number to entitle him to be placed beside a poet so prolific in heartiness and melody as Burns. With regard to Campbell's heartiness, this is quite a different quality from the heartiness of Burns and Skinner, and is in quality English rather than Scottish, though, no doubt, it is of a fine and rare strain, especially in "The Battle of the Baltic." His songs illustrate an infirmity which even the Scottish song-writers share with the English—a defective sense of that true song-warble which we get in the stornelli and rispetti of the Italian peasants. A poet may have heartiness in plenty, but if he has that love of consonantal effects which Donne displays he will never write a first-rate song. Here, indeed, is the crowning difficulty of song-writing. An extreme simplicity of structure and of diction must be accompanied by an instinctive apprehension of the melodic capabilities of verbal sounds, and of what Samuel Lover, the Irish song-writer, called "singing" words, which is rare in this country, and seems to belong to the Celtic rather than to the Saxon ear. "The song-writer," says Lover, "must frame his song of open vowels with as few guttural or hissing sounds as possible, and he must be content sometimes to sacrifice grandeur and vigour to the necessity of selecting singing words and not reading words." And he exemplifies the distinction between singing words and reading words by a line from one of Shelley's songs—
"'The fresh earth in new leaves drest,'
"where nearly every word shuts up the mouth instead of opening it." But closeness of vowel sounds is by no means the only thing to be avoided in song-writing. A phrase may be absolutely unsingable, though the vowels be open enough, if it is loaded with consonants. The truth is that in song-writing it is quite as important, in a consonantal language like ours, to attend to the consonants as to the vowels; and perhaps the first thing to avoid in writing English songs is the frequent recurrence of the sibilant. But this applies to all the brief and quintessential forms of poetry, such as the sonnet, the elegy, &c.
xxxx elegy.As to the elegy—a form of poetic art which has more relation to the objects of the external world than the song, but less relation to these than the stornello—its scope seems to be wide indeed, as practised by such various writers as Tyrtæus, Theognis, Catullus, Tibullus, and our own Gray. It may almost be said that perfection of form is more necessary here and in the sonnet than in the song, inasmuch as the artistic pretensions are more pronounced. Hence even such apparent minutiæ as those we have hinted at above must not be neglected here.
Perfection of detail demanded in the quintessential forms of poetry.We have quoted Dionysius of Halicarnassus in relation to the arrangement of words in poetry. His remarks on sibilants are equally deserving of attention. He goes so far as to say that σ is entirely disagreeable, and, when it often recurs, insupportable. The hiss seems to him to be more appropriate to the beast than to man. Hence certain writers, he says, often avoid it, and employ it with regret. Some, he tells us, have composed entire odes without it. But if sibilation is a defect in Greek odes, where the softening effect of the vowel sounds is so potent, it is much more so in English poetry, where the consonants dominate, though it will be only specially noticeable in the brief and quintessential forms such as the song, the sonnet, the elegy. Many poets only attend to their sibilants when these clog the rhythm. To write even the briefest song without a sibilant would be a tour de force; to write a good one would no doubt be next to impossible. It is singular that the only metricist who ever attempted it was John Thelwall, the famous "Citizen John," friend of Lamb and Coleridge, and editor of the famous Champion newspaper where many of Lamb's epigrams appeared. Thelwall gave much attention to metrical questions, and tried his hand at various metres. Though "Citizen John's" sapphics might certainly have been better, he had a very remarkable critical insight into the rationale of metrical effects, and his "Song without a Sibilant" is extremely neat and ingenious. Of course, however, it would be mere pedantry to exaggerate this objection to sibilants even in these brief forms of poetry.
As a fine art English poetry is receiving much attention in our time. Defective rhymes once allowable, and make shift work in general, are no longer tolerated. And we believe the time is not far distant when even such a subject as vowel composition (the arrangement of one vowel sound with regard to another) will have to be studied with the care which the Greeks evidently bestowed upon it.(t. w.)
