I stood one day in a Swiss village at the foot of the Jura, and
watched the coming of the storm. Heavy black clouds, their edges
purpled by the setting sun, were rapidly covering the loveliest sky
in Europe, save that of Italy. Thunder growled in the distance, and
gusts of biting wind were driving huge drops of rain over the
thirsty plain. Looking upwards, I beheld a large Alpine falcon, now
rising, now sinking, as he floated bravely in the very midst of the
storm and I could almost fancy that he strove to battle with it. At
every fresh peal of thunder, the noble bird bounded higher aloft, as
if in answering defiance. I followed him with my eyes for a long
time, until he disappeared in the east. On the ground, about fifty
paces beneath me, stood a stork; perfectly tranquil and impassive in
the midst of the warring elements. Twice or thrice she turned her
head towards the quarter from whence the wind came, with an
indescribable air of half indifferent curiosity; but at length she
drew up one of her long sinewy legs, hid her head beneath her wing,
and calmly composed herself to sleep.
I thought of Byron and Goethe; of the stormy sky that overhung both;
of the tempest-tossed existence, the lifelong struggle, of the one,
and the calm of the other; and of the two mighty sources of poetry
exhausted and closed by them.
Byron and Goethe--the two names that predominate, and, come what
may, ever will predominate, over our every recollection of the fifty
years that have passed away. They rule; the master-minds, I might
almost say the tyrants, of a whole period of poetry; brilliant, yet
sad; glorious in youth and daring, yet cankered by the worm in the
bud, despair. They are the two representative poets of two great
schools; and around them we are compelled to group all the lesser
minds which contributed to render the era illustrious. The qualities
which adorn and distinguish their works are to be found, although
more thinly scattered, in other poets their contemporaries; still
theirs are the names that involuntarily rise to our lips whenever we
seek to characterize the tendencies of the age in which they lived.
Their genius pursued different, even opposite routes; and yet very
rarely do our thoughts turn to either without evoking the image of
the other, as a sort of necessary complement to the first. The eyes
of Europe were fixed upon the pair, as the spectators gaze on two
mighty wrestlers in the same arena; and they, like noble and
generous adversaries, admired, praised, and held out the hand to
each other. Many poets have followed in their footsteps; none have
been so popular. Others have found judges and critics who have
appreciated them calmly and impartially; not so they: for them there
have been only enthusiasts or enemies, wreaths or stones; and when
they vanished into the vast night that envelops and transforms alike
men and things--silence reigned around their tombs. Little by
little, poetry had passed away from our world, and it seemed as if
their last sigh had extinguished the sacred flame.
A reaction has now commenced; good, in so far as it reveals a desire
for and promise of new life; evil, in so far as it betrays narrow
views, a tendency to injustice towards departed genius, and the
absence of any fixed rule or principle to guide our appreciation of
the past. Human judgment, like Luther's drunken peasant, when saved
from falling on one side, too often topples over on the other. The
reaction against Goethe, in his own country especially, which was
courageously and justly begun by Menzel during his lifetime, has
been carried to exaggeration since his death. Certain social
opinions, to which I myself belong, but which, although founded on a
sacred principle, should not be allowed to interfere with the
impartiality of our judgment, have weighed heavily in the balance;
and many young, ardent, and enthusiastic minds of our day have
reiterated with Bonne that Goethe is the worst of despots; the
cancer of the German body.
The English reaction against Byron--I do not speak of that mixture
of cant and stupidity which denies the poet his place in Westminster
Abbey, but of literary reaction--has shown itself still more
unreasoning. I have met with adorers of Shelley who denied the
poetic genius of Byron; others who seriously compared his poems with
those of Sir Walter Scott. One very much overrated critic writes
that "Byron makes man after his own image, and woman after his own
heart; the one is a capricious tyrant, the other a yielding slave."
The first forgot the verses in which their favorite hailed
"The pilgrim of eternity, whose fame
Over his living head like Heaven is bent;"
[Footnote: Adonais.]
the second, that after the appearance of "The Giaour" and "Childe
Harold," Sir Walter Scott renounced writing poetry. [Footnote:
Lockhart.] The last forgot that while he was quietly writing
criticisms, Byron was dying for new-born liberty in Greece. All
judged, too many in each country still judge, the two poets, Byron
and Goethe, after an absolute type of the beautiful, the true, or
the false, which they had formed in their own minds; without regard
to the state of social relations as they were or are; without any
true conception of the destiny or mission of poetry, or of the law
by which it, and every other artistic manifestation of human life,
is governed.
