The Relation of Music to Poetry

BEFORE attempting any delimitation of the frontiers of Music and Poetry, or any discussion of their interaction, it is perhaps prudent to admit that in one respect it is impossible to separate them. There is a sense in which the Republic of Beauty is one and indivisible. The elation, the thrill, which every form of beauty excites, whether it be an Egyptian temple, a Beethoven sonata, a lyric of Shelley, a ‘wild-flower in its lair,’ or a couple of kittens at play, implies as it were a common nervous system connecting all manifestations of beauty and our appreciation thereof; and two provinces of beauty so nearly adjacent as Music and Poetry, are peculiarly liable to become interfused in a common emotion, to swim in ‘ the light that never was on sea or land,’ till their boundaries seem blent beyond recognition; and when, in such a perfect song as Wolff’s ‘ Verborgenheit,’ the music rises and falls in close sympathy with the emotion of the words, the union becomes so intimate that it is hard to say, while listening, which is the poetry and which the music.

Nevertheless the provinces of Music and Poetry, however nearly they may at times approach, are in fact distinct; and though they have in common the property of conveying, as nothing else can convey, ‘the sense of tears in mortal things,’ of appealing to that within us which makes us ‘feel that we are greater than we know,’ they reach the highlands of the soul by separate roads from different directions. A homely proof of this lies in the fact that an intense delight in the beauty of language, in the broad and delicate harmonies of ordered words, what is loosely called ‘verbal music,’ is often found to exist in people who have no ear for music in the ordinary sense of the term, who cannot distinguish one tune from another or pronounce the simplest musical phrase. As for memorizing a melody, they could as easily hover in mid-air; yet they will recite, not prose alone, but verse, with perfect intonation and exquisite delicacy of expression. It is not necessary to labor the point; such cases must be within the experience of every one; they prove conclusively that Music and Poetry occupy distinct though neighboring regions, under the control of separate though allied rulers.

This distinction proves fatal to the Wagnerian conception of Music as at once the handmaid and complement of Poetry. Misled by his peculiar mental constitution, Wagner deemed that all musical expression had a poetic basis. He himself thought in terms of music; and, violently forcing all kinds of concrete images and pseudo-philosophic ideas into musical moulds, he naïvely proclaimed that they were quite at home there. His belief that Poetry would never come into her kingdom until wedded to Music, seems to have arisen from his abnormal insensibility to Poetry, coupled with his abnormal sensibility to Music. Of the latter fact his music-dramas abound in splendid evidence; but they abound no less in distressing proof of the former.

The best of English translations cannot convert into poetry the German doggerel which Wagner considered a perfectly satisfactory ‘poetic basis’ for the glorious music of his Meistersinger. Nothing more raw, or more vapid, has ever been misnamed ‘poetry’ than his book-of-tho-words of Tristan and Isolde; nothing more full of foggy mockphilosophy, of grandiose puerilities, has ever been patched together than the cumbrous literary lay-figure which he has clothed with the magnificent music of The Ring. The distance between the words and the music is always immense, often immeasurable. It is almost incredible that Wagner could have regarded as poetry, worthy of being wedded to immortal music, such a jumble of vague ejaculations as that which accompanies the heavenly strains of the ‘Liebestod.’ But the fact remains that he did regard it as poetry, and it simply proves that he was insensible to poetry as such. As Mr. Ernest Newman pungently remarks in his Study of Wagner, —

‘These lines may be, and actually are, admirably adapted for a musical setting, but they are no more poetry than an auctioneer’s catalogue is poetry. . . . Wagner,’ continues Mr. Newman, ‘has unconsciously done precisely what he blamed the older composers for — he has dragged the poet along at the heels of the musician. And he has rightly done so; for, as he ought to have seen, the element of musical pleasure counts for so much in opera that its presence compensates for the absence of poetry in the ordinary sense.’

