'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 will be Wordsworth and Byron.' Thus wrote Matthew Arnold in
1881, and now that the century's last autumn is passing away, a new
edition of Byron's works appears in the fullness of time to quicken
our memories and rekindle our curiosity, by placing before us a
complete record of the life, letters, and poetry of one whom Macaulay
declared in 1830 to be the most celebrated Englishman of the
nineteenth century, and who seventy years later may still be counted
among its most striking and illustrious figures.
As the new edition is issued by instalments, and several volumes are
still to come, to compare its contents, arrangement, and the editorial
accessories with those of preceding editions might be thought
premature. We may say, however, that a large number of Byron's
letters, not before printed, have now been added; and that the text of
this new material has been prepared from originals, whereas it is now
impossible so to collate the text of the greater number of the letters
heretofore published. Moore is supposed to have destroyed many of
those entrusted to him; and moreover he handled the originals very
freely, making large omissions, and transposing passages from one
letter to another, though we presume that he did not re-write and
amplify passages after the fashion in which certain French editors
have dealt with recent memoirs. The letters now for the first time
published by Mr. Murray were for the most part inaccessible to Moore.
But for all these details we may refer our readers to the concise and
valuable prefaces appended to the three volumes of Letters and
Journals.
We have now, therefore, a substantial acquisition of fresh and quite
authentic material, though it would be rash to assume that all
important documents are included, for the family archives are still
held in reserve. It is admitted by the editor that the literary value
of the letters now printed for the first time is not high, but he
explains that in publishing, with a few exceptions, the whole
available correspondence, he has acted on the principle that they form
an aggregate collection of great biographical interest, and may thus
serve as the best substitute for the lost memoirs. We may agree that
any scrap of a great man's writing, or even any words spoken, may
throw some light upon his character, whether the subject be trivial or
tremendous, a business letter to his solicitor or a defiance of
society; for even though careless readers chance to miss some pearl
strung at random on a string of commonplaces, to the higher criticism
nothing is quite valueless. In this instance, at any rate, no pains
have been spared to place the real Lord Byron, as described more or
less unconsciously by himself, before his fellow-countrymen; and the
result is to confirm his reputation as a first-class letter-writer.
The private and confidential correspondence of eminent literary men
would be usually more decorous than interesting; but Byron, though he
is not always respectable, is never dull. The correspondence and
journals, taken all together, constitute the most interesting and
characteristic collection of its kind in English literature.
In regard to the effect upon his personal reputation, we have long
known what manner of man was Byron; nor is it likely that, after
passing in review the complete array of evidence collected in these
volumes, the general verdict of posterity will be sensibly modified.
Those who judge him should bear in mind that perhaps no famous life
has ever been so thoroughly laid bare, or scrutinised with greater
severity. The tendency of biographers is to soften down errors and
praise where they can; and in an autobiography the writer can tell his
own story. But the assiduous searching out and publication of every
letter and diary that can be gathered or gleaned is a different
ordeal, which might try the reputation of most of us; while in the
case of an impulsive, wayward, high-spirited man, exposed to strong
temptations, with all a poet's traditional irritability, whose rank
and genius concentrated public attention on his writings from his
early youth, this test must be extremely severe. Many of the letters
are of a sort that do not ordinarily appear in a biography. Byron's
letters to his wife at the time of their separation, which are
moderate and even dignified, are supplemented by his wife's letters to
him and to her friends, full of mysterious imputations; and there are
letters to and from the lady with whom his _liaison_ was notorious.
His own reckless letters from Venice to Moore, and those from Shelley
and others describing his dissipated habits, were clearly never
intended for general reading after his death. Of course most of these
are not now produced for the first time, nor do we argue that they
ought never to have appeared, for the biographical interest is
undeniable. Our point is that the publication of such private and
damaging correspondence is so very unusual in biographies that it
places Byron at a special disadvantage, and that when we pass our
judgment upon him we are bound to take into account the unsparing use
that has been made of papers connected with the most intimate
transactions of a lifetime which was no more than a short and stormy
passage from youth to manhood; for he was cut off before the age at
which men abandon the wild ways of their springtide, and are usually
disposed to obliterate the record of them. At least one recent
biography might be mentioned which would have read differently if it
had been compiled with similar candour.
The annotations subjoined to almost every page of the text are so
ample and particular as to furnish in themselves extensive reading.
The notices of every person named would go far to serve as a brief
biographical dictionary of Byron's contemporaries, whether known or
unknown to fame. We get a concise account of Madame de Stael--her
birth, books, and political opinions--very useful to those who had no
previous acquaintance with her. Lady Morgan and Joanna Southcote
obtain quite as much space as would be allotted to them in any
handbook of celebrities. Beau Brummell and Lord Castlereagh are
treated with similar liberality. There is a full account, taken from
the _Examiner_, of the procession with which Louis XVIII. made his
entry into London in 1814. The notes--of about four pages each--upon
Hobhouse and Lord Carlisle may be justified by their close connection
with Byron's affairs; though some of us might have been content with
less. Allusions to such notorious evildoers as Tarquin are explained,
and stock quotations from Shakespeare have been carefully verified.
The result is that a reader might go through this edition of Byron
with the very slightest previous knowledge of general literature or of
contemporary history, and might give himself a very fair middle-class
education in the process, although the consequence might be to imbue
him with what Coleridge has called 'a passion for the disconnected.'
Nevertheless we readily acknowledge the thorough execution of this
part of the editorial work, and the very meritorious labour that has
been spent upon bringing together every kind of document and reference
that can inform or enlighten us upon the main subjects of Byron's life
and writings. In the poems the practice of giving in notes the rough
drafts and rejected versions of passages and lines, so as to show the
poet at work, seems to us not altogether fair to him, and is
occasionally distracting to those readers who enjoy a fine picture
without asking how the colours were mixed, or are not anxious about
the secrets of a good dinner. Yet to students of method, to the
fellow-craftsman, and to the literary virtuoso, these variant
readings, of which there are sometimes four to a single line, may
often be of substantial interest, as throwing light on the tendencies
and predilections of taste which are the formative influences upon
style in prose or poetry.
