“his mother’s softness crept
To those wild eyes, which like an infant’s wept.”
If his crimes and love could be weighed in a celestial balance, weight
being apportioned to the rarity and value of the love, which would
descend?
The points indicated in Conrad’s character are not many, but they are
sufficient for its delineation, and it is a moral character. We must, of
course, get rid of the notion that the relative magnitude of the virtues
and vices according to the priest or society is authentic. A reversion
to the natural or divine scale has been almost the sole duty preached to
us by every prophet. If we could incorporate Conrad with ourselves we
should find that the greater part of what is worst in us would be
neutralised. The sins of which we are ashamed, the dirty, despicable
sins, Conrad could not have committed; and in these latter days they are
perhaps the most injurious.
We do not understand how moral it is to yield unreservedly to enthusiasm,
to the impression which great objects would fain make upon us, and to
embody that impression in worthy language. It is rare to meet now even
with young people who will abandon themselves to a heroic emotion, or
who, if they really feel it, do not try to belittle it in expression.
Byron’s poetry, above most, tempts and almost compels surrender to that
which is beyond the commonplace self.
It is not true that “The Corsair” is insincere. He who hears a note of
insincerity in Conrad and Medora may have ears, but they must be those of
the translated Bottom who was proud of having “a reasonable good ear in
music.” Byron’s romance has been such a power exactly because men felt
that it was not fiction and that his was one of the strongest minds of
his day. He was incapable of toying with the creatures of the fancy
which had no relationship with himself and through himself with humanity.
A word as to Byron’s hold upon the people. He was able to obtain a
hearing from ordinary men and women, who knew nothing even of
Shakespeare, save what they had seen at the theatre. Modern poetry is
the luxury of a small cultivated class. We may say what we like of
popularity, and if it be purchased by condescension to popular silliness
it is nothing. But Byron secured access to thousands of readers in
England and on the Continent by strength and loveliness, a feat seldom
equalled and never perhaps surpassed. The present writer’s father, a
compositor in a dingy printing office, repeated verses from “Childe
Harold” at the case. Still more remarkable, Byron reached one of this
writer’s friends, an officer in the Navy, of the ancient stamp; and the
attraction, both to printer and lieutenant, lay in nothing lower than
that which was best in him. It is surely a service sufficient to
compensate for many more faults than can be charged against him that
wherever there was any latent poetic dissatisfaction with the vulgarity
and meanness of ordinary life he gave it expression, and that he has
awakened in the _people_ lofty emotions which, without him, would have
slept. The cultivated critics, and the refined persons who have
_schrecklich viel gelesen_, are not competent to estimate the debt we owe
to Byron.