Indeed, from the standpoint of verbal and metrical beauty, the advantage to poetry of being wedded to music is less than nothing. A beautiful poem, just in so far as it is a beautiful poem, satisfying in emotional and intellectual expression, exquisite in diction, is outraged by being set to music. Violence is done to it in several ways: the rhymes lose their effect through the lack of correspondence between the musical phrases and the verbal phrases; the accented notes in the music often do not coincide with the stress in the verse; the time of the music is often at cross-purposes with the metre of the poetry; a single word of a poem is now brutally dismembered, now stretched out on a musical rack of many bars, now flung from pillar to post, especially in choral-writing; and finally, worst outrage of all, the direct intellectual and emotional appeal of the poem is drowned in the flood of pleasure which the music directly and overwhelmingly bestows. It is true that some modern composers have made serious efforts to minimize these injuries; but they have only partially succeeded, for the simple reason that the appeal of Poetry is distinct, not in degree, but in kind, from the appeal of Music. The more satisfying the pleasure which a poem gives me, the less I desire it to be set to music. In this I mean no disparagement of the art of Music; far from it; I write as a devout lover of Music no less than of Poetry; but their spheres are separate, and can never be combined with complete satisfaction to a devotee of both arts.

Take, for instance, such a poem as Wordsworth’s sonnet on Westminster Bridge. No one with the faintest perception of verbal beauty could fail to be impressed by the closing lines of that sonnet. Now imagine them set to music. The poem, as a poem, would not gain, but would greatly lose, by the process. I do not say that the pleasure of listening to the musical setting would not be as great as the pleasure of reading the poem; it might even be greater, it would certainly be more immediate; but it would be a different sort of pleasure; and the fine qualities which distinguished the sonnet as a sonnet would be smothered by the music.

Consider an actual example in which a modern composer has robed a masterpiece of poetry with music which cannot be praised more highly than by saying that it is worthy of the verse which inspired it — Granville Bantock’s setting of the second chorus of Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon. Here the rhythm of the poetry is very clearly marked, as always in Swinburne. The metre is in triple time; and the beauty of the verse, the ebb and flow of its strong tide, the swing of its movement, are firmly associated with triple time in the minds and hearts of all who love that solemn chorus. The composer knows that full well; but when he comes to set the verses to music, he simply ignores it, and employs ½ time, ruthlessly cutting across the sound-waves of the verse. There can be no question that the music has done violence to the verse in the matter of metre; and not in that matter alone: verbal phrases, single words, are so reiterated that their value as verse is utterly lost, and the rhyme-scheme is shattered to bits. The music is noble and satisfying; it has caught the mood, the atmosphere, of the poem, and conveys them to the listener with more directness than even the words themselves can do. But the verbal beauty is gone, knocked to pieces and drowned in the great waves of unregarding harmony.

Now, has the musician sinned in this? I think not. If he had adhered closely to the poet’s metre, the musical effect would soon have become monotonous; and he is bound to make the musical effect his first consideration. But it may well be asked — if adherence to the metre would have become monotonous in the music, why does it not become so in the poetry? The answer is that it does; and the poet can escape disaster in this respect only by introducing into the structure of his verse variations and irregularities of accent, sometimes bold, sometimes delicate. Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Swinburne himself, were consummate in this branch of their art. Its skillful use, when managed with the ars celare artem, denotes a master of poetic technique; and it is the pitfall in which the bungler most easily comes to grief. It would carry me too far from my subject to enter into details; enough that the particular methods by which the poet mitigates, if he cannot avoid, monotony do not suffice for the musician; and this is the musician’s justification for the pitiless way in which he dislocates and mangles the poet’s verse.

The violence done to prose by being set to music is not so serious; there is no rhyme to suffer contumely; and the disregard of the periods of prose by the musician is less patent than his disregard of the metre of verse. But just in so far as prose rises to the dignity of poetry, the mischief becomes apparent. The majesty, the noble poise of the words themselves, disappear.

