Part 21

the octave scale attributed to Pythagoras, was admitted, to preserve the time-honoured seven strings one note had to be omitted; it was therefore customary to omit the C, which in Greek practice was a dissonance. The Greek names for the strings of seven and eight stringed lyres, the first note being highest in pitch and nearest the player, were as follows: _Nete_, _Paranete_, _Paramese_; _Mese_, _Lichanos_, _Parhypate_, _Hypate_; or _Nete_, _Paranete_, _Trite_, _Paramese_; _Mese_, _Lichanos_, _Parhypate_, _Hypate_--the last four from Mese to Hypate being the finger tetrachord, the others touched with the plectrum. The highest string in pitch was called the last, [Greek: neate]; the lowest in pitch was called the highest, [Greek: hypate], because it was, in theory at least, the longest string. The keynote and thumb string was [Greek: mese], middle; the next lower was [Greek: lichanos], the first finger or lick-finger string; [Greek: trite], the third, being in the plectrum division, was also known as [Greek: oxeia], sharp, perhaps from the dissonant quality to which we have referred as the cause of its omission. The plectrum and finger tetrachords together were [Greek: diapason], through all; in the disjunct scale, an octave.

In transcribing the Greek notes into our notation, the absolute pitch cannot be represented; the relative positions of the semitones are alone determined. We have already quoted the scale of Pythagoras, the Dorian or true Greek succession:--

[Illustration: musical notes.]

Shifting the semitone one degree upwards in each tetrachord, we have the Phrygian

[Illustration: musical notes.]

Another degree gives the Lydian

[Illustration: musical notes.]

which would be our major scale of E were not the keynote A. The names imply an Asiatic origin. We need not here pursue further the much-debated question of Greek scales and their derivation; it will suffice to remark that the outside notes of the tetrachords were fixed in their tuning as perfect fourths--the inner strings being, as stated, in diatonic sequence, or when chromatic two half-tones were tuned, when enharmonic two quarter-tones, leaving respectively the wide intervals of a minor and major third, and both impure, to complete the tetrachord. (A. J. H.)

See the article by Theodore Reinach in Daremberg and Saglio, _Antiguites grecques et romaines_; Wilhelm Johnsen, _Die Lyra, ein Beitrag zur griechischen Kunstgeschichte_ (Berlin, 1876); Hortense Panum, "Harfe und Lyra in Nord Europa," _Intern. Mus. Ges._, Sbd. vii. 1, pp. 1-40 (Leipzig, 1905); A. J. Hipkins, "Dorian and Phrygian, reconsidered from a non-harmonic point of view," in _Intern. Mus. Ges._ (Leipzig, 1903), iv. 3.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See Ed. Gerhard, _Auserlesene griech. Vasenbilder_, part iii. (Berlin, 1847), pl. 236 and p. 157.

[2] See Aristotle, _Polit_. v. 6. 5.

LYRE-BIRD, the name by which one of the most remarkable birds Of Australia is commonly known, the _Menura superba_ or _M. novae-hollandiae_ of ornithologists. It was first observed in 1798 in New South Wales, and though called by its finders a "pheasant"--from its long tail--the more learned of the colony seem to have regarded it as a bird-of-Paradise.[1] A specimen having reached England in 1799, it was described by General Davies as forming a new genus of birds, in the Linnean Society's _Transactions_ (vi. p. 207, pl. xxii.), no attempt, however, being made to fix its systematic place. In 1802 L. P. Vieillot figured and described it in a supplement to his _Oiseaux Dorés_ as a bird-of-Paradise (ii. pp. 30 seq., pls. 14-16), from drawings by Sydenham Edwards, sent him by Parkinson, the manager of the Leverian Museum. The first to describe any portion of its anatomy was T. C. Eyton, who in 1841 (_Ann. Nat. History_, vii. pp. 49-53) perceived that it was a Passerine bird and that it presented some points of affinity to the South American genus _Pteroptochus_. In 1867 Huxley stated that he was disposed to divide his very natural assemblage the _Coracomorphae_ (essentially identical with Eyton's _Insessores_) into two groups, "one containing _Menura_, and the other all the other genera which have yet been examined" (_Proc. Zool. Soc._, 1867, p. 472)--a still further step in advance.[2] In 1875 A. Newton put forth the opinion in his article on birds, in the 9th edition of this _Encyclopaedia_, that _Menura_ had an ally in another Australian form, _Atrichia_ (see SCRUB-BIRD), which he had found to present peculiarities hitherto unsuspected, and he regarded them as standing by themselves, though each constituting a distinct family. This opinion was partially adopted in the following year by A. H. Garrod, who (_Proc. Zool. Society_, 1876, p. 518) formally placed these two genera together in his group of Abnormal Acromyodian _Oscines_ under the name of _Menurinae_; ornithologists now generally recognize at once the alliance and distinctness of the families Menuridae and Atrichiidae, and place them together to form the group _Suboscines_ of the Diacromyodian _Passeres_.