Probably the most favourable circumstance for a poet is that he should
only be known, like the Divinity of Nature, from his works; or at
least that, like Wordsworth, he should keep the noiseless tenor of his
way down some secluded vale of life, whereby his poems stand out in
clear relief like fine paintings on a plain wall. Is there any modern
English poet of the first class, except Byron, whose entire prose
writings and biography are bound up in standard editions with his
poetry? The question is at any rate worth asking, because certainly
there is no case in which the record of a poet's private life and
personal fortunes has so greatly affected, for good or for ill, his
poetic reputation. Those who detested his character and condemned his
way of living found it difficult to praise his verses; they detected
the serpent under every stone. For those who were fascinated by the
picture of a reckless prodigal, always in love and in debt, with
fierce passions and a haughty contempt for the world, who defied
public opinion and was suspected of unutterable things--such a
personality added enormous zest to his poetry. But now that Byron's
whole career has been once more laid out before his countrymen, with
light poured on to it from every cranny and peephole, those who take
up this final edition of his life and works must feel that their main
object and duty should be to form an unbiased estimate of the true
value, apart from the author's rank and private history, of poems
which must always hold a permanent place in the high imaginative
literature of England.
It may be said that every writer of force and originality traverses
two phases of opinion before his substantive rank in the great order
of merit is definitely fixed: he is either depressed or exalted
unduly. He may be neglected or cheapened by his own generation, and
praised to the sides by posterity; or his fame may undergo the inverse
treatment, until he settles down to his proper level. Byron's
reputation has passed through sharper vicissitudes than have befallen
most of his compeers; for though no poet has ever shot up in a brief
lifetime to a higher pinnacle of fame, or made a wider impression upon
the world around him, after his death he seems to have declined
slowly, in England, to a point far below his real merits. And at this
moment there is no celebrated poet, perhaps no writer, in regard to
whom the final judgment of critics and men of letters is so
imperfectly determined. Here is a man whom Goethe accounted a
character of unique eminence, with supreme creative power, whose
poetry, he admitted, had influenced his own later verse--one of those
who gave strenuous impulse to the romantic movement throughout
England, France, and Germany in the first quarter of this century, who
set the fashion of his day in England, stirred and shaped the popular
imagination, and struck a far resonant note in our poetry. Yet after
his death he suffered a kind of eclipse; his work was much more unduly
depreciated than it had been extolled; while in our own time such
critics as Matthew Arnold and Mr. Swinburne have been in profound
disagreement on the question of his worth and value as a poet. Nor is
it possible for impartial persons to accept the judgment of either of
these two eminent artists in poetry, since Arnold placed Wordsworth
and Byron by anticipation on the same level at this century's end,
whereas Wordsworth stands now far higher. And the bitter disdain which
Sir. Swinburne has poured upon Byron's verse and character, though
tempered by acknowledgment of his strength and cleverness, and by
approbation of his political views, excites some indignation and a
sympathetic reaction in his favour. One can imagine the ghost of Byron
rebuking his critic with the words of the Miltonic Satan, 'Ye knew me
once no mate For you, there sitting where ye durst not soar'; for in
his masculine defiant attitude and daring flights the elder poet
overtops and looks down upon the fine musical artist of our own day.
Some of the causes which have combined to lower Byron's popularity are
not far to seek. The change of times, circumstance, and taste has been
adverse to him. The political school which he so ardently represented
has done its work; the Tory statesmen of the Metternich and
Castlereagh type, who laid heavy hands upon nations striving for light
and liberty, have gone down to their own place; the period of stifling
repression has long ended in Europe. Italy and Greece are free, the
lofty appeals to classic heroism are out of date, and such fiery
high-swelling trumpet notes as
'Yet, Freedom! yet, thy banner, torn, but flying,
Streams like a thunderstorm _against_ the wind,'
fall upon cold and fastidious ears. 'The day will come,' said Mazzini
in after-years, 'when the democracy will acknowledge its debt to
Byron;' but the demos is notoriously ungrateful, and the subject races
have now won their independence. The shadow of discouragement and
weariness which passed over sensitive minds at the beginning of this
century, a period of political disillusion, has long been swept away
by the prosperity and sanguine activities of the Victorian era; and
the literary style has changed with the times. Melancholy moods,
attitudes of scornful despair, tales of fierce love and bloody revenge
are strange and improbable to readers who delight in situations and
emotions with which they are familiar, who demand exactitude in detail
and correct versification; while sweet harmonies, perfection of metre,
middle-class pastorals, and a blameless moral tone came in with
Tennyson. In short, many of the qualities which enchanted Byron's own
generation have disenchanted our own, both in his works and his life;
for when Macaulay wrote in 1830 that the time would come when his
'rank and private history will not be regarded in estimating his
poetry,' he took no account of future editions enlarged and annotated,
or of biographies of _The Real Lord Byron_; whereby it has come to
pass, as we suspect, that the present world knows more of Byron's
private history than of his poems. His faults and follies stand out
more prominently than ever; his story is more attractive reading than
most romances; and the stricter morality of the day condemns him more
severely than did the society to which he belonged. Psychological
speculation is now so much more practised in literature than formerly,
there is so much more interest in 'the man behind the book,' that
serious moral delinquencies, authentically recorded and eagerly read,
operate more adversely than ever in affecting the public judgment upon
Byron's poetry, because they provide a damaging commentary upon it.
His contemporaries--Coleridge, Keats, Shelley--lived so much apart
from the great world of their day that important changes in manners
and social opinion have made much less difference in the standard by
which their lives are compared with their work. Their poetry,
moreover, was mainly impersonal. Whereas Byron, by stamping his own
character on so much of his verse, created a dangerous interest in the
man himself; and his _empeiria_ (as Goethe calls it), his too
exclusively worldly experience, identified him with his particular
class in society, rendering him largely the responsible representative
of a libertinism in habits and sentiments that was more pardonable in
his time than in our own. His poetry belongs also in another sense to
the world he lived in: it is incessantly occupied with current events
and circumstance, with Spain, Italy, and Greece as he actually saw
them, with comparisons of their visible condition and past glories,
with Peninsular battlefields, and with Waterloo. Of worldliness in
this objective meaning his contemporaries had some share, yet they
instinctively avoided the waste of their power upon it; and so their
finest poetry is beautiful by its detachment, by a certain magical
faculty of treating myth, romance, and the mystery of man's
sympathetic relations with universal Nature.
