-----
Footnote 38:
Preface to _Poetry of Byron_, chosen and arranged by Matthew Arnold,
1881.
-----
When at last I held in my hand the volume of poems which I had chosen
from Wordsworth, and began to turn over its pages, there arose in me
almost immediately the desire to see beside it, as a companion volume, a
like collection of the best poetry of Byron. Alone amongst our poets of
the earlier part of this century, Byron and Wordsworth not only furnish
material enough for a volume of this kind, but also, as it seems to me,
they both of them gain considerably by being thus exhibited. There are
poems of Coleridge and of Keats equal, if not superior, to anything of
Byron or Wordsworth; but a dozen pages or two will contain them, and the
remaining poetry is of a quality much inferior. Scott never, I think,
rises as a poet to the level of Byron and Wordsworth at all. On the
other hand, he never falls below his own usual level very far; and by a
volume of selections from him, therefore, his effectiveness is not
increased. As to Shelley there will be more question; and indeed Mr.
Stopford Brooke, whose accomplishments, eloquence, and love of poetry we
must all recognize and admire, has actually given us Shelley in such a
volume. But for my own part I cannot think that Shelley’s poetry, except
by snatches and fragments, has the value of the good work of Wordsworth
and Byron; or that it is possible for even Mr. Stopford Brooke to make
up a volume of selections from him which, for real substance, power, and
worth, can at all take rank with a like volume from Byron or Wordsworth.
Shelley knew quite well the difference between the achievement of such a
poet as Byron and his own. He praises Byron too unreservedly, but he
sincerely felt, and he was right in feeling, that Byron was a greater
poetical power than himself. As a man, Shelley is at a number of points
immeasurably Byron’s superior; he is a beautiful and enchanting spirit,
whose vision, when we call it up, has far more loveliness, more charm
for our soul, than the vision of Byron. But all the personal charm of
Shelley cannot hinder us from at last discovering in his poetry the
incurable want, in general, of a sound subject-matter, and the incurable
fault, in consequence, of unsubstantiality. Those who extol him as the
poet of clouds, the poet of sunsets, are only saying that he did not, in
fact, lay hold upon the poet’s right subject-matter; and in honest
truth, with all his charm of soul and spirit, and with all his gift of
musical diction and movement, he never, or hardly ever, did. Except, as
I have said, for a few short things and single stanzas, his original
poetry is less satisfactory than his translations, for in these the
subject-matter was found for him. Nay, I doubt whether his delightful
Essays and Letters, which deserve to be far more read than they are now,
will not resist the wear and tear of time better, and finally come to
stand higher, than his poetry.
There remain to be considered Byron and Wordsworth. That Wordsworth
affords good material for a volume of selections, and that he gains by
having his poetry thus presented, is an old belief of mine which led me
lately to make up a volume of poems chosen out of Wordsworth, and to
bring it before the public. By its kind reception of the volume, the
public seems to show itself a partaker in my belief. Now Byron also
supplies plenty of material for a like volume, and he too gains, I
think, by being so presented. Mr. Swinburne urges, indeed, that “Byron,
who rarely wrote anything either worthless or faultless, can only be
judged or appreciated in the mass; the greatest of his works was his
whole work taken together.” It is quite true that Byron rarely wrote
anything either worthless or faultless; it is quite true also that in
the appreciation of Byron’s power a sense of the amount and variety of
his work, defective though much of his work is, enters justly into our
estimate. But although there may be little in Byron’s poetry which can
be pronounced either worthless or faultless, there are portions of it
which are far higher in worth and far more free from fault than others.
And although, again, the abundance and variety of his production is
undoubtedly a proof of his power, yet I question whether by reading
everything which he gives us we are so likely to acquire an admiring
sense even of his variety and abundance, as by reading what he gives us
at his happier moments. Varied and abundant he amply proves himself even
by this taken alone. Receive him absolutely without omission or
compression, follow his whole out-pouring stanza by stanza and line by
line from the very commencement to the very end, and he is capable of
being tiresome.
Byron has told us himself that the _Giaour_ “is but a string of
passages.” He has made full confession of his own negligence. “No one,”
says he, “has done more through negligence to corrupt the language.”
