The writer of prose, by intelligence taught,
Says the thing that will please, in the way that he ought.
Frederick Locker-Lampson.
_No species of poetry is more ancient than the lyrical, and yet none
shows so little sign of having outlived the requirements of human
passion. The world may grow tired of epics and of tragedies, but each
generation, as it sees the hawthorns blossom and the freshness of
girlhood expand, is seized with a pang which nothing but the spasm of
verse will relieve. Each youth imagines that spring-tide and love are
wonders which he is the first of human beings to appreciate, and he
burns to alleviate his emotion in rhyme. Historians exaggerate, perhaps,
the function of music in awakening and guiding the exercise of lyrical
poetry. The lyric exists, they tell us, as an accompaniment to the lyre;
and without the mechanical harmony the spoken song is an artifice. Quite
as plausibly might it be avowed that music was but added to verse to
concentrate and emphasize its rapture, to add poignancy and volume to
its expression. But the truth is that these two arts, though sometimes
happily allied, are, and always have been, independent. When verse has
been innocent enough to lean on music, we may be likely to find that
music also has been of the simplest order, and that the pair of them,
like two delicious children, have tottered and swayed together down the
flowery meadows of experience. When either poetry or music is adult, the
presence of each is a distraction to the other, and each prefers, in the
elaborate ages, to stand alone, since the mystery of the one confounds
the complexity of the other. Most poets hate music; few musicians
comprehend the nature of poetry; and the combination of these arts has
probably, in all ages, been contrived, not for the satisfaction of
artists, but for the convenience of their public._
_This divorce between poetry and music has been more frankly accepted in
the present century than ever before, and is nowadays scarcely opposed
in serious criticism. If music were a necessary ornament of lyrical
verse, the latter would nowadays scarcely exist; but we hear less and
less of the poets devotion (save in a purely conventional sense) to the
lute and the pipe. What we call the Victorian lyric is absolutely
independent of any such aid. It may be that certain songs of Tennyson
and Christina Rossetti have been with great popularity "set," as it is
called, "to music." So far as the latter is in itself successful, it
stultifies the former; and we admit at last that the idea of one art
aiding another in this combination is absolutely fictitious. The
beauty--even the beauty of sound--conveyed by the ear in such lyrics as
"Break, break, break," or "When I am dead, my dearest," is obscured, is
exchanged for another and a rival species of beauty, by the most
exquisite musical setting that a composer can invent._
_The age which has been the first to accept this condition, then, should
be rich in frankly lyrical poetry; and this we find to be the case with
the Victorian period. At no time has a greater mass of this species of
verse been produced, not even in the combined Elizabethan and Jacobean
age. But when we come to consider the quality of this later harvest of
song, we observe in it a far less homogeneous character. We can take a
piece of verse, and decide at sight that it must be Elizabethan, or of
the age of the Pleiade in France, or of a particular period in Italy.