There is no absolute type on earth: the absolute exists in the
Divine Idea alone; the gradual comprehension of which man is
destined to attain; although its complete realization is impossible
on earth; earthly life being but one stage of the eternal evolution
of life, manifested in thought and action; strengthened by all the
achievements of the past, and advancing from age to age towards a
less imperfect expression of that idea. Our earthly life is one
phase of the eternal aspiration of the soul towards progress, which
is our law ascending in increasing power and purity from the finite
towards the infinite; from the real towards the Ideal; from that
which is, towards that which is to come. In the immense storehouse
of the past evolutions of life constituted by universal tradition,
and in the prophetic instinct brooding in the depths of the human
soul, does poetry seek inspiration. It changes with the times, for
it is their expression; it is transformed with society, for--
consciously or unconsciously--it sings the lay of Humanity;
although, according to the individual bias or circumstances of the
singer, it assumes the hues of the present, or of the future in
course of elaboration, and foreseen by the inspiration of genius. It
sings now a dirge and now a cradle song; it initiates or sums up.
Byron and Goethe summed up. Was it a defect in them? No; it was the
law of the times, and yet society at the present day, twenty years
after they have ceased to sing, assumes to condemn them for having
been born too soon. Happy indeed are the poets whom God raises up at
the commencement of an era, under the rays of the rising sun. A
series of generations will lovingly repeat their verses, and
attribute to them the new life which they did but foresee in the
germ.
Byron and Goethe summed up. This is at once the philosophical
explanation of their works, and the secret of their popularity. The
spirit of an entire epoch of the European world became incarnate in
them ere its decease, even as--in the political sphere--the spirit
of Greece and Rome became incarnate before death in Caesar and
Alexander. They were the poetic expression of that principle, of
which England was the economic, France the political, and Germany
the philosophic expression: the last formula, effort, and result of
a society founded on the principle of individuality. That epoch, the
mission of which had been, first through the labors of Greek
philosophy, and afterwards through Christianity, to rehabilitate,
emancipate, and develop individual man--appears to have concentrated
in them, in Fichte, in Adam Smith, and in the French school des
drolls de l'homme, its whole energy and power, in order fully to
represent and express all that it had achieved for mankind. It was
much; but it was not the whole; and therefore it was doomed to pass
away. The epoch of individuality was deemed near the goal; when low
immense horizons were revealed; vast unknown lands in whose
untrodden forests the principle of individuality was an insufficient
guide. By the long and painful labors of that epoch the human
unknown quantity had been disengaged from the various quantities of
different nature by which it had been surrounded; but only to be
left weak, isolated, and recoiling in terror from the solitude in
which it stood. The political schools of the epoch had proclaimed
the sole basis of civil organization to be the right to liberty and
equality (liberty for all), but they had encountered social anarchy
by the way. The philosophy of the epoch had asserted the sovereignty
of the human Ego, and had ended in the mere adoration of fact, in
Hegelian immobility. The Economy of the epoch imagined it had
organized free competition, while it had but organized the
oppression of the weak by the strong; of labor by capital; of
poverty by wealth. The Poetry of the epoch had represented
individuality in its every phase; had translated in sentiment what
science had theoretically demonstrated; and it had encountered the
void. But as society at last discovered that the destinies of the
race were not contained in a mere problem of liberty, but rather in
the harmonization of liberty with association--so did poetry
discover that the life it had hitherto drawn from individuality
alone was doomed to perish for want of aliment; and that its future
existence depended on enlarging and transforming its sphere. Both
society and poetry uttered a cry of despair: the death-agony of a
form of society produced the agitation we have seen constantly
increasing in Europe since 1815: the death-agony of a form of poetry
evoked Byron and Goethe. I believe this point of view to be the only
one that can lead us to a useful and impartial appreciation of these
two great spirits.
There are two forms of individuality; the expressions of its
internal and external, or--as the Germans would say--of its
subjective and objective life. Byron was the poet of the first,
Goethe of the last. In Byron the Ego is revealed in all its pride of
power, freedom, and desire, in the uncontrolled plenitude of all its
faculties; inhaling existence at every pore, eager to seize "the
life of life." The world around him neither rules nor tempers him.
The Byronian Ego aspires to rule it; but solely for dominion's sake,
to exercise upon it the Titanic force of his will. Accurately
speaking, he cannot be said to derive from it either color, tone, or
image; for it is he who colors; he who sings; he whose image is
everywhere reflected and reproduced. His poetry emanates from his
own soul; to be thence diffused upon things external; he holds his
state in the centre of the universe, and from thence projects the
light radiating from the depths of his own mind; as scorching and
intense as the concentrated solar ray. Hence that terrible unity
which only the superficial reader could mistake for monotony.
Byron appears at the close of one epoch, and before the dawn of the
other; in the midst of a community based upon an aristocracy which
has outlived the vigor of its prime; surrounded by a Europe
containing nothing grand, unless it be Napoleon on one side and Pitt
on the other, genius degraded to minister to egotism; intellect
bound to the service of the past. No seer exists to foretell the
future: belief is extinct; there is only its pretence: prayer is no
more; there is only a movement of the lips at a fixed day or hour,
for the sake of the family, or what is called the people; love is no
more; desire has taken its place; the holy warfare of ideas is
abandoned; the conflict is that of interests. The worship of great
thoughts has passed away. That which is, raises the tattered banner
of some corpse-like traditions; that which would be, hoists only the
standard of physical wants, of material appetites: around him are
ruins, beyond him the desert; the horizon is a blank. A long cry of
suffering and indignation bursts from the heart of Byron: he is
answered by anathemas. He departs; he hurries through Europe in
search of an ideal to adore; he traverses it distracted,
palpitating, like Mazeppa on the wild horse; borne onwards by a
fierce desire; the wolves of envy and calumny follow in pursuit. He
visits Greece; he visits Italy; if anywhere a lingering spark of the
sacred fire, a ray of divine poetry, is preserved, it must be there.
