 
 out of the welter of Sordello abide the lines in which 
 
 " the grieved and obscure waters slope 
 Into a darkness quieted by hope." 
 
 But memory may thus apportion praise without doing 
 wrong to the just claims of mannerism and of conceit. 
 If simplicity can do what these cannot, they in their 
 turn have their own work ; and, when they are of the 
 right kind, they do it well. Critics have drawn a 
 contrast between the difficulty entailed in such rapid 
 and versatile thought as Browning's and the bad,
 
 54 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 bombastic, unnecessary, overloaded obscurity of certain 
 Elizabethans. Wither brought a similar charge 
 
 " As the sun doth oft exhale 
 Vapours from each rotten vale, 
 Poesy so sometimes drains 
 Gross conceits from muddy brains." 
 
 It all depends on how the thing is done. The con- 
 ventional conceit may be handled deftly or clumsily, 
 the conceit arising from activity of mind may be success- 
 ful or not ; further, conceits of one kind may be trans- 
 formed by force of poetic feeling into conceits of another. 
 Nothing is more common throughout the Elizabethans 
 than a somewhat unconvincing exaggeration ; but an 
 apparently similar trick ceases in the hands of Shake- 
 speare to be unconvincing, and becomes the vehicle 
 of passion. So with Donne as for instance : 
 " Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice 
 To make dreams truth and fables histories." 
 Cowley's first Anacreontic is a curious example of an 
 extravagant conceit converted by lightness of touch 
 and dexterity of treatment into something which strikes 
 the mind as quite natural and straightforward 
 
 " The sea itself (which one would think 
 Should have but little need of drink) 
 Drinks twice ten thousand rivers up. 
 
 The moon and stars drink up the Sun : 
 They drink and dance by their own light, 
 They drink and revel all the night : 
 Nothing in nature's sober found, 
 But an eternal health goes round.
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 55 
 
 Fill up the bowl, then, fill it high, 
 Fill all the glasses there for why 
 Should every creature drink but I ? 
 Why, man of morals, tell me why ? " 
 
 Donne in his famous " Ecstasy" affords an instance of a 
 poet so violently compelled by what he wants to say that 
 he, as it were, smashes through the very conceits he set 
 out to use ; in each of these we feel the insufficiency, 
 are conscious of the idea struggling within the inadequate 
 metaphor, until at last the true sense triumphs in lines 
 of absolute simplicity 
 
 " All day the same our postures were, 
 And we said nothing, all the day." 
 
 The effect is attained, but not by the mere simplicity, 
 nor yet by the force of contrast ; the accumulation of 
 conceits is an essential of the artistic whole. Like all 
 the media of artistic expression, that is to say, the 
 conceits have become something other, something new ; 
 for, as Dr. Bradley has said, " anything which is really 
 a mere ' conceit ' is mere decoration " ; and mere 
 decoration is inartistic, is bad. Badness and clumsiness 
 were largely, however, despite the extravagancies of 
 certain poets, eliminated in the period immediately 
 preceding the Puritan by the interaction of various 
 tendencies, which culminated in an almost unrivalled 
 mastery of lyrical art. There was the Spenserian ; 
 there was the critical, suggested in Sidney and em- 
 phasised in the " metaphysical " school and in the 
 definitely and intentionally classical restraint of Jonson. 
 These tendencies overlapped and mingled, and the 
 crown and flower of them was Milton ; he had the
 
 56 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 knowledge of many literatures, the gift of borrowing 
 and improving what he borrowed, the necessary 
 obedience to the precept and example of the classics, 
 the command of metaphor, the lyric touch, the critical 
 spirit to discern what was poetical, what essential, and 
 what not ; he had the inexplicable transforming power 
 of the poet. We may apply to him the phrase found 
 for another poet 
 
 " Singer to whom the singing ages climb 
 Convergent." 
 