This accusation brought by himself against his poems is not just; but
when he goes on to say of them, that “their faults, whatever they may
be, are those of negligence and not of labor,” he says what is perfectly
true. “_Lara_,” he declares, “I wrote while undressing after coming home
from balls and masquerades, in the year of revelry, 1814. The _Bride_
was written in four, the _Corsair_ in ten days.” He calls this “a
humiliating confession, as it proves my own want of judgment in
publishing, and the public’s in reading, things which cannot have
stamina for permanence.” Again he does his poems injustice; the producer
of such poems could not but publish them, the public could not but read
them. Nor could Byron have produced his work in any other fashion; his
poetic work could not have first grown and matured in his own mind, and
then come forth as an organic whole; Byron had not enough of the artist
in him for this, nor enough of self-command. He wrote, as he truly tells
us, to relieve himself, and he went on writing because he found the
relief become indispensable. But it was inevitable that works so
produced should be, in general, “a string of passages,” poured out, as
he describes them, with rapidity and excitement, and with new passages
constantly suggesting themselves, and added while his work was going
through the press. It is evident that we have here neither deliberate
scientific construction, nor yet the instinctive artistic creation of
poetic wholes; and that to take passages from work produced as Byron’s
was is a very different thing from taking passages out of the _Œdipus_
or the _Tempest_, and deprives the poetry far less of its advantage.
Nay, it gives advantage to the poetry, instead of depriving it of any.
Byron, I said, has not a great artist’s profound and patient skill in
combining an action or in developing a character,—a skill which we must
watch and follow if we are to do justice to it. But he has a wonderful
power of vividly conceiving a single incident, a single situation; of
throwing himself upon it, grasping it as if it were real and he saw and
felt it, and of making us see and feel it too. The _Giaour_ is, as he
truly called it, “a string of passages,” not a work moving by a deep
internal law of development to a necessary end; and our total impression
from it cannot but receive from this, its inherent defect, a certain
dimness and indistinctness. But the incidents of the journey and death
of Hassan, in that poem, are conceived and presented with a vividness
not to be surpassed; and our impression from them is correspondingly
clear and powerful. In _Lara_, again, there is no adequate development
either of the character of the chief personage or of the action of the
poem; our total impression from the work is a confused one. Yet such an
incident as the disposal of the slain Ezzelin’s body passes before our
eyes as if we actually saw it. And in the same way as these bursts of
incident, bursts of sentiment also, living and vigorous, often occur in
the midst of poems which must be admitted to be but weakly-conceived and
loosely-combined wholes. Byron cannot but be a gainer by having
attention concentrated upon what is vivid, powerful, effective in his
work, and withdrawn from what is not so.
Byron, I say, cannot but be a gainer by this, just as Wordsworth is a
gainer by a like proceeding. I esteem Wordsworth’s poetry so highly, and
the world, in my opinion, has done it such scant justice, that I could
not rest satisfied until I had fulfilled, on Wordsworth’s behalf, a
long-cherished desire;—had disengaged, to the best of my power, his good
work from the inferior work joined with it, and had placed before the
public the body of his good work by itself. To the poetry of Byron the
world has ardently paid homage; full justice from his contemporaries,
perhaps even more than justice, his torrent of poetry received. His
poetry was admired, adored, “with all its imperfections on its head,”—in
spite of negligence, in spite of diffuseness, in spite of repetitions,
in spite of whatever faults it possessed. His name is still great and
brilliant. Nevertheless the hour of irresistible vogue has passed away
for him; even for Byron it could not but pass away. The time has come
for him, as it comes for all poets, when he must take his real and
permanent place, no longer depending upon the vogue of his own day and
upon the enthusiasm of his contemporaries. Whatever we may think of him,
we shall not be subjugated by him as they were; for, as he cannot be for
us what he was for them, we cannot admire him so hotly and
indiscriminately as they. His faults of negligence, of diffuseness, of
repetition, his faults of whatever kind, we shall abundantly feel and
unsparingly criticise; the mere interval of time between us and him
makes disillusion of this kind inevitable. But how then will Byron
stand, if we relieve him too, so far as we can, of the encumbrance of
his inferior and weakest work, and if we bring before us his best and
strongest work in one body together? That is the question which I, who
can even remember the latter years of Byron’s vogue, and have myself
felt the expiring wave of that mighty influence, but who certainly also
regard him, and have long regarded him, without illusion, cannot but ask
myself, cannot but seek to answer. The present volume is an attempt to
provide adequate data for answering it.