Even an ode of our own eighteenth century is hardly to be confounded
with a fragment from any other school. The great Georgian age introduced
a wide variety into English poetry; and yet we have but to examine the
selected jewels strung into so exquisite a carcanet by Mr. Palgrave in
his "Golden Treasury" to notice with surprise how close a family
likeness exists between the contributions of Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats,
and Byron. The distinctions of style, of course, are very great; but the
general character of the diction, the imagery, even of the rhythm, is
more or less identical. The stamp of the same age is upon them,--they
are hall-marked 1820._
_It is perhaps too early to decide that this will never be the case with
the Victorian lyrics. While we live in an age we see the distinction of
its parts, rather than their co-relation. It is said that the Japanese
Government once sent over a Commission to report upon the art of Europe;
and that, having visited the exhibitions of London, Paris, Florence, and
Berlin, the Commissioners confessed that the works of the European
painters all looked so exactly alike that it was difficult to
distinguish one from another. The Japanese eye, trained in absolutely
opposed conventions, could not tell the difference between a Watts and a
Fortuny, a Theodore Rousseau and a Henry Moore. So it is quite possible,
it is even probable, that future critics may see a close similarity
where we see nothing but divergence between the various productions of
the Victorian age. Yet we can judge but what we discern; and certainly
to the critical eye to-day it is the absence of a central tendency, the
chaotic cultivation of all contrivable varieties of style, which most
strikingly seems to distinguish the times we live in._
_We use the word "Victorian" in literature to distinguish what was
written after the decline of that age of which Walter Scott, Coleridge,
and Wordsworth were the survivors. It is well to recollect, however,
that Tennyson, who is the Victorian writer_ par excellence, _had
published the most individual and characteristic of his lyrics long
before the Queen ascended the throne, and that Elizabeth Barrett, Henry
Taylor, William Barnes, and others were by this date of mature age. It
is difficult to remind ourselves, who have lived in the radiance of that
august figure, that some of the most beautiful of Tennyson's lyrics,
such as "Mariana" and "The Dying Swan" are now separated from us by as
long a period of years as divided them from Dr. Johnson and the author
of "Night Thoughts." The reflection is of value only as warning us of
the extraordinary length of the epoch we still call "Victorian." It
covers, not a mere generation, but much more than half a century. During
this length of time a complete revolution in literary taste might have
been expected to take place. This has not occurred, and the cause may
very well be the extreme license permitted to the poets to adopt
whatever style they pleased. Where all the doors stand wide open, there
is no object in escaping; where there is but one door, and that one
barred, it is human nature to fret for some violent means of evasion.
How divine have been the methods of the Victorian lyrists may easily be
exemplified_:--
_"Quoth tongue of neither maid nor wife
To heart of neither wife nor maid,
Lead we not here a jolly life
Betwixt the shine and shade?_
_"Quoth heart of neither maid nor wife
To tongue of neither wife nor maid,
Thou wagg'st, but I am worn with strife,
And feel like flowers that fade."_
_That is a masterpiece, but so is this:--_
_"Nay, but you who do not love her,
Is she not pure gold, my mistress?
Holds earth aught--speak truth--above her?
Aught like this tress, see, and this tress,
And this last fairest tress of all,
--So fair, see, ere I let it fall?_
_"Because, you spend your lives in praisings,
To praise, you search the wide world over:
Then why not witness, calmly gazing,
If earth holds aught--speak truth--above her?
Above this tress, and this I touch,
But cannot praise, I love so much!"_
_And so is this:--_
_"Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will._
_"This be the verse yon grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill."_
_But who would believe that the writers of these were contemporaries?_
_If we examine more closely the forms which lyric poetry has taken since
1830, we shall find that certain influences at work in the minds of our
leading writers have led to the widest divergence in the character of
lyrical verse. It will be well, perhaps, to consider in turn the leading
classes of that work. It was not to be expected that in an age of such
complexity and self-consciousness as ours, the pure song, the simple
trill of bird-like melody, should often or prominently be heard. As
civilization spreads, it ceases to be possible, or at least it becomes
less and less usual, that simple emotion should express itself with
absolute naivete. Perhaps Burns was the latest poet in these islands
whose passion warbled forth in perfectly artless strains; and he had the
advantage of using a dialect still unsubdued and unvulgarized.
Artlessness nowadays must be the result of the most exquisitely finished
art; if not, it is apt to be insipid, if not positively squalid and
fusty. The obvious uses of simple words have been exhausted; we cannot,
save by infinite pains and the exercise of a happy genius, recover the
old spontaneous air, the effect of an inevitable arrangement of the only
possible words._
_This beautiful direct simplicity, however, was not infrequently secured
by Tennyson, and scarcely less often by Christina Rossetti, both of whom
have left behind them jets of pure emotional melody which compare to
advantage with the most perfect specimens of Greek and Elizabethan song.
Tennyson did not very often essay this class of writing, but when he
did, he rarely failed; his songs combine, with extreme naturalness and
something of a familiar sweetness, a felicity of workmanship hardly to
be excelled. In her best songs, Miss Rossetti is scarcely, if at all,
his inferior; but her judgment was far less sure, and she was more ready
to look with complacency on her failures. The songs of Mr. Aubrey de
Vere are not well enough known; they are sometimes singularly charming.
