THE LADY OF THE LYRICS

    THE LADY OF THE LYRICS

    She is eclipsed, or gone, or in hiding. But the sixteenth century took her for granted as the object of song； she was a class, a state, a sex. It was scarcely necessary to waste the lyrist's time- -time that went so gaily to metre as not to brook delays――in making her out too clearly. She had no more of what later times call individuality than has the rose, her rival, her foil when she was kinder, her superior when she was cruel, her ever fresh and ever conventional paragon. She needed not to be devised or divined； she was ready. A merry heart goes all the day； the lyrist's never grew weary. Honest men never grow tired of bread or of any other daily things whereof the sweetness is in their own simplicity.

    The lady of the lyrics was not loved in mortal earnest, and her punishment now and then for her ingratitude was to be told that she was loved in jest. She did not love； her fancy was fickle； she was not moved by long service, which, by the way, was evidently to be taken for granted precisely like the whole long past of a dream. She had not a good temper. When the poet groans it seems that she has laughed at him； when he flouts her, we may understand that she has chidden her lyrist in no temperate terms. In doing this she has sinned not so much against him as against Love. With that she is perpetually reproved. The lyrist complains to Love, pities Love for her scorning, and threatens to go away with Love, who is on his side. The sweetest verse is tuned to love when the loved one proves worthy.

    There is no record of success for this policy. She goes on dancing or scolding, as the case may be, and the lyrist goes on boasting of his constancy, or suddenly renounces it for a day. The situation has variants, but no surprise or ending. The lover's convention is explicit enough, but it might puzzle a reader to account for the lady's. Pride in her beauty, at any rate, is hers――pride so great that she cannot bring herself to perceive the shortness of her day. She is so unobservant as to need to be told that life is brief, and youth briefer than life； that the rose fades, and so forth.

    Now we need not assume that the lady of the lyrics ever lived. But taking her as the perfectly unanimous conception of the lyrists, how is it she did not discover these things unaided？ Why does the lover invariably imagine her with a mind intensely irritable under his own praise and poetry？ Obviously we cannot have her explanation of any of these matters. Why do the poets so much lament the absence of truth in one whose truth would be of little moment？ And why was the convention so pleasant, among all others, as to occupy a whole age―― nay, two great ages-of literature？

    Music seems to be principally answerable. For the lyrics of the lady are "words for music" by a great majority. There is hardly a single poem in the Elizabethan Song-books, properly so named, that has what would in our day be called a tone of sentiment. Music had not then the tone herself； she was ingenious, and so must the words be. She had the air of epigram, and an accurately definite limit. So, too, the lady of the lyrics, who might be called the lady of the stanzas, so strictly does she go by measure. When she is quarrelsome, it is but fuguishness； when she dances, she does it by a canon. She could not but be perverse, merrily sung to such grave notes.

    So fixed was the law of this perversity that none in the song-books is allowed to be kind enough for a "melody," except one lady only. She may thus derogate, for the exceedingly Elizabethan reason that she is "brown." She is brown and kind, and a "sad flower," but the song made for her would have been too insipid, apparently, without an antithesis. The fair one is warned that her disdain makes her even less lovely than the brown.

    Fair as a lily, hard to please, easily angry, ungrateful for innumerable verses, uncertain with the regularity of the madrigal, and inconstant with the punctuality of a stanza, she has gone with the arts of that day； and neither verse nor music will ever make such another lady. She refused to observe the transiency of roses； she never really intended――much as she was urged――to be a shepherdess； she was never persuaded to mitigate her dress. In return, the world has let her disappear. She scorned the poets until they turned upon her in the epigram of many a final couplet； and of these the last has been long written. Her "No" was set to counterpoint in the part-song, and she frightened Love out of her sight in a ballet. Those occupations are gone, and the lovely Elizabethan has slipped away. She was something less than mortal.

    But she who was more than mortal was mortal too. This was no lady of the unanimous lyrists, but a rare visitant unknown to these exquisite little talents. She was not set for singing, but poetry spoke of her； sometimes when she was sleeping, and then Fletcher said

    None can rock Heaven to sleep but her.

    Or when she was singing, and Carew rhymed

    Ask me no more whither doth haste The nightingale when May is past； For in your sweet dividing throat She winters, and keeps warm her note.

    Sometimes when the lady was dead, and Carew, again, wrote on her monument

    And here the precious dust is laid, Whose purely-tempered clay was made So fine that it the guest betrayed.

    But there was besides another Lady of the lyrics； one who will never pass from the world, but has passed from song. In the sixteenth century and in the seventeenth century this lady was Death. Her inspiration never failed； not a poet but found it as fresh as the inspiration of life. Fancy was not quenched by the inevitable thought in those days, as it is in ours, and the phrase lost no dignity by the integrity of use.

    To every man it happens that at one time of his life――for a space of years or for a space of months――he is convinced of death with an incomparable reality. It might seem as though literature, living the life of a man, underwent that conviction in those ages. Death was as often on the tongues of men in older ages, and oftener in their hands, but in the sixteenth century it was at their hearts. The discovery of death did not shake the poets from their composure. On the contrary, the verse is never measured with more majestic effect than when it moves in honour of this Lady of the lyrics. Sir Walter Raleigh is but a jerky writer when he is rhyming other things, however bitter or however solemn； but his lines on death, which are also lines on immortality, are infinitely noble. These are, needless to say, meditations upon death by law and violence； and so are the ingenious rhymes of Chidiock Tichborne, written after his last prose in his farewell letter to his wife――"Now, Sweet- cheek, what is left to bestow on thee, a small recompense for thy deservings"――and singularly beautiful prose is this. So also are Southwell's words. But these are exceptional deaths, and more dramatic than was needed to awake the poetry of the meditative age.

    It was death as the end of the visible world and of the idle business of life――not death as a passage nor death as a fear or a darkness――that was the Lady of the lyrists. Nor was their song of the act of dying. With this a much later and much more trivial literature busied itself. Those two centuries felt with a shock that death would bring an end, and that its equalities would make vain the differences of wit and wealth which they took apparently more seriously than to us seems probable. They never wearied of the wonder. The poetry of our day has an entirely different emotion for death as parting. It was not parting that the lyrists sang of； it was the mere simplicity of death. None of our contemporaries will take such a subject； they have no more than the ordinary conviction of the matter. For the great treatment of obvious things there must evidently be an extraordinary conviction.

    But whether the chief Lady of the lyrics be this, or whether she be the implacable Elizabethan feigned by the love-songs, she has equally passed from before the eyes of poets.

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