I do not suggest that musicians should refrain from choosing beautiful language to set to music; our enjoyment of Tristan and Isolde certainly would not be diminished if the words were beautiful instead of banal; and commonplace prose can scarcely be so high an incentive to the composition of music as lofty verse. We must surely applaud the spirit which animates the composer who declines to associate good music with bad words, even if it were only to prevent the bad words from gaining a currency which they would not otherwise obtain. Nor can I approve the grudging spirit of the poet who refuses to lend the aid of his art to the musician, lest the beauty of his verse should suffer indignity through being distorted and disguised in the musical setting. Music is so desirable an end in itself that a poet who loves music may well be content, nay proud, to assist her even at his own expense; and though, when sung, the poem must lose much of its essential value, that value will reappear whenever the poem is detached from the music. The injury is only temporary, and is sustained in a splendid cause. Poetry, after her friendly visit to the land of her neighbor Music, can return to her own country and possess her soul in peace, with the added satisfaction of knowing that she has gained popularity by cooperation with her powerful ally. It is quite certain, for instance, that Swinburne’s superb verse has already been borne on the wings of Granville Bantock’s music into hundreds of homes which it would never otherwise have reached.

It is interesting to find that there is a physiological ground for separating the spheres of Music and Poetry. It is an established fact that music and speech are actuated by distinct cerebral centres. Persons mentally deficient are often extremely susceptible to music, and can easily memorize the melody of a song, while quite incapable of appreciating or memorizing the words. Children can often hum a tune long before they can speak. As M. Combarieu puts it, in a striking passage quoted by Mr. Ernest Newman in his Study of Wagner, —

‘There exists a musical manner of thinking (une pensée musicale). The musician thinks with sounds, as the poet thinks with words. It is a mysterious privilege, but indubitable. If, in the vague domain of æsthetics, there is a solid basis on which we can build, it is this; yet all the empirical explanations have foundered upon this special faculty, which represents all the originality and perhaps all the psychology of the musician. Music has two different significations, united in the one form like the soul and the body, of which the one is very simple, while the other eludes all verbal analysis; it is at once a direct imitation of the emotional life and of external objects, and it is the language of a sui generis mode of thought. Not only do poet and musician not speak the same language or obey the same laws, but they do not think with the same faculty.’

‘ They do not think with the same faculty’, — precisely. Neither, I would add, do their creations appeal to the same faculty; nor therefore can their creations, conceived by separate faculties, appealing to separate faculties, be combined with complete satisfaction to the listener. Either the music will drag the words, or the words will drag the music. They cannot cooperate in perfect harmony.

It is nevertheless true that the poet renders great service to the musician by suggesting and stimulating musical thought. If poetry be — as Matthew Arnold once defined it — ‘a criticism of life,’ it may serve the musician much in the same way as his own experiences of life serve him; it may bring grist to the musical mill. The raw material of musical thought, as of poetic thought, is life itself; and a rich web of thought already woven by the poet may well supply just the basis and incentive which the musician requires. It may excite and stimulate in the musician a different brain-centre from that which was excited and stimulated in the poet when he conceived his poem, and the consequence will be, not a verbal but a musical creation. Goethe’s Egmont, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus supplied Beethoven with the basis and incentive for two of his greatest overtures, which would certainly not otherwise have been composed; and these dramas provided not only the basis and incentive, but also the atmosphere of sombre grandeur which pervades the overtures.

This suggestion of an atmosphere is the most direct service which Poetry renders to Music; for it is with generalized emotion that Music naturally deals, — with the photo-sphere, so to speak, of a particular emotion, rather than with the emotion itself. In transcendent regions of the vague and vast, the indefinite and elusive, the inarticulate, where Poetry begins to stammer, and Painting and Sculpture to lose precision, there Music enters and takes command of domains which are hers by divine right. There she moves and reigns absolute mistress, unrestrained save by her own self-imposed laws; and when she speaks of those large moods, or of those lovely but fleeting suggestions, which come to man he knows not how or whence and are the very iridescence of the human soul, she speaks with a voice of such authority that articulate speech is abashed. That is the realm of Music; and she quits it at the peril of her dignity and power. When she descends from her cloudland, and mingles with the crowd of concrete things, she enters into futile competition with other arts in their peculiar provinces, and fails to convince. When Wagner, in the Good Friday music in Parsifal, fixes the atmosphere of a calm and tender morning of early spring, we thank Heaven for a tone-picture beautiful beyond words; all that is gross and aggressive in our disposition falls from us, like a sordid garment, as we listen to that pure and delicate tissue of sweet sound, and we kneel entranced in the presence of divine simplicity; but when even such a master as Beethoven stoops from the regions of generalized emotion to imitate the concrete call of the cuckoo, I can only sadly say, as Browning said of Shakespeare under corresponding provocation — Did Beethoven? — the less Beethoven he.

