A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

myself later in this chapter, in the attempt to indicate the changes in lyric atmosphere as we pass, for instance, from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean age, or from the “Augustan” to the Romantic epoch in English literature. Is this sensitiveness to the temper of various historic periods merely the possession of a few hundred professional scholars, who have trained themselves, like Walter Pater, to live in some well-chosen moment of the past and to find in their hyper-sensitized responsiveness to its voices a sort of consolation prize for their isolation from the present? Race-mindedness is common, no doubt, but difficult to express in words: historic-mindedness, though more capable of expression, is necessarily confined to a few. Is the response to the poetry of past epochs, then, chiefly a response of the individual reader to an individual poet, and do we cross the frontiers of race and language and historic periods with the main purpose of finding a man after our own heart? Or is the secret of our pleasure in the poetry of alien races and far-off times simply this: that nothing human is really alien, and that poetry through its generalizing, universalizing power, reveals to us the essential oneness of mankind?

 

2. Graphic Arts and the Lyric

A specific illustration may suggest an answer. An American collector of Japanese prints recognizes in these specimens of Oriental craftsmanship that mastery of line and composition which are a part of the universal language of the graphic arts. Any human being, in fact, who has developed a sensitiveness to artistic beauty will receive a measure of delight from the work of Japanese masters. A few strokes of the brush upon silk, a bit of lacquer work, the decoration of a sword-hilt, are enough to set his eye dancing. But the expert collector soon passes beyond this general enthusiasm into a quite particular interest in the handicraft of special artists,—a Motonobu, let us say, or a Sesshiu. The collector finds his pleasure in their individual handling of artistic problems, their unique faculties of eye and hand. He responds, in a word, both to the cosmopolitan language employed by every practitioner of the fine arts, and to the local idiom, the personal accent, of, let us say, a certain Japanese draughtsman of the eighteenth century.

And now take, by way of confirmation and also of contrast, the attitude of an American lover of poetry toward those specimens of Japanese and Chinese lyrics which have recently been presented to us in English translations. The American’s ignorance of the riental languages cuts him off from any appreciation of the individual handling of diction and metre. A Lafcadio Hearn may write delightfully about that special seventeen syllable form of Japanese verse known as the hokku. Here is a hokku by Basho, one of the most skilled composers in that form. Hearn prints it with the translation, [Footnote: Kwaidan, p. 188. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1904.] and explains that the verses are intended to suggest the joyous feeling of spring-time:

 

“Oki, oki yo!

Waga tomo ni sen

N�ru—kocho!”

(Wake up! Wake up!—I will make thee my comrade, thou sleeping butterfly.) An Occidental reader may recognize, through the translation, the charm of the poetic image, and he may be interested in a technical lyric form hitherto new to him, but beyond this, in his ignorance of Japanese, he cannot go. Here is a lyric by Wang Ch’angLing, a Chinese poet of the eighth century:

 

Tears in the Spring [Footnote: These Chinese lyrics are quoted from The Lute of Jade, London, 1909. The translations are by L. Cranmer-Byng.]

 

“Clad in blue silk and bright embroidery

At the first call of Spring the fair young bride,

On whom as yet Sorrow has laid no scar,

Climbs the Kingfisher’s Tower. Suddenly

She sees the bloom of willows far and wide,

And grieves for him she lent to fame and war.”

And here is another spring lyric by Po Ch�-I (A.D. 772-846), as clear and simple as anything in the Greek Anthology:

 

The Grass [Footnote: These Chinese lyrics are quoted from The Lute of Jade, London, 1909. The translations are by L. Cranmer-Byng.]

 

“How beautiful and fresh the grass returns!

When golden days decline, the meadow burns;

Yet autumn suns no hidden root have slain,

The spring winds blow, and there is grass again.

 

“Green rioting on olden ways it falls:

The blue sky storms the ruined city walls;

Yet since Wang Sun departed long ago,

When the grass blooms both joy and fear I know.”

The Western reader, although wholly at the mercy of the translator, recognizes the pathos and beauty of the scene and thought expressed by the Chinese poet. But all that is specifically Chinese in lyric form is lost to him.

I have purposely chosen these Oriental types of lyric because they represent so clearly the difference between the universal language of the graphic arts and the more specialized language of poetry. The latter is still able to convey, even through translation, a suggestion of the emotions common to all men; and this is true of the verse which lies wholly outside the line of that Hebrew-Greek-Roman tradition which has affected so profoundly the development of modern European literature. Yet to express “ce que tout le monde pense“—which was Boileau’s version of Horace’s “propria communia dicere“—is only part of the function of lyric poetry. To give the body of the time the form and pressure of individual feeling, of individual artistic mastery of the language of one’s race and epoch;—this, no less than the other, is the task and the opportunity of the lyric poet.

