Germans, like the Welsh, can sing perfectly serious songs perfectly
seriously in chorus: can with clear eyes and clear voices join together
in words of innocent and beautiful personal passion, for a false maiden
or a dead child. The nearest one can get to defining the poetic temper
of Englishmen is to say that they couldn't do this even for beer. They
can sing in chorus, and louder than other Christians: but they must have
in their songs something, I know not what, that is at once shamefaced
and rowdy. If the matter be emotional, it must somehow be also broad,
common and comic, as "Wapping Old Stairs" and "Sally in Our Alley." If
it be patriotic, it must somehow be openly bombastic and, as it were,
indefensible, like "Rule Britannia" or like that superb song (I never
knew its name, if it has one) that records the number of leagues from
Ushant to the Scilly Isles. Also there is a tender love-lyric called "O
Tarry Trousers" which is even more English than the heart of _The
Midsummer Night's Dream_. But our greatest bards and sages have often
shown a tendency to rant it and roar it like true British sailors; to
employ an extravagance that is half conscious and therefore half
humorous. Compare, for example, the rants of Shakespeare with the rants
of Victor Hugo. A piece of Hugo's eloquence is either a serious triumph
or a serious collapse: one feels the poet is offended at a smile. But
Shakespeare seems rather proud of talking nonsense: I never can read
that rousing and mounting description of the storm, where it comes to--

"Who take the ruffian billows by the top,
Curling their monstrous heads, and _hanging_ them
With deafening clamour in the slippery clouds."

without seeing an immense balloon rising from the ground, with
Shakespeare grinning over the edge of the car, and saying, "You can't
stop me: I am above reason now." That is the nearest we can get to the