A recent French critic of Chateaubriand, who defines the 'romantisme'
of that epoch as no more than a great waking up of the poetic spirit,
says that the movement was moral and psychological generally before it
spread into literature. In criticising Byron's poetry we have to bear
in mind that he came in on the first wave of this flood, which
overflowed the exhausted and arid field of poetry at the end of the
last century, fertilising it with colour and emotion. The comparison
between Byron in England and Chateaubriand in France must have been
often drawn. The similarity in their style, their moody, melancholy
outlook upon common humanity, their aristocratic temper, their
self-consciousness, their influence upon the literature of the two
countries, the enthusiasm that they excited among the ardent spirits
of the generation that reached manhood immediately after them, and the
vain attempts of the elder critics to resist their popularity and deny
their genius--form a remarkable parallel in literary history. As
Jeffrey failed at first to discern the promise of Byron, so Morellet
could only perceive the obviously weak points of Chateaubriand, laying
stress on his affectations, his inflated language, his sentimental
exaggeration, upon all the faults which were common to these two men
of genius, the defects of their qualities, the energetic rebound from
the classic level of orderly taste and measured style. It was the
ancient _regime_ contending against a revolutionary uprising, and in
poetry, as in politics, the leaders of revolution are sure to be
excessive, to force their notes, to frighten their elders, and to
scandalise the conservative mind. Yet just as Chateaubriand, after
passing through his period of depression, is now rising again to his
proper place in French literature, so we may hope that an impartial
survey of Byron's verse will help to determine the rank that he is
likely to hold permanently, although the high tide of Romance in
poetry has at this moment fallen to a low ebb, and the spell which it
laid upon our forefathers may have lost its power in an altered world.
It must be counted to the credit of these Romantic writers that at any
rate they widened and varied the sphere and the resources of their
art, by introducing the Oriental element, so to speak, into the
imaginative literature of modern Europe. They brought the lands of
ancient civilisation again within the sphere of poetry, reviving into
fresh animation the classic glories of Hellas, reopening the gates of
the mysterious East, and showing us the Greek races still striving, as
they were twenty-two centuries earlier, for freedom against the
barbarous strength of an Asiatic empire. Byron was the first of the
poets who headed this literary crusade for the succour of Christianity
against Islam in the unending contest between East and West on the
shores of the Mediterranean, and in this cause he eventually died.
Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Victor Hugo were also travellers in
Asia, and had drawn inspiration from that source; they all
instinctively obeyed, like Bonaparte, the impulse which sends
adventurous and imaginative spirits toward that region of strong
passions and primitive manners, where human life is of little matter,
and where the tragic situations of drama and fiction may at any time
be witnessed in their simple reality. The effect was to introduce
fresh blood into the veins of old romance; and Byron led the van of an
illustrious line of poets who turned their _impressions de voyage_
into glowing verse, for the others only trod in his footsteps and
wrote on his model, while Lamartine openly imitated him in his
_Dernier Chant de Childe Harold_. For the first time the Eastern tale
was now told by a poet who had actually seen Eastern lands and races,
their scenery and their cities, who drew his figures and landscape
with his eye on the objects, and had not mixed his local colours by
the process of skimming books of travel for myths, legends, costume,
or customs, with such result as may be seen in Moore's _Lalla Rookh_
and in Southey's _Thalaba_, or even in Scott's _Talisman_. The preface
to this novel shows that Scott fully appreciated the risk of competing
with Byron, albeit in prose, in the field of Asiatic romance, yet all
his skill avails little to diminish the sense of conventional
figure-drawing and of uncertainty in important details when they are
not gathered in the field, but only transplanted from the library.
Byron has noticed in one of his letters the errors of this kind into
which a great poet must fall whose accurate observation has been
confined mainly to his own country. 'There is much natural talent,' he
writes, 'spilt over the _Excursion_, yet Wordsworth says of Greece
that it is a land of
'Rivers, fertile plains, and sounding shores
Under a cope of variegated sky.
The rivers are dry half the year, the plains are barren, the shores
still and tideless, the sky is anything but variegated, being for
months and months beautifully blue.'
This may be thought trivial criticism, yet it is evidence of the
attention given by Byron to precise description. His accuracy in
Oriental costume was also a novelty at that time, when so little was
known of Oriental lore that even Mr. Murray 'doubted the propriety of
putting the name of Cain into the mouth of a Mohammedan.' With regard
to his characters, we may readily admit that in the _Giaour_ or the
_Bride of Abydos_ the heroes and heroines behave and speak after the
fashion of high-flying Western romance, and that their lofty
sentiments in love or death have nothing specifically Oriental about
them. But this was merely the romantic style used by all Byron's
contemporaries, and generally accepted by the taste of that day as
essential to the metrical rendering of a passionate love-story. It may
be argued, with Scott, that when a writer of fiction takes in hand a
distant age or country, he is obliged to translate ideas and their
expression into forms with which his readers are, to some extent,
familiar. Byron seasoned his Oriental tales with phrases and imagery
borrowed from the East; but whatever scenic or characteristic effects
might have thus been produced are seriously marred by the explanatory
notices and erudite references to authorities that are appended to the
text. This fashion of garnishing with far-fetched outlandish words, in
order to give the requisite flavour of time or place, was peculiar to
the new romantic school of his era; it was the poetical dialect of the
time, and Byron employed it too copiously. Yet, with all his faults,
he remains a splendid colourist, who broke through a limited mannerism
in poetry, and led forth his readers into an unexplored region of
cloudless sky and purple sea, where the serene aspect of nature could
be powerfully contrasted with the shadow of death and desolation cast
over it by the violence of man.
