“The English may think of Byron as they please; but this is certain,
that they can show no poet who is to be compared to him. He is
different from all the others, and for the most part, greater” (vol.
i. p. 290).
This passage is one which Mr. Arnold quotes, and he strives to diminish
its importance by translating _der ihm zu vergleichen wäre_, by “who is
his parallel,” and maintains that Goethe “was not so much thinking of the
strict rank, as poetry, of Byron’s production; he was thinking of that
wonderful personality of Byron which so enters into his poetry.” It is
just possible; but if Goethe did think this, he used words which are
misleading, and if the phrase _der ihm zu vergleichen wäre_ simply
indicates parallelism, it has no point, for in that sense it might have
been applied to Scott or to Southey.
“I have read once more Byron’s ‘Deformed Transformed,’ and must say
that to me his talent appears greater than ever. His devil was
suggested by my Mephistopheles; but it is no imitation—it is
thoroughly new and original; close, genuine, and spirited. There are
no weak passages—not a place where you could put the head of a pin,
where you do not find _invention and thought_ [italics mine]. Were
it not for his hypochondriacal negative turn, he would be as great as
Shakespeare and the ancients” (vol. i. p. 294).
Eckermann expressed his surprise. “Yes,” said Goethe, “you may believe
me, I have studied him anew and am confirmed in this opinion.” The
position which Byron occupies in the Second Part of “Faust” is well
known. Eckermann talked to Goethe about it, and Goethe said, “I could
not make use of any man as the representative of the modern poetical era
except him, who undoubtedly is to be regarded as the greatest genius of
our century” (vol. i. p. 425). Mr. Arnold translates this word “genius”
by “talent.” The word in the original is _talent_, and I will not
dispute with so accomplished a German scholar as Mr. Arnold as to what is
the precise meaning of _talent_. In both the English translations of
Eckermann the word is rendered “genius,” and after the comparison between
Byron, Shakespeare, and the ancients just quoted, we can hardly admit
that Goethe meant to distinguish scientifically between the two orders of
intellect and to assign the lower to Byron.
But, last of all, I will translate Goethe’s criticism upon “Cain.” So
far as I know, it has not yet appeared in English. It is to be found in
the Stuttgart and Tübingen edition of Goethe, 1840, vol. xxxiii. p. 157.
Some portions which are immaterial I have omitted:—
“After I had listened to the strangest things about this work for
almost a year, I at last took it myself in hand, and it excited in me
astonishment and admiration; an effect which will produce in the mind
which is simply susceptible, everything good, beautiful, and great. .
. . The poet who, surpassing the limit of all our conceptions, has
penetrated with burning spiritual vision the past and present, and
consequently the future, has now subdued new regions under his
limitless talent, but what he will accomplish therein can be
predicted by no human being. His procedure, however, we can
nevertheless in a measure more closely determine. He adheres to the
letter of the Biblical tradition, for he allows the first pair of
human beings to exchange their original purity and innocence for a
guilt mysterious in its origin; the punishment which is its
consequence descending upon all posterity. The monstrous burden of
such an event he lays upon the shoulders of Cain as the
representative of a wretched humanity, plunged for no fault of its
own into the depths of misery.
“To this primitive son of man, bowed down and heavily burdened,
death, which as yet he has not seen, is an especial trouble; and
although he may desire the end of his present distress, it seems
still more hateful to exchange it for a condition altogether unknown.
Hence we already see that the full weight of a dogmatic system,
explaining, mediating, yet always in conflict with itself, just as it
still for ever occupies us, was imposed on the first miserable son of
man. These contradictions, which are not strange to human nature,
possessed his mind, and could not be brought to rest, either through
the divinely-given gentleness of his father and brother, or the
loving and alleviating co-operation of his sister-wife. In order to
sharpen them to the point of impossibility of endurance, Satan comes
upon the scene, a mighty and misleading spirit, who begins by
unsettling him morally, and then conducts him miraculously through
all worlds, causing him to see the past as overwhelmingly vast, the
present as small and of no account, and the future as full of
foreboding and void of consolation.
“So he turns back to his own family, more excited, but not worse than
before; and finding in the family circle everything as he has left
it, the urgency of Abel, who wishes to make him offer a sacrifice,
becomes altogether insupportable. More say we not, excepting that
the motivation of the scene in which Abel perishes is of the rarest
excellence, and what follows is equally great and priceless. There
now lies Abel! That now is Death—there was so much talk about it,
and man knows about it as little as he did before.
“We must not forget, that through the whole piece there runs a kind
of presentiment of a Saviour, so that the poet at this point, as well
as in all others, has known how to bring himself near to the ideas by
which we explain things, and to our modes of faith.
“Of the scene with the parents, in which Eve at last curses the
speechless Cain, which our western neighbour lifts into such striking
prominence, there remains nothing more for us to say: we have to
approach the conclusion with astonishment and reverence.
“With regard to this conclusion, an intelligent and fair friend,
related to us through esteem for Byron, has asserted that everything
religious and moral in the world was put into the last three words of
the piece.” {143}
We have now heard enough from Goethe to prove that Mr. Arnold’s
interpretation of “_so bald er reflectirt ist er ein Kind_” is not
Goethe’s interpretation of Byron. It is to be remembered that Goethe was
not a youth overcome by Mr. Arnold’s “vogue” when he read Byron. He was
a singularly self-possessed old man.
