or narrative verse was to wear for many generations; and which, shorn of its rhyme, it wears as blank verse to-day. "Thou wert acquainted with Chaucer! Pardie, God save his soul, The first finder of our faire language," rhapsodises Occleve. The times which follow Chaucer are not prolific of great names until we approach that truly Periclean age of art, the reign of Elizabeth. But the forces were, nevertheless, gathering. Along the way we find as guidelights Occleve, Mallory, Caxton, Shelton, Wyatt, Surrey; and, shining with an ever-increasing refulgence, Sackville, Lely, Sidney, Spenser, Bacon, Marlowe; until, from the summit, flames forth the deathless beacon reared by Shakespeare. The English song In spite of the dictum of a prominent English writer upon music (H. R. Haweis) that the English are not a musical people, they have from time immelovers of morial been ardent lovers of song; and "the songs of a nation," says Lowell," are like wild flowers pressed between the blood-stained pages of history. The Infinite sends its messages to us by untutored spirits, and the lips of little children, and the unboastful beauty of simple nature." Byrd, in his" Preface to Psalms, Sonnets, and Songs," quaintly says: "There is not any musike of instruments whatever comparable to that which is made by the voyces of men; where the voyces are good, and the same well-sorted and ordered." Among the Anglo-Saxons, as well as among the Celtic and other northern races of Europe, the harp seems to have been the instrument mostly in use, of course as accompaniment to the chant, recitation, or song. 'The minstrels," says Percy, were the successors of the ancient bards, who, under different names, were admired and revered from the earliest ages among the people of Gaul, Britain, Ireland, and the North; and indeed by almost all the first inhabitants of Europe, whether of Celtic or Gothic race; but by none more than by our own Teutonic ancestors, particularly by all the Danish tribes. Among these they were distinguished by the name Scalds, a word which denotes smoothers and polishers of language.' We are told that to possess a harp was the first requirement of a Norman gentleman, and to be able to perform upon it indispensable to his pretensions to gentility. Chaucer mentions in his poems a great number of musical instruments, evidence that the development of music kept pace with that of literature. When we reach the days of the Tudors we find music in a very advanced stage. Erasmus says of the people of England: "They challenge the prerogative of having the most handsome women, of keeping the best table, and of being the most accomplished in the skill of music of any people." 1 We read of " madrigals, ballets (ballads), and canzonets." "The ballad and dance-tune," says Ritter, “complemented each other from the very start (of English civilisation) and have remained inseparable companions." Music in the time of In Elizabeth's time we find the names of such composers as Tye, Marbeck, Tallis, Byrd, Morley, etc.; but, before the days of Elizabeth, contrapuntal composition was well advanced. The favourite madrigal-" the light-footed English madrigal," Ritter calls it seems to have been quite an elabo'RITTER: "Music in England,” chap. ii. Elizabeth J rate affair in several parts. The well-known and quaintly charming "Sumer is icumen in,' a canon or "rota" as it is called, was written as early as 1223. But what concerns us more than any contrapuntal developments is the fact that society in the English Periclean age was simply saturated with musical feeling that musical feeling which comes of freedom, gayety, and living close to nature. The people of that day were not the sombre, soul-burdened people of post-Revolution times, but a careless, light-hearted race, true children of the Renaissance. There existed. a veritable joie de vivre, and the universal joyousness rippled, like the joyousness of birds, spontaneously into song. "In the time of Elizabeth, not only was music a qualification for ladies and gentlemen, but even the city of London advertised the musical abilities of boys educated in Bridewell and Christ's Hospital, as a mode of recommending them as servants, apprentices, and husbandmen. Tinkers sung catches; milkmaids sung ballads; carters whistled; each trade, and even beggars, had their special songs. The bass viol hung in the drawing-room for the amusement of waiting visitors; and the lute, cithern, and virginals, for the amusement of waiting customers, were the necessary furniture of the barber shop. They had music at dinner, music at supper, music at weddings, music at funerals, music at night, music at dawn, music at work, music at play. He who felt not in some degree its soothing influence was viewed as a morose, unmusical being whose converse ought to be shunned and regarded with suspicion and distrust."'1 'CHAPPELL: " Popular Music of the Olden Times," vol. i., chap. iii. The reader will trace in the foregoing an analogy between these times of rich mental harvest and the lyric days of Greece. Shakespeare's sense of music "If music be the food of love, play on; Shakespeare makes the duke sigh in "Twelfth Night." In Shakespeare the sense of union between music and verse reaches its finest flower. He was its arch-priest. His heart beat to the universal rhythms. This is evidenced by his spontaneity and daring in the management of blank verse, which in his hands. attained a freedom of movement not reached by any other writer. It is evidenced by his mastery of all the melodic and metrical resources of his medium; for he was supreme in every metric device by which verse may be varied and enriched, and he employed methods which in less consummate hands might easily be productive of a chaos of mere chopped prose, but which, in the hands of the master, become a complex and wonderful instrument whence issue immortal strains of power and beauty. His perfect musical ear is even more demonstrated in the little lyric flights scattered throughout the dramas. We have no songs more spontaneous, or instinct with music, than" Hark, hark, the lark," "Who is Silvia?" "O come unto these yellow sands,' Come away, come away, Death," and a host of others. They seem literally to sing themselves. In some indeed the joyous lilt loses itself, for very wanton gladness, in a mere inarticulate ripple. As "It was a lover and his lass, With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino, That through the green cornfields did pass The high-water mark of the verse of this epoch is also the high-water mark of music. Decadence after From Shakespeare on we have to note a steady decadence. It is true that we catch Shakespearean echoes in the verse of Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Campion, Wither, Carew, Herrick, Suckling, Shakespeare Lovelace, Waller, and others; but these dwindle with the perspective until, by the time of the Restoration, the English Muse was virtually moribund. It is a far cry from "Queen and huntress, chaste and fair," to the formal rhymed couplet of Dryden's day, "when men wrote in measured thuds, by rule.' "How was it," asks a writer,1" that a people could lose its ear during a century and a half, as if a violinist should suddenly prefer a tom-tom to his violin?" The causes of this prolonged decadence are two-fold. In the inevitable barren periods which always follow epochs of great productivity-the fallow seasons of nature -the light of inspiration faded, and a cold formalism fell upon art. Men reverted to a meaningless classicism, and enveloped verse in conventional fetters as inexorable as the tentacles of an octopus. But it is even more due to the great parliamentary and religious struggles which began with the Stuarts. The domination of the Commonwealth sealed the fate both of music and poetry. The Puritans, confounding music with popery, looked 'WILLIAM R. THAYER: "Review of Reviews," October, 1894. |