 But if Milton is the complex result of all these tendencies, 
 and " blends, transcends them all," Herrick, his con- 
 temporary, may rather be said to have distilled from 
 the wealth at his disposal than to have utilised it 
 directly. He is not " metaphysical," nor is he the slave 
 of conventional conceit ; he has got rid of useless 
 ornament, and is left playing with the sweetness of his 
 own fancy alone. He is the master of " fancy," in 
 Wordsworth's sense, as opposed to the more august 
 and austere gift of imagination. He has in perfection 
 that quality which chiefly distinguishes the Carolan 
 lyrists as a whole the grace, the ease, the lucidity, 
 the exactness, the epigrammatic point and finish. All 
 this is the result, partly no doubt of reaction from 
 Elizabethan opulence and turbulence, but also directly 
 of Elizabethan melody and charm. By much en- 
 thusiasm, by many attempts, by long self-criticism, the 
 formal part of poetry had attained to this precision. 
 Not that anything had 
 
 " Made poetry a mere mechanic art " ; 
 
 for the Carolan lyric could never have been produced 
 without the subjective impulse to song ; its very lilt
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 57 
 
 tells us as much. There are certain kinds of archi- 
 tectural effect which can be attained by taking thought ; 
 the ring of the couplet, the solemnity of blank verse, 
 worthless and hollow as they are by themselves, may 
 yet by themselves exist, unillumined by the sacred 
 spark ; but there has to be a mood corresponding to the 
 formal measure and infusing life into it before one gets 
 
 " Then this immensive cup 
 
 Of aromatic wine, 
 Catullus, I'll quaff up 
 To that terse muse of thine." 
 
 Here is Herrick at his most trivial, making no attempt 
 to sound the greater depths of feeling, as, however, he 
 was well able to do when he chose ; but the syllables 
 themselves are stamped with something final and 
 satisfying, something which is the seal of true art. 
 Herrick could move freely and write adequately without 
 conceits ; but when he does use them, they are neither 
 far-fetched nor hackneyed ; they never fall short and 
 never overreach themselves ; they are exactly in tune 
 with the thing said and the mood of the poet saying it. 
 For instance 
 
 " Besides, the childhood of the day has kept, 
 Against you come, some orient tears unwept " ; 
 
 or again 
 
 " The Rose was sick and smiling died ; 
 And, being to be sanctified, 
 About the bed there sighing stood 
 The sweet and flowery sisterhood." 
 
 We have seen the growth and culmination of various 
 tendencies in the period ending with the first half of
 
 58 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 the seventeenth century ; then comes the Puritan 
 interval, and the changed muse of the Restoration. 
 " It is entirely in keeping," wrote Dr. Richard Garnett, 
 " with the solid and terrestrial character of Restoration 
 literature in general, that no description of poetry 
 should manifest so grievous a lapse from the standard 
 of the preceding age as the lyrical. The decline of the 
 drama has attracted more attention, partly from the 
 violent contrast of two schools, which had hardly one 
 principle or one method in common, partly because our 
 own age had but imperfectly realised the exceeding 
 wealth in song of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, 
 until Mr. Arthur Bullen showed what unsuspected 
 treasures of poetry were hidden in old music-books. 
 Whatever else an Elizabethan or Jacobean lyric may 
 be, it is almost certain to be melodious. The average 
 Restoration lyric is correct enough in scansion, but the 
 melody is conventional, poor, and thin. ... It was as 
 though a blight had suddenly fallen upon the nation, 
 and men's ears had become incapable of distinguishing 
 between sweetness and smoothness. So, indeed, the}' 
 had as regarded the music of verse ; but how little 
 technical music, whether vocal or instrumental, was 
 neglected, even in private circles, we may learn from 
 Pepys's Diary . . . the only explanation is, that the age 
 preceding that of the Restoration was poetical, and the 
 Restoration age was prosaic." This passage is interest- 
 ing in its emphasis upon that separation between music 
 and poetry which seemed to grow in proportion to 
 the growth of civilisation, sophistication, and specialisa- 
 tion. The separation can never be complete ; and 
 though in itself it is desirable, when regarded from the 
 point of view of abstract theories about the adequacy
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 59 
 
 of each particular art, still its first definite appearance 
 in the history of English lyric seems to have told tem- 
 porarily against the lyric itself. It was inevitable that 
 the arts should draw apart, and the severance is fully 
 justified both in theory and in fact ; but it was equally 
 inevitable that the process should entail temporary 
 loss, and should be gradual. Of the two pre-eminent 
 lyrists of the eighteenth century, Burns and Blake, the 
 former was utterly possessed of the idea of tune, and 
 of the latter Professor Raleigh writes : "It seems that 
 he sang his own lyrics to tunes of his own choice, and 
 shaped them by that loose prosody which music 
 supplies." What Wordsworth thought of the con- 
 nection with music we have already seen ; by his time 
 the process of separation had gone too far to be treated 
 as anything but necessary and almost complete. It is 
 of the nature of lyric to be infinitely adaptable and for 
 ever modern. If the epic is indeed past reviving, it is 
 because certain quite casual and local characteristics 
 have been insisted on as essential to anything which is 
 to bear that name. The long narrative poem is still 
 possible ; but yet there is this difference that it is not 
 hard to imagine a state of national impulses and in- 
 terests in which the long narrative poem would cease 
 to be possible while yet the lyric mood remained ; 
 but to imagine a state hostile to lyric is to conceive it 
 as coming under that condemnation pronounced by 
 Dr. Garnett upon the eighteenth century, of being 
 definitely unpoetical, a " prosaic " age. Modernity 
 does seem to tell against length and patience ; it may 
 be that 
 
