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"When Spring casts all her swallows forth" 224

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INTRODUCTION

The writer of prose, by intelligence taught,
Says the thing that will please, in the way that he ought.

Frederick Locker-Lampson.

_No species of poetry is more ancient than the lyrical, and yet none
shows so little sign of having outlived the requirements of human
passion. The world may grow tired of epics and of tragedies, but each
generation, as it sees the hawthorns blossom and the freshness of
girlhood expand, is seized with a pang which nothing but the spasm of
verse will relieve. Each youth imagines that spring-tide and love are
wonders which he is the first of human beings to appreciate, and he
burns to alleviate his emotion in rhyme. Historians exaggerate, perhaps,
the function of music in awakening and guiding the exercise of lyrical
poetry. The lyric exists, they tell us, as an accompaniment to the lyre;
and without the mechanical harmony the spoken song is an artifice. Quite
as plausibly might it be avowed that music was but added to verse to
concentrate and emphasize its rapture, to add poignancy and volume to
its expression. But the truth is that these two arts, though sometimes
happily allied, are, and always have been, independent. When verse has
been innocent enough to lean on music, we may be likely to find that
music also has been of the simplest order, and that the pair of them,
like two delicious children, have tottered and swayed together down the
flowery meadows of experience. When either poetry or music is adult, the
presence of each is a distraction to the other, and each prefers, in the
elaborate ages, to stand alone, since the mystery of the one confounds
the complexity of the other. Most poets hate music; few musicians
comprehend the nature of poetry; and the combination of these arts has
probably, in all ages, been contrived, not for the satisfaction of
artists, but for the convenience of their public._

_This divorce between poetry and music has been more frankly accepted in
the present century than ever before, and is nowadays scarcely opposed
in serious criticism. If music were a necessary ornament of lyrical
verse, the latter would nowadays scarcely exist; but we hear less and
less of the poets devotion (save in a purely conventional sense) to the
lute and the pipe. What we call the Victorian lyric is abso