Since the appearance in 1865 of J. Gould's _Handbook to the Birds of Australia_, little important information has been published concerning the habits of this form, and the account therein given must be drawn upon for what here follows. Of all birds, says that author, the _Menura_ is the most shy and hard to procure. He has been among the rocky and thick "brushes"--its usual haunts--hearing its loud and liquid call-notes for days together without getting sight of one. Those who wish to see it must advance only while it is singing or scratching up the earth and leaves; and to watch its actions they must keep perfectly still. The best way of procuring an example seems to be by hunting it with dogs, when it will spring upon a branch to the height of 10 ft. and afford an easy shot ere it has time to ascend farther or escape as it does by leaps. Natives are said to hunt it by fixing on their heads the erected tail of a cock-bird, which alone is allowed to be seen above the brushwood. The greater part of its time is said to be passed upon the ground, and seldom are more than a pair to be found in company. One of the habits of the cock is to form small round hillocks, which he constantly visits during the day, mounting upon them and displaying his tail by erecting it over his head, drooping his wings, scratching and pecking at the soil, and uttering various cries--some his own natural notes, others an imitation of those of other animals. The tail, his most characteristic feature, only attains perfection in the bird's third or fourth year, and then not until the month of June, remaining until October, when the feathers are shed to be renewed the following season. The food consists of insects, especially beetles and myriapods, as well as snails. The nest is placed near to or on the ground, at the base of a rock or foot of a tree, and is closely woven of fine but strong roots or other fibres, and lined with feathers, around all which is heaped a mass, in shape of an oven, of sticks, grass, moss and leaves, so as to project over and shelter the interior structure, while an opening in the side affords entrance and exit. Only one egg is laid, and this of rather large size in proportion to the bird, of a purplish-grey colour, suffused and blotched with dark purplish-brown.

Incubation is believed to begin in July or August, and the young is hatched about a month later. It is at first covered with dark down, and appears to remain for some weeks in the nest. It is greatly to be hoped that so remarkable a form as the lyre-bird, the nearly sole survivor apparently of a very ancient race of beings, will not be allowed to become extinct--its almost certain fate so far as can be judged--without many more observations of its manners being made. Several examples of _Menura_ have been brought alive to Europe, and some have long survived in captivity.

[Illustration: FIG. 1.]

[Illustration: FIG. 2.]

[Illustration: FIG. 3.]

Three species of _Menura_ have been indicated--the old _M. superba_, the lyre-bird proper, which inhabits New South Wales, the southern part of Queensland, and perhaps some parts of Victoria; _M. victoriae_, separated from the former by Gould (_Proc. Zool. Soc._, 1862, p. 23), and said to take its place near Melbourne; and _M. alberti_, first described by C. L. Bonaparte (_Consp. Avium_, i. 215) on Gould's authority, and, though discovered on the Richmond river in New South Wales, having apparently a more northern range than the other two. All those have the apparent bulk of a hen pheasant, but are really much smaller, and their general plumage is of a sooty brown, relieved by rufous on the chin, throat, some of the wing-feathers and the tail-coverts. The wings, consisting of twenty-one remiges, are rather short and rounded; the legs[3] and feet very strong, with long, nearly straight claws. In the immature and female the tail is somewhat long, though affording no very remarkable character, except the possession of sixteen rectrices; but in the fully-plumaged male of _M. superba_ and _M. victoriae_ it is developed in the extraordinary fashion that gives the bird its common English name. The two exterior feathers (fig. 1, a, b) have the outer web very narrow, the inner very broad, and they curve at first outwards, then somewhat inwards, and near the tip outwards again, bending round forwards so as to present a lyre-like form. But this is not all; their broad inner web, which is of a lively chestnut colour, is apparently notched at regular intervals by spaces that, according to the angle at which they are viewed, seem either black or transparent; and this effect is, on examination, found to be due to the barbs at those spaces being destitute of barbules. The middle pair of feathers (fig. 2, a, b) is nearly as abnormal. These have no outer web, and the inner web very narrow; near their base they cross each other, and then diverge, bending round forwards near their tip. The remaining twelve feathers (fig. 3) except near the base are very thinly furnished with barbs, about ¼ in. apart, and those they possess, on their greater part, though long and flowing, bear no barbules, and hence have a hair-like appearance. The shafts of all are exceedingly strong. In the male of _M. alberti_ the tail is not only not lyriform, but the exterior rectrices are shorter than the rest. (A. N.)

