or as
“In la sua volontade e nostra pace;”
or as
“... Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all.”
But as compared with Leopardi, Wordsworth, though at many points less
lucid, though far less a master of style, far less of an artist, gains
so much by his criticism of life being, in certain matters of profound
importance, healthful and true, whereas Leopardi’s pessimism is not,
that the value of Wordsworth’s poetry, on the whole, stands higher for
us than that of Leopardi’s, as it stands higher for us, I think, than
that of any modern poetry except Goethe’s.
Byron’s poetic value is also greater, on the whole, than Leopardi’s; and
his superiority turns in the same way upon the surpassing worth of
something which he had and was, after all deduction has been made for
his shortcomings. We talk of Byron’s _personality_, “a personality in
eminence such as has never been yet, and is not likely to come again;”
and we say that by this personality Byron is “different from all the
rest of English poets, and in the main greater.” But can we not be a
little more circumstantial, and name that in which the wonderful power
of this personality consisted? We can; with the instinct of a poet Mr.
Swinburne has seized upon it and named it for us. The power of Byron’s
personality lies in “the splendid and imperishable excellence which
covers all his offences and outweighs all his defects: _the excellence
of sincerity and strength_.”
Byron found our nation, after its long and victorious struggle with
revolutionary France, fixed in a system of established facts and
dominant ideas which revolted him. The mental bondage of the most
powerful part of our nation, of its strong middle-class, to a narrow and
false system of this kind, is what we call British Philistinism. That
bondage is unbroken to this hour, but in Byron’s time it was even far
more deep and dark than it is now. Byron was an aristocrat, and it is
not difficult for an aristocrat to look on the prejudices and habits of
the British Philistine with scepticism and disdain. Plenty of young men
of his own class Byron met at Almack’s or at Lady Jersey’s, who regarded
the established facts and reigning beliefs of the England of that day
with as little reverence as he did. But these men, disbelievers in
British Philistinism in private, entered English public life, the most
conventional in the world, and at once they saluted with respect the
habits and ideas of British Philistinism as if they were a part of the
order of creation, and as if in public no sane man would think of
warring against them. With Byron it was different. What he called the
_cant_ of the great middle part of the English nation, what we call its
Philistinism, revolted him; but the cant of his own class, deferring to
this Philistinism and profiting by it, while they disbelieved in it,
revolted him even more. “Come what may,” are his own words, “I will
never flatter the million’s canting in any shape.” His class in general,
on the other hand, shrugged their shoulders at this cant, laughed at it,
pandered to it, and ruled by it. The falsehood, cynicism, insolence,
misgovernment, oppression, with their consequent unfailing crop of human
misery, which were produced by this state of things, roused Byron to
irreconcilable revolt and battle. They made him indignant, they
infuriated him; they were so strong, so defiant, so maleficent,—and yet
he felt that they were doomed. “You have seen every trampler down in
turn,” he comforts himself with saying, “from Buonaparte to the simplest
individuals.” The old order, as after 1815 it stood victorious, with its
ignorance and misery below, its cant, selfishness, and cynicism above,
was at home and abroad equally hateful to him. “I have simplified my
politics,” he writes, “into an utter detestation of all existing
governments.” And again: “Give me a republic. The king-times are fast
finishing; there will be blood shed like water and tears like mist, but
the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I
foresee it.”
Byron himself gave the preference, he tells us, to politicians and
doers, far above writers and singers. But the politics of his own day
and of his own class,—even of the Liberals of his own class,—were
impossible for him. Nature had not formed him for a Liberal peer, proper
to move the Address in the House of Lords, to pay compliments to the
energy and self-reliance of British middle-class Liberalism, and to
adapt his politics to suit it. Unfitted for such politics, he threw
himself upon poetry as his organ; and in poetry his topics were not
Queen Mab, and the Witch of 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.
Such was Byron’s personality, by which “he is different from all the
rest of English poets, and in the main greater.” But he posed all his
life, says M. Scherer. Let us distinguish. There is the Byron who posed,
there is the Byron with his affectations and silliness, the Byron whose
weakness Lady Blessington, with a woman’s acuteness, so admirably
seized; “his great defect is flippancy and a total want of
self-possession.” But when this theatrical and easily criticized
personage betook himself to poetry, and when he had fairly warmed to his
work, then he became another man; then the theatrical personage passed
away; then a higher power took possession of him and filled him; then at
last came forth into light that true and puissant personality, with its
direct strokes, its ever-welling force, its satire, its energy, and its
agony. This is the real Byron; whoever stops at the theatrical
preludings does not know him. And this real Byron may well be superior
to the stricken Leopardi, he may well be declared “different from all
the rest of English poets, and in the main greater,” in so far as it is
true of him, as M. Taine well says, that “all other souls, in comparison
with his, seem inert”; in so far as it is true of him that with superb,
exhaustless energy, he maintained, as Professor Nichol well says, “the
struggle that keeps alive, if it does not save, the soul;” in so far,
finally, as he deserves (and he does deserve) the noble praise of him
which I have already quoted from Mr. Swinburne; the praise for “the
splendid and imperishable excellence which covers all his offences and
outweighs all his defects: _the excellence of sincerity and strength_.”