Many persons will be inclined to think that Goethe, so far from putting
Byron on a lower level than that usually assigned to him, has
over-praised him, and will question the “burning spiritual vision” which
the great German believed the great Englishman to possess. But if we
consider what Goethe calls the “motivation” of Cain; if we reflect on
what the poet has put into the legend; on the exploration of the universe
with Lucifer as a guide; on its result, on the mode in which the death of
Abel is reached; on the doom of the murderer—the limitless wilderness
henceforth and no rest; on the fidelity of Adah, who, with the true
instinct of love, separates between the man and the crime; on the majesty
of the principal character, who stands before us as the representative of
the insurgence of the human intellect, so that, if we know him, we know a
whole literature; if we meditate hereon, we shall say that Goethe has not
exaggerated. It is the same with the rest of Byron’s dramas. Over and
above the beauty of detached passages, there is in each one of them a
large and universal meaning, or rather meaning within meaning, precisely
the same for no reader, but none the less certain, and as inexhaustible
as the meanings of Nature. This is one reason why the wisdom of a
selection from Byron is so doubtful. The worth of “Cain,” of
“Sardanapalus,” of “Manfred,” of “Marino Faliero,” is the worth of an
outlook over the sea; and we cannot take a sample of the scene from a
cliff by putting a pint of water into a bottle. But Byron’s critics and
the compilers tell us of failures, which ought not to survive, and that
we are doing a kindness to him if we suppress these and exhibit him at
his best. No man who seriously cares for Byron will assent to this
doctrine. We want to know the whole of him, his weakness as well as his
strength; for the one is not intelligible without the other. A human
being is an indivisible unity, and his weakness _is_ his strength, and
his strength _is_ his weakness.
It is not my object now, however, to justify what Mr. Arnold calls the
Byronic “superstition.” I hope I could justify a good part of it, but
this is not the opportunity. I cannot resist, however, saying a word by
way of conclusion on the manner in which Byron has fulfilled what seems
to me one of the chief offices of the poet. Mr. Arnold, although he is
so dissatisfied with Byron because he “cannot reflect,” would probably in
another mood admit that “reflections” are not what we demand of a poet.
We do not ask of him a rhymed book of proverbs. He should rather be the
articulation of what in Nature is great but inarticulate. In him the
thunder, the sea, the peace of morning, the joy of youth, the rush of
passion, the calm of old age, should find words, and men should through
him become aware of the unrecognised wealth of existence. Byron had the
power above most poets of acting as a kind of tongue to Nature. His
descriptions are on everybody’s lips, and it is superfluous to quote
them. He represented things not as if they were aloof from him, but as
if they were the concrete embodiment of his soul. The woods, the wilds,
the waters of Nature are to him—
“the intense
Reply of _hers_ to our intelligence.”
His success is equally marked when he portrays men or women whose
character attracts him. Take, for example, the girl in “The Island”:—
“The sunborn blood suffused her neck, and threw
O’er her clear nutbrown skin a lucid hue,
Like coral reddening through the darken’d wave,
Which draws the diver to the crimson cave.
Such was this daughter of the southern seas,
_Herself a billow in her energies_.
* * * * *
Her smiles and tears had pass’d, as light winds pass
O’er lakes to ruffle, not destroy, their glass,
_Whose depths unsearch’d_, _and fountains from the hill_,
_Restore their surface_, _in itself so still_.”
Passages like these might be quoted without end from Byron, and they
explain why he is and must be amongst the immortals. He may have been
careless in expression; he may have been a barbarian and not a εύφυής, as
Mr. Matthew Arnold affirms, but he was _great_. This is the word which
describes him. He was a mass of living energy, and therefore he is
sanative. Energy, power, is the one thing after which we pine in this
sickly age. We do not want carefully and consciously constructed poems
of mosaic. Strength is what we need and what will heal us. Strength is
true morality, and true beauty. It is the strength in Byron that
falsifies the accusation of affectation and posing, which is brought
against him. All that is meant by affectation and posing was a mere
surface trick. The real man, Byron, and his poems are perfectly
unconscious, as unconscious as the wind. The books which have lived and
always will live have this unconsciousness in them, and what is
manufactured, self-centred, and self-contemplative will perish. The
world’s literature is the work of men, who, to use Byron’s own words—
“Strip off this fond and false identity;”
who are lost in their object, who write because they cannot help it,
imperfectly or perfectly, as the case may be, and who do not sit down to
fit in this thing and that thing from a commonplace book. Many novelists
there are who know their art better than Charlotte Brontë, but she, like
Byron—and there are more points of resemblance between them than might at
first be supposed—is imperishable because she speaks under overwhelming
pressure, self-annihilated, we may say, while the spirit breathes through
her. The Byron “vogue” will never pass so long as men and women are men
and women. Mr. Arnold and the critics may remind us of his imperfections
of form, but Goethe is right after all, for not since Shakespeare have we
had any one _der ihm zu vergleichen wäre_.