THAMYRIS
CHAPTER IThe 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 embarrassedladies, 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 Musescould not gratify their curiosity, Satan, who, as in theBook 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 vanishaltogether. Metre too dissolved and degenerated from all regular recognisable form; and when finally Satan jerked out the latest jewel of Americanvers 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 andgraceless 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 hisOdesto be read, or to be sung to the lyre: but Lucretius and Virgil undoubtedlywrote their poems to be read. Virgil indeed gave public readings of hisEclogues. 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 theChanson de gestesmay 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 intendedto 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 theLiederof 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 theresulting 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 andenjoyed, 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 mediumand 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 newways, 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.