the lively sense of beauty and delight which marked the lyric mood of the time more easily accommodated itself to and revitalized fixed and exotic literary modes than would have been possible with a colder and more literal generation. Conventional meaning and real meaning, however, we find rapidly shifting and changing from decade to decade throughout this age of rapid change and swift development, whether in the vein of pastoral, of sonnet, or of song. The earlier romantic idealism rests chiefly in the pastoral convention, which, indeed, tinges the Elizabethan lyric throughout. In the best of the pastoral lyrics pastoralism is but a setting or background, subtly suggesting the tone of romantic idealism and of golden-age otherworldliness, which is the fundamental mood of the piece. Likewise, also, amid all the amatory conventionality of the sonnet-sequences, we feel that the recurrent formulæ of love, of lover's despair and lady's praise, are but the obbligato accompaniment of the real, the underlying theme, which, through all the artifices of art, is purposing the lyric revelation and self-expression of the poet's inner mood and nature. It is so in the sonnets of Shakespeare, and in the best of those of Sidney, Spenser, and Drayton. And for the reason, doubtless, that love is the great awakener of the soul—

Beauty breeds love, love consummates a man,

as Chapman sings-we find in these sonnets more of the modern note, more of the introspective and analytical spirit, than had yet appeared in the lyric. They are the first full expression in

English poetry of the subjective spirit of modern lyricism.

Song-Lyric.

In the song-lyric of the Elizabethan age conventionality is melted into pure lyric mood, or only The Elizabethan adds a further ornament and grace to a musical utterance without it somewhat formless and unstayed. The exquisite accord of music and words in this lyric has been noted by all competent judges. Elizabethan music was a music perfectly fitted to song, slight and melodic, full of local colour and suggestiveness, and admirably adapted to commend and ensure and fortify lyric poetry of as perfect a quality in its particular kind as probably has been or ever will be written to the accompaniment of musical notes in so intractable a language as English. The Elizabethan song-lyric is a form of pure art-poetic emotion stirred by the sense of beauty and of musical delight, with the slightest possible admixture of the temporal and the adventitious. These haunting measures of song, the secret of which seems to be now lost from our speech, are never overweighted with meaning, nor at their best are they overcharged with convention or with ornament. Elizabethan song-writer understands instinctively the laws of the kind in which he works. How free are the lyrics in Shakespeare's plays, for example, from the subtleties and the compressions of the dramatic style of that master. Meaning here is masked in pure mood, is suggested and potential, not hardened into thought. "The apothecaries", writes Thomas Campion in the preface to his Fourth Book of Airs, "have Books of Gold, whose leaves,

The

being opened, are so light as that they are subject to be shaken with the least breath; yet, rightly handled, they serve both for ornament and use. Such are light Airs." And yet, in all this lyric-song there is almost never the suggestion of the mere exercise in versification. It has everywhere the note of spontaneity. A flying mood is caught in its passage, is slightly idealized, and then is fitted to diction and verse which by association and by cadence exactly render it to the hearer or reader. If the mood be inconsequential and fleeting, it is so much the more the proper material for musical and lyric expression. The mere music of words, allied to the exact quantum and substance of feeling and idea, has never elsewhere been equalled in English for lightness and grace, and an indescribable charm and singularity of verbal expressiveness. In Shakespeare, Campion, Heywood, Dekker, and Breton, and in the single masterpieces of a host of minor or unnamed singers, is found in unapproachable perfection that peculiar artless art, that first fine careless rapture, that exquisite harmony and union of form and substance, which in the last resort, as M. Brunetière rightly says, is all that is needed in poetic form to constitute the true lyric, and which in any form seems to be the crowning attainment of art. In its day the Elizabethan song-lyric is a holiday lyric, the sweetener and solace of life in hall and bower, in court and city. It responds to the superabundant play-instinct of the age-the instinct of men seeking free expression after the long ascetic repression of the Middle Ages. The Elizabethan period is partly, and for a few brief

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years, what Taine calls it, the period of a Pagan Renaissance. Life all at once has come to have a new joy and interest for men, here, now, and of itself. The senses reassert their rights. And it is still a half-century before the relapse into the black remorse of Puritanism. And so, meanwhile, the romantic comedy of life is played out to the sound of the lyre and of song.

This sense of joyous elation, this spontaneity and careless ease of the early Elizabethan song, is that which gives it high permanent worth to us; and no one can appreciate its richness and inspiration who does not drink somewhat deeply of it—who cannot for the moment give himself up to the mood of it, rejoice in its joy, and admire its seeming-careless art and its happy music. It supplies something not elsewhere found in English poetry. Afterwards, and all too soon, the eternal note of sadness is brought in.

Lyrists.

The chief lyric writers typical of the first great poetic period extending to the death of Elizabeth Chief Elizabethan are Spenser, Sidney, Raleigh, Lyly, Greene, Peele, Nash, Lodge, Breton, Shakespeare, Daniel, Drayton, Southwell, Barnes, Heywood, and Dekker. Others-Donne, Jonson, Campion, and Sir John Davies, for example—fall partly within the same period, but their lyric manner, as well as in a less degree also the lyric manner of Shakespeare, Chapman, and Daniel, points rather to the special style of the lyric of the Jacobean period, and is rather transitional than typically Elizabethan. Spenser and Sidney fitly usher in the great period of the lyric. In the

Shepherd's Calendar the lyric and the pastoral notes are blended. Fresh and elate, if also slightly conscious and naïve, like the voice of youth, it struck out a new music in English verse. The Lyrics of Spenser's characteristic lyric, however, Spenser. is the Greater Lyric, the prolonged lyric. His art requires ample room for its evolutions. Ac-cordingly his lyric utterance, as in the Epithalamion, is large, harmonious, and splendidly impassive. The sharper lyrical cry, the strenuous utterance of brief but deep emotion, first comes from Sidney, as in the sonnet beginning:

Of Sidney.

Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust.

Of Minor

After this the way is open to all comers, and the full choir of song is heard in the land. In this choir are many notes and many voices: the delicate melody of Lyly, perfect in Lyrists. diction, light and refined; the richer note of Greene, full of English feeling, strangely heightened with pastoral and Renaissance fancies, varied in rhythm, but somewhat languorous and overwrought; Peele's few lyrics, golden in cadence, that go on murmuring in the memory; the fresh voice of Nash, now rollicking and open, and again musically melancholic; Lodge, more inclined to pastoralism, trying experiments in motives and rhythms that evade failure by a hand's-breadth, and too copious in his vein of song to be uniformly felicitous; Breton, as fresh as Nash, as copious as Lodge, but endowed with a finer artistic feeling, and altogether captivating in his ready grace and buoyancy; Dekker and Heywood, lyrical and Elizabethan in spirit, humane, LIBRARY

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