 " This strange disease of modern life 
 With its sick hurry, its divided aims,"
 
 60 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 while it gains in innumerable subtleties and intricacies 
 of excitement, loses the augustness, the tranquillity, 
 the spaciousness required for a long poem. But against 
 any such indictment must be set the vital fact that 
 size is not an essential of greatness. The yueye$o? that 
 Aristotle requires in art is only just so much as shall 
 exhibit the qualities of art within itself ; true greatness 
 may belong to the slightest and briefest song. But 
 this at any rate may be admitted that tragedy and 
 epic, however widely interpreted, do preserve a certain 
 rigour of requirement which may or may not be con- 
 sonant with the prevailing mood of any particular 
 epoch, while lyric asks only the pure poetic impulse 
 and power ; if the age feels in that way which at 
 once demands and compels the service of poetry, 
 it will express itself in some such way as may fairly 
 be called lyrical. But it will tend too, after a while, 
 to experiment in new forms, and to blur definitions. 
 There will be lyrical this and lyrical that, over and above 
 the lyric pure and simple. All this has been already 
 urged as part of the nature of lyric ; we come now to 
 the illustration of it in the development of English 
 poetry. The dissociation from music was at once 
 a result and a cause of complication and confusion. 
 It gave greater scope, and opportunity for greater 
 completeness in the several kinds. Boundaries became 
 and remain insecure. The elegy is of course by deriva- 
 tion to be distinguished from the lyric ; but an anthology 
 of English lyrics might well contain, not only Gray's 
 Elegy, but that succession of the peculiar glories of the 
 English muse Lycidas, Adonais, and Thyrsis ; nor 
 must we forget that Wordsworth classed his ode on the 
 " Intimations of Immortality " as an " elegiac piece."
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 61 
 
 Lycidas, Adonais, and Thyrsis all owe something, 
 indeed much, to the Bion Moschus and Theocritus 
 tradition ; the long irregular ode goes back to Pindar 
 through the harmonies of Gray, the irregularities of 
 Cowley, the learning of Ben Jonson, and the experi- 
 ments of the Pleiade. Both ode and elegy originally 
 required musical accompaniment ; but with the absence 
 of music, the fusion seems complete. Adonais might, 
 it is true, be excluded from a lyrical anthology on the 
 merely external ground of length ; but Lycidas and 
 Thyrsis present a singleness and persistence of in- 
 spiration within a narrower compass. The ode is an 
 acknowledged lyrical form ; the elegiac, at any rate to 
 Wordsworth, is not ; yet he could call his greatest ode 
 elegiac because of its subject ; and if Lycidas is lyrical, 
 why not Adonais ? And if Gray's Pindaric odes are 
 lyrical, why is not his elegy ? Is it because of the 
 subject ? But the subject of Wordsworth's ode does 
 not suffice to prevent it from being an ode. Is it 
 because of the quietness of mood, the slowness of move- 
 ment ? If so, what of Collins's ode to Evening ? 
 Surely that is lyrical. Or again, is it because of the 
 scrupulous and laborious care of the composition ? 
 But what then of Gray's own odes ? Any one form as 
 it now exists sums up a thousand tendencies, is the 
 fruit of innumerable arguments and experiments. So 
 distinct and so complete within itself, yet so obscure and 
 multiform in origin, is any lyrical or quasi-lyrical 
 poem of modern times, that a general survey becomes 
 impossible. The variety, the adaptability, bewilder. 
 But there is one lyrical measure existing in the English 
 language at once sufficiently popular to be regarded as 
 a national and typical form of expression, and suf-
 
