Everything is against our appreciating the spirit and the age of Byron.
The age that has just passed from us is always like a dream when we wake
in the morning, a thing incredible and centuries away. And the world of
Byron seems a sad and faded world, a weird and inhuman world, where men
were romantic in whiskers, ladies lived, apparently, in bowers, and the
very word has the sound of a piece of stage scenery. Roses and
nightingales recur in their poetry with the monotonous elegance of a
wall-paper pattern. The whole is like a revel of dead men, a revel with
splendid vesture and half-witted faces.
But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the
less ready shall we be to make use of the word "artificial." Nothing in
the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many
works of art are branded with artificiality because they exhibit vanity
and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental
thing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in
darkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around
him. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity
is a voice out of the abyss.
The remarkable fact is, however, and it bears strongly on the present
position of Byron, that when a thing is unfamiliar to us, when it is
remote and the product of some other age or spirit, we think it not
savage or terrible, but merely artificial. There are many instances of
this: a fair one is the case of tropical plants and birds. When we see
some of the monstrous and flamboyant blossoms that enrich the equatorial
woods, we do not feel that they are conflagrations of nature; silent
explosions of her frightful energy. We simply find it hard to believe
that they are not wax flowers grown under a glass case. When we see some
of the tropic birds, with their tiny bodies attached to gigantic beaks,
we do not feel that they are freaks of the fierce humour of Creation. We
almost believe that they are toys out of a child's play-box,
artificially carved and artificially coloured. So it is with the great
convulsion of Nature which was known as Byronism. The volcano is not an
extinct volcano now; it is the dead stick of a rocket. It is the remains
not of a natural but of an artificial fire.
But Byron and Byronism were something immeasurably greater than anything
that is represented by such a view as this: their real value and meaning
are indeed little understood. The first of the mistakes about Byron lies
in the fact that he is treated as a pessimist. True, he treated himself
as such, but a critic can hardly have even a slight knowledge of Byron
without knowing that he had the smallest amount of knowledge of himself
that ever fell to the lot of an intelligent man. The real character of
what is known as Byron's pessimism is better worth study than any real
pessimism could ever be.
It is the standing peculiarity of this curious world of ours that almost
everything in it has been extolled enthusiastically and invariably
extolled to the disadvantage of everything else.
One after another almost every one of the phenomena of the universe has
been declared to be alone capable of making life worth living. Books,
love, business, religion, alcohol, abstract truth, private emotion,
money, simplicity, mysticism, hard work, a life close to nature, a life
close to Belgrave Square are every one of them passionately maintained
by somebody to be so good that they redeem the evil of an otherwise
indefensible world. Thus while the world is almost always condemned in
summary, it is always justified, and indeed extolled, in detail after
detail.
Existence has been praised and absolved by a chorus of pessimists. The
work of giving thanks to Heaven is, as it were, divided ingeniously
among them. Schopenhauer is told off as a kind of librarian in the House
of God, to sing the praises of the austere pleasures of the mind.
Carlyle, as steward, undertakes the working department and eulogises a
life of labour in the fields. Omar Khayyam is established in the cellar
and swears that it is the only room in the house. Even the blackest of
pessimistic artists enjoys his art. At the precise moment that he has
written some shameless and terrible indictment of Creation, his one pang
of joy in the achievement joins the universal chorus of gratitude, with
the scent of the wild flower and the song of the bird.
Now Byron had a sensational popularity, and that popularity was, as far
as words and explanations go, founded upon his pessimism. He was adored
by an overwhelming majority, almost every individual of which despised
the majority of mankind. But when we come to regard the matter a little
more deeply we tend in some degree to cease to believe in this
popularity of the pessimist. The popularity of pure and unadulterated
pessimism is an oddity; it is almost a contradiction in terms. Men would
no more receive the news of the failure of existence or of the
harmonious hostility of the stars with ardour or popular rejoicing than
they would light bonfires for the arrival of cholera or dance a
breakdown when they were condemned to be hanged. When the pessimist is
popular it must always be not because he shows all things to be bad, but
because he shows some things to be good. Men can only join in a chorus
of praise even if it is the praise of denunciation. The man who is
popular must be optimistic about something even if he is only optimistic
about pessimism. And this was emphatically the case with Byron and the
Byronists. Their real popularity was founded not upon the fact that they
blamed everything, but upon the fact that they praised something. They
heaped curses upon man, but they used man merely as a foil. The things
they wished to praise by comparison were the energies of Nature. Man was
to them what talk and fashion were to Carlyle, what philosophical and
religious quarrels were to Omar, what the whole race after practical
happiness was to Schopenhauer, the thing which must be censured in order
that somebody else may be exalted. It was merely a recognition of the
fact that one cannot write in white chalk except on a blackboard.
