Tragedy was goat-song, and the earliest specimens of it were mainly composed of choruses. The tendency of modern drama is to divide itself further and further from lyric, but in early ages the two kinds were indissoluble. The intensity of feeling and the melody of verse in Othello does not make that work an example of lyrical poetry, and this is even more acutely true of Le Misanthrope, which is, nevertheless, a poem. The tragedies of Racine, for example, are composed of the purest poetry, but they are essentially non-lyrical, although lyrical portions are here and there attached to them. There are large sections of drama which it is inconceivable should be set to music, or sung, or even given in recitative. It is easier to exclude the dramatic species from lyric than to banish the epic. The lyric has the function of revealing, in terms of pure art, the secrets of the inner life, its hopes, its fantastic joys, its sorrows, its delirium. It is, as he insists, the personal thought, or passion, or inspiration, which gives its character to lyrical poetry. But, with this warning, the definition of Hegel is valuable. This is impossible, and recalls us to the importance of taking the form into consideration. It would constrain us to regard Wordsworth's Excursion as a lyric, and Tennyson's Revenge (where the subject is treated exactly as one of the Homeridae would have treated an Ionian myth) as an epic. This is to ignore the metrical form of the poem, and to deal with its character only. Hegel, who has gone minutely into this question in his Esthetik, contends that when poetry is objective it is epical, and when it is subjective it is lyrical. This distinction, however, is often without a difference, as for example, in the case of the so-called Hymns of Homer, epical in form but wholly lyrical in character. However, the distinction between epical and lyrical, between Ta €rn, what was said, and Ta ♞Art, what was sung, is accepted, and neither Homer nor Hesiod is among the lyrists. But inexactly, since it is plain that they were recited, with a plain accompaniment on a stringed instrument. These poems were styled epic, in direct contradistinction to the lyric of Pindar and Bacchylides. Homer and Hesiod are each of them represented with a lyre, yet if any poetry can be described as non-lyrical, it is surely the archaic hexameter of the Iliad and the Erga. The primeval oracles were chanted in verse, and the Orphic and Bacchic Mysteries, which were celebrated at Eleusis and elsewhere, combined, it is certain, metre with music. In the earliest times it may be said that all poetry was of its essence lyrical. LYRICAL POETRY, a general term for all poetry which is, or can be supposed to be, susceptible of being sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument.
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