Nothing. A glorious past, a degraded present; none of life's poetry;
no movement, save that of the sufferer turning on his couch to
relieve his pain. Byron, from the solitude of his exile, turns his
eyes again towards England; he sings. What does he sing? What
springs from the mysterious and unique conception which rules, one
would say in spite of himself, over all that escapes him in his
sleepless vigil? The funeral hymn, the death-song, the epitaph of
the aristocratic idea; we discovered it, we Continentalists; not his
own countrymen. He takes his types from amongst those privileged by
strength, beauty, and individual power. They are grand, poetical,
heroic, but solitary; they hold no communion with the world around
them, unless it be to rule, over it; they defy alike the good and
evil principle; they "will bend to neither." In life and in death
"they stand upon their strength;" they resist every power, for their
own is all their, own; it was purchased by
"Superior science--penance--daring-
And length of watching-strength of mind--and skill
In knowledge of our fathers."
Each of them is the personification, slightly modified, of a single
type, a single idea--the individual; free, but nothing more than
free; such as the epoch now closing has made him; Faust, but without
the compact which submits him to the enemy; for the heroes of Byron
make no such compact. Cain kneels not to Arimanes; and Manfred,
about to die, exclaims:
"The mind, which is immortal, makes itself
Requital for its good and evil thoughts-
Is its own origin of ill, and end-
And its own place and time, its innate sense,
When stripped of this mortality, derives
No color from the fleeting things without,
But is absorbed in sufferance or in joy;
Born from the knowledge of its own desert."
They have no kindred: they live from their own life only they
repulse humanity, and regard the crowd with disdain. Each of them
says: "I have faith in myself"; never, "I have faith in ourselves."
They all aspire to power or to happiness. The one and the other
alike escape them; for they bear within them, untold, unacknowledged
even to themselves, the presentiment of a life that mere liberty can
never give them. Free they are; iron souls in iron frames, they
climb the Alps of the physical world as well as the Alps of thought;
still is their visage stamped with a gloomy and ineffaceable
sadness; still is their soul-whether, as in Cain and Manfred, it
plunge into the abyss of the infinite, "intoxicated with eternity,"
or scour the vast plain and boundless ocean with the Corsair and
Giaour--haunted by a secret and sleepless dread. It seems as if they
were doomed to drag the broken links of the chain they have burst
asunder, riveted to their feet. Not only in the petty society
against which they rebel does their soul feel fettered and
restrained; but even in the world of the spirit. Neither is it to
the enmity of society that they succumb; but under the assaults of
this nameless anguish; under the corroding action of potent
faculties "inferior still to their desires and their conceptions";
under the deception that comes from within. What can they do with
the liberty so painfully won? On whom, on what, expend the exuberant
vitality within them? They are alone; this is the secret of their
wretchedness and impotence. They "thirst for good"--Cain has said it
for them all--but cannot achieve it; for they have no mission, no
belief, no comprehension even of the world around them. They have
never realized the conception of Humanity in the multitudes that
have preceded, surround, and will follow after them; never thought
on their own place between the past and future; on the continuity of
labor that unites all the generations into one whole; on the common
end and aim, only to be realized by the common effort; on the
spiritual post-sepulchral life even on earth of the individual,
through the thoughts he transmits to his fellows; and, it may be--
when he lives devoted and dies. in faith--through the guardian
agency he is allowed to exercise over the loved ones left on earth.
Gifted with a liberty they know not how to use; with a power and
energy they know not how to apply; with a life whose purpose and aim
they comprehend not; they drag through their useless and convulsed
existence. Byron destroys them one after the other, as if he were
the executioner of a sentence decreed in heaven. They fall unwept,
like a withered leaf into the stream of time.
"Nor earth nor sky shall yield a single tear,
Nor cloud shall gather more, nor leaf shall fall,
Nor gale breathe forth one sigh for thee, for all."
They die, as they have lived, alone; and a popular malediction
hovers round their solitary tombs.