 62 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 ficiently exact to be regarded as bound up of necessity 
 with rule one form in which to transgress the letter of 
 the law is to abandon something of the spirit ; and it 
 is worth while, taking that form, the sonnet, as a type 
 of the exactest metrical precision our language knows, 
 to trace its growth in the hands of successive generations 
 of poets ; for here if anywhere will lie an answer to 
 that ancient and baffling question of the correspondence 
 of form and matter of how far the thought gains or 
 loses by subjecting the inspiration of the moment to the 
 formula sanctioned and approved by time and we 
 shall find it, if we do find it, just where our inquiry set 
 out to look for it in that very kind of poetry which 
 would seem to allow least of limit and law, and to cry 
 most urgently for freedom of utterance to the four winds 
 of heaven. Never were the dramatic conventions neces- 
 sitated by stage-representation, or those formulae of 
 composition which seem likely to keep the epic a dead 
 form henceforward, so close a bondage for the subject- 
 matter to which they were applied, as the inexorable 
 rhythm and enumeration of the sonnet for the sudden- 
 ness and splendour of the lyric. It is exactly in the 
 contrast between the sonnet and the occasional pieces 
 called vaguely " lyrical " that we shall find light thrown 
 upon the nature of lyric ; for in so far as it is a form, 
 lyric is but a special case of this question of relation of 
 form to matter ; and it is because we find it wavering 
 from fixed types to instances of entirely baffling vague- 
 ness and uncertainty that it raises so difficult a problem. 
 Where some poems of a certain kind have their laws 
 given, and some again give their own laws at the moment 
 of their conception, what law that is universal shall be 
 found, what formula that is binding ? Comparison with
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 63 
 
 drama and epic is for this reason hard to draw ; while 
 these cling to their ancient structure for fear that, 
 breaking it, they should lose something of themselves, 
 the lyric changes lightly and sympathetically. Not so, 
 however, the precise sonnet- form ; and by its unique 
 quality it furnishes a clue to all the rest of the difficulty. 
 It is necessary to revert in connection with this one 
 instance of the sonnet to the whole question of spon- 
 taneity and inspiration, and to recapitulate conclusions. 
 The poet has an idea to be expressed ; the form should 
 be chosen for him by the necessities of his subject. 
 One would not expect that, if a man started by saying 
 ' Shall I put this idea into a sonnet or an ode ? ' the 
 result would be satisfactory. One would rather expect 
 the poet, looking back upon a completed poem, to be 
 able to say with Mr. Austin Dobson 
 
 " I intended an ode, 
 
 And it turn'd to a sonnet." 
 
 Instances of deliberate choice are of course familiar in 
 the larger modes ; Milton was not sure whether he would 
 write an epic or a drama, nor even of the subject he 
 would treat. Dr. Bradley has shown how the subject 
 in this sense is external to the poem, and how the same 
 is true of the external form, the architectural structure. 
 But the special claim of lyric is to present in a brief span 
 and a single view that union of form with matter which 
 is necessary to all art. In what way this claim is 
 justified may best be shown by a summary account of 
 the particular lyrical kind, the sonnet. To us it seems 
 a difficult and exacting one ; but it originated quite 
 naturally to music and in a language whose abundance 
 of rhymes made light of the difficulty. It was intro-
 
 64 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 duced from Italy to France and from both to England 
 as a literary exercise. It has to be remembered as a 
 fact, whatever theory of inspiration we may hold, 
 that the first line of a sonnet of the accepted type must 
 end in a syllable to which the language will supply three 
 further rhymes. Hence the temptation to the use of it 
 as an exercise merely. The stress laid upon it was 
 characteristic of the whole mood and spirit in which 
 the borrowings of the Elizabethans were conducted. 
 " The Elizabethan sonnet," says Mr. Lee, " offers the 
 best of all illustrations of the vast debt that Elizabethan 
 literature owed to foreign influences. For practical 
 purposes the sonnet may be regarded as an invention of 
 Italy. It was at any rate the Italian writers of the 
 thirteenth century who first gave the genre definite or 
 permanent shape and character. Dante (1265-1321) 
 may fairly be reckoned the earliest sonneteer of historic 
 interest. ... In the fourteenth century Petrarch (1304- 
 74) assumed Dante's mantle, and devoted his main 
 literary energy to sonneteering. Although his sonnets 
 differ little from Dante's either in form or spirit, 
 Petrarch's fame as a sonneteer quickly outran that of 
 his predecessor. Petrarch was the sonneteer who 
 finally dominated Western Europe ; and no. subsequent 
 practitioner in the art in Italy, France, Spain, or England 
 during the two centuries which followed his achievement, 
 failed to bear witness to his mighty influence." Again : 
 " While pointing out to the French nation all the avenues 
 to literary culture which the ancient classics offered 
 them, Du Bellay was especially emphatic in his com- 
 mendation of the Italian sonnet as a main source of 
 culture. ' Sonne-moi ces beaux sonnets, non moins 
 docte que plaisante invention italienne, pour lesquels
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 65 
 
