Byron and the World.
Two obvious reasons why Byron has long been a prophet more honoured
abroad than at home are his life and his work. He is the most romantic
figure in the literature of the century, and his romance is of that
splendid and daring cast which the people of Britain--'an aristocracy
materialised and null, a middle class purblind and hideous, a lower class
crude and brutal'--prefers to regard with suspicion and disfavour. He is
the type of them that prove in defiance of precept that the safest path
is not always midway, and that the golden rule is sometimes unspeakably
worthless: who set what seems a horrible example, create an apparently
shameful precedent, and yet contrive to approve themselves an honour to
their country and the race. To be a good Briton a man must trade
profitably, marry respectably, live cleanly, avoid excess, revere the
established order, and wear his heart in his breeches pocket or anywhere
but on his sleeve. Byron did none of these things, though he was a
public character, and ought for the example's sake to have done them all,
and done them ostentatiously. He lived hard, and drank hard, and played
hard. He was flippant in speech and eccentric in attire. He thought
little of the sanctity of the conjugal tie, and said so; and he married
but to divide from his wife--who was an incarnation of the national
virtue of respectability--under circumstances too mysterious not to be
discreditable. He was hooted into exile, and so far from reforming he
did even worse than he had done before. After bewildering Venice with
his wickedness and consorting with atheists like Shelley and conspirators
like young Gamba, he went away on a sort of wild-goose chase to Greece,
and died there with every circumstance of publicity. Also his work was
every whit as abominable in the eyes of his countrymen as his life. It
is said that the theory and practice of British art are subject to the
influence of the British school-girl, and that he is unworthy the name of
artist whose achievement is of a kind to call a blush to the cheek of
youth. Byron was contemptuous of youth, and did not hesitate to write--in
_Beppo_ and in _Cain_, in _Manfred_ and _Don Juan_ and the
_Vision_--exactly as he pleased. In three words, he made himself
offensively conspicuous, and from being infinitely popular became utterly
contemptible. Too long had people listened to the scream of this eagle
in wonder and in perturbation, and the moment he disappeared they grew
ashamed of their emotion and angry with its cause, and began to hearken
to other and more melodious voices--to Shelley and Keats, to Wordsworth
and Coleridge and the 'faultless and fervent melodies of Tennyson.' In
course of time Byron was forgotten, or only remembered with disdain; and
when Thackeray, the representative Briton, the artist Philistine, the foe
of all that is excessive or abnormal or rebellious, took it upon himself
to flout the author of _Don Juan_ openly and to lift up his heavy hand
against the fops and fanatics who had affected the master's humours, he
did so amid general applause. Meanwhile, however, the genius and the
personality of Byron had come to be vital influences all the world over,
and his voice had been recognised as the most human and the least insular
raised on English ground since Shakespeare's. In Russia he had created
Pushkin and Lermontoff; in Germany he had awakened Heine, inspired
Schumann, and been saluted as an equal by the poet of _Faust_ himself; in
Spain he had had a share in moulding the noisy and unequal talent of
Espronceda; in Italy he had helped to develop and to shape the melancholy
and daring genius of Leopardi; and in France he had been one of the
presiding forces of a great aesthetic revolution. To the men of 1830 he
was a special and peculiar hero. Hugo turned in his wake to Spain and
Italy and the East for inspiration. Musset, as Mr. Swinburne has
said--too bitterly and strongly said--became in a fashion a Kaled to his
Lara, 'his female page or attendant dwarf.' He was in some sort the
grandsire of the Buridan and the Antony of Dumas. Berlioz went to him
for the material for his _Harold en Italie_, his _Corsaire_ overture, and
his _Episode_. Delacroix painted the _Barque de Don Juan_ from him, with
the _Massacre de Scio_, the _Marino Faliero_, the _Combat du Giaour et du
Pacha_, and many a notable picture more. Is it at all surprising that M.
Taine should have found heart to say that alone among modern poets Byron
'atteint a la cime'? or that Mazzini should have reproached us with our
unaccountable neglect of him and with our scandalous forgetfulness of the
immense work done by him in giving a 'European _role_ . . . to English
literature' and in awakening all over the Continent so much 'appreciation
and sympathy for England'?