At this point we are confronted with the vexed question of what is termed ‘Programme Music,’— music, that is, which deliberately selects concrete images for its material, and attempts to express not the atmosphere of an event or an emotion, but the actual event or emotion itself. Extreme cases of this type of music are the cry of the baby in Strauss’s Domestic Symphony, the sneers and snarls of the critics in his Heldenleben, the contortions of the dragon in Wagner’s Siegfried. In my humble judgment Music demeans herself in attempting these merely imitative effects, and demeans herself in vain; here the musician laboriously strives, and fails, to produce an impression which the writer or the painter could have achieved by a stroke of the pen or brush. The musician can effectively express the heroic mood; Strauss does it in the opening section of his Heldenleben; but he can not depict the concrete particulars which evoked the heroic mood. The musician can convey an impression of monstrous gloom; Wagner often does it supremely in the Ring; but he cannot draw a convincing portrait of a particular monster.

The musical phrases, moreover, which are associated with particular personages or events, are usually quite arbitrary; they do not really suggest the personages or events to which they refer, or it would not be necessary to indicate them in the analytical programme of a concert. The musical phrase, for instance, which Wagner connects with the person of Parsifal, is beautiful in itself, but it no more suggests the character of Parsifal than it suggests that of Hamlet or Julius Cæsar; it is utterly impossible for any one to infer from the notes themselves the kind of person they are intended to portray.

Apart from the beauty of the music, as music, the pleasure which one obtains from a study of a piece of Programme Music is akin to that which one gets from solving a geometrical problem, or translating a passage from a foreign language; and I have observed that those amateurs who derive most enjoyment from this aspect of a musical composition are not as a rule very susceptible to music. I recall a certain scholarly friend who, after listening to a Schumann quintette which, in Shakespeare’s phrase, had haled the soul out of my body, asked quite simply what it meant. He might as well have asked what a sunset meant. But that is the kind of man who, by the help of an annotated programme, well conned beforehand, will suck a sort of intellectual pleasure out of a piece of Programme Music, while he would be impressed but faintly by, let us say, an impromptu of Schubert, and would afterwards ask what it meant. On the other hand, a musical man may thoroughly enjoy the mental exercise of tracing the threads of the various leitmotifs interwoven into an intricate score of Strauss, just as he may enjoy the intellectual exercise of tracing the various sedimentary strata and intrusive igneous rocks which constitute the framework of a mountain; and in each case his knowledge of their anatomy may enrich his enjoyment; but it is not essential to his pleasure in either; and it is a purely intellectual satisfaction, wholly distinct from his æsthetic perception of the beauty of the music or the mountain, — that as the lie perception which is denied to the man who has no ear for music or sensibility to scenery. The provision of this purely intellectual enjoyment is incidental to all Programme Music; but it is not, in my judgment, an essential function of music.

The musician can adequately portray the strenuousness of strife, the exultation of victory, but not the contending hosts in conflict, not the conflict itself; and I must confess that the battle-scene in Heldenleben, save for the merely intellectual pleasure obtained from analyzing its structure, affects me, as music, little more than would a powerful version of our old friend ‘The Battle of Prague,’with its egregious Early-Victorian annotations, ‘cannon in the distance,’ ‘cries of the wounded,’and so forth. But when Strauss passes from this melodramatic lowland to that lofty region of generalized emotion in which Music lives and moves and has her being, what a transformation! What sublime simplicity, what infinite tenderness pervade the closing stanzas of that enchanting tone-poem! Music has found herself once more; she speaks again with her natural voice to her own people; and after heartfelt thanksgiving they recall the battle-scene, and murmur, Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galére ?