 tu as Petrarque et quelques modernes Italians.' ' 
 The connection of the sonnet with music is very inti- 
 mate ; it is thought to have grown originally from a 
 form of Provencal song in the eleventh or twelfth 
 century, and sonnets were set and sung all over Europe 
 in the countries, and during the period, of their greatest 
 prevalence. The fashion of writing them came into 
 England with Wyatt and Surrey, and those who followed 
 the fashion, up till nearly the end of the sixteenth 
 century, by taking over the matter and method as well 
 as the form avoided the difficulties of constraining the 
 one to the other. There might have been the trouble 
 of the repeated rhyme, but for the most part they did 
 not keep to the strict Petrarchan model. Spenser com- 
 promised in the form ababbcbccdcdee, and Sidney wrote 
 correctly enough ; but the so-called Shakespearean 
 form prevailed, and in the hands of Shakespeare himself, 
 of Keats and in one instance at any rate of Drayton, 
 has given us material for a noble if a different tradition. 
 When the change came and the critical spirit triumphed, 
 of necessity the fashion of the conventional sonnet- 
 sequence was over. But the sonnet itself was evidently 
 congenial to something in the national temper, for it 
 survived to good purpose, both in the Petrarchan and 
 in the Shakespearean type. The rhyme-formula of the 
 latter is ababcdcdefefgg, of the former abbaabba, with 
 a certain amount of license in the arrangement of the 
 sestet, which may have two or three rhymes, in almost 
 any order. The two commonest modifications of the 
 Petrarchan kind have been the octave abbaacca, and the 
 concluding couplet in the sestet. But the rhyme- 
 arrangement is not the only requirement ; the movement 
 is equally essential.
 
 66 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 " The sonnet is a wave of melody : 
 
 From heaving waters of the impassioned soul 
 A billow of tidal music one and whole 
 
 Flows in the ' octave ' ; then, returning free, 
 Its ebbing surges in the ' sestet ' roll 
 
 Back to the deeps of life's tumultuous sea." 
 This exactness of break and turn even Wordsworth 
 and Rossetti have on occasion disregarded ; but Milton, 
 in definitely avoiding it, created practically a new type 
 of sonnet, though few have ever attempted to follow 
 his example. He was rid too of the convention implied 
 in the sequence ; his sonnets are free, and fit each to 
 a definite occasion. This is not to deny to all his 
 predecessors either sincerity of feeling or adequacy of 
 result ; but even those whose love we may believe to 
 have been neither a pose nor a Platonic aspiration after 
 an ideal beauty, but an actual and human passion 
 even Spenser and Shakespeare fall into their place in 
 the general vogue and accept, however much they may 
 glorify, the method. Milton wrote sonnets only when 
 he had something, whether noble or trivial, to say ; 
 he confined himself to specific occasions. From his time 
 onwards the histor}' of the sonnet need comprise but 
 a few pre-eminent names. Keats perhaps stands alone 
 in having written beautiful poetry in both the Petrarchan 
 and the Shakespearean kind. Wordsworth wrote, besides 
 some hundreds which will never emerge from obscurity, 
 a considerable number of the finest sonnets in the 
 language, keeping to the Petrarchan model with reason- 
 able fidelity. He has been accused, with some injustice, 
 of rejecting or avoiding one of the chief ornaments of 
 the sonnet in the hands, say, of Rossetti the sonorous 
 last line. But sonority is an easily over- rated quality.
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 67 
 
 " The mere volume of sound," says Myers " the actual 
 sonority of the passage is a quite subordinate element 
 in the effect, which is produced mainly by relations and 
 sequences of vowels and consonants, too varying and 
 delicate to be reproduced by rule." Neither Rossetti 
 nor any other good poet ever aimed at a last line which 
 should be just " sound and fury " ; it is not for volume 
 but for sufficiency of sound that the ear waits as the end 
 of a poem approaches. The effect is so striking and 
 complete in Rossetti because his sonnets accumulate 
 such force, move so augustly, and close so aptly, with 
 a sort of precision of magnificence ; they are triumphant 
 in their energy and in the control of it, and they move 
 to an inevitable end. Wordsworth was not deficient in 
 this kind 
 