Undoubtedly this contrast, between fair scenery and foul barbarism,
had been presented more than once in poetry; yet no one before Byron
had brought it out with the sure hand of an eye-witness, or with such
ardent sympathy for a nation which had been for centuries trodden
under the feet of aliens in race and religion, yet still clung to its
ancient traditions of freedom. Throughout his descriptive poems, from
_Childe Harold_ to _Don Juan_, it is the true and forcible impression,
taken from sight of the thing itself, that gives vigour and animation
to his pictures, and that has stamped on the memory the splendid
opening of the _Giaour_, the meditations in Venice and Rome, the
glorious scenery of the Greek islands, and even such single lines as
'By the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone.'
In the art of painting what may be called historical landscape, where
retrospective associations give intellectual colour to the picture,
Byron has very few rivals. His descriptions of the Lake of Geneva, of
Clarens, of the Trojan plain--
'High barrows, without marble or a name,
A vast, untilled, and mountain-skirted plain,
And Ida in the distance'--
have the quality of faithful drawing illumined by imaginative power.
They have certainly touched the emotions and enhanced the pleasure of
all travellers in the last three generations whose minds are
accessible to poetic suggestion; and if at the present day their style
be thought too elaborate and the allusions commonplace, it cannot be
denied that the fine art of English composition would be poorer
without them. The stanzas in _Childe Harold_ on Waterloo are full of
the energy which takes hold of and poetically elevates the incidents
of war--the distant cannon, the startled dancers, the transition from
the ball-room to the battlefield, from the gaiety of life to the
stillness of death. Nothing very original or profound in all this, it
may be said; yet the great difficulty of dealing adequately with
heroic action in contemporary verse, of writing a poem on a campaign
that has just been reported in the newspapers, is exemplified by the
fact that Walter Scott's two compositions on Waterloo are failures;
nor has any poet since Byron yet succeeded in giving us a good modern
battlepiece.
Nevertheless there is much in Byron's longer poems (excepting always
_Don Juan_) that seems tedious to the modern reader; there are
descriptions and declamations too long drawn-out to sustain the
interest; and there are many lines that are superfluous, untidy, and
sometimes ungrammatical. One can only plead, in extenuation of these
defects, that the fashion of his day was for long metrical romance, in
which it is difficult to maintain the high standard of careful
composition exacted by the latest criticism. It is almost impossible
to tell a long story in verse that shall be throughout poetical. And
one main reason why this fashion has nearly passed away may be
surmised to be that the versified narrative cannot adapt itself in
this respect to the present taste, which is impatient of fluent
lengthy heroics, refusing to accept them for the sake of some finely
executed passages. Southey's epics are now quite unreadable, and many
of the blemishes in Byron's poetry are inseparable from the romantic
style; they are to be found in Scott's metrical tales, which have much
redundancy and some weak versification; while his chiefs and warriors
often talk a stilted chivalrous language which would now be discarded
as theatrical. Byron's personages have the high tragic accent and
costume; yet one must admit that they have also a fierce vitality; and
as for the crimes and passions of his Turkish pashas and Greek
patriots, he had actually seen the men and heard of their deeds. The
fact that he also portrayed more unreal characters in dismal
drapery--Lara, Conrad, and Manfred, as the mouthpieces of splenetic
misanthropy--has led to some unjust depreciation of his capacity for
veritable delineation. Macaulay, for example, in his essay on Byron,
observes that 'Johnson, the man whom Don Juan met in the slave-market,
is a striking failure. How differently would Sir Walter Scott have
drawn a bluff, fearless Englishman in such a situation!' and Mr.
Swinburne echoes this criticism. But it is unfair to compare a minor
character, slightly sketched into a poem for the purposes of the plot,
with the full-length portrait that might have been made of him by a
first-class artist in prose. The proper comparison would be between
the figures in the metrical romances of the two poets, whereby it
might be shown that Scott could take as little trouble as Byron did
about an unimportant subsidiary actor. In regard to the leading heroes
and heroines, Scott's poetic creations are hardly more interesting or
dramatic than Byron's; and whenever he makes, even in prose, an
excursion into Asia, his figure-drawing becomes conventional. But he
was usually at the disadvantage, from which Byron was certainly free,
of being hampered by an inartistic propensity to make virtuous heroes
triumph in the long run.
Yet it must be admitted that no poet of the same calibre has turned
out so much loose uneven work as Byron. His lapses into lines that are
lame or dull are the more vexatious to the correct modern ear when, as
sometimes happens, they spoil a fine passage, and in the midst of a
superb flight his muse comes down with a broken wing. In the subjoined
stanza, for example, from the Waterloo episode in _Childe Harold_, the
first five lines are clear, strenuous, and concise, while the next
three are confused and clumsy; so that though he recovers himself in
the final line, the general effect is much damaged:
'Last noon beheld them full of lusty life,
Last eve in Beauty's circle proudly gay,
The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife,
The morn the marshalling in arms--the day
Battle's magnificently stern array.
The thunder-clouds close o'er it, _which when rent,
The earth is covered thick with other clay,
Which her own clay shall cover_, heaped and pent,
Rider and horse--friend, foe--in one red burial blent.'
These blots, and there are many, become less pardonable when we
observe, from the new edition, that Byron by no means neglected
revision of his work. But his impetuous temper, and the circumstance
of his writing far from the printing-press, encouraged hasty
execution; and though the most true remark that 'easy writing is
devilish hard reading' is his own, though he praised excessively the
chiselled verse of Pope, he was always inclined to pose as one who
threw off jets of boiling inspiration, and in one letter he compares
himself to the tiger who makes or misses his point in one spring. He
ranked Pope first among English poets, yet he learnt nothing in that
school; he pretended to undervalue Shakespeare, yet he must have had
the plays by heart, for his letters bristle with quotations from them.