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Collins, _Account of New South Wales_, ii. 87-92 (London, 1802).

[2] Owing to the imperfection of the specimen at his disposal, Huxley's brief description of the bones of the head in _Menura_ is not absolutely correct. A full description of them, with elaborate figures, is given by Parker in the same Society's _Transactions_ (ix. 306-309, pl. lvi. figs. 1-5).

[3] The metatarsals are very remarkable in form, as already noticed by Eyton (_loc. cit._), and their tendons strongly ossified.

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. In the earliest times it may be said that all poetry was of its essence lyrical. 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. 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_. These poems were styled epic, in direct contradistinction to the lyric of Pindar and Bacchylides. But inexactly, since it is plain that they were recited, with a plain accompaniment on a stringed instrument. However, the distinction between epical and lyrical, between [Greek: ta epe], what was said, and [Greek: ta mele], what was sung, is accepted, and neither Homer nor Hesiod is among the lyrists. 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. 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 is to ignore the metrical form of the poem, and to deal with its character only. 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 impossible, and recalls us to the importance of taking the form into consideration. But, with this warning, the definition of Hegel is valuable. It is, as he insists, the personal thought, or passion, or inspiration, which gives its character to lyrical poetry.

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 easier to exclude the dramatic species from lyric than to banish the epic. There are large sections of drama which it is inconceivable should be set to music, or sung, or even given in recitative. 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. 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 tendency of modern drama is to divide itself further and further from lyric, but in early ages the two kinds were indissoluble. Tragedy was goat-song, and the earliest specimens of it were mainly composed of choruses. As Prof. G. G. Murray says, in the _Suppliants_ of Aeschylus, the characters "are singing for two-thirds of the play," accompanied by tumultuous music. This primitive feature has gradually been worn away; the chorus grew less and less prominent, and disappeared; the very verse-ornament of drama tends to vanish, and we have plays essentially so poetical as those of Ibsen and Maeterlinck written from end to end in bare prose.

To return again to Greece, there was an early distinction, soon accentuated, between the poetry chanted by a choir of singers, and the song which expressed the sentiments of a single poet. The latter, the [Greek: melos] or song proper, had reached a height of technical perfection in "the Isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved and sung," as early as the 7th century B.C. That poetess, and her contemporary Alcaeus, divide the laurels of the pure Greek song of Dorian inspiration. By their side, and later, flourished the great poets who set words to music for choirs, Alcman, Arion, Stesichorus, Simonides and Ibycus, who lead us at the close of the 5th century to Bacchylides and Pindar, in whom the magnificent tradition of the dithyrambic odes reached its highest splendour of development. The practice of Pindar and Sappho, we may say, has directed the course of lyrical poetry ever since, and will, unquestionably, continue to do so. They discovered how, with the maximum of art, to pour forth strains of personal magic and music, whether in a public or a private way. The ecstasy, the uplifted magnificence, of lyrical poetry could go no higher than it did in the unmatched harmonies of these old Greek poets, but it could fill a much wider field and be expressed with vastly greater variety. It did so in their own age. The gnomic verses of Theognis were certainly sung; so were the satires of Archilochus and the romantic reveries of Mimnermus.

At the Renaissance, when the traditions of ancient life were taken up eagerly, and hastily comprehended, it was thought proper to divide poetry into a diversity of classes. The earliest English critic who enters into a discussion of the laws of prosody, William Webbe, lays it down, in 1586, that in verse "the most usual kinds are four, the heroic, elegiac, iambic and lyric." Similar confusion of terms was common among the critics of the 15th and 16th centuries, and led to considerable error. It is plain that a border ballad is heroic, and may yet be lyrical; here the word "heroic" stands for "epic." It is plain that whether a poem is lyrical or not had nothing to do with the question whether it is composed in an iambic measure. Finally, it is undoubted that the early Greek "elegies" were sung to an accompaniment on the flute, whether they were warlike, like those of Tyrtaeus, or philosophical and amatory like those of Theognis. But (see ELEGY) the present significance of "elegy," and this has been the case ever since late classical times, is funereal; in modern parlance an elegy is a dirge. Whether the great Alexandrian dirges, like those of Bion and of Moschus, on which our elegiacal tradition is founded, were actually sung to an accompaniment or not may be doubted; they seem too long, too elaborate, and too ornate for that. But, at any rate, they were composed on the convention that they would be sung, and it is conceivable that music might have been wedded to the most complex of these Alexandrian elegies. Accordingly, although _Lycidas_ and _Adonais_ are not habitually "set to music," there is no reason why they should not be so set, and their rounded and limited although extensive form links them with the song, not with the epic. There are many odes of Swinburne's for which it would be more difficult to write music than for his _Ave atque Vale_. In fact, in spite of its solemn and lugubrious regularity, the formal elegy or dirge is no more nor less than an ode, and is therefore entirely lyrical.