 " Or the unimaginable touch of time " 
 
 is as splendid an instance as could be found ; but 
 Rossetti does perhaps achieve this particular effect most 
 often of all English poets 
 
 " And watered with the wasteful warmth of tears. "- 
 " Follow the desultory feet of death." 
 " Sleepless with cold commemorative eyes." 
 
 examples crowd upon the memory. But the triumph 
 of the last line is not to be distinguished from triumphant 
 creation of the sonnet as a whole ; it is not a different 
 art, but a portion of the same. There is then a sense in 
 which it is undoubtedly true to say that Rossetti stands 
 supreme among sonneteers ; and it is just in this 
 supremacy of his that we find the secret of the sonnet. 
 The intricacy of the form was not to him an obstacle, 
 but a tool, because he grew in the sonnet- tradition ;
 
 68 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 the very thoughts and music of those early Italians, 
 his masters, were all about him ; the formula was not a 
 convention imposed, it was apt and ready. Into it he 
 wrought with ease the modern subtlety of his thought 
 and the luxurious profusion of his imagery ; in him it 
 is manifest how 
 
 " The form remains, the function never dies." 
 
 The form remains because it is adaptable, perpetually 
 new ; it is not so much a vessel fit to receive many 
 different distillations as a body that can become literally 
 one with many different souls ; it is the organ of the 
 tradition that produces it. Wordsworth has well 
 criticised it, and by implication all literary and artistic 
 laws, in his lines 
 
 " Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room ; 
 And hermits are contented with their cells ; 
 And students with their pensive citadels : 
 Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom, 
 Sit blithe and happy ; bees that soar for bloom, 
 High as the highest peak of Furness Fells, 
 Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells : 
 In truth, the prison unto which we doom 
 Ourselves, no prison is : and hence to me, 
 In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound 
 Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground, 
 Pleased if some souls (for such there needs must be) 
 Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, 
 Should find brief solace there, as I have found." 
 
 It is important, however, that one should quarrel with 
 the phrase " the weight of too much liberty " ; for 
 surely it is a question rather of kind than of degree.
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 69 
 
 Liberty, however great, need not, any more than need 
 custom, lie upon us 
 
 " with a weight 
 Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life ! " 
 
 The secret of art, like the secret of life, is in the union, 
 the conjunction, the proportion, the adaptation ; the 
 sonnet is a type in poetry of what ritual may be in 
 religion ; and Wordsworth's analogy of the nun leads 
 naturally to a quotation from Mrs. Meynell in which 
 this side of the truth about art is made for ever clear : 
 " The monastery, in like manner, holds its sons to little 
 trivial rules of time and exactitude, not to be broken, 
 laws that are made secure against the restlessness of 
 the heart fretting for insignificant liberties trivial 
 laws to restrain from a trivial freedom. And within 
 the gate of these laws which seem so small, lies the world 
 of mystic virtue. They enclose, they imply, they lock, 
 they answer for it. Lesser virtues may flower in daily 
 liberty and may flourish in prose ; but infinite virtues 
 and greatness are compelled to the measure of poetry, 
 and obey the constraint of an hourly convent bell. It is 
 no wonder that every poet worthy the name has had a 
 passion for metre, for the very verse. To him the 
 difficult fetter is the condition of an interior range im- 
 measurable." The other side of the truth about art is 
 suggested in a sentence of Shelley's : " It is by no 
 means essential that a poet should accommodate his 
 language to this traditional form, so that the harmony, 
 which is its spirit, be observed. . . . Every great poet 
 must inevitably innovate upon the example of his 
 predecessors in the exact structure of his peculiar 
 versification." Thus does each successive problem
 