His avowed taste in poetry is hard to reconcile with his own
performances: his verse was rushing, irregular, audacious, yet he
overpraises the smooth composition of Rogers; he dealt in heroic
themes and passionate love-stories, yet Crabbe's humble pastorals had
their full charm for him. Except Crabbe and Rogers, he declared, 'we
are all--Scott, Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell, and I--upon a wrong
revolutionary poetical system, not worth a damn in itself;' but among
these are some leaders of the great nineteenth-century renaissance in
English verse; and Byron was foremost in the revolt against unnatural
insipidity which has brought us through romance to realism, by his
clear apprehension of natural form and colour, and even by the havoc
which he made among conventional respectabilities. He dwelt too
incessantly upon his own sorrows and sufferings; and in the gloomy
soliloquies of his dramatic characters we have an actor constantly
reappearing in his favourite part. Yet this also was a novelty to the
generation brought up on the impersonal poetry of the classic school;
and here, again, he is a forerunner of the self-reflecting analytical
style that is common in our own day; for there is a Byronic echo in
the 'divine despair' of Tennyson. The melancholy brooding spirit,
dissatisfied with society and detesting complacency, had for some time
been in the air; it had affected the literature of France and Germany;
Werther, Obermann, and Rene are all moulded on the same type with
Childe Harold; yet Sainte-Beuve rightly says that this identity of
type does not mean imitation--it means that the writers were all in
the same atmosphere. There is everywhere the same reaction against
philosophic optimism and the same antipathy to the ways of mankind 'so
vain and melancholy,' They sought refuge from inborn ennui or
irritability among the mountains, on the sea, or in distant voyages,
and they instinctively embodied these moods and feelings in various
personages of fiction, in the solitary wanderer, in the fierce outlaw,
in the man 'with chilling mystery of mien,' who rails against heaven
and humanity. Their literature, in short, however overcoloured it may
have been, did represent a generally prevailing characteristic among
men of excessive sensibility at a time of stir and tumult in the world
around them; it was not a mere unnatural invention, though we must
leave to the psychologist the task of tracing a connection between
this mental attitude and the circumstances that generated it. But the
self-occupied mind has no dramatic power, and so their repertory
contained one single character, a reproduction of their own in
different attitudes and situations. Chateaubriand may be said never to
have dropped his mask; whereas Byron, whose English sense of humour
must have fought against taking himself so very seriously, relieved
his conscience by lapses into epigram, irony, and persiflage. Thus in
the same year (1818), and from the same place (Venice), he produced
the fourth canto of _Childe Harold_, full of deep longing for unbroken
solitude:
'There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and Music in its roar;'
and also _Beppo_, a satirical sketch of the loose and easy Venetian
society in which he was actually living. Here, again, his somewhat
ribald letters from Venice do his romantic poetry some wrong; but in
fact he had a diabolic pleasure in betraying himself, and his
_Memoires d'Outre Tombe_, if they had been preserved, would have been
very different from Chateaubriand's elaborate autobiography.
It was the spectacle of Christians groaning under Turkish oppression,
and of their heroic resistance, that inspired three of Byron's finest
poems, the _Giaour_, the _Bride of Abydos_, the _Siege of Corinth_. On
this subject he was so heartily in earnest that he could even lose
sight of his own woes; and notwithstanding the exuberance of colour
and sentiment, these tales still hold their place in the first rank of
metrical romance. Their construction is imperfect, even fragmentary;
yet while Scott could put together and tell his story much better, not
even Scott could drive it onward and sustain the verse at a high level
with greater energy, or decorate his narrative with finer description
of scenery, or give more intensity to the moments of fierce action.
The splendid apostrophe to Greece in the _Giaour_--
'Clime of the unforgotten brave!
Whose land from plain to mountain cave
Was Freedom's home or Glory's grave'--
has forty lines of unsurpassed beauty and fire, written in the
manuscript, as a note tells us, in a hurried and almost illegible
hand--an authentic example of true improvisation which the elaborate
poets of our own day may match if they can. The tumid phrase and
melodramatic figuring--
'Dark and unearthly is the scowl
That glares beneath his dusky cowl'--
are now worn-out theatrical properties; yet those who have seen the
untamed Asiatic might find it hard to overdraw the murderous hate and
sullen ferocity that his face, or his victim's, will occasionally
disclose. The heroes, at any rate, love and die in a masculine way; it
is the old tragic theme of bitter unmerited misfortune, of daring
adventure that ends fatally, without any of the wailing sensuality
that infects the more harmonious poetry of a later day. There are,
perhaps, for modern taste, too many outlandish words and references to
Eastern customs or beliefs, requiring glossaries and marginal
explanations; nor does the profuse annotation of the present edition
lighten a reader's burden in this respect. Byron had no business to
write 'By pale Phingari's trembling light,' leaving us at the mercy of
assiduous editors to expound that 'Phingari' is the Greek [Greek:
phengarion], and stands here for the moon. And if he could have spared
us such Orientalisms as 'Al Sirat's arch,' or 'avenging Monkir's
scythe,' we should have mixed up less desultory reading with the
enjoyment of fine passages. He gives us too much of his local
colouring, he checks the rush of his verse by superfluous metaphors,
he has weak and halting lines. The style is heated and fuming, yet the
dainty art-critic who lays hands on such metal thrown red hot from the
forge may chance to burn his fingers over it. Nor must we forget that
in these poems Byron brought the classic lands of Greece and the
Levant within the sphere of modern romance, and has unquestionably
added some 'deathless pages' to English literature.