This, for those who can read with the soul's eyes, is what Byron
sings; or rather what humanity sings through him. The emptiness of
the life and death of solitary individuality has never been so
powerfully and efficaciously summed up as in the pages of Byron. The
crowd do not comprehend him: they listen; fascinated for an instant;
then repent, and avenge their momentary transport by calumniating
and insulting the poet. His intuition of the death of a form of
society they call wounded self-love; his sorrow for all is
misinterpreted as cowardly egotism. They credit not the traces of
profound suffering revealed by his lineaments; they credit not the
presentiment of a new life which from time to time escapes his
trembling lips; they believe not in the despairing embrace in which
he grasps the material universe--stars, lakes, alps, and sea--and
identifies himself with it, and through it with God, of whom--to him
at least--it is a symbol. They do, however, take careful count of
some unhappy moments, in which, wearied out by the emptiness of
life, he has raised--with remorse I am sure--the cup of ignoble
pleasures to his lips, believing he might find forgetfulness there.
How many times have not his accusers drained this cup, without
redeeming the sin by a single virtue; without--I will not say
bearing--but without having even the capacity of appreciating the
burden which weighed on Byron! And did he not himself dash into
fragments the ignoble cup, so soon as he beheld something worthy the
devotion of his life?
Goethe--individuality in its objective life--having, like Byron, a
sense of the falsehood and evil of the world round him-followed
exactly the opposite path. After having--he, too, in his youth--
uttered a cry of anguish in his Werther; after having laid bare the
problem of the epoch in all its terrific nudity, in Faust; he
thought he had done enough, and refused to occupy himself with its
solution. It is possible that the impulse of rebellion against
social wrong and evil which burst forth for an instant in Werther
may long have held his soul in secret travail; but that he despaired
of the task of reforming it as beyond his powers. He himself
remarked in his later years, when commenting on the exclamation made
by a Frenchman on first seeing him: "That is the face of a man who
has suffered much": that he should rather have said: "That is the
face of a man who has struggled energetically;" but of this there
remains no trace in his works. Whilst Byron writhed and suffered
under the sense of the wrong and evil around him, he attained the
calm--I cannot say of victory--but of indifference. In Byron the man
always ruled, and even at times, overcame the artist: the man was
completely lost in the artist in Goethe. In him there was no
subjective life; no unity springing either from heart or head.
Goethe is an intelligence that receives, elaborates, and reproduces
the poetry affluent to him from all external objects: from all
points of the circumference; to him as centre. He dwells aloft
alone; a mighty watcher in the midst of creation. His curious
scrutiny investigates, with equal penetration and equal interest,
the depths of the ocean and the calyx of the floweret. Whether he
studies the rose exhaling its Eastern perfume to the sky, or the
ocean casting its countless wrecks upon the shore, the brow of the
poet remains equally calm: to him they are but two forms of the
beautiful; two subjects for art.
Goethe has been called a pantheist. I know not in what sense critics
apply this vague and often ill-understood word to him. There is a
materialistic pantheism and a spiritual pantheism; the pantheism of
Spinoza and that of Giordano Bruno; of St. Paul; and of many others-
-all different. But there is no poetic pantheism possible, save on
the condition of embracing the whole world of phenomena in one
unique conception: of feeling and comprehending the life of the
universe in its divine unity. There is nothing of this in Goethe.
There is pantheism in some parts of Wordsworth; in the third canto
of "Childe Harold," and in much of Shelley; but there is none in the
most admirable compositions of Goethe; wherein life, though
admirably comprehended and reproduced in each of its successive
manifestations, is never understood as a whole. Goethe is the poet
of details, not of unity; of analysis, not of synthesis. None so
able to investigate details; to set off and embellish minute and
apparently trifling points; none throw so beautiful a light on
separate parts; but the connecting link escapes him. His works
resemble a magnificent encyclopaedia, unclassified. He has felt
everything but he has never felt the whole. Happy in detecting a ray
of the beautiful upon the humblest blade of grass gemmed with dew;
happy in seizing the poetic elements of an incident the most prosaic
in appearance--he was incapable of tracing all to a common source,
and recomposing the grand ascending scale in which, to quote a
beautiful expression of Herder's "every creature is a numerator of
the grand denominator, Nature." How, indeed, should he comprehend
these things, he who had no place in his works or in his poet's
heart for humanity, by the light of which conception only can the
true worth of sublunary things be determined? "Religion and
politics," [Footnote: Goethe and his Contemporaries.] said he, "are
a troubled element for art. I have always kept myself aloof from
them as much as possible." Questions of life and death for the
millions were agitated around him; Germany re-echoed to the war
songs of Korner; Fichte, at the close of one of his lectures, seized
his musket, and joined the volunteers who were hastening (alas! what
have not the Kings made of that magnificent outburst of
nationality!) to fight the battles of their fatherland. The ancient
soil of Germany thrilled beneath their tread; he, an artist, looked
on unmoved; his heart knew no responsive throb to the emotion that
shook his country; his genius, utterly passive, drew apart from the
current that swept away entire races. He witnessed the French
Revolution in all its terrible grandeur, and saw the old world
crumble beneath its strokes; and while all the best and purest
spirits of Germany, who had mistaken the death-agony of the old
world for the birth-throes of a new, were wringing their hands at
the spectacle of dissolution, he saw in it only the subject of a
farce. He beheld the glory and the fall of Napoleon; he witnessed
the reaction of down-trodden nationalities--sublime prologue of the
grand epopee of the peoples destined sooner or later to be unfolded-
-and remained a cold spectator. He had neither learned to esteem
men, to better them, nor even to suffer with them. If we except the
beautiful type of Berlichingen, a poetic inspiration of his youth,
man, as the creature of thought and action; the artificer of the
future, so nobly sketched by Schiller in his dramas, has no
representative in his works. He has carried something--of this
nonchalance even into the manner in which his heroes conceive love.
