V. THE TYPOGRAPHY OF THE QUARTO (1609), CON- SIDERED IN ITS BEARING ON THE AUTHORITY INTRODUCTION I MODERN critics have found it convenient to preserve the classification of poetry which their predecessors borrowed from the ancients at the Revival of Learning. But, in order to illustrate his theory, each has been forced to define anew such terms as lyric,' 'elegiac,' 'epic,' and the terms, in consequence of these repeated attempts, have at last ceased to be definite. Now, despite this shifting indefiniteness, when we say of any poetry that it is lyrical and elegiac, we are understood to mean that it deals with emotion rather than with doctrine or drama ; and further, that its merit lies, not so much in the exclusive delineation of any one emotional experience as, in the suggestion, by beautiful imagery and musical sound, of those aspirations and regrets which find a voice but little less articulate in the sister-art of music. Narrowing the definition, we may say that the best lyrical and elegiac poetry expresses, by both its meaning and its movement, the quintessence of man's desire for Beauty, abstracted from concrete and transitory embodiments. The matter in such poetry is of Beauty that must die'; the method, a succession of beautiful images flashed from a river of pleasing sound. It is the effect of an art which appeals to the mind's eye with a lovely and vivid imagination, and to the mind's ear with a melody at all times soft and (since Beauty dwells with Sadness) at many times pathetic.1 To illustrate one art by 1 Mr. Bagehot seems to deny this when he says (Hartley Coleridge) that with whatever differences of species and class the essence of lyrical poetry remains in all identical; it is designed to express, and when successful does b another is often to lose, in the confusion of real distinction, most of the gain won by comparing justly; yet, at the risk of that loss, it may be said of lyrical and elegiac poetry that it stands to other poetry, and to all speech, in some such relation as that of sculpture to architecture. And this is particularly true of Shakespeare's Poems. Marble may be used for many ends, and in all its uses may be handled with a regard for Beauty; but there comes a Phidias, possessed beyond others with the thirst for Beauty, and pre-eminent both in perception and in control of those qualities which fit marble for expressing Beauty to the mind through the eye. He is still unsatisfied by any divided dedication; and so, in the rhythmic procession of a frieze, he consecrates it to Beauty alone. At other times he may be the first of architects, an excellent citizen at all. The Poems of Shakespeare may be compared to the Frieze of the Parthenon, insomuch as both are works in which the greatest masters of words and of marble that we know have exhibited the exquisite adaptation of those materials to the single expression of Beauty. express, some one mood, some single sentiment, some isolated longing in human nature.' I doubt it. On the contrary the essence of lyrical, certainly of elegiac poetry, consists in the handling of sentiment and emotion to suggest infinity, not unity, not the science of psychology but, the mysticism of desire. The emotion may sometimes be isolated for the sake of more effectively contrasting its definiteness with the vast aspiration it engenders. A lyrical poet, for instance, would be content to echo the single note of a curlew, but only because it suggests a whole moorland: the particular moorland, that is, over which one bird is flying, and therewith the flight of all birds, once a part of religion, over all moorlands in all ages. Such a poem, if it were successful, would give, not only the transient mood of a single listener but, all the melancholy and all the meaning and all the emotion without meaning that have ever followed the flight of a lonely bird over a waste place. Mr. Bagehot knows this, for he goes on thus: Hence lyrical poets must not be judged literally from their lyrics: they are discourses; they require to be reduced into the scale of ordinary life, to be stripped of the enraptured element, to be clogged with gravitating prose.' And why is this to be done? To judge the poet.' Exactly! But why judge the poet instead of enjoying the poem ? |