Alfieri speaks with similar scorn of the tragedies of his predecessors.
“Mi eadevano dalle mani per la languidezza, triviality e prolissit’i dei
modi e del verso, senza parlare poi della snervatezza dei pensieri. Or
perche mai questa nostra divina lingua, si maschia aneo, ed energica, e
feroce, in boeca di Dante, dovra, ella farsi cost sbiadata ed eunuca nel
dialogo tragico?”
To men thus sick of the languid manner of their {352}contemporaries
ruggedness seemed a venial fault, or rather a positive merit. In their
hatred of meretricious ornament, and of what Cowper calls “creamy
smoothness,” they erred on the opposite side. Their style was too
austere, their versification too harsh. It is not easy, however, to
overrate the service which they rendered to literature. The intrinsic
value of their poems is considerable. But the example which they set
of mutiny against an absurd system was invaluable. The part which they
performed was rather that of Moses than that of Joshua. They opened the
house of bondage; but they did not enter the promised land.
During the twenty years which followed the death of Cowper, the
revolution in English poetry was fully consummated. None of the writers
of this period, not even Sir Walter Scott, contributed so much to
the consummation as Lord Byron. Yet Lord Byron contributed to it
unwillingly, and with constant self-reproach and shame. All his tastes
and inclinations led him to take part with the school of poetry which
was going out against the school which was coming in. Of Pope himself
he spoke with extravagant admiration. He did not venture directly to say
that the little man of Twickenham was a greater poet than Shakspeare
or Milton; but he hinted pretty clearly that he thought so. Of his
contemporaries, scarcely any had so much of his admiration as Mr.
Gifford, who, considered as a poet, was merely Pope, without Pope’s
wit and fancy, and whose satires are decidedly inferior in vigour and
poignancy to the very imperfect juvenile performance of Lord Byron
himself. He now and then praised Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Coleridge, but
ungraciously and without cordiality. When he attacked them, he
brought his whole soul to the work. {353}Of the most elaborate of
Mr. Wordsworth’s poems he could find nothing to say, but that it was
“clumsy, and frowsy, and his aversion.” Peter Bell excited his spleen to
such a degree that he evoked the shades of Pope and Dryden, and demanded
of them whether it were possible that such trash could evade contempt?
In his heart he thought his own Pilgrimage of Harold inferior to his
Imitation of Horace’s Art of Poetry, la feeble echo of Pope and Johnson.
This insipid performance he repeatedly designed to publish, and was
withheld only by the solicitations of his friends. He has distinctly
declared his approbation of the unities, the most absurd laws by which
genius was ever held in servitude. In one of his works, we think in his
letter to Mr. Bowles, he compares the poetry of the eighteenth century
to the Parthenon, and that of the nineteenth to a Turkish mosque, and
boasts that, though he had assisted his contemporaries in building their
grotesque and barbarous edifice, he had never joined them in defacing
the remains of a chaster and more graceful architecture. In another
letter he compares the change which had recently passed on English
poetry to the decay of Latin poetry after the Augustan age. In the
time of Pope, he tells his friend, it was all Horace with us. It is all
Claudian now.
For the great old masters of the art he had no very enthusiastic
veneration. In his letter to Mr. Bowles he uses expressions which
clearly indicate that he preferred Pope’s Iliad to the original.
Mr. Moore confesses that his friend was no very fervent admirer of
Shakspeare. Of all the poets of the first class, Lord Byron seems to
have admired Dante and Milton most. Yet in the fourth canto of Childe
Harold, he places Tasso, a writer not merely inferior to them, but of
{354}quite a different order of mind, on at least a footing of equality
with them. Mr. Hunt is, we suspect, quite correct in saying that Lord
Byron could see little or no merit in Spenser.
But Byron the critic and Byron the poet were two very different men. The
effects of the noble writer’s theory may indeed often be traced in his
practice. But his disposition led him to accommodate himself to the
literary taste of the age in which he lived; and his talents would have
enabled him to accommodate himself to the taste of any age. Though he
said much of his contempt for mankind, and though he boasted that amidst
the inconstancy of fortune and of fame he was all-sufficient to himself,
his literary career indicated nothing of that lonely and unsocial pride
which he affected. We cannot conceive him, like Milton or Wordsworth,
defying the criticism of his contemporaries, retorting their scorn, and
labouring on a poem in the full assurance that it would be unpopular,
and in the full assurance that it would