 70 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 that of artistic creation at large, that of the relation of 
 one form of art, the lyric, to poetry as a whole, that 
 again of the sonnet within the lyric, and finally that 
 raised in the two quotations just contrasted imply 
 all the others, and demand a solution which shall 
 meet them all. Shelley claims for the poet leave to 
 depart from tradition, Mrs. Meynell emphasises the 
 value of tradition to the poet ; but the opposition is 
 only in the mode of expression. It remains true that 
 art justifies itself, and that the one test of any kind of 
 art is whether or no it gets its own effect. If we figure 
 the world as engaged in a great attempt, amid innumer- 
 able confusions, to become one with some celestial arche- 
 type, some world already ordered and serene, then we 
 can think of any work of art which achieves its own end 
 as a step towards success, a bolt shot securely and in- 
 dubitably home in the intangible mechanism of the 
 universe. We hear the ring of it. It is idle to set up 
 a contrast between the superficially novel methods of 
 Walt Whitman and the more obviously artistic work of 
 Tennyson, as though the one could break away from 
 his heritage while the other was content to inherit his. 
 In each and any case there must be a utilisation of all 
 the material to hand, but there must be a revelation too, 
 or the product is not art. The kind of newness that we 
 require for originality to be claimed and allowed is in a 
 sense only the making plain of what is already there, the 
 reconciliation with an eternally existent reality. The 
 critical faculty is no more and no less than the capacity 
 to recognise this revelation when it is made. To say 
 that the movement of Whitman's verse obeys no 
 technical law that could have been framed on the 
 strength of previously accepted literature, is only to
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 71 
 
 say of it what can be said of Tennyson too, and is by no 
 means to deny its correspondence with a profounder 
 law. Indeed, it is just the same fundamental tightness 
 \vhich we recognise in one poet as in another. Whitman 
 is an artist in virtue of his great and magical phrases : 
 " lovely and soothing death," " the huge and thoughtful 
 night " ; he is a lyrist in virtue of the way his verse can 
 on occasion run 
 
 " Out of the cradle endlessly rocking," 
 
 or 
 
 " When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed." 
 
 To speak of Whitman as breaking away from tradition 
 is to ignore the singleness of the poetic note, to forget 
 that no new form is possible without a new inspiration, 
 and that, just as inevitably, new inspiration will always 
 require a new form. The difference between the 
 novelty of Rossetti and the novelty of Whitman is 
 trivial and external ; in the sense that matters, each 
 is both new and old in precisely the way in which every 
 artist must be. It is a mistake to represent the in- 
 vention of new modes as a departure from law ; it is 
 rather a step in the approximation to those eternal 
 laws which are set as types and controllers of our 
 thought. The lesson of the sonnet, whose rules cease 
 in the right hands to be obstructions and become the 
 ministers of inspiration, is but the counterpart of another 
 lesson that diversity of form is demanded by diversity 
 of impulse, in order that rules may not be imposed in 
 those cases and upon those artists in which and by 
 whom they would be felt to be obstructions. Just 
 as it was said in the case of Blake, that we feel him to 
 be justified only when he gives us what we sub-
 
 72 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 consciously expect that is to say, what we recognise as 
 harmonious with the ultimate law so on the side of the 
 artist, the acceptance of rule must be in a sense sub- 
 conscious must be an act rather of faith than of reason. 
 The flying dream is reconciled in creative art with the 
 abiding law ; but yet the artistic, like the moral, 
 impulse, works within space and time, and in some way 
 not to be understood must approximate, if progress 
 be a reality, through the years to that which is timeless. 
 Hence the increase both in number of kinds of expres- 
 sion, and in exactness of any one kind ; for these are 
 the ways in which the approximation to the ultimate 
 may most fairly be supposed to take place. There is, 
 it has been maintained above, an absolute standard of 
 worth ; and indeed a fixed standard is necessary if 
 progress is to have any meaning at all. Good poetry 
 puts us in touch with something outside the temporal 
 and mutable nature of things, and so we need not ask 
 in what age or under what circumstances it has been 
 composed. But undeniably also each particular epoch 
 both demands and renders possible a particular kind 
 of artistic effect. To ignore this would be to ignore the 
 essential value of position. Our claim for the lyric 
 note is that it is too fundamental a thing to allow of 
 definition ; it cannot be confined to a type ; its very 
 singleness is warrant that it may be preserved despite 
 a thousand external changes and differences. It is 
 one kind of union of form with matter, an unmistakable 
 and enduring kind ; it persists, not through time, but 
 timelessly. Yet in so far as it is a human product, its 
 manifestation must be temporal and vary with the 
 casualties of circumstance. Hence the possibility and 
 the value of critical distinction ; hence the importance
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 73 
 