Byron has been over-praised, no doubt. “Byron is one of our French
superstitions,” says M. Edmond Scherer; but where has Byron not been a
superstition? He pays now the penalty of this exaggerated worship.
“Alone among the English poets his contemporaries, Byron,” said M.
Taine, “_atteint à la cîme_,—gets to the top of the poetic mountain.”
But the idol that M. Taine had thus adored M. Scherer is almost for
burning. “In Byron,” he declares, “there is a remarkable inability ever
to lift himself into the region of real poetic art,—art impersonal and
disinterested,—at all. He has fecundity, eloquence, wit, but even these
qualities themselves are confined within somewhat narrow limits. He has
treated hardly any subject but one,—himself; now the man, in Byron, is
of a nature even less sincere than the poet. This beautiful and blighted
being is at bottom a coxcomb. He posed all his life long.”
Our poet could not well meet with more severe and unsympathetic
criticism. However, the praise often given to Byron has been so
exaggerated as to provoke, perhaps, a reaction in which he is unduly
disparaged. “As various in composition as Shakespeare himself, Lord
Byron has embraced,” says Sir Walter Scott, “every topic of human life,
and sounded every string on the divine harp, from its slightest to its
most powerful and heart-astounding tones.” It is not surprising that
some one with a cool head should retaliate, on such provocation as this,
by saying: “He has treated hardly any subject but one, _himself_.” “In
the very grand and tremendous drama of _Cain_,” says Scott, “Lord Byron
has certainly matched Milton on his own ground.” And Lord Byron has done
all this, Scott adds “while managing his pen with the careless and
negligent ease of a man of quality.” Alas, “managing his pen with the
careless and negligent ease of a man of quality,” Byron wrote in his
_Cain_—
“Souls that dare look the Omnipotent tyrant in
His everlasting face, and tell him that
His evil is not good;”
or he wrote—
“... And _thou_ would’st go on aspiring
To the great double Mysteries! the _two Principles_!”[39]
One has only to repeat to oneself a line from _Paradise Lost_ in order
to feel the difference.
-----
Footnote 39:
The italics are in the original.
-----
Sainte-Beuve, speaking of that exquisite master of language, the Italian
poet Leopardi, remarks how often we see the alliance, singular though it
may at first sight appear, of the poetical genius with the genius for
scholarship and philology. Dante and Milton are instances which will
occur to every one’s mind. Byron is so negligent in his poetical style,
he is often, to say the truth, so slovenly, slipshod, and infelicitous,
he is so little haunted by the true artist’s fine passion for the
correct use and consummate management of words, that he may be described
as having for this artistic gift the insensibility of the
barbarian;—which is perhaps only another and a less flattering way of
saying, with Scott, that he “manages his pen with the careless and
negligent ease of a man of quality.” Just of a piece with the rhythm of
“Dare you await the event of a few minutes’
Deliberation?”
or of
“All shall be void—
Destroy’d!”
is the diction of
‘Which now is painful to these eyes,
Which had not seen the sun to rise;
or of
“... there let him lay!”
or of the famous passage beginning
“He who hath bent him o’er the dead;”
with those trailing relatives, that crying grammatical solecism, that
inextricable anacolouthon! To class the work of the author of such
things with the work of the authors of such verse as
“In the dark backward and abysm of time”—
or as
“Presenting Thebes, or Pelops’ line,
Or the tale of Troy divine”—
is ridiculous. Shakespeare and Milton, with their secret of consummate
felicity in diction and movement, are of another and an altogether
higher order from Byron, nay, for that matter, from Wordsworth also;
from the author of such verse as
“Sol hath dropt into his harbour”—
or (if Mr. Ruskin pleases) as
“Parching summer hath no warrant”
as from the author of
“All shall be void—
Destroy’d!”
