THAMYRIS
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW SERIES
_DÆDALUS, or Science and the Future_
By J. B. S. Haldane
_ICARUS, or The Future of Science_
By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.
_THE MONGOL IN OUR MIDST_
By F. G. Crookshank, M.D. _Fully Illustrated_
_WIRELESS POSSIBILITIES_
By Prof. A. M. Low. _With four Diagrams._
_NARCISSUS, An Anatomy of Clothes_
By Gerald Heard. _Illustrated_
_TANTALUS, or The Future of Man_ By F. C. S. Schiller
_THE PASSING OF THE PHANTOMS_
By Prof. C. J. Patten, M.A., M.D., Sc.D., F.R.A.I.
_CALLINICUS, A Defence of Chemical Warfare_
By J. B. S. Haldane
_QUO VADIMUS? Some Glimpses of the Future_
By E. E. Fournier d’Albe, D.Sc., F.Inst.P.
_THE CONQUEST OF CANCER_
By H. W. S. Wright, M.S., F.R.C.S.
_HYPATIA, or Woman and Knowledge_
By Dora Russell (The Hon. Mrs. Bertrand Russell)
_LYSISTRATA, or Woman’s Future and Future Woman_
By A. M. Ludovici
_WHAT I BELIEVE_
By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.
_PERSEUS, or Of Dragons_ By H. F. Scott Stokes, M.A.
_THE FUTURE OF SEX_ By Rebecca West
_THE EVOCATION OF GENIUS_ By Alan Porter
_AESCULAPIUS, or Disease and The Man_
By F. G. Crookshank, M.D.
_PROTEUS, or The Future of Intelligence_ By Vernon Lee
_THAMYRIS, or Is there a Future for Poetry?_
By R. C. Trevelyan
_PROMETHEUS, or Biology and the Advancement of Man_
By H. S. Jennings
_PARIS, or The Future of War_
By Captain B. H. Liddell Hart
_Other Volumes in Preparation_
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
THAMYRIS
OR
Is there a Future for
Poetry?
BY
R. C. TREVELYAN
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
681 FIFTH AVENUE
COPYRIGHT 1925
By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
_All Rights Reserved_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_To_
_The Memory of_
_OSWALD SICKERT_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE MUSES IN HEAVEN 1
II THE MEDIUM OF SPOKEN VERSE 13
III THE EVOLUTION OF TECHNIQUE 29
IV POETIC MATERIAL 47
V MISCELLANEOUS 67
VI THE CHILDREN OF THAMYRIS 81
THAMYRIS
CHAPTER I
THE MUSES IN HEAVEN
There is an old Teutonic legend that every year, upon All Souls’ Day,
the archangel Raphael is sent down to the classical ward of Hell, where
the dispossessed deities of heathendom are confined, with a summons
for the nine Muses to appear and give a command performance before
the throne of Jehovah and the assembled Host of Heaven. So the poor
embarrassed ladies, ushered before that critical and unsympathetic
audience, reluctantly tune their lyres, and begin some ancient
Hellenic chant, some ode, it may be, that they had once sung in the
feasting-hall of Olympus, or at the marriage of Cadmus and Harmonia.
At first their strange pagan minstrelsy seems harsh and unpleasing to
blessed ears, accustomed only to the angelical modes of “saintly shout
and solemn jubilee”; but before long, in spite of themselves, the
angels are touched and troubled by this disquieting music, burdened
with all the passions and sighs of humanity, until at last celestial
visages are stained with tears, and the sound of weeping is heard in
Heaven.
But on one of these occasions, not so very long ago, after the Muses
had come to the end of their program, several of the more literary
archangels expressed a desire to hear some examples of post-classical
poetry, of which they knew little or nothing. As the Muses could
not gratify their curiosity, Satan, who, as in the _Book of Job_,
was paying one of his rare visits to the court of Jehovah, stepped
into the breach, and beguiled several hours with poetical specimens
from different periods, which he had picked up during his ceaseless
wanderings to and fro upon the earth. At first his audience was
enchanted. He had an excellent ear and memory, and could reproduce
perfectly the several styles of the troubadours and minnesingers,
and of the various courtly or popular minstrels of the Middle Ages.
But gradually a change came over his performance. The saints and
angels grew puzzled and restless, as the element of song, and even
of intonation, progressively disappeared, until at last they found
themselves listening with pain and indignation to mere naked, spoken
verse. And what verse? Rime they were familiar with in their hymns,
and liked. But soon even rime began to fade, and threatened to vanish
altogether. Metre too dissolved and degenerated from all regular
recognisable form; and when finally Satan jerked out the latest jewel
of American _vers libre_, he was greeted, as once before in Hell, with
a dismal universal hiss, the sign of public scorn. The Muses had long
ago fled down horror-stricken to Hades; and Satan, who always dislikes
unpopularity, smiled, bowed, and retired. The choirmaster, Gabriel,
tapped the desk with his baton, and a moment later the Heavenly Host
was purging its offended ears with the strains of a noble Gregorian
chant.