But though in certain of its escapades Programme Music may make the judicious grieve, its assumption of functions hitherto undertaken only by the poet and painter has undoubtedly raised the art of Music in the esteem of that large body of intellectual folk who are only slightly musical; to them ‘absolute’ music brings but a vague and dim pleasure. Though too well-bred and perhaps a little afraid to say so, in their heart of hearts they suspect it of being just a little trivial or sensuous; they are inclined to patronize it, somewhat after the manner of the substantial English country gentleman of fifty years ago. But such people are beginning to take Programme Music seriously. ‘Ah! — now you are talking,’one seems to hear them say to the composer. They may not enjoy the really musical part of the music, but they do apprehend the definite images with which it is associated; the composer is speaking in a language not wholly foreign to them. He has thrown a sop to Cerberus, and is consequently now acclaimed in sacred circles to which entrance had long been denied him. Programme Music bids fair to stamp his creations with the hall-mark of the intellectuals at the court of Fashion.

In this respect, the composer of Programme Music is rendering a solid, if somewhat oblique, service to a good cause, to wit, the popularizing of serious music. Allured by definite images, a large number of semi-musical people of intellect are becoming interested in Programme Music, and eventually may be induced thereby to cultivate the fields of music pure and simple. I have heard musical purists say hard things of the composer who thus makes to himself friends of the Mammon of unrighteousness; they dub him timeserver, perhaps truly; but a timeserver in serving his generation may be serving generations yet unborn; compromise, in this as in most things, is wisdom on our imperfect planet; and the poet who lends his verse to the musician, to be distorted for good musical purposes, is no less a time-server than the musician who for another good purpose materializes his music by associating it with concrete images alien to its genius. By means of this compromise, Music and Poetry win for each other adherents in fields which would otherwise remain outside their influence.

To put it bluntly, music helps the musical but unpoetical man to appreciate poetry; poetry helps the poetical but unmusical man to appreciate music. An accomplished professional musician recently assured me that although he had often read FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, he never felt its force, or realized its beauty, till he heard Bantock’s musical setting thereof. To him poetry was a foreign language, to which music had supplied explanatory notes in his native tongue. That is a clear case of music helping an unpoetical man to appreciate poetry. Conversely, there are many unmusical people who will listen intently to a song, with even more pleasure than they would listen to the verse alone, but who would be bored by the music if detached from the words. We all know such people, and they afford clear evidence of the fact that poetry helps an unmusical man to appreciate music. It does so in several ways: —

1. The unmusical hearer unconsciously reads into the music some of the pleasure which the words alone would have given him.

2. The words endow the music with a significance which the unmusical man would fail to detect in the music alone. For him the words are a key to the music.

3. The distinctly human element which words import into the music touches him in a way in which the music by itself would not touch him. Such a man would enjoy, let us say, Schumann’s ‘Nachtstuck’ far more if there were words to it; whereas to a musical man words would restrict its scope, and materialize the delicacy of its spiritual atmosphere.

4. Words can best display the powers of that most beautiful and sympathetic of all instruments, the human voice, whose accents penetrate many a soul which the tones of any other instrument fail to reach. This is, I suppose, the chief reason for the popularity of the song above every other form of musical composition.

The fact that words help the unmusical man to appreciate music is responsible for a ‘new art-form’ in which this service is frightfully abused. We are threatened with a revival of that ancient abomination, the recitation of words to musical accompaniment, or, as its advocates prefer to describe it, the illustration of music by recited words. I have lately been shown a poem which it is proposed to recite, not in the intervals of the movements of a string-quartette, but during the actual performance of the music. I cannot conceive anything more wildly irritating to a discriminating lover of music and poetry; yet it seems, alas, possible that such a proceeding might give pleasure to some ears insensitive to music but sensitive to poetry, or vice versa; though even then, I should have supposed, the interference of the one set of sounds with the other would have caused a sense of discomfort at least. Like so many other new horrors, it is nothing but an old horror in a new dress, a pretentious variety of that vulgar device in which the sentimental spoken words of a melodrama are accompanied by ‘soft music.’ To a lover alike of poetry and music the effect is akin to the torment which such a man suffers when he goes into a restaurant to dine with a friend, and suddenly into the midst of intimate talk there intrudes the maddening impertinence of the restaurant band. He cannot listen to the music; he cannot listen to his friend; and he is soon worked up into a state of frenzy. May Heaven in its infinite mercy deliver us from this ‘new art-form!’

