THE LADY OF THE LYRICS

She is eclipsed, or gone, or in hiding.  But the sixteenth century took her for granted as the object of song; she was a class, a state, a sex.  It was scarcely necessary to waste the lyrist’s time—­time that went so gaily to metre as not to brook delays—­in making her out too clearly.  She had no more of what later times call individuality than has the rose, her rival, her foil when she was kinder, her superior when she was cruel, her ever fresh and ever conventional paragon.  She needed not to be devised or divined; she was ready.  A merry heart goes all the day; the lyrist’s never grew weary.  Honest men never grow tired of bread or of any other daily things whereof the sweetness is in their own simplicity.

The lady of the lyrics was not loved in mortal earnest, and her punishment now and then for her ingratitude was to be told that she was loved in jest.  She did not love; her fancy was fickle; she was not moved by long service, which, by the way, was evidently to be taken for granted precisely like the whole long past of a dream.  She had not a good temper.  When the poet groans it seems that she has laughed at him; when he flouts her, we may understand that she has chidden her lyrist in no temperate terms.  In doing this she has sinned not so much against him as against Love.  With that she is perpetually reproved.  The lyrist complains to Love, pities Love for her scorning, and threatens to go away with Love, who is on his side.  The sweetest verse is tuned to love when the loved one proves worthy.

There is no record of success for this policy.  She goes on dancing or scolding, as the case may be, and the lyrist goes on boasting of his constancy, or suddenly renounces it for a day.  The situation has variants, but no surprise or ending.  The lover’s convention is explicit enough, but it might puzzle a reader to account for the lady’s.  Pride in her beauty, at any rate, is hers—­pride so great that she cannot bring herself to perceive the shortness of her day.  She is so unobservant as to need to be told that life is brief, and youth briefer than life; that the rose fades, and so forth.

Now we need not assume that the lady of the lyrics ever lived.  But taking her as the perfectly unanimous conception of the lyrists, how is it she did not discover these things unaided?  Why does the lover invariably imagine her with a mind intensely irritable under his own praise and poetry?  Obviously we cannot have her explanation of any of these matters.  Why do the poets so much lament the absence of truth in one whose truth would be of little moment?  And why was the convention so pleasant, among all others, as to occupy a whole age—­nay, two great ages—­of literature?