With a poetical gift and a poetical performance of the very highest
order, the slovenliness and tunelessness of much of Byron’s production,
the pompousness and ponderousness of much of Wordsworth’s are
incompatible. Let us admit this to the full.
Moreover, while we are hearkening to M. Scherer, and going along with
him in his faultfinding, let us admit, too, that the man in Byron is in
many respects as unsatisfactory as the poet. And, putting aside all
direct moral criticism of him,—with which we need not concern ourselves
here,—we shall find that he is unsatisfactory in the same way. Some of
Byron’s most crying faults as a man,—his vulgarity, his affectation,—are
really akin to the faults of commonness, of want of art, in his
workmanship as a poet. The ideal nature for the poet and artist is that
of the finely touched and finely gifted man, the εὐφυής of the Greeks;
now, Byron’s nature was in substance not that of the εὐφυής at all, but
rather, as I have said, of the barbarian. The want of fine perception
which made it possible for him to formulate either the comparison
between himself and Rousseau, or his reason for getting Lord Delawarr
excused from a “licking” at Harrow, is exactly what made possible for
him also his terrible dealings in, _An ye wool_; _I have redde thee_;
_Sunburn me_; _Oons, and it is excellent well_. It is exactly, again,
what made possible for him his precious dictum that Pope is a Greek
temple, and a string of other criticisms of the like force; it is
exactly, in fine, what deteriorated the quality of his poetic
production. If we think of a good representative of that finely touched
and exquisitely gifted nature which is the ideal nature for the poet and
artist,—if we think of Raphael, for instance, who truly is εὐφυής just
as Byron is not,—we shall bring into clearer light the connection in
Byron between the faults of the man and the faults of the poet. With
Raphael’s character Byron’s sins of vulgarity and false criticism would
have been impossible, just as with Raphael’s art Byron’s sins of common
and bad workmanship.
Yes, all this is true, but it is not the whole truth about Byron
nevertheless; very far from it. The severe criticism of M. Scherer by no
means gives us the whole truth about Byron, and we have not yet got it
in what has been added to that criticism here. The negative part of the
true criticism of him we perhaps have; the positive part, by far the
more important, we have not. Byron’s admirers appeal eagerly to foreign
testimonies in his favor. Some of these testimonies do not much move me;
but one testimony there is among them which will always carry, with me
at any rate, very great weight,—the testimony of Goethe. Goethe’s
sayings about Byron were uttered, it must however be remembered, at the
height of Byron’s vogue, when that puissant and splendid personality was
exercising its full power of attraction. In Goethe’s own household there
was an atmosphere of glowing Byron-worship; his daughter-in-law was a
passionate admirer of Byron, nay, she enjoyed and prized his poetry, as
did Tieck and so many others in Germany at that time, much above the
poetry of Goethe himself. Instead of being irritated and rendered
jealous by this, a nature like Goethe’s was inevitably led by it to
heighten, not lower, the note of his praise. The Time-Spirit, or
_Zeit-Geist_, he would himself have said, was working just then for
Byron. This working of the _Zeit-Geist_ in his favor was an advantage
added to Byron’s other advantages, an advantage of which he had a right
to get the benefit. This is what Goethe would have thought and said to
himself; and so he would have been led even to heighten somewhat his
estimate of Byron, and to accentuate the emphasis of praise. Goethe
speaking of Byron at that moment was not and could not be quite the same
cool critic as Goethe speaking of Dante, or Molière, or Milton. This, I
say, we ought to remember in reading Goethe’s judgments on Byron and his
poetry. Still, if we are careful to bear this in mind, and if we quote
Goethe’s praise correctly,—which is not always done by those who in this
country quote it,—and if we add to it that great and due qualification
added to it by Goethe himself,—which so far as I have seen has never yet
been done by his quoters in this country at all,—then we shall have a
judgment on Byron, which comes, I think, very near to the truth, and
which may well command our adherence.
