Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/283

Rh 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 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.

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. 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.

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 and, 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.

 POGGENDORFF, (1796-1877), physicist, and editor for more than half a century of the well-known scientific journal called after him Poggendorff's Annalen, was born in Hamburg on the 29th December 1796. His father, a wealthy manufacturer of that town, was all but ruined by the French siege. His son Christian, after receiving his education at Hamburg and Schiffbeck, had therefore, when only sixteen, to apprentice himself to an apothecary in Hamburg, and when twenty-two began to earn his living as an apothecary's assistant at Itzehoe. Ambition and a strong inclination towards a scientific career led him to throw up his business and remove to Berlin, where he entered the university in 1820. Here his abilities were speedily recognized, and in 1823 he was appointed meteorological observer to the Academy of Sciences with a small salary, which was important to him, inasmuch as the expenses of his university career had nearly exhausted his slender patrimony. Even at this early period he had conceived the idea of founding a physical and chemical scientific journal. The realization of this plan was hastened by the sudden death of Gilbert, the editor of Gilbert's Annalen der Physik, in 1824. Poggendorff immediately put himself in communication with the publisher, Barth of Leipsic, with the result that he was installed as editor of a scientific journal which was to be a continuation of Gilbert's Annalen on a somewhat extended plan, indicated by its title Annalen der Physik und Chemie. Poggendorff was admirably qualified for the post which he thus attained. He had an extraordinary memory, well-stored with scientific knowledge, both modern and historical, which served him in good stead in the critical part of his editorial duty. He had a cool and impartial judgment, with a strong preference for facts as against theory of the speculative kind at least, and was able to throw himself into the spirit of modern experimental science, represented in the early part of his editorial career by such great names as, , , ,. He also possessed in more than German measure the German virtue of orderliness in the arrangement of knowledge and in the conduct of business. To this he added an engaging geniality of manner and much tact in dealing with men; so marked in fact was this part of his character that, notwithstanding his somewhat trying position, he never during his long life was involved in anything that could be fairly called a literary quarrel. These qualities of its editor soon made Poggendorff's Annalen the foremost scientific journal in Europe. He collected around him all the eminent  XIX. - 35