She is eclipsed, or gone, or in hiding. But the sixteenth century took
her for granted as the object of song; she was a class, a state, a sex.
It was scarcely necessary to waste the lyrist's time--time that went so
gaily to metre as not to brook delays--in making her out too clearly. She
had no more of what later times call individuality than has the rose, her
rival, her foil when she was kinder, her superior when she was cruel, her
ever fresh and ever conventional paragon. She needed not to be devised
or divined; she was ready. A merry heart goes all the day; the lyrist's
never grew weary. Honest men never grow tired of bread or of any other
daily things whereof the sweetness is in their own simplicity.
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.
There is no record of success for this policy. She goes on dancing or
scolding, as the case may be, and the lyrist goes on boasting of his
constancy, or suddenly renounces it for a day. The situation has
variants, but no surprise or ending. The lover's convention is explicit
enough, but it might puzzle a reader to account for the lady's. Pride in
her beauty, at any rate, is hers--pride so great that she cannot bring
herself to perceive the shortness of her day. She is so unobservant as
to need to be told that life is brief, and youth briefer than life; that
the rose fades, and so forth.
Now we need not assume that the lady of the lyrics ever lived. But
taking her as the perfectly unanimous conception of the lyrists, how is
it she did not discover these things unaided? Why does the lover
invariably imagine her with a mind intensely irritable under his own
praise and poetry? Obviously we cannot have her explanation of any of
these matters. Why do the poets so much lament the absence of truth in
one whose truth would be of little moment? And why was the convention so
pleasant, among all others, as to occupy a whole age--nay, two great
ages--of literature?
Music seems to be principally answerable. For the lyrics of the lady are
"words for music" by a great majority. There is hardly a single poem in
the Elizabethan Song-books, properly so named, that has what would in our
day be called a tone of sentiment. Music had not then the tone herself;
she was ingenious, and so must the words be. She had the air of epigram,
and an accurately definite limit. So, too, the lady of the lyrics, who
might be called the lady of the stanzas, so strictly does she go by
measure. When she is quarrelsome, it is but fuguishness; when she
dances, she does it by a canon. She could not but be perverse, merrily
sung to such grave notes.
So fixed was the law of this perversity that none in the song-books is
allowed to be kind enough for a "melody," except one lady only. She may
thus derogate, for the exceedingly Elizabethan reason that she is
"brown." She is brown and kind, and a "sad flower," but the song made
for her would have been too insipid, apparently, without an antithesis.
The fair one is warned that her disdain makes her even less lovely than
the brown.
Fair as a lily, hard to please, easily angry, ungrateful for innumerable
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 roses; 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 been long
written. Her "No" was set to counterpoint in the part-song, and she
frightened Love out of her sight in a ballet. Those occupations are
gone, and the lovely Elizabethan has slipped away. She was something
less than mortal.
But she who was more than mortal was mortal too. This was no lady of the
unanimous lyrists, but a rare visitant unknown to these exquisite little
talents. She was not set for singing, but poetry spoke of her; sometimes
when she was sleeping, and then Fletcher said--
None can rock Heaven to sleep but her.