True, as a man, Byron could not manage himself, could not guide his ways
aright, but was all astray. True, he has no light, cannot lead us from
the past to the future; “the moment he reflects, he is a child.” The way
out of the false state of things which enraged him he did not see,—the
slow and laborious way upward; he had not the patience, knowledge,
self-discipline, virtue, requisite for seeing it. True, also, 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. Yet a personality of Byron’s force
counts for so much in life, and a rhetorician of Byron’s force counts
for so much in literature! But it would be most unjust to label Byron,
as M. Scherer is disposed to label him, as a rhetorician only. Along
with his astounding power and passion he had a strong and deep sense for
what is beautiful in nature, and for what is beautiful in human action
and suffering. When he warms to his work, when he is inspired, Nature
herself seems to take the pen from him as she took it from Wordsworth,
and to write for him as she wrote for Wordsworth, though in a different
fashion, with her own penetrating simplicity. Goethe has well observed
of Byron, that when he is at his happiest his representation of things
is as easy and real as if he were improvising. It is so; and his verse
then exhibits quite another and a higher quality from the rhetorical
quality,—admirable as this also in its own kind of merit is,—of such
verse as
“Minions of splendor shrinking from distress,”
and of so much more verse of Byron’s of that stamp. Nature, I say, takes
the pen for him; and then, assured master of a true poetic style though
he is not, any more than Wordsworth, yet as from Wordsworth at his best
there will come such verse as
“Will no one tell me what she sings?”
so from Byron, too, at his best, there will come such verse as
“He heard it, but he heeded not; his eyes
Were with his heart, and that was far away.”
Of verse of this high quality, Byron has much; of verse of a quality
lower than this, of a quality rather rhetorical than truly poetic, yet
still of extraordinary power and merit, he has still more. To separate,
from the mass of poetry which Byron poured forth, all this higher
portion, so superior to the mass, and still so considerable in quantity,
and to present it in one body by itself, is to do a service, I believe,
to Byron’s reputation, and to the poetic glory of our country.
Such a service I have in the present volume attempted to perform. To
Byron, after all the tributes which have been paid to him, here is yet
one tribute more—
“Among thy mightier offerings here are mine!”
not a tribute of boundless homage certainly, but sincere; a tribute
which consists not in covering the poet with eloquent eulogy of our own,
but in letting him, at his best and greatest, speak for himself. Surely
the critic who does most for his author is the critic who gains readers
for his author himself, not for any lucubrations on his author:—gains
more readers for him, and enables those readers to read him with more
admiration.
And in spite of his prodigious vogue, Byron has never yet, perhaps, had
the serious admiration which he deserves. Society read him and talked
about him, as it reads and talks about _Endymion_ to-day; and with the
same sort of result. It looked in Byron’s glass as it looks in Lord
Beaconsfield’s, and sees, or fancies that it sees, its own face there;
and then it goes its way, and straightway forgets what manner of man it
saw. Even of his passionate admirers, how many never got beyond the
theatrical Byron, from whom they caught the fashion of deranging their
hair, or of knotting their neck-handkerchief, or of leaving their
shirt-collar unbuttoned; how few profoundly felt his vital influence,
the influence of his splendid and imperishable excellence of sincerity
and strength!
His own aristocratic class, whose cynical make-believe drove him to
fury; the great middle-class, on whose impregnable Philistinism he
shattered himself to pieces,—how little have either of these felt
Byron’s vital influence! As the inevitable break-up of the old order
comes, as the English middle-class slowly awakens from its intellectual
sleep of two centuries, as our actual present world, to which this sleep
has condemned us, shows itself more clearly,—our world of an aristocracy
materialized and null, a middle-class purblind and hideous, a lower
class crude and brutal,—we shall turn our eyes again, and to more
purpose, upon this passionate and dauntless soldier of a forlorn hope,
who, ignorant of the future and unconsoled by its promises, nevertheless
waged against the conversation of the old impossible world so fiery
battle; waged it till he fell,—waged it with such splendid and
imperishable excellence of sincerity and strength.
Wordsworth’s value is of another kind. Wordsworth has an insight into
permanent sources of joy and consolation for mankind which Byron has
not; his poetry gives us more which we may rest upon than Byron’s,—more
which we can rest upon now, and which men may rest upon always. I place
Wordsworth’s poetry, therefore, above Byron’s on the whole, although in
some points he was greatly Byron’s inferior, and although Byron’s poetry
will always, probably, find more readers than Wordsworth, and will give
pleasure more easily. But these two, Wordsworth and Byron, stand, it
seems to me, first and preeminent in actual performance, a glorious
pair, among the English poets of this century. Keats had probably,
indeed, a more consummate poetic gift than either of them: but he died
having produced too little and being as yet too immature to rival them.
I for my part can never even think of equalling with them any other of
their contemporaries;—either Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in
a mist of opium; or Shelley, beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in
the void his luminous wings in vain. Wordsworth and Byron stand out by
themselves. When the year 1900 is turned, and our nation comes to
recount her poetic glories in the century which has then just ended, the
first names with her will be these.