Goethe's altar is spread with the choicest flowers, the most
exquisite perfumes, the first-fruits of nature; but the Priest is
wanting. In his work of second creation--for it cannot be denied
that such it was--he has gone through the vast circle of living and
visible things; but stopped short before the seventh day. God
withdrew from him before that time; and the creatures the poet has
evoked wander within the circle, dumb and prayerless; awaiting until
the man shall come to give them a name, and appoint them to a
destination.
No, Goethe is not the poet of Pantheism; he is a polytheist in his
method as an artist; the pagan poet of modern times. His world is,
above all things, the world of forms: a multiplied Olympus. The
Mosaic heaven and the Christian are veiled to him. Like the pagans,
he parcels out Nature into fragments, and makes of each a divinity;
like them, he worships the sensuous rather than the ideal; he looks,
touches, and listens far more than he feels. And what care and labor
are bestowed upon the plastic portion of his art! what importance is
given--I will not say to the objects themselves--but to the external
representation of objects! Has he not somewhere said that "the
beautiful is the result of happy position?"[Footnote: In the Kunst
und Alterthum, I think.]
Under this definition is concealed an entire system of poetic
materialism, substituted for the worship of the ideal; involving a
whole series of consequences, the logical result of which was to
lead Goethe to indifference, that moral suicide of some of the
noblest energies of genius. The absolute concentration of every
faculty of observation on each of the objects to be represented,
without relation to the ensemble; the entire avoidance of every
influence likely to modify the view taken of that object, became in
his hands one of the most effective means of art. The poet, in his
eyes, was neither the rushing stream a hundred times broken on its
course, that it may carry fertility to the surrounding country; nor
the brilliant flame, consuming itself in the light it sheds around
while ascending to heaven; but rather the placid lake, reflecting
alike the tranquil landscape and the thunder-cloud; its own surface
the while unruffled even by the lightest breeze. A serene and
passive calm with the absolute clearness and distinctness of
successive impressions, in each of which he was for the time wholly
absorbed, are the peculiar characteristics of Goethe. "I allow the
objects I desire to comprehend, to act tranquilly upon me," said he;
"I then observe the impression I have received from them, and I
endeavor to render it faithfully." Goethe has here portrayed his
every feature to perfection. He was in life such as Madame Von Arnim
proposed to represent him after death; a venerable old man, with a
serene, almost radiant countenance; clothed in an antique robe,
holding a lyre resting on his knees, and listening to the harmonies
drawn from it either by the hand of a genius, or the breath of the
winds. The last chords wafted his soul to the East; to the land of
inactive contemplation. It was time: Europe had become too agitated
for him.
Such were Byron and Goethe in their general characteristics; both
great poets; very different, and yet, complete as is the contrast
between them, and widely apart as are the paths they pursue,
arriving at the same point. Life and death, character and poetry,
everything is unlike in the two, and yet the one is the complement
of the other. Both are the children of fatality--for it is
especially at the close of epochs that the providential law which
directs the generations assumes towards individuals the semblance of
fatality--and compelled by it unconsciously to work out a great
mission. Goethe contemplates the world in parts, and delivers the
impressions they make upon him, one by one, as occasion presents
them. Byron looks upon the world from a single comprehensive point
of view; from the height of which he modifies in his own soul the
impressions produced by external objects, as they pass before him.
Goethe successively absorbs his own individuality in each of the
objects he reproduces. Byron stamps every object he portrays with
his own individuality. To Goethe, nature is the symphony; to Byron
it is the prelude. She furnishes to the one the entire subject; to
the other the occasion only of his verse. The one executes her
harmonies; the other composes on the theme she has suggested. Goethe
better exgresses lives; Byron life. The one is most vast; the other
more deep. The first searches everywhere for the beautiful, and
loves, above all things, harmony and repose; the other seeks the
sublime, and adores action and force. Characters, such as Coriolanus
or Luther, disturbed Goethe. I know not if, in his numerous pieces
of criticism, he has ever spoken of Dante; but assuredly he must
have shared the antipathy felt for him by Sir Walter Scott; and
although he would undoubtedly have sufficiently respected his genius
to admit him into his Pantheon, yet he would certainly have drawn a
veil between his mental eye and the grand but sombre figure of the
exiled seer, who dreamed of the future empire of the world for his
country, and of the world's harmonious development under her
guidance. Byron loved and drew inspiration from Dante. He also loved
Washington and Franklin, and followed, with all the sympathies of a
soul athirst for action, the meteor-like career of the greatest
genius of action our age has produced, Napoleon; feeling indignant--
perhaps mistakenly--that he did not die in the struggle.