In his judicious and interesting Life of Byron, Professor Nichol quotes
Goethe as saying that Byron “is undoubtedly to be regarded as the
greatest genius of our century.” What Goethe did really say was “the
greatest _talent_,” not “the greatest _genius_.” The difference is
important, because, while talent gives the notion of power in a man’s
performance, genius gives rather the notion of felicity and perfection
in it; and this divine gift of consummate felicity by no means, as we
have seen, belongs to Byron and to his poetry. Goethe said that Byron
“must unquestionably be regarded as the greatest talent of the
century.”[40] He said of him moreover: “The English may think of Byron
what they please, but it is certain that they can point to no poet who
is his like. He is different from all the rest, and in the main
greater.” Here, again, Professor Nichol translates: “They can show no
(living) poet who is to be compared to him;”—inserting the word
_living_, I suppose, to prevent its being thought that Goethe would have
ranked Byron, as a poet, above Shakespeare and Milton. But Goethe did
not use, or, I think, mean to imply, any limitation such as is added by
Professor Nichol. Goethe said simply, and he meant to say, “_no_ poet.”
Only the words which follow[41] ought not, I think, to be rendered, “who
is to be compared to him,” that is to say, “_who is his equal as a
poet_.” They mean rather, “who may properly be compared with him,” “_who
is his parallel_.” And when Goethe said that Byron was “in the main
greater” than all the rest of the English poets, he 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, and which Goethe called “a personality such, for its eminence,
as has never been yet, and such as is not likely to come again.” He was
thinking of that “daring, dash, and grandiosity,”[42] of Byron, which
are indeed so splendid; and which were, so Goethe maintained, of a
character to do good, because “everything great is formative,” and what
is thus formative does us good.
-----
Footnote 40:
“Der ohne Frage als das grösste Talent des Jahrhunderts anzusehen
ist.”
Footnote 41:
“Der ihm zu vergleichen wäre.”
Footnote 42:
“Byron’s Kühnheit, Keckheit und Grandiosität, ist das nicht alles
bildend?—Alles Grosse bildet, sobald wir es gewahr werden.”
-----
The faults which went with this greatness, and which impaired Byron’s
poetical work, Goethe saw very well. He saw the constant state of
warfare and combat, the “negative and polemical working,” which makes
Byron’s poetry a poetry in which we can so little find rest; he saw the
_Hang zum Unbegrenzten_, the straining after the unlimited, which made
it impossible for Byron to produce poetic wholes such as the _Tempest_
or _Lear_; he saw the _zu viel Empirie_, the promiscuous adoption of all
the matter offered to the poet by life, just as it was offered, without
thought or patience for the mysterious transmutation to be operated on
this matter by poetic form. But in a sentence which I cannot, as I say,
remember to have yet seen quoted in any English criticism of Byron,
Goethe lays his finger on the cause of all these defects in Byron, and
on his real source of weakness both as a man and as a poet. “The moment
he reflects, he is a child,” says Goethe;—“_sobald er reflectirt ist er
ein Kind_.”
Now if we take the two parts of Goethe’s criticism of Byron, the
favorable and the unfavorable, and put them together, we shall have, I
think, the truth. On the one hand, a splendid and puissant personality—a
personality “in eminence such as has never been yet, and is not likely
to come again”; of which the like, therefore, is not to be found among
the poets of our nation, by which Byron “is different from all the rest,
and in the main greater.” Byron is, moreover, “the greatest talent of
our century.” On the other hand, this splendid personality and unmatched
talent, this unique Byron, “is quite too much in the dark about
himself;”[43] nay, “the moment he begins to reflect, he is a child.”
There we have, I think, Byron complete; and in estimating him and
ranking him we have to strike a balance between the gain which accrues
to his poetry, as compared with the productions of other poets, from his
superiority, and the loss which accrues to it from his defects.
-----
Footnote 43:
“Gar zu dunkel über sich selbst.”