The consideration of the fact that poetry helps the unmusical man to appreciate music naturally suggests the inquiry, What type of poetry is best adapted for musical setting? Unquestionably, it would appear, poetry of an obvious kind, dealing with primary emotions. In dramatic poetry, in the ballad, the folk-song, and the simple lyric, we have a style of poetry admirably suited to the purposes of the musician; in poetry of a more abstract type also, provided that it is suffused with the atmosphere of emotion, whether the emotion be lofty or lowly, gay or serious. When, after the impressive orchestral introduction, in the solemn chorus of Brahms’s Requiem, we hear emerge through the music the massive words ‘All flesh is as grass,’ we feel at once the kinship of the two great arts, and the mutual help which they may render one to the other. The partnership of the two arts here proves successful, because the words express a large general reflection deeply tinged with emotion, such as music can strongly emphasize. But though in this instance the theme is a lofty one, it is the atmospheric quality of the words which matters, not the dignity of the emotion.

Ruskin, who, with all his sensitiveness to the beauty of language, was not a musical man, wanders, I think, far from the truth when he says that a maiden may sing of her lost love, but a miser may not sing of his lost gold. Why not? The emotion of the miser, however ignoble its origin, is nevertheless genuine emotion; and its atmosphere can be conveyed by music just as expressively as the atmosphere of the maiden’s nobler feeling. Wagner has, in fact, conveyed the atmosphere of such a base-born passion, with extraordinary vividness, in the case of Alberich and his loss of the Rhinegold. All depends upon the souls of the poet and musician being attuned to the same degree and quality of emotion; and when this is not the case, disaster follows. Surely the Nadir in this respect was reached in the ‘Cujus animam’ section of Rossini’s Stabat Mater. The words of the old monastic poem are poignant with the anguish of the Mother of the Crucified; the music, pompous and jubilant, would be appropriate to some jolly ceremonial occasion, the trooping of the colors, say, or the opening of the new winter gardens. Indeed I have actually heard it performed on such occasions with excellent effect.

Philosophical poetry, at any rate, where it becomes argumentative, intricat e, and unemotional, is wholly unsuit - ed to musical illustration. An intellectual disquisition is hopeless matter for music; as well try to set to music the Differential Calculus. Of course the Differential Calculus might lie set to music, and the music might even be beautiful, but would it bear any natural relation whatever to the theme in hand? No; it is the large, vague, subtle, elusive emotions of the soul which are the proper raw material for music of the philosophic sort.

Music is hanging weights on her wings when she meddles with metaphysical speculations, just as surely as when she stoops to imitate a baby s cry. In so doing she renounces her birt hright of universality, which is her proudest privilege. Why should she worry about the ‘Thee in Me, or the ' Me within Thee Blind,’ when it is hers, and hers alone, to ‘hale souls out of men’s bodies’ with a voice understanded of the people the wide world over; when she alone, with faculty transcending the confusion of tongues, can suggest, as no other art can suggest, the ineffable mystery of love, the impalpable shadow of death? Is not the labored t ramp of unseen feet in Chopin’s Funeral March more big with suggestion than any actual funeral cortège of any particular hero? Do not the shifting tone-lights of Tristan and Isolde’s love-duet hint at a passion more delicate, more sublime, than is known to mortal man and maid? Does not the rhythmic heart-beat of the music, in the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, throb with some vast yearning, striving to be born, looming out of the void, a yearning at once cosmic and human, whose wistfulness exceeds all that we can predicate of it? Yes; where speech fails, where argument and analysis collapse, there Music reigns, sole and triumphant. She need not covet alien kingdoms.