When travelling in that second fatherland of all poetic souls--
Italy--the poets still pursued divergent routes; the one experienced
sensations; the other emotions; the one occupied himself especially
with nature; the other with the greatness dead, the living wrongs,
the human memories. [Footnote: The contrast between the two poets is
nowhere more strikingly displayed than by the manner in which they
were affected by the sight of Rome. In Goethe's Elegies and in his
Travels in Italy we find the impressions of the artist only. He did
not understand Rome. The eternal synthesis that, from the heights of
the Capitol and St. Peter, is gradually unfolded in ever-widening
circles, embracing first a nation and then Europe, as it will
ultimately embrace humanity, remained unrevealed to him; he saw only
the inner circle of paganism; the least prolific, as well as least
indigenous. One might fancy that he caught a glimpse of it for an
instant, when he wrote: "History is read here far otherwise than in
any other spot in the universe; elsewhere we read it from without to
within; here one seems to read it from within to without; "but if
so, he soon lost sight of it again, and became absorbed in external
nature." Whether we halt or advance, we discover a landscape ever
renewing itself in a thousand fashions. We have palaces and ruins;
gardens and solitudes: the horizon lengthens in the distance, or
suddenly contracts; huts and stables, columns and triumphal arches,
all lie pell-mell, and often so close that we might find room for
all on the same sheet of paper."
At Rome Byron forgot passions, sorrows, his own individuality, all,
in the presence of a great idea; witness this utterance of a soul
born for devotedhess:--
"O Rome! my country! city of the soul!
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
Lone mother of dead empires! and control
In their shut breasts their petty misery."
When at last he came to a recollection of himself and his position,
it was with a hope for the world (stanza 98) and a pardon for his
enemies. From the fourth canto of Childe Harold, the daughter of
Byron might learn more of the true spirit of her father than from
all the reports she may have heard, and all the many volumes that
have been written upon him.]
And yet, notwithstanding all the contrasts, which I have only hinted
at, but which might be far more elaborately displayed by extracts
from their works; they arrived--Goethe, the poet of individuality in
its objective life--at the egotism of indifference; Byron--the poet
of individuality an its subjective life--at the egotism (I say it
with regret, but it, too, is egotism) of despair: a double sentence
upon the epoch which it was their mission to represent and to close!
Both of them--I am not speaking of their purely literary merits,
incontestable and universally acknowledged--the one by the spirit of
resistance that breathes through all his creations; the other by the
spirit of sceptical irony that pervades his works, and by the
independent sovereignty attributed to art over all social relations-
-greatly aided the cause of intellectual emancipation, and awakened
in men's minds the sentiment of liberty. Both of them--the one,
directly, by the implacable war he waged against the vices and
absurdities of the privileged classes, and indirectly, by investing
his heroes with all the most brilliant qualities of the despot, and
then dashing them to pieces as if in anger;--the other, by the
poetic rehabilitation of forms the most modest, and objects the most
insignificant, as well as by the importance attributed to details--
combated aristocratic prejudices, and developed in men's minds the
sentiment of equality. And having by their artistic excellence
exhausted both forms of the poetry of individuality, they have
completed the cycle cf its poets; thereby reducing all followers in
the same sphere to the subaltern position of imitators, and creating
the necessity of a new order of poetry; teaching us to recognize a
want where before we felt only a desire. Together they have laid an
era in the tomb; covering it with a pall that none may lift; and, as
if to proclaim its death to the young generation, the poetry of
Goethe has written its history, while that of Byron has graven its
epitaph.
And now farewell to Goethe; farewell to Byron! farewell to the
sorrows that crush but sanctify not--to the poetic flame that
illumines but warms not--to the ironical philosophy that dissects
without reconstructing--to all poetry which, in an age where there
is so much to do, teaches us inactive contemplation; or which, in a
world where there is so much need of devotedness, would instil
despair. Farewell to all types of power without an aim; to all
personifications of the solitary individuality which seeks an aim to
find it not, and knows not how to apply the life stirring within it;
to all egotistic joys and griefs:
"Bastards of the soul;
O'erweening slips of idleness: weeds--no more-
Self-springing here and there from the rank soil;
O'erflowings of the lust of that same mind
Whose proper issue and determinate end,
When wedded to the love of things divine,
Is peace, complacency, and happiness."
Farewell, a long farewell to the past! The dawn of the future is
announced to such as can read its signs, and we owe ourselves wholly
to it.
The duality of the Middle Ages, after having struggled for centuries
under the banners of emperor and pope; after having left its trace
and borne its fruit in every branch of intellectual development; has
reascended to heaven--its mission accomplished--in the twin flames
of poesy called Goethe and Byron. Two hitherto distinct formulae of
life became incarnate in these two men. Byron is isolated man,
representing only the internal aspect of life; Goethe isolated man,
representing only the external.