-----
A balance of this kind has to be struck in the case of all poets except
the few supreme masters in whom a profound criticism of life exhibits
itself in indissoluble connection with the laws of poetic truth and
beauty. I have seen it said that I allege poetry to have for its
characteristic this: that it is a criticism of life; and that I make it
to be thereby distinguished from prose, which is something else. So far
from it, that when I first used this expression, _a criticism of life_,
now many years ago, it was to literature in general that I applied it,
and not to poetry in especial. “The end and aim of all literature,” I
said, “is, if one considers it attentively, nothing but that: _a
criticism of life_.” And so it surely is; the main end and aim of all
our utterance, whether in prose or in verse, is surely a criticism of
life. We are not brought much on our way, I admit, towards an adequate
definition of poetry as distinguished from prose by that truth; still a
truth it is, and poetry can never prosper if it is forgotten. In poetry,
however, the criticism of life has to be made conformably to the laws of
poetic truth and poetic beauty. Truth and seriousness of substance and
matter, felicity and perfection of diction and manner, as these are
exhibited in the best poets, are what constitute a criticism of life
made in conformity with the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty; and
it is by knowing and feeling the work of those poets, that we learn to
recognize the fulfilment and non-fulfilment of such conditions.
The moment, however, that we leave the small band of the very best
poets, the true classics, and deal with poets of the next rank, we shall
find that perfect truth and seriousness of matter, in close alliance
with perfect truth and felicity of manner, is the rule no longer. We
have now to take what we can get, to forego something here, to admit
compensation for it there; to strike a balance, and to see how our poets
stand in respect to one another when that balance has been struck. Let
us observe how this is so.
We will take three poets, among the most considerable of our century:
Leopardi, Byron, Wordsworth. Giacomo Leopardi was ten years younger than
Byron, and he died thirteen years after him; both of them, therefore,
died young—Byron at the age of thirty-six, Leopardi at the age of
thirty-nine. Both of them were of noble birth, both of them suffered
from physical defect, both of them were in revolt against the
established facts and beliefs of their age; but here the likeness
between them ends. The stricken poet of Recanati had no country, for an
Italy in his day did not exist; he had no audience, no celebrity. The
volume of his poems, published in the very year of Byron’s death, hardly
sold, I suppose, its tens, while the volumes of Byron’s poetry were
selling their tens of thousands. And yet Leopardi has the very qualities
which we have found wanting to Byron; he has the sense for form and
style, the passion for just expression, the sure and firm touch of the
true artist. Nay, more, he has a grave fulness of knowledge, an insight
into the real bearings of the questions which as a sceptical poet he
raises, a power of seizing the real point, a lucidity, with which the
author of _Cain_ has nothing to compare. I can hardly imagine Leopardi
reading the
“... And _thou_ would’st go on aspiring
To the great double Mysteries! the _two Principles_!”
or following Byron in his theological controversy with Dr. Kennedy,
without having his features overspread by a calm and fine smile, and
remarking of his brilliant contemporary, as Goethe did, that “the moment
he begins to reflect, he is a child.” But indeed whoever wishes to feel
the full superiority of Leopardi over Byron in philosophic thought, and
in the expression of it, has only to read one paragraph of one poem, the
paragraph of _La Ginestra_, beginning
“Sovente in queste piagge,”
and ending
“Non so se il riso o la pietà prevale.”
In like manner, Leopardi is at many points the poetic superior of
Wordsworth too. He has a far wider culture than Wordsworth, more mental
lucidity, more freedom from illusions as to the real character of the
established fact and of reigning conventions; above all, this Italian,
with his pure and sure touch, with his fineness of perception, is far
more of the artist. Such a piece of pompous dulness as
“O for the coming of that glorious time,”
and all the rest of it, or such lumbering verse as Mr. Ruskin’s enemy,
“Parching summer hath no warrant”—
would have been as impossible to Leopardi as to Dante. Where, then, is
Wordsworth’s superiority? for the worth of what he has given us in
poetry I hold to be greater, on the whole, than the worth of what
Leopardi has given us. It is in Wordsworth’s sound and profound sense
“Of joy in widest commonalty spread;”
whereas Leopardi remains with his thoughts ever fixed upon the _essenza
insanabile_, upon the _acerbo, indegno mistero delle cose_. It is in the
power with which Wordsworth feels the resources of joy offered to us in
nature, offered to us in the primary human affections and duties, and in
the power with which, in his moments of inspiration, he renders this
joy, and makes us, too, feel it; a force greater than himself seeming to
lift him and to prompt his tongue, so that he speaks in a style far
above any style of which he has the constant command, and with a truth
far beyond any philosophic truth of which he has the conscious and
assured possession. Neither Leopardi nor Wordsworth are of the same
order with the great poets who made such verse as