Byron has told us why he adopted for the _Corsair_, and afterwards for
_Lara_, 'the good old and now neglected heroic couplet':
'The stanza of Spenser is, perhaps, too slow and dignified for
narrative, though I confess it is the measure after my own heart;
Scott alone, of the present generation, has hitherto triumphed
completely over the fatal facility of the octosyllabic verse; and
this is not the least victory of his fertile and mighty genius; in
blank verse Milton, Thomson, and our dramatists are the beacons
that shine along the deep, but warn us from the rough and barren
rocks on which they are kindled.'[25]
We doubt much, from a comparison of the poems, whether the experiment
of changing his metre was successful. The short eight-syllabled line
displayed Byron's capacity for vigorous concision and swift movement;
it is eminently suited for strength and speed; whereas in the slow
processional couplet he becomes diffuse, often tedious; he has room
for more rhetoric and verbosity; he falls more into the error of
describing at length the character and sentiments of his gloomy
heroes, instead of letting them act and speak for themselves. At
moments when inspiration is running low, and a gap has to be filled
up, the shorter line needs less padding, and can be more rapidly run
over when it is weak. Whereas a feeble heroic couplet becomes
ponderous and sinks more quickly into bathos--as in the following
sample from the _Corsair_:
'Oh! burst the Haram, wrong not on your lives
One female form--remember--_we_ have wives.'
And the consequence has been that _Lara_ and the _Corsair_ are now,
we believe, the least readable of Byron's metrical romances.
Of Byron's dramas we are obliged to say that, to borrow his own
metaphor, he would have fared better as a poet if he had taken warning
from the beacons, and had given blank verse a wide berth, instead of
setting himself boldly on a course which, as he evidently knew, is
full of peril for fast-sailing, free-going versifiers. He saw that he
could not approach the great masters of this measure, he was resolved
not to imitate them; and so he appears to have chosen the singular
alternative of writing nothing that should in the least resemble them.
His general object as a playwriter is stated, in a letter about
_Sardanapalus_, to have been 'to dramatise striking passages of
history and mythology.'
'You will find,' he adds most truly, 'all this very unlike
Shakespeare; and so much the better in one sense, for I look upon
him to be the worst of models, though the most extraordinary of
writers. It has been my object to be as simple and severe as
Alfieri, and I have broken down the poetry as nearly as I could to
common language.'
And undoubtedly he did break it down so effectually that much of his
blank verse hobbles like a lame horse, being often mere prose printed
in short lines. Here are two specimens, not cut into lengths, which
have no metrical construction at all:
'Unless you keep company with him, and you seem scarce used to such
high society, you can't tell how he approaches.'[26]
'Where thou shalt pass thy days in peace, but on condition that the
three young princes are given up as hostages,'[27]
Many others of the same quality might be given, in which the
_disjecti membra poetae_ would be exceedingly hard to find. It is
surprising that a writer of Byron's experience should have fallen into
the error of supposing that simplicity could be attained by the mere
use of common language. For even Wordsworth, who is a master of simple
strength, could never allow his peasants to talk their ordinary
vernacular without a fatal drop into the commonplace; and all verse
that is to be plain and unaffected in style and thought requires the
most studious composition. Byron seems scarcely to have understood
that blank verse has any rules of scansion, and his signal failure in
this metre has become less tolerable and more conspicuous, since Keats
in his day, and Tennyson after him, have carefully studied the
construction of blank verse, and have left us admirable examples of
its capacity for romantic expression. It is indeed strange that Byron
should have fancied that he could use so delicate an instrument with a
rough unpractised hand.
There are some vigorous passages scattered through the plays, and we
have it on record that Dr. Parr could not sleep a wink after reading
_Sardanapalus_. Nevertheless, we fear that the present generation will
find little cause for demurring to Jeffrey's judgment upon the
tragedies, that they are for the most part 'solemn, prolix, and
ostentatious.' They were not composed, as Byron himself explained,
'with the most remote view to the stage,' so that he had not before
his eyes the wholesome fear of a critical audience. In truth it must
be admitted that he lacked the true dramatic instinct; he could only
set up his leading figures to deliver imposing speeches appropriate to
a tragic situation; and one may guess that the consciousness of
awkward handling weighed upon the spirit and style of his blank verse,
for his ear seems to have completely misled him when it had lost the
guidance of recurrent rhyme. Of _Cain: a Mystery_, one must speak
reverently, since Walter Scott, to whom it was dedicated, wrote that
the author had 'matched Milton on his own ground'; yet in Lucifer, who
leads the dialogue, we have little more than a spectral embodiment of
Byron's own rebellious temper; and in this poem, as in _Manfred_, the
discussion of metaphysical problems carries him beyond his depth.
There are, nevertheless, some fine declamatory passages; and we may
quote as a curiosity one soft line, fresh from the Swiss mountains:
'Pipes in the liberal air
_Mixed with the sweet bells of the sauntering herd_,'
which is to be found in _Manfred_ and might have been taken from the
_Excursion_.
When we turn from the plays to the lyrics, we see at once the
importance, to a poet, of choosing rightly the metrical form that is
the best expression of his peculiar genius. In some of these shorter
poems Byron rises to his highest level, and by these will his
popularity be permanently maintained. They are certainly of very
unequal merit; yet when Byron is condemned for artificiality and
glaring colour, we may point to the poem beginning 'And thou art dead,
as young and fair,' where form and feeling are in harmony throughout
eight long stanzas, without a single line that is feeble or
overcharged:
'The better days of life were ours;
The worst can be but mine;
The sun that cheers, the storm that lowers,
Shall never more be thine.
The silence of that dreamless sleep
I envy now too much to weep;
Nor need I to repine
That all those charms have passed away,
I might have watched through long decay.'
There is no novelty in the ideas, nor does he open the deeper vein of
thoughts that touch the mind with a sense of mortality. Yet the verse
has a masculine brevity that renders effectively the attitude in which
men may well be content firmly to confront an irreparable misfortune.
In his poems of strenuous action, although Byron has not the rare
quality of heroic simplicity, he could at times strike a high
vibrating war note, and could interpret romantically the patriotic
spirit. The two stanzas which we quote from the Hebrew Melodies show
that he could now and then shake off the redundant metaphors and
epithets that overload too much of his impetuous verse, and use his
strength freely:
'Though thou art fall'n, while we are free
Thou shalt not taste of death!
The generous blood that flowed from thee
Disdained to sink beneath;
Within our veins its currents be,
Thy spirit on our breath.
'Thy name, our charging hosts along,
Shall be their battle word!
Thy fall, the theme of choral song
From virgin voices poured!
To weep would do thy glory wrong;
Thou shalt not be deplored.'