The mistake of confounding the respective spheres of Music and Poetry arises mainly from a defective appreciation of one or the other art. A man who is equally sensitive to the appeal of each does not make this mistake, does not mix these divine liquors. In the majority of people, either the ear for music or the ear for verbal beauty is defective or undeveloped; more frequently, I think, the ear for verbal beauty. It is difficult otherwise to account for the rarity of ardent lovers of poetry. It is not the demand which Poetry makes on the intellect, by reason of its compactness and intensity of expression, which is responsible for the sparse congregations in the temple of Poetry. If that were so, we should not find it neglected by men and women who shrink from no mental effort in grappling with some difficult chapter of philosophy or stiff scientific problem. No; it is simply because the peculiar acoustic beauty of fine verse, which gives some of us a thrill equaled only by the thrill of music, does not affect them in that wise. They may delight to study the poetry of Browning or Meredith, but it is for the sake of the intellectual content of the poems, or the pleasure of cracking hard linguistic nuts, not for the sake of enjoying an acoustic beauty which, in sooth, those two particular poets seldom exhibit. The highest type of poetry, that wherein the quintessence of remembered emotion is expressed with perfect clarity and sincerity, in exquisitely chosen words, and phrasing of subtle balance, such poetry fails to thrill the majority of men. Its verbal beauty is a thing per se, the essential thing in poetry, without which poetry, however admirable in other respects, is essentially prose; and this peculiar verbal beauty, with the special kind of pleasure which it bestows, cannot be translated into the medium of music or of any other art.

Take, for example, such a poem as ‘The Toys,’ by Coventry Patmore, a poem of which the motive happens to be wide in its appeal to popular human instincts: how comes it that it is known and loved by so few? Simply because its pathetic details, its tender play of emotion, its wonderful ascent from the trivial to the sublime, are expressed in verse to the delicate verbal beauty of which most ears are deaf. That peculiar verbal beauty is of the essence of the poem, and could not possibly be translated into music.

Or let us take a widely different: example from a living author,¹ a poem classic in the calm dignity of its language, nobly plain, tense with controlled emotion. The poet looks Death in the eyes; for him death is the end of all things. Let those who, gazing into that gray face, can pluck up no better spirit, cry ‘Let us drink and eat; for tomorrow we die.’ The poet has a loftier answer to the eternal Nay, and thus exhorts his lady; —

Here again, the thing of beauty which the poet has woven out of the mists of unbelief, the rainbow which the setting sun of his love has flung athwart the blank prospect of annihilation, above all, the peculiar verbal beauty of the faultless lyric, are things that cannot possibly be translated into music.

A full appreciation of Poetry implies four conditions precedent: —

1. A discriminating sensitiveness to the verbal beauty of verse. 2. Recognition of the fitness of the words chosen to express the thought and feeling. 3. Comprehension of the thought and feeling itself in all its bearings. 4. Understanding of the technical structure of the verse in mass and in detail.

Similarly, a full appreciation of Music implies: —

1. A discriminating sensitiveness to the musical beauty of music. 2. Recognition of the fitness of the notes, the musical phraseology, chosen to express the thought and feeling. 3. Comprehension of the thought and feeling itself in all its bearings. 4. Understanding of the technical structure of the music in mass and in detail.

In the case of Music and Poetry alike, these are highly complex mental processes; and few there be who are fully equipped by nature and education to follow them out in all their subtle intricacies. In regard to the second, third, and fourth conditions the appeal is to somewhat the same faculties in each art. Given a knowledge both of music and poetry, the understanding of the structure of a fugue is closely analogous to the understanding of the structure of a sonnet; and the technical satisfaction obtained from a masterly example of the one or the other is very similar. Comprehension of the intellectual and emotional contents of a musical or poetical composition, and recognition of the effectiveness of the means employed to express them, demand much the same faculty in each case.

But the first condition precedent, the essential condition, namely, a discriminating sensitiveness to the verbal beauty of verse, is something totally distinct from a discriminating sensitiveness to ihe musical beauty of music, and is a condition which renders the appreciation of Music a totally distinct thing from the appreciation of Poetry; and it is because this first condition is so seldom satisfied, that genuine lovers of Poetry are so rare.

I have deliberately refrained from following those well-worn paths of musical and poetical investigation which lie in the domain of exact knowledge. I have avoided the mathematics of music, the laws of prosody, and such questions as the derivation of primitive music and poetry from the dance, topics which occupy the fields of ascertained scientific or historic fact; and have ventured to deal with those evasive aspects of the subject which are beset with difficulties and ambiguities. But I am content if I have succeeded in suggesting any lines of thought which may help lovers of Music and Poetry to realize a little more of the mystery of those great arts, or to quicken their aspirations toward that transcendent region where the distinct and many-colored rays of Music and Poetry, with all other manifestations of beauty, blend into one clear light.