Higher than these two incomplete existences; at the point of
intersection between the two aspirations towards a heaven they were
unable to reach, will be revealed the poetry of the future; of
humanity; potent in new harmony, unity, and life.
But because, in our own day, we are beginning, though vaguely, to
foresee this new social poetry, which will soothe the suffering soul
by teaching it to rise towards God through humanity; because we now
stand on the threshold of a new epoch, which, but for them, we
should not have reached; shall we decry those who were unable to do
more for us than cast their giant forms into the gulf that held us
all doubting and dismayed on the other side? From the earliest times
has genius been made the scapegoat of the generations. Society has
never lacked men who have contented themselves with reproaching the
Chattertons of their day with not being patterns of self-devotion,
instead of physical or moral suicides; without ever asking
themselves whether they had, during their lifetime, endeavored to
place aught within the reach of such but doubt and destitution. I
feel the necessity of protesting earnestly against the reaction set
on foot by certain thinkers against the mighty-souled, which serves
as a cloak for the cavilling spirit of mediocrity. There is
something hard, repulsive, and ungrateful in the destructive
instinct which so often forgets what has been done by the great men
who preceded us, to demand of them merely an account of what more
might have been done. Is the pillow of scepticism so soft to genius
as to justify the conclusion that it is from egotism only that at
times it rests its fevered brow thereon? Are we so free from the
evil reflected in their verse as to have a right to condemn their
memory? That evil was not introduced into the world by them. They
saw it, felt it, respired it; it was around, about, on every side of
them, and they were its greatest victims. How could they avoid
reproducing it in their works? It is not by deposing Goethe or Byron
that we shall destroy either sceptical or anarchical indifference
amongst us. It is by becoming believers and organizers ourselves. If
we are such, we need fear nothing. As is the public, so will be the
poet. If we revere enthusiasm, the fatherland, and humanity; if our
hearts are pure, and our souls steadfast and patient, the genius
inspired to interpret our aspirations, and bear to heaven our ideas
and our sufferings, will not be wanting. Let these statues stand.
The noble monuments of feudal times create no desire to return to
the days of selfdom.
But I shall be told, there are imitators. I know it too well; but
what lasting influence can be exerted on social life by those who
have no real life of their own? They will but flutter in the void,
so long as void there be. On the day when the living shall arise to
take the place of the dead, they will vanish like ghosts at cock-
crow. Shall we never be sufficiently firm in our own faith to dare
to show fitting reverence for the grand typical figures of an
anterior age? It would be idle to speak of social art at all, or of
the comprehension of humanity, if we could not raise altars to the
new gods, without overthrowing the old. Those only should dare to
utter the sacred name of progress, whose souls possess intelligence
enough to comprehend the past, and whose hearts possess sufficient
poetic religion to reverence its greatness. The temple of the true
believer is not the chapel of a sect; it is a vast Pantheon, in
which the glorious images of Goethe and Byron will hold their
honored place, long after Goetheism and Byronism shall have ceased
to be.
When, purified alike from imitation and distrust, men learn to pay
righteous reverence to the mighty fallen, I know not whether Goethe
will obtain more of their admiration as an artist, but I am certain
that Byron will inspire them with more love, both as man and poet--a
love increased even by the fact of the great injustice hitherto
shown to him. While Goethe held himself aloof from us, and from the
height of his Olympian calm seemed to smile with disdain at our
desires, our struggles, and our sufferings--Byron wandered through
the world, sad, gloomy, and unquiet; wounded, and bearing the arrow
in the wound. Solitary and unfortunate in his infancy; unfortunate
in his first love, and still more terribly so in his ill-advised
marriage; attacked and calumniated both in his acts and intentions
without inquiry or defence; harassed by pecuniary difficulties;
forced to quit his country, home, and child; friendless--we have
seen it too clearly since his death--pursued even on the Continent
by a thousand absurd and infamous falsehoods, and by the cold
malignity of a world that twisted even his sorrows into a crime; he
yet, in the midst of inevitable reaction, preserved his love for his
sister and his Ada; his compassion for misfortune; his fidelity to
the affections of his childhood and youth, from Lord Clare to his
old servant Murray, and his nurse Mary Gray. He was generous with
his money to all whom he could help or serve, from his literary
friends down to the wretched libeller Ashe. Though impelled by the
temper of his genius, by the period in which he lived, and by that
fatality of his mission to which I have alluded, towards a poetic
individualism, the inevitable incompleteness of which I have
endeavored to explain, he by no means set it up as a standard. That
he presaged the future with the prevision of genius is proved by his
definition of poetry in his journal--a definition hitherto
misunderstood, but yet the best I know: "Poetry is the feeling of a
former world and of a future." Poet as he was, he preferred activity
for good, to all that his art could do. Surrounded by slaves and
their oppressors; a traveller in countries where even remembrance
seemed extinct; never did he desert the cause of the peoples; never
was he false to human sympathies. A witness of the progress of the
Restoration, and the triumph of the principles of the Holy Alliance,
he never swerved from his courageous opposition; he preserved and
publicly proclaimed his faith in the rights of the peoples and in
the final
[Footnote:
Yet, Freedom! yet, thy banner torn, but flying,
Streams, like the thunder-storm, against the wind:
Thy trumpet voice, though broken now and dying,
The loudest still the tempest leaves behind.