And we have another magnificent example of Byron's lyrical power in
the _Isles of Greece_, where the two lines,
'Ah, no! the voices of the dead
Sound like a distant torrent's fall,'
drop suddenly into the elegiac strain, into a mournful echo that
dwells upon the ear, followed by the rising note of a call to arms. It
must be remembered that nothing is so rare as a stirring war-song, and
that in our time we have had a good many attempts--almost all
failures; whereas the _Isles of Greece_ will long continue to stir the
masculine imagination of Englishmen.
On the other hand, it must be admitted that Byron's Occasional Pieces
abound with cheap pathos, dubious fervour, and a kind of commonplace
sentimentality that comes out in the form as well as in the feeling of
his inferior work. The rhymes are apt to be hackneyed, the similes are
sometimes tagged on awkwardly instead of being weaved into the
texture, the expression has often lost its strength, and the emotion
lacks sincerity. Byron, like his brother poets, wrote copiously what
was published indiscriminately; but if the first-class work had not
been very good it would never have buoyed up above sheer oblivion so
much that was third-rate and bad. His pieces are much _too_
occasional, for he was prone to indulgence in hasty verse whenever the
fit was upon him, or as a method of enlisting public sympathy with his
own misconduct, so that he was constantly appearing before the world
as a perfidious sentimentalist, with a false air of lamentation over
the misfortunes which he had brought upon himself, as in the Poems of
the Separation. Yet when he shook off his personal grief and took to
politics, no other poet could more vividly express his intense living
interest in the great events of his time, or strike the proper note of
some great catastrophe. It may be affirmed that the _Ode to Napoleon_
is better than anything else that has been written in English upon the
most astonishing career in modern history:
'The triumph and the vanity,
The rapture of the strife--
The earthquake-voice of Victory,
To thee the breath of life;
The sword, the sceptre, and that sway
Which man seemed made but to obey,
Wherewith renown was rife--
All quelled; Dark Spirit, what must be
The madness of thy memory!
'The Desolator desolate!
The Victor overthrown!
The Arbiter of others' fate
A suppliant for his own!
Is it some yet imperial hope
That with such change can calmly cope?
Or dread of death alone?
To die a prince--or live a slave--
Thy choice is most ignobly brave.'
In the first of these two stanzas the seventh line is weak and breaks
the rapid rush of the verse; but the high pressure and impetus of the
poem are sustained throughout twenty stanzas, producing the effect of
an improvisatore who stops rather from want of breath than from any
other lack of inspiration. In this respect the ode is a rare poetical
exploit; for all poems composed under the spur of the moment, upon
some memorable incident that has just startled the world, must be more
or less improvised, and must hit the right pitch of extraordinary
popular emotion. It is the difficulty of turning out good work under
such arduous conditions that has too often shipwrecked or stranded
some unlucky laureate.
There is one province of verse, if not exactly of poetry, in which
Byron reigns undisputedly, though it is far distant from the land of
lyrics. In his latest and longest production, _Don Juan_, he tells us
that his 'sere fancy has fallen into the yellow leaf':
'And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk
Turns what was once romantic to burlesque.'
It was in _Beppo: a Venetian Story_ that he dropped, for the first
time, the weapon of trenchant sarcasm and invective, with no very fine
edge upon it, which he flourished in his youth, and took up the tone
of light humorous satire upon society. He soon acquired mastery over
the metre (which was suggested, as is well known, by Hookham Frere's
_Whistlecraft_); and in _Don Juan_ he produced a long, rambling poem
of a kind never before attempted, and still far beyond any subsequent
imitations, in the English language. Of a certainty there is much that
it is by no means desirable to imitate, for the English literature
does not assimilate the element of cynical libertinism, which indeed
becomes coarse on an English tongue. Yet it is remarkable that the
Whistlecraft metre, although Byron could manage it with point and
spirit, has never produced more than insipid _pastiche_ in later
hands. But while _Beppo_ may be classed as pure burlesque, _Don Juan_
strikes various keys, ironical and voluptuous, grave and gay, rising
sometimes to the level of strenuous realistic narrative in the
episodes of the shipwreck and the siege, falling often into something
like grotesque buffoonery, with much picturesque description, many
animated lines, and occasional touches of effective pathos. As a story
it has the picaresque flavour of _Gil Blas_, presenting a variety of
scenes and adventures strung together without any definite plot; as a
poem its reputation rests upon some passages of indisputable beauty;
while Byron's own experiences, grievances, and animosities, personal
or political, run through the whole performance like an accompaniment,
and break out occasionally into humorous sarcasm or violent
denunciations. That the overheated fervour of a stormy youth should
cool down into disdainful irony, under the chill of disappointment and
exhaustion, was natural enough; and this unfinished poem may be
regarded as typical of Byron's erratic life, full of loose intrigue
and adventure, with its sudden and premature ending.
It is in _Don Juan_ that Byron stands forth as the founder and
precursor of modern realism in poetry. He has now finally exorcised
the hyperbolic fiend that vexed his youth, he has cast off the
illusions of romance, he knows the ground he treads upon, and his
pictures are drawn from life; he is the foremost of those who have
ventured boldly upon the sombre actualities of war and bloodshed:--
'But let me put an end unto my theme,
There was an end of Ismail, hapless town,
Far flashed her burning towers o'er Danube's stream,
And redly ran his blushing waters down.
The horrid warwhoop and the shriller scream
Rose still; but fainter were the thunders grown;
Of forty thousand that had manned the wall
Some hundreds breathed, the rest were silent all.'
'A versified paraphrase,' it may be said, 'of sober history,' yet
withal very different from the most animated prose, which must be kept
at a lower temperature of intense expression. If we turn to quieter
scenes--which are called picturesque because the artist, like a
painter, has selected the right subject and point of view, and has
grouped his details with exquisite skill--we may take the stanzas
describing the return of the pirate Lambro to his Greek island--
'He saw his white walls shining in the sun,
His garden trees all shadowy and green'--
as a fine example of pure objective writing, which lays out the whole
scene truthfully, with the direct vision of one who has seen it. One
does not find here the suggestive intimations, the wide imaginative
horizon of higher poetry; there are no musical blendings of sound and
sense, as in such lines as Tennyson's
'By the long wash of Australasian seas.'