Other poets have once or twice succeeded in catching this clear natural
treble,--the living linnet once captured in the elm, as Tusitala puts
it; but this has not been a gift largely enjoyed by our Victorian
poets._
_The richer and more elaborate forms of lyric, on the contrary, have
exactly suited this curious and learned age of ours. The species of
verse which, originally Italian or French, have now so abundantly and so
admirably been practised in England that we can no longer think of them
as exotic, having found so many exponents in the Victorian period that
they are pre-eminently characteristic of it. "Scorn not the Sonnet,"
said Wordsworth to his contemporaries; but the lesson has not been
needed in the second half of the century. The sonnet is the most solid
and unsingable of the sections of lyrical poetry; it is difficult to
think of it as chanted to a musical accompaniment. It is used with great
distinction by writers to whom skill in the lighter divisions of poetry
has been denied, and there are poets, such as Bowles and Charles
Tennyson-Turner, who live by their sonnets alone. The practice of the
sonnet has been so extended that all sense of monotony has been lost. A
sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning differs from one by D. G. Rossetti
or by Matthew Arnold to such excess as to make it difficult for us to
realize that the form in each case is absolutely identical._
_With the sonnet might be mentioned the lighter forms of elaborate
exotic verse; but to these a word shall be given later on. More closely
allied to the sonnet are those rich and somewhat fantastic
stanza-measures in which Rossetti delighted. Those in which Keats and
the Italians have each their part have been greatly used by the
Victorian poets. They lend themselves to a melancholy magnificence, to
pomp of movement and gorgeousness of color; the very sight of them gives
the page the look of an ancient blazoned window. Poems of this class are
"The Stream's Secret" and the choruses in "Love is enough." They satisfy
the appetite of our time for subtle and vague analysis of emotion, for
what appeals to the spirit through the senses; but here, again, in
different hands, the "thing," the metrical instrument, takes wholly
diverse characters, and we seek in vain for a formula that can include
Robert Browning and Gabriel Rossetti, William Barnes and Arthur Hugh
Clough._
_From this highly elaborated and extended species of lyric the
transition is easy to the Ode. In the Victorian age, the ode, in its
full Pindaric sense, has not been very frequently used. We have
specimens by Mr. Swinburne in which the Dorian laws are closely adhered
to. But the ode, in a more or less irregular form, whether paean or
threnody, has been the instrument of several of our leading lyrists. The
genius of Mr. Swinburne, even to a greater degree than that of Shelley,
is essentially dithyrambic, and is never happier than when it spreads
its wings as wide as those of the wild swan, and soars upon the very
breast of tempest. In these flights Mr. Swinburne attains to a volume of
sonorous melody such as no other poet, perhaps, of the world has
reached, and we may say to him, as he has shouted to the Mater
Triumphalis:--_
_"Darkness to daylight shall lift up thy paean,
Hill to hill thunder, vale cry back to vale,
With wind-notes as of eagles AEschylean,
And Sappho singing in the nightingale."_
_Nothing could mark more picturesquely the wide diversity permitted in
Victorian lyric than to turn from the sonorous and tumultuous odes of
Mr. Swinburne to those of Mr. Patmore, in which stateliness of
contemplation and a peculiar austerity of tenderness find their
expression in odes of iambic cadence, the melody of which depends, not
in their headlong torrent of sound, but in the cunning variation of
catalectic pause. A similar form has been adopted by Lord De Tabley for
many of his gorgeous studies of antique myth, and by Tennyson for his
"Death of the Duke of Wellington." It is an error to call these iambic
odes "irregular," although they do not follow the classic rules with
strophe, antistrophe, and epode. The enchanting "I have led her
home," in "Maud," is an example of this kind of lyric at its highest
point of perfection._
_A branch of lyrical poetry which has been very widely cultivated in the
Victorian age is the philosophical, or gnomic, in which a serious chain
of thought, often illustrated by complex and various imagery, is held in
a casket of melodious verse, elaborately rhymed. Matthew Arnold was a
master of this kind of poetry, which takes its form, through Wordsworth,
from the solemn and so-called "metaphysical" writers of the seventeenth
century. We class this interesting and abundant section of verse with
the lyrical, because we know not by what other name to describe it; yet
it has obviously as little as possible of the singing ecstasy about it.