Now what lesson, if any, may we draw from this apologue?
Were the angels right or wrong, or perhaps neither? Has the
history of poetry been merely a deplorable tale of decadence, a
progressive impoverishment and deterioration, through senility and
second-childishness, towards an unlamented death in a bastard and
graceless prose? Or on the contrary has the gradual divorce of poetry
from music and intoning meant its liberation for subtler and more
rational, but no less truly poetic purposes? Before attempting to
answer such questions, let us first look at the historical facts.
Homer, the fountain-head of Hellenic, and so of European poetry, though
originally sung to the accompaniment of a lyre, was in later times
intoned by professional rhapsodists, much as most Oriental poetry is
intoned to this day. Greek lyrical poetry was of course always sung,
whether chorally or by soloists. The dialogue of Greek plays was not
sung, but was probably intoned, or at least declaimed in a highly
conventional and rhythmical manner, which was perhaps not so very
unlike the still-surviving tradition of the Japanese Nō play-actors.
It is uncertain whether Horace intended his _Odes_ to be read, or to
be sung to the lyre: but Lucretius and Virgil undoubtedly wrote their
poems to be read. Virgil indeed gave public readings of his _Eclogues_.
Probably, could we hear gramophone records of his performances, we
should say that he was intoning rather than reading. However that may
be, his example set a fashion that was disastrous for Latin poetry.
His successors wrote more and more with a view to declamation, not in
the noble Homeric manner, but in a style that was both bombastic and
amateurish; and so poetry soon degenerated into stale rhetoric and
boredom.
When after the lapse of centuries poetry emerged again, rejuvenated,
its infant energies were still schooled by the same two mistresses,
music and intonation. The art of the rhapsodists of the _Chanson
de gestes_ may have been ruder than that of the Homeridae, but its
æsthetic character and its social function were much the same. And
for centuries the medieval lyric was intended to be sung, not read.
But with the multiplication of books the inevitable change began to
operate, and the medium of poetry came more and more to be verse spoken
and read, rather than performed.
The poetical drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was, from
a historical point of view, no more than a brief and glorious episode.
The declamation of dramatic verse may well have been a great art on the
English, French and Spanish stage; but, if so, it has not survived into
our own time, and shows little sign of resurrection. The development of
polyphonic and instrumental music, while it has made modern opera and
the _Lieder_ of Schubert and Brahms possible, seems to have destroyed
all hope of an equal marriage between music and lyrical poetry. Modern
polyphony is a great art, but a tyrannous; and though a beautiful poem
may still inspire a beautiful setting, the medium of the resulting
work of art will be musical, and not poetic. Verse no doubt can still
be declaimed, whether on the stage or elsewhere; but actors have
generally neither taste nor tradition; the poets themselves have seldom
enough skill or training to be effective; and professional reciters
are “abominable, unutterable, and worse.” Thus it would seem that all
the avenues which might lead to the public performance of poetry are
blocked. There are either no roads at all, or those that exist are in
the possession of road-hogs. Is this state of things a disaster or no?
And if it be a disaster, are there any remedies to be found?
It is no doubt possible that so summary a diagnosis may be quite
misleading. Chaucer, it might be objected, already wrote for readers;
and so did Milton. Yet many of us find them, and some of their
successors, still quite readable. Surely then great poetry can still be
both produced and enjoyed, even when it is completely divorced from
music or intonation. All this may be true. Yet it is well to remember
that Chaucer was the immediate successor on the one hand of the English
and French minstrels, and on the other of Dante and Boccaccio, whose
art in its turn grew directly out of that of the troubadours and the
Italian minstrels. And who have been the inheritors of Chaucer’s
art? Spenser, let us say, and in our time William Morris. Is it not
possible that both Chaucer and Dante were peculiarly fortunate, in
that their art had only quite recently emerged from the discipline of
a more primitive musical stage? Their successors may be said to have
deteriorated, the more purely literary they became, and the further
removed from the Pierian fountain-head of minstrelsy. Then again
Milton, though more than any other English poet he was consciously the
heir to all the ages, inherited his medium and his metrical technique
directly from Shakespeare’s verse that was written, not for reading,
but for dramatic performance, although no doubt Milton modified it
considerably for his own undramatic purposes. As to the inheritors of
Milton’s art, such as Wordsworth and Keats, Matthew Arnold and Mr.
Bridges, considerable as have been their achievements, are there not
some signs, even in their own work, and still more in the tendency
of recent experiments, of an impulse to break away from Miltonic and
Shakespearian usage, as though the medium of blank verse could no
longer be profitably explored, not at least in its old traditional form?
Nevertheless it might plausibly be maintained that although the poets
of the future are not likely to repeat the particular successes of
Chaucer and Milton and their school, there is no reason why they should
not exploit the medium of spoken verse in quite new ways, just as
successfully as did their predecessors. First however it would be as
well to become somewhat clearer as to the nature of this medium of
spoken and silently read verse, and how it differs from more primitive
poetry.