More difficulty is met with in the case of the sonnet, for although no piece of verse, when it is inspired by subjective passion, fits more closely with Hegel's definition of what lyrical poetry should be, yet the rhythmical complication of the sonnet, and its rigorous uniformity, seem particularly ill-fitted to interpretation on a lyre. When F. M. degli Azzi put the book of Genesis (1700) into sonnets, and Isaac de Benserade the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid (1676) into rondeaux, these eccentric and laborious versifiers produced what was epical rather than lyrical poetry, if poetry it was at all. But the sonnet as Shakespeare, Wordsworth and even Petrarch used it was a cry from the heart, a subjective confession, and although there is perhaps no evidence that a sonnet was ever set to music with success, yet there is no reason why that might not be done without destroying its sonnet-character.

Jouffroy was perhaps the first aesthetician to see quite clearly that lyrical poetry is, really, nothing more than another name for poetry itself, that it includes all the personal and enthusiastic part of what lives and breathes in the art of verse, so that the divisions of pedantic criticism are of no real avail to us in its consideration. We recognize a narrative or epical poetry; we recognize drama; in both of these, when the individual inspiration is strong, there is much that trembles on the verge of the lyrical. But outside what is pure epic and pure drama, all, or almost all, is lyrical. We say almost all, because the difficulty arises of knowing where to place descriptive and didactic poetry. The _Seasons_ of Thomson, for instance, a poem of high merit and lasting importance in the history of literature--where is that to be placed? What is to be said of the _Essay on Man_? In primitive times, the former would have been classed under epic, the second would have been composed in the supple iambic trimeter which so closely resembled daily speech, and would not have been sharply distinguished from prose. Perhaps this classification would still serve, were it not for the element of versification, which makes a sharp line of demarcation between poetic art and prose. This complexity of form, rhythmical and stanzaic, takes much of the place which was taken in antiquity by such music as Terpander is supposed to have supplied. In a perfect lyric by a modern writer the instrument is the metrical form, to which the words have to adapt themselves. There is perhaps no writer who has ever lived in whose work this phenomenon may be more fruitfully studied than it may be in the songs and lyrics of Shelley. The temper of such pieces as "Arethusa" and "The Cloud" is indicated by a form hardly more ambitious than a guitar; Hellas is full of passages which suggest the harp; in his songs Shelley touches the lute or viol de gamba, while in the great odes to the "West Wind" and to "Liberty" we listen to a verse-form which reminds us by its volume of the organ itself. On the whole subject of the nature of lyric poetry no commentary can be more useful to the student than an examination of the lyrics of Shelley in relation to those of the songwriters of ancient Greece.

See Hegel, _Die Phänomenologie des Geistes_ (1807); T. S. Jouffroy, _Cours d'esthétique_ (1843); W. Christ, _Metrik der Griechen und Römer_, 2te. Aufl. (1879). (E. G.)

LYSANDER (Gr. [Greek: Lysandros]), son of Aristocritus, Spartan admiral and diplomatist. Aelian (_Var. Hist._ xii. 43) and Phylarchus (_ap._ Athen. vi. 271 e) say that he was a _mothax_, i.e. the son of a helot mother (see HELOTS), but this tradition is at least doubtful; according to Plutarch he was a Heraclid, though not of either royal family. We do not know how he rose to eminence: he first appears as admiral of the Spartan navy in 407 B.C. The story of his influence with Cyrus the Younger, his naval victory off Notium, his quarrel with his successor Callicratidas in 406, his appointment as [Greek: epistoleus] in 405, his decisive victory at Aegospotami, and his share in the siege and capitulation of Athens belong to the history of the Peloponnesian War (q.v.). By 404 he was the most powerful man in the Greek world and set about completing the task of building up a Spartan empire in which he should be supreme in fact if not in name. Everywhere democracies were replaced by oligarchies directed by bodies of ten men (decarchies, [