Yet in these passages Byron has after his own fashion served Nature
faithfully, and he has preserved to us some masterly sketches of life
and manners that have long since disappeared. The Greek islands have
since fallen under the dominion of European uniformity; the costume of
the people, the form of their government, are shabby imitations of
Western models. But the cloudless sky, the sun slowly sinking behind
Morea's hills, the sea on whose azure brow Time writes no wrinkle, and
the marbled steep of Sunium, are still unchanged; and the peaceful
tourist in these waters will see at once that Byron was a true workman
in line and colour, and will feel the intellectual pleasure that comes
from accurate yet artistic interpretation of natural beauties.
The poem of _Don Juan_ is, therefore, a miscellany, connected on the
picturesque side with _Childe Harold_, and by its mocking spirit with
_Beppo_ and the _Vision of Judgment_, the two pieces that may be
classed as pure burlesque. The irreverent persiflage of the _Vision_
belongs to the now obsolete school of Voltaire, and in biting wit and
daring ridicule the performance is not unworthy of that supreme master
in _diablerie_. Nor can it be asserted that this lashing sarcasm was
undeserved, or that all the profanity was in Byron's parody, for
Southey's conception of the Almighty as a High Tory judge, with an
obsequious jury of angels, holding a trial of George III., browbeating
the witnesses against him and acquitting him with acclamation, so that
he leaves the court without a stain on his character, was false and
abject enough to stir the bile of a less irritable Liberal than Byron.
There exists, moreover, in the mind of every good English Whig a
lurking sympathy with the Miltonic Satan, insomuch that all subsequent
attempts by minor poets to humiliate and misrepresent him have
invariably failed. Southey's _Vision_, and Robert Montgomery's libel
upon Satan, have each undergone the same fate of being utterly
extinguished, knocked clean out of English literature by one single
crushing onslaught of Byron and Macaulay respectively.
Our conclusion must be brief, for in fact it is not easy to propound
to the readers of this Review any general observations, which shall be
new as well as true, upon a man's life and works that have been
subjected to incessant scrutiny and criticism throughout the
nineteenth century. At the beginning of this period Byron found
himself matched, in the poetic arena, against contemporary rivals of
first-class genius and striking originality. And from his death almost
up to the century's close there has been no time when some
considerable poet has not occupied the forefront of English letters,
and stamped his impression on the public mind. Variety in style and
ideas has produced many vicissitudes of taste in poetry; it has been
discovered that narrative can be better done in prose, and so the
novel has largely superseded story-telling in verse. There have also
been great political and social changes, and all these things have
severely tested the staying powers of a writer who is too closely
associated with his own period to be reckoned among those wide-ranging
spirits whom Shelley has called 'the kings of thought.' Nevertheless
the new edition of Byron is appearing at a moment which is, we think,
not inopportune. There is just now, as by a coincidence there was in
the year 1800, a dearth of poetic production; we have fallen among
lean years; we have come to a break in the succession of notable
poets; the Victorian celebrities have one by one passed away; and we
can only hope that the first quarter of the twentieth century may
bring again some such bountiful harvest as was vouchsafed to our
grandfathers at the beginning of the nineteenth. In the meantime the
reading of Byron may operate as a wholesome tonic upon the literary
nerves of the rising generation; for, as Mr. Swinburne has generously
acknowledged, with the emphatic concurrence of Matthew Arnold, his
poems have 'the excellence of sincerity and strength.' Now one
tendency of latter-day verse has been toward that over-delicacy of
fibre which has been termed decadence, toward the preference of
correct metrical harmonies over distinct and incisive expression,
toward vague indications of meaning. In this form the melody prevails
over the matter; the style inclines to become precious and garnished
with verbal artifice. Some recent French poets, indeed, in their
anxiety to correct the troublesome lucidity of their mother-tongue,
have set up the school of symbolism, which deals in half-veiled
metaphor and sufficiently obscure allusion, relying upon subtly
suggestive phrases for evoking associations. For ephemeral infirmities
of this kind the straightforward virility of Byron's best work may
serve as an antidote. On the other hand, we have the well-knit
strenuous verse of extreme realism, wrought out by a poet in his
shirt-sleeves, with rhymes clear-sounding like the tap of hammer on
anvil, who sings of rough folk by sea and land, and can touch national
emotion in regard to the incidents or politics of the moment. He
paints without varnish, in hard outline, avoiding metaphor and
ornamental diction generally; taking his language so freely out of the
mouths of men in actual life that he makes occasional slips into
vulgarity. He is at the opposite pole from the symbolist; but true
poetry demands much more distinction of style and nobility of thought.
And here again Byron's high lyrical notes may help to maintain
elevation of tone and to preserve the romantic tradition. His poetry,
like his character, is full of glaring imperfections; yet he wrote as
one of the great world in which he made for a time such a noise; and
after all that has been said about his moral delinquencies, it is
certain that we could have better spared a better man.
In one of Tennyson's earlier letters is the following passage, with
reference to something written at the time in _Philip van Artevelde_:
'He does not sufficiently take into consideration the peculiar
strength evolved by such writers as Byron and Shelley, who, however
mistaken they may be, did yet give the world another heart, and a
new pulse, and so we are kept going. Blessed be those who grease
the wheels of the old world.'
This is the large-hearted, far-seeing judgment of one who could survey
the whole line and evolutionary succession of English verse, being
himself destined to close the long list of nineteenth-century poets,
which was opened by Byron and his contemporaries. The time has surely
now come when we may leave discussing Byron as a social outlaw, and
cease groping after more evidence of his misdeeds. The office of true
criticism is to show that he made so powerful an impression on our
literature as to win for himself permanent rank in its annals, and
that his work, with all its shortcomings, does yet mark and illustrate
an important stage in the connected development of our English poetry.