Surely it is ridiculous to maintain seriously that Byron's love of the
desolate and inhuman in nature was the mark of vital scepticism and
depression. When a young man can elect deliberately to walk alone in
winter by the side of the shattering sea, when he takes pleasure in
storms and stricken peaks, and the lawless melancholy of the older
earth, we may deduce with the certainty of logic that he is very young
and very happy. There is a certain darkness which we see in wine when
seen in shadow; we see it again in the night that has just buried a
gorgeous sunset. The wine seems black, and yet at the same time
powerfully and almost impossibly red; the sky seems black, and yet at
the same time to be only too dense a blend of purple and green. Such was
the darkness which lay around the Byronic school. Darkness with them was
only too dense a purple. They would prefer the sullen hostility of the
earth because amid all the cold and darkness their own hearts were
flaming like their own firesides.
Matters are very different with the more modern school of doubt and
lamentation. The last movement of pessimism is perhaps expressed in Mr
Aubrey Beardsley's allegorical designs. Here we have to deal with a
pessimism which tends naturally not towards the oldest elements of the
cosmos, but towards the last and most fantastic fripperies of artificial
life. Byronism tended towards the desert; the new pessimism towards the
restaurant. Byronism was a revolt against artificiality; the new
pessimism is a revolt in its favour. The Byronic young man had an
affectation of sincerity; the decadent, going a step deeper into the
avenues of the unreal, has positively an affectation of affectation. And
it is by their fopperies and their frivolities that we know that their
sinister philosophy is sincere; in their lights and garlands and ribbons
we read their indwelling despair. It was so, indeed, with Byron himself;
his really bitter moments were his frivolous moments. He went on year
after year calling down fire upon mankind, summoning the deluge and the
destructive sea and all the ultimate energies of nature to sweep away
the cities of the spawn of man. But through all this his sub-conscious
mind was not that of a despairer; on the contrary, there is something of
a kind of lawless faith in thus parleying with such immense and
immemorial brutalities. It was not until the time in which he wrote 'Don
Juan' that he really lost this inward warmth and geniality, and a sudden
shout of hilarious laughter announced to the world that Lord Byron had
really become a pessimist.
One of the best tests in the world of what a poet really means is his
metre. He may be a hypocrite in his metaphysics, but he cannot be a
hypocrite in his prosody. And all the time that Byron's language is of
horror and emptiness, his metre is a bounding 'pas de quatre.' He may
arraign existence on the most deadly charges, he may condemn it with the
most desolating verdict, but he cannot alter the fact that on some walk
in a spring morning when all the limbs are swinging and all the blood
alive in the body, the lips may be caught repeating:
'Oh, there's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away,
When the glow of early youth declines in beauty's dull decay;
'Tis not upon the cheek of youth the blush that fades so fast,
But the tender bloom of heart is gone ere youth itself be past.'
That automatic recitation is the answer to the whole pessimism of Byron.
The truth is that Byron was one of a class who may be called the
unconscious optimists, who are very often, indeed, the most
uncompromising conscious pessimists, because the exuberance of their
nature demands for an adversary a dragon as big as the world. But the
whole of his essential and unconscious being was spirited and confident,
and that unconscious being, long disguised and buried under emotional
artifices, suddenly sprang into prominence in the face of a cold, hard,
political necessity. In Greece he heard the cry of reality, and at the
time that he was dying, he began to live. He heard suddenly the call of
that buried and sub-conscious happiness which is in all of us, and which
may emerge suddenly at the sight of the grass of a meadow or the spears
of the enemy.