 

3. Decay and Survival

To appreciate the triumph of whatever lyrics have survived, even when sheltered by the protection of common racial or cultural traditions, one must remember that the overwhelming majority of lyrics, like the majority of artistic products of all ages and races and stages of civilization, are irretrievably lost. Weak-winged is song! A book like Gummere’s Beginnings of Poetry, glancing as it does at the origins of so many national literatures and at the rudimentary poetic efforts of various races that have never emerged from barbarism, gives one a poignant sense of the prodigality of the song-impulse compared with the slenderness of the actual survivals. Autumn leaves are not more fugitive. Even when preserved by sacred ritual, like the Vedas and the Hebrew Psalter, what we possess is only an infinitesimal fraction of what has perished. The Sibyl tears leaf after leaf from her precious volume and scatters them to the winds. How many glorious Hebrew war-songs of the type presented in the “Song of Deborah” were chanted only to be forgotten! We have but a handful of the lyrics of Sappho and of the odes of Pindar, while the fragments of lyric verse gathered up in the Greek Anthology tantalize us with their reminder of what has been lost beyond recall.

Yet if we keep to the line of Hebrew-Greek-Roman tradition, we are equally impressed with the enduring influence of the few lyrics that have survived. The Hebrew lyric, in its diction, its rhythmical patterns, and above all in its flaming intensity of spirit, bears the marks of racial purity, of mental vigor and moral elevation. It became something even more significant, however, than the spiritual expression of a chosen race. The East met the West when these ancient songs of the Hebrew Psalter were adopted and sung by the Christian Church. They were translated, in the fourth century, into the Latin of the Vulgate. Many an Anglo-Saxon gleeman knew that Latin version. It moulded century after century the liturgy of the European world. It influenced Tyndale’s English version of the Psalms, and this has in turn affected the whole vocabulary and style of the modern English lyric. There is scarcely a page of the Oxford Book of English Verse which does not betray in word or phrase the influence of the Hebrew Psalter.

Or take that other marvelous example of the expression of emotion in terms of bodily sensation, the lyric of the Greeks. Its clarity and unity, its dislike of vagueness and excess, its finely artistic restraint, are characteristic of the race. The simpler Greek lyrical measures were taken over by Catullus, Horace and Ovid, and though there were subtle qualities of the Greek models which escaped the Roman imitators, the Greco-Roman or “classic” restraint of over-turbulent emotions became a European heritage. It is doubtless true, as Dr. Henry Osborn Taylor has pointed out, [Footnote: See his Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages, chap. 9, and particularly the passage quoted in the “Notes and Illustrations” to chap. v of this volume.] that the Greek and Roman classical metres became in time inadequate to express the new Christian spirit “which knew neither clarity nor measure.” “The antique sense of form and proportion, the antique observance of the mean and avoidance of extravagance and excess, the antique dislike for the unlimited or the monstrous, the antique feeling for literary unity, and abstention from irrelevancy, the frank love for all that is beautiful or charming, for the beauty of the body and for everything connected with the joy of mortal life, the antique reticence as to hopes or fears of what was beyond the grave,—these qualities cease in medieval Latin poetry.”

 

4. Lyrics of Western Europe

The racial characteristics of the peoples of Western Europe began to show themselves even in their Latin poetry, but it is naturally in the rise of the vernacular literatures, during the Middle Ages, that we trace the signs of thnic differentiation. Teuton and Frank and Norseman, Spaniard or Italian, betray their blood as soon as they begin to sing in their own tongue. The scanty remains of Anglo-Saxon lyrical verse are colored with the love of battle and of the sea, with the desolateness of lonely wolds, with the passion of loyalty to a leader. Read “Deor’s Lament,” “Widsith,” “The Wanderer,” “The Sea-farer,” or the battle-songs of Brunanburh and Maldon in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. [Footnote: See Cook and Tinker, Select Translations from Old English Poetry (Boston, 1902), and Pancoast and Spaeth, Early English Poems (New York, 1911).] The last strophe of “Deor’s Lament,” our oldest English lyric, ends with the line:

 

“Thaes ofereode, thisses swa maeg”

“That he surmounted, so this may I!”

The wandering Ulysses says something like this, it is true, in a line of the Odyssey, but to feel its English racial quality one has only to read after it Masefield’s “To-morrow”:

 

“Oh yesterday our little troop was ridden through and through,

Our swaying, tattered pennons fled, a broken beaten few,

And all a summer afternoon they hunted us and slew;

_But to-morrow,

By the living God, we ‘II try the game again_!”

When Taillefer, knight and minstrel, rode in front of the Norman line at the battle of Hastings, “singing of Charlemagne and of Roland and of Oliver and the vassals who fell at Roncevaux,” he typified the coming triumphs of French song in England. [Footnote: See E. B. Reed, English Lyrical Poetry, chap. 2. 1912.] French lyrical fashions would have won their way, no doubt, had there been no battle of Hastings. The banners of William the Conqueror had been blessed by Rome. They represented Europe, and the inevitable flooding of the island outpost of “Germania” by the tide of European civilization. Chanson and carole, dance-songs, troubadour lyrics, the ballade, rondel and No�l, amorous songs of French courtiers, pious hymns of French monks, began to sing themselves in England. The new grace and delicacy is upon every page of Chaucer. What was first Proven�al and then French, became English when Chaucer touched it. From the shadow and grimness and elegiac pathos of Old English poetry we come suddenly into the light