 of reverting to the manifold growth and development, 
 the change that has come over lyric with its divorce 
 from music and with the coming of the modern temper. 
 So we return to our starting-point. " For pure 
 poignancy, profundity, and weight," writes J. A. 
 Symonds, " Elizabethan lyrics will compare not un- 
 favourably with Victorian. The difference does not 
 consist in the ore worked by the lyrists, but in their 
 way of handling it. In this latter age a poet allows 
 himself far wider scope of treatment when he writes a 
 song. He does not think of the music of voice or viol, 
 but of that harmony which intellectually sounds in the 
 ears of the soul. The result is a wealthier and fuller 
 symphony, reaching the imaginative sense not upon the 
 path of musical sound, but appealing to the mental 
 ear and also to that ' inward eye which is the bliss of 
 solitude.' The Victorian lyric, superior in its range, 
 suggestiveness, variety, and richness, inferior in its 
 spontaneity and birdlike intonation, corresponds to 
 the highly-strung and panharmonic instrument of the 
 poet's spirit which produced it, and to the manifold 
 sympathies of the reader's mind for which it was in- 
 tended. It is iridescent with the intermingled hues 
 of fancy, contemplation, wisdom, personal passion, 
 discursive rhetoric, idyllic picture-painting. Modes of 
 complicated expression, involving serried reasoning, 
 audacious metaphors, elliptical imagery, and rapid 
 modulations from one key of feeling to another, which 
 a playwright like Shakespeare employed only in his 
 dramatic dialogue, find themselves at home in the lyrical 
 poetry of our own age." Symonds perhaps misunder- 
 stood what kind of spontaneity it was that the Eliza- 
 bethans could justly claim ; but his general presentment
 
 74 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 of the differences of temper is correct, except in so far 
 as it might give the false impression of a modern lyric 
 being necessarily elaborate. Of course the influence 
 of growth is all the other way ; it is to give greater 
 force to simplicity. For each word has been used in so 
 many positions that its new position has incomparable 
 force. It is the supreme power of the poet to call up 
 tears with utterly simple and commonplace words, to 
 have the effect of a child's voice singing. To compare 
 the way in which Shakespeare and Browning used this 
 power will be to establish the singleness of the lyric 
 note and to show at the same time the change in external 
 potentialities that has been wrought by time. Shake- 
 speare has a certain carelessness in his casual songs, 
 he can convey what he wishes to convey by the merest 
 nonsense 
 
 " When that I was and a little tiny boy, 
 With hey ho, the wind and the rain, 
 A foolish thing was but a toy, 
 
 For the rain it raineth every day." 
 
 Or again 
 
 " It was a lover and his lass, 
 
 With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino, 
 That o'er the green cornfield did pass, 
 
 In the spring-time, the only pretty ring time, 
 When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding ; 
 Sweet lovers love the spring." 
 
 The poignancy in Browning of Andrea del Sarto's 
 " I often am much wearier than you think,"
 
 On the Nature of Lyric 75 
 
 or Pompilia's 
 
 " I am just seventeen years and five months old, 
 And, if I lived one day more, three full weeks " 
 
 would be better compared with the great lines of Shake- 
 speare's tragedies, for it requires the same consciously 
 dramatic setting ; but it is instructive to note, against 
 the extravagant looseness of the Shakespearean lyric at 
 its simplest, how Browning accumulates, for his own 
 simplicity, and for the achievement of a very similar 
 triumph in the purely lyrical kind, every device of 
 the exactest artistry. 
 
 " I will hold your hand but as long as all may, 
 Or so very little longer," 
 
 he writes with superb adequacy of expression " an 
 effortless and absolute sublimity " ; or again 
 
 " Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead," 
 
 or 
 
 " It all comes to the same thing in the end," 
 
 or 
 
 " This is Ancona, yonder is the sea " ; 
 
 or again 
 
 ' What a name ! was it love or praise ? 
 
 Speech half -asleep or song half- a wake ? 
 I must learn Spanish one of these days, 
 Only for that slow sweet name's sake." 
 
 The third line of these four is comparable only, in its 
 kind, with the last of the following 
 
 " Yet I hardly know. When a soul has seen 
 By the means of Evil that Good is best,
 
 7 6 On the Nature of Lyric 
 
 And, through earth and its noise, what is heaven's 
 
 serene, 
 When our faith in the same has stood the test 
 
 Why, the child grown man, you burn the rod, 
 
 The uses of labour are surely done ; 
 There remaineth a rest for the people of God : 
 
 And I have had troubles enough, for one." 
 
 The nature of lyric is an unchanging and immortal 
 thing ; but we see here how it takes the accidents of 
 time as a means to its own perfection. It is single, and 
 achieves its end in innumerable ways. 
 
 THE END