It neither pours its heart out in a rapture, nor wails forth its
despair. It has as little of the nightingale's rich melancholy as of the
lark's delirium. It hardly sings, but, with infinite decorum and
sobriety, speaks its melodious message to mankind. This sort of
philosophical poetry is really critical; its function is to analyze and
describe; and it approaches, save for the enchantment of its form,
nearer to prose than do the other sections of the art. It is, however,
just this species of poetry which has particularly appealed to the age
in which we live; and how naturally it does so may be seen in the
welcome extended to the polished and serene compositions of Mr. William
Watson._
_Almost a creation, or at least a complete conquest, of the Victorian
age is the humorous lyric in its more delicate developments. If the past
can point to Prior and to Praed, we can boast, in their various
departments, of Calverly, of Locker-Lampson, of Mr. Andrew Lang, of
Mr. W. S. Gilbert. The comic muse, indeed, has marvellously extended her
blandishments during the last two generations, and has discovered
methods of trivial elegance which were quite unknown to our forefathers.
Here must certainly be said a word in favor of those French forms of
verse, all essentially lyrical, such as the ballad, the rondel, the
triolet, which have been used so abundantly as to become quite a feature
in our lighter literature. These are not, or are but rarely, fitted to
bear the burden of high emotion; but their precision, and the deftness
which their use demands fit them exceedingly well for the more
distinguished kind of persiflage. No one has kept these delicate
butterflies in flight with the agile movement of his fan so admirably as
Mr. Austin Dobson, that neatest of magicians._
_Those who write hastily of Victorian lyrical poetry are apt to find
fault with its lack of spontaneity. It is true that we cannot pretend to
discover on a greensward so often crossed and re-crossed as the poetic
language of England many morning dewdrops still glistening on the
grasses. We have to pay the penalty of our experience in a certain lack
of innocence. The artless graces of a child seem mincing affectations in
a grown-up woman. But the poetry of this age has amply made up for any
lack of innocence by its sumptuous fulness, its variety, its magnificent
accomplishment, its felicitous response to a multitude of moods and
apprehensions. It has struck out no new field for itself; it still
remains where the romantic revolution of 1798 placed it; its aims are
not other than were those of Coleridge and of Keats. But within that
defined sphere it has developed a surprising activity. It has occupied
the attention and become the facile instrument of men of the greatest
genius, writers of whom any age and any language might be proud. It has
been tender and fiery, severe and voluminous, gorgeous and marmoreal, in
turns. It has translated into words feelings so subtle, so transitory,
moods so fragile and intangible, that the rough hand of prose would but
have crushed them. And this, surely, indicates the great gift of
Victorian lyrical poetry to the race. During a time of extreme mental
and moral restlessness, a time of speculation and evolution, when all
illusions are tested, all conventions overthrown, when the harder
elements of life have been brought violently to the front, and where
there is a temptation for the emancipated mind roughly to reject what is
not material and obvious, this art has preserved intact the lovelier
delusions of the spirit, all that is vague and incorporeal and illusory.
So that for Victorian Lyric generally no better final definition can be
given than is supplied by Mr. Robert Bridges in a little poem of
incomparable beauty, which may fitly bring this essay to a close:--_
_"I have loved flowers that fade,
Within whose magic tents
Rich hues have marriage made
With sweet immemorial scents:
A joy of love at sight,--
A honeymoon delight,
That ages in an hour:--
My song be like a flower._
_"I have loved airs that die
Before their charm is writ
Upon the liquid sky
Trembling to welcome it.
Notes that with pulse of fire
Proclaim the spirit's desire,
Then die, and are nowhere:--
My song be like an air."_
Edmund Gosse.