Byron and Wordsworth.
He had his share in the work of making Matthew Arnold possible, but he is
the antipodes of those men of culture and contemplation--those artists
pensive and curious and sedately self-contained--whom Arnold best loved
and of whom the nearest to hand is Wordsworth. Byron and Wordsworth are
like the Lucifer and the Michael of the _Vision of Judgment_. Byron's
was the genius of revolt, as Wordsworth's was the genius of dignified and
useful submission; Byron preached the dogma of private revolution,
Wordsworth the dogma of private apotheosis; Byron's theory of life was
one of liberty and self-sacrifice, Wordsworth's one of self-restraint and
self-improvement; Byron's practice was dictated by a vigorous and
voluptuous egoism, Wordsworth's by a benign and lofty selfishness; Byron
was the 'passionate and dauntless soldier of a forlorn hope,' Wordsworth
a kind of inspired clergyman. Both were influences for good, and both
are likely to be influences for good for some time to come. Which is the
better and stronger is a question that can hardly be determined now. It
is certain that Byron's star has waned, and that Wordsworth's has waxed;
but it is also certain that there are moments in life when the _Ode to
Venice_ is almost as refreshing and as precious as the ode on the
_Intimations_, and when the epic mockery of _Don Juan_ is to the full as
beneficial as the chaste philosophy of _The Excursion_ and the _Ode to
Duty_. Arnold was of course with Michael heart and soul, and was only
interested in our Lucifer. He approached his subject in a spirit of
undue deprecation. He thought it necessary to cite Scherer's opinion
that Byron is but a coxcomb and a rhetorician: partly, it would appear,
for the pleasure of seeming to agree with it in a kind of way and partly
to have the satisfaction of distinguishing and of showing it to be a
mistake. Then, he could not quote Goethe without apologising for the
warmth of that consummate artist's expressions and explaining some of
them away. Again, he was pitiful or disdainful, or both, of Scott's
estimate; and he did not care to discuss the sentiment which made that
great and good man think _Cain_ and the _Giaour_ fit stuff for family
reading on a Sunday after prayers, though as Mr. Ruskin has pointed out,
in one of the wisest and subtlest bits of criticism I know, the sentiment
is both natural and beautiful, and should assist us not a little in the
task of judging Byron and of knowing him for what he was. That Arnold
should institute a comparison between Leopardi and Byron was probably
inevitable: Leopardi had culture and the philosophic mind, which Byron
had not; he is incapable of influencing the general heart, as Byron can;
he is a critics' poet, which Byron can never be; he was always an artist,
which Byron was not; and--it were Arnoldian to take the comparison
seriously. Byron was not interested in words and phrases but in the
greater truths of destiny and emotion. His empire is over the
imagination and the passions. His personality was many-sided enough to
make his egoism representative. And as mankind is wont to feel first and
to think afterwards, a single one of his heart-cries may prove to the
world of greater value as a moral agency than all the intellectual
reflections that Leopardi contrived to utter. After examining this and
that opinion and doubting over and deprecating them all, Arnold touched
firm ground at last in a dictum of Mr. Swinburne's, the most pertinent
and profound since those of Goethe, to the effect that in Byron there is
a 'splendid and imperishable excellence which covers all his offences and
outweighs all his defects: the excellence of sincerity and strength.'
With this 'noble praise' our critic agreed so vigorously that it became
the key-note of the latter part of his summing up, and in the end you
found him declaring Byron the equal of Wordsworth, and asserting of this
'glorious pair' that 'when the year 1900 is turned, and the nation comes
to recount her poetic glories in the century which has just then ended,
the first names with her will be these.' The prophecy is as little like
to commend itself to the pious votary of Keats as to the ardent
Shelleyite: there are familiars of the Tennysonian Muse, the Sibyl of
_Rizpah_ and _Vastness_ and _Lucretius_ and _The Voyage_, to whom it must
seem impertinent beyond the prophet's wont; there are--(but _they_ scarce
count)--who grub (as for truffles) for meanings in Browning. But it was
not uttered to please, and in truth it has enough of plausibility to
infuriate whatever poet-sects there be. Especially the Wordsworthians.