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Having been embraced and kissed, she had to consider her taste for the man, and acknowledge a neatness of impetuosity in the deed; and he was neither apologizing culprit nor glorying-bandit when it was done, but something of the lyric God tempering his fervours to a pleased sereneness, not offering a renewal of them. He glowed transparently.
Being self-contained, the lyric is a harmonious whole, in which the parts may be repeated for emphasis; looking backward and forward, the dramatic utterance is a progressive and incomplete whole, which cannot stay for iteration. Lyric poetry is like a communication from friend to friend, intimate and meditative; dramatic poetry is like a passionate conversation which one overhears.
The Danube valley was a high road for the armies of crusaders; another route led from Northern Italy to Vienna, by which Peire Vidal probably found his way to Hungary. At the same time, though Provençal influence was strong, the Middle High German lyric rarely relapsed into mere imitation or translation of troubadour productions.
For the literature itself requires some introduction of mood for its romantic, homely, sentimental, essentially German qualities; the mere Anglo-Saxon or Latin being, methinks, incapable of caring at once for Wilhelm Meister, or Siebennkäs, or Götz, or the manifold lyric of Forest and Millstream.
The 'Scarlet Letter, for example, has not a little of the lofty largeness and of the stately movement of true tragedy; 'Paul and Virginia, again, abounds in a passionate self-revelation which is essentially lyric; and many a novel-with-a-purpose, needless to name here, displays its author's readiness to avail himself of all the devices of the orator.
In the first place it is in stanzas, and what Browning would have classed as a "Dramatic Lyric." The subject is as follows: The scene "a Madhouse," and the persons a Visitor, a Physician, and a Patient.
"Green rioting on olden ways it falls: The blue sky storms the ruined city walls; Yet since Wang Sun departed long ago, When the grass blooms both joy and fear I know." The Western reader, although wholly at the mercy of the translator, recognizes the pathos and beauty of the scene and thought expressed by the Chinese poet. But all that is specifically Chinese in lyric form is lost to him.
Suppose we follow Watts-Dunton's hint, and start, as if it were from a central point, with the Pure Lyric, the expression of the Ego in song. Shelley's "Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples," Coleridge's "Ode to Dejection," Wordsworth's "She dwelt among the untrodden ways," Tennyson's "Break Break" will serve for illustrations. These are subjective, personal poems.
The interruptions of the dialogue, however, impose a constraint upon the writer, and break the illusion of the reader. The finest passages are those which are lyric in form as well as in spirit.
Even your lyric poet, who more than any other artist stands or sings alone, falls easily into mere lyric eccentricity if he is not bound to his fellows by wholesome and normal ties. In fact, this lyric eccentricity, weakness, wistfulness, is one of the notable defects of American poetry. We have always been lacking in the more objective forms of literary art, like epic and drama.
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