The tree hath lost its blossomes, and the rind,
Chopped by the axe, looks rough and little worth,
But the sap lasts--and still the seed we find
Sown deep, even in the bosom of the North,
So shall a better spring less bitter fruit bring forth."]
triumph of liberty. The following passage from his journal is the
very abstract of the law governing the efforts of the true party of
progress at the present day: "Onwards! it is now the time to act;
and what signifies self, if a single spark of that which would be
worthy of the past [Footnote: Written in Italy.] can be bequeathed
unquenchably to the future? It is not one man, nor a million, but
the SPIRIT of liberty which must be spread. The waves which dash on
the shore are, one by one, broken; but yet the OCEAN conquers
nevertheless. It overwhelms the armada; it wears the rock; and if
the Neptunians are to be believed, it has not only destroyed but
made a world." At Naples, in the Romagna, wherever he saw a spark of
noble life stirring, he was ready for any exertion; or danger, to
blow it into a flame. He stigmatized baseness, hypocrisy, and
injustice, whencesoever they sprang.
Thus lived Byron, ceaselessly tempest-tossed between the ills of the
present and his yearnings after the future; often unequal; sometimes
sceptical; but always suffering--often most so when he seemed to
laugh;
[Footnote:
"And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
'Tis that I may not weep."]
and always loving, even
when he seemed to curse.
Never did "the eternal spirit of the chainless mind" make a brighter
apparition amongst us. He seems at times a transformation of that
immortal Prometheus, of whom he has written so nobly; whose cry of
agony, yet of futurity, sounded above the cradle of the European
world; and whose grand and mysterious form, transfigured by time,
reappears from age to age, between the entombment of one epoch and
the accession of another; to wail forth the lament of genius,
tortured by the presentment of things it will not see realized in
its time. Byron, too, had the "firm will" and the "deep sense;" he,
too, made of his "death a victory." When he heard the cry of
nationality and liberty burst forth in the land he had loved and
sung in early youth, he broke his harp and set forth. While the
CHRISTIAN Powers were protocolizing or worse--while the CHRISTIAN
nations were doling forth the alms of a few piles of ball in aid of
the CROSS struggling with the Crescent; he, the poet, and pretended
sceptic, hastened to throw his fortune, his genius, and his life at
the feet of the first people that had arisen in the name of the
nationality and liberty he loved.
I know no more beautiful symbol of the future destiny and mission of
art than the death of Byron in Greece. The holy alliance of poetry
with the cause of the peoples; the union--still so rare--of thought
and action--which alone completes the human Word, and is destined to
emancipate the world; the grand solidarity of all nations in the
conquest of the rights ordained by God for all his children, and in
the accomplishment of that mission for which alone such rights
exist--all that is now the religion and the hope of the party of
progress throughout Europe, is gloriously typified in this image,
which we, barbarians that we are, have already forgotten.
The day will come when democracy will remember all that it owes to
Byron. England, too, will, I hope, one day remember the mission--so
entirely English, yet hitherto overlooked by her--which Byron
fulfilled on the Continent; the European role given by him to
English literature, and the appreciation and sympathy for England
which he awakened amongst us.
Before he came, all that was known of English literature was the
French translation of Shakespeare, and the anathema hurled by
Voltaire against the "intoxicated barbarian." It is since Byron that
we Continentalists have learned to study Shakespeare and other
English writers. From him dates the sympathy of all the true-hearted
amongst us for this land of liberty, whose true vocation he so
worthily represented among the oppressed. He led the genius of
Britain on a pilgrimage throughout all Europe.
England will one day feel how ill it is--not for Byron but for
herself--that the foreigner who lands upon her shores should search
in vain in that temple which should be her national Pantheon, for
the poet beloved and admired by all the nations of Europe, and for
whose death Greece and Italy wept as it had been that of the noblest
of their own sons.
In these few pages--unfortunately very hasty--my aim has been, not
so much to criticise either Goethe or Byron, for which both time and
space are wanting, as to suggest, and if possible lead, English
criticism upon a broader, more impartial, and more useful path than
the one generally followed. Certain travellers of the eleventh
century relate that they saw at Teneriffe a prodigiously lofty tree,
which, from its immense extent of foliage, collected all the vapors
of the atmosphere; to discharge them, when its branches were shaken,
in a shower of pure and refreshing water. Genius is like this tree,
and the mission of criticism should be to shake the branches. At the
present day it more resembles a savage striving to hew down the
noble tree to the roots.