UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

INTRODUCTION

THE

the English

'HE English Lyric has been late in coming into its own. For a full century the exquisite song of the lesser Elizabethan choir lay perdue History of the while the great critics of the classical appreciation of period, following in the way of the later Lyric. Aristotelian tradition, solemnly discussed theory and practice in epic and drama only. Dryden, ever a jealous defender of English literary performance, has next to nothing to say of the English Lyric. The eighteenth-century imitators of Milton and Spenser catch not so much at the lyric vein of these masters as at their tricks of diction and at their narrative or their idyllic manner. Percy's Reliques, in 1765, however, began to bring back into esteem the wilding flavour of sixteenthand seventeenth-century verse, both art-lyric and popular song and ballad. And perhaps the obscurer collections of verse which earlier in the century preceded the Reliques, such as Allan Ramsay's Evergreen, also helped to insinuate something of the spirit of the older lyric, and something of its peculiar cadence and rhythm of song, into the minds of impressionable youths like Burns and Blake and Chatterton, and to prepare the taste of the new generation little by little for the new things which

were coming in poetry. The Romantic revolution was certainly in part a literary revolution, involving a return to higher sources of inspiration and to older poetic ideals than had prevailed for so long. Wordsworth, writing in 1815, testifies as to the effect wrought by Percy's Reliques, that "For our own country its poetry has been absolutely redeemed by it". The lyrical spirit of modern English poetry is in considerable measure a development from the lyrical spirit of the Elizabethan age; and the appreciation of the Elizabethan lyric has grown with the growth of the modern lyric.

What is Lyric?

The term 'Lyric' in modern times has always been of uncertain usage. In the broadest sense it is often taken to cover all poetry which does not fall under the species Epic or Drama, or any of their allied forms. Vagueness of connotation has attached to the term, also, from the implicit acceptance by some modern writers of the lyric form and mood as the poetic form and mood par excellence. In this sense lyrical expression is conceived as the very soul and essence of poetical expression. Thus Gray in a letter to Mason, December 19th, 1756, writes: "The true lyric style, with all its flights of fancy, ornaments, and heightening of expression, and harmony of sound, is in its nature superior to every other style; which is just the cause why it could not be borne in a work of great length, no more than the eye could bear to see all this scene that we constantly gaze upon— the verdure of the fields and woods, the azure of the sea and skies-turned into one dazzling expanse of gems". The same idea has been elaborated

by Poe in his essay on The Poetic Principle; and Coleridge, in his summary of the characteristics of Shakespeare's work, calls attention to the "interfusion of the lyrical-that which in its very essence is poetical".

In the stricter sense of the term, however, two essential ideas attach to the lyric: the idea of its musical character and associations, and The Lyric and the idea of the lyric as the peculiar poetic Music. instrument for the expression of personal mood and feeling. In its origins generally, no doubt, and in its highest development as an unmixed species in the lyrical poetry of the Greeks, the lyric is always closely associated with music. Wordsworth, indeed. asserts that in all lyric kinds, "for the production of their full effect, an accompaniment of music is indispensable": although he modifies this statement by adding that in most of his own verse, "as a substitute for the classic lyre or romantic harp, I require nothing more than an animated or impassioned recitation, adapted to the subject". In the modern lyric accordingly there are two classes: on the one hand such verse as in form and spirit is most nearly associated with the idea of musical delivery or accompaniment, like the Elizabethan song-lyric; and on the other hand such verse as most closely imitates the form and spirit of verse in other tongues, especially Greek or Italian, which originally was associated with that idea, like the modern ode or sonnet.1 From the variety of its funda

1 See the discussion of the relations of music and poetry by Mr. Theodore Watts in the article on 'Poetry' in the Encyclopædia Britannica.

mental musical associations, direct or remote, flows that variety of metrical form which is characteristic of the lyric species. In the perfect or ideal lyric, whether poem or song, the form must be the perfect expression of the mood. "In the last resort," as M. Brunetière writes, "this conformity of the movement with the emotion in a poem is all that is needed to constitute it a true lyric." Similarly, as music is perhaps the most delicate and wonderful artistic instrument for the expression

Whence Lyric subjectivity.

1

of æsthetic mood, the lyric, which is the poetic form most nearly allied to music, is that in which æsthetic individualism and subjectivity attain their fullest utterance.

In his famous preface of 1815, Wordsworth confines the lyric to "the hymn, the ode, the elegy, the The several Lyric song, and the ballad", and postulates, kinds: doubtful in addition to narrative poetry, to the varieties. drama, and to the lyric, three other main poetic divisions, viz., 'the idyllium', didactic poetry, and satiric poetry. The ballad in the stricter sense the communal or folk-epic, innocent of the personal and subjective note-is obviously allied rather with narrative than with lyrical poetry, Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads to the contrary notwithstanding. On the other hand the sonnet, which Wordsworth oddly enough ranks with the idyl, should be classed with the modern lyric, where it belongs by right both of its ultimate musical origin and of the lyrical subjectivity of its inspiration. The idyl, represented by such poems as L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, is a class obviously allied to both 1 L'Evolution de la Poésie Lyrique en France (Paris, 1895), vol. i., 152.

narrative and lyric, and much of the composite poetry of the present century which is usually classed as lyrical is rather idyllic in form and spirit.1 Didactic poetry and satiric poetry, finally, the two leading poetic types of the English 'classical' period, are also the two pre-eminently anti-lyrical forms, and consequently under no classification can they be properly ranked as any part of that literary residuum sometimes2 called 'lyrical poetry'.

Conformance to the external marks of any recognized lyric kind constitutes perhaps 'a lyric', pro forma; but such is not the criterion of 'the lyrical'. Quality, on the contrary, quality and inspiration, are the subtle tests of all lyrical writing. Lyric poetry is pre-eminently the outcome of "the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds". Apply this test never so strictly, and it is still amazing what extent and variety of product remains from the two great periods of English poetry. And outside of these periods also, there are important lyrical gleanings, especially in the poetry of the pre-Elizabethan period.

The Anglo-Saxon poetry, which, like all primitive poetry, is mostly of an indeterminate and undifferentiated species, is streaked here and there by lyricism. It presents perhaps no lyric in the

1 The Idyl of course is of classical origin. The species in modern poetry is discussed in the interesting essay, entitled "A Comparison of Elizabethan with Victorian Poetry", by the late Mr. J. A. Symonds (in his Essays Speculative and Suggestive, 399 f.). See also his Greek Poets, ch. xx.

"As, for example, by Landor (Works, iv. 56):—"all that portion of our metre, which, wanting a definite term, is ranged under the capitulary of lyric ".