(_Reprinted_, _with corrections_, _by permission from the_ “_Contemporary
Review_,” _August_, 1881.)
MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD has lately published a remarkable essay {133} upon
Lord Byron. Mr. Arnold’s theory about Byron is, that he is neither
artist nor thinker—that “he has no light, cannot lead us from the past to
the future;” “the moment he reflects, he is a child;” “as a poet he has
no fine and exact sense for word and structure and rhythm; he has not the
artist’s nature and gifts.” The excellence of Byron mainly consists in
his “sincerity and strength;” in his rhetorical power; in his
“irreconcilable revolt and battle” against the political and social order
of things in which he lived. “Byron threw himself upon poetry as his
organ; and in poetry his topics were not Queen Mab, and the Witch of the
Atlas, and the Sensitive Plant, they were the upholders of the old order,
George the Third and Lord Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington and
Southey, and they were the canters and tramplers of the great world, and
they were his enemies and himself.”
Mr. Arnold appeals to Goethe as an authority in his favour. In order,
therefore, that English people may know what Goethe thought about Byron I
have collected some of the principal criticisms upon him which I can find
in Goethe’s works. The text upon which Mr. Arnold enlarges is the remark
just quoted which Goethe made about Byron to Eckermann: “_so bald er
reflectirt ist er ein Kind_”—_as soon as he reflects he is a child_.
Goethe, it is true, did say this; but the interpretation of the saying
depends upon the context, which Mr. Arnold omits. I give the whole
passage, quoting from Oxenford’s translation of the _Eckermann
Conversations_, vol. i. p. 198 (edition 1850):—
“‘Lord Byron,’ said Eckermann, ‘is no wiser when he takes ‘Faust’ to
pieces and thinks you found one thing here, the other there.’ ‘The
greater part of those fine things cited by Lord Byron,’ Goethe
replied, ‘I have never even read; much less did I think of them when
I was writing “Faust.” But Lord Byron is only great as a poet; as
soon as he reflects he is a child. He knows not how to help himself
against the stupid attacks of the same kind made upon him by his own
countrymen. He ought to have expressed himself more strongly against
them. ‘What is there is mine,’ he should have said, ‘and whether I
got it from a book or from life is of no consequence; the only point
is, whether I have made a right use of it.’ Walter Scott used a
scene from my ‘Egmont,’ and he had a right to do so; and because he
did it well, he deserves praise.’”
Goethe certainly does not mean that Byron was unable to reflect in the
sense in which Mr. Arnold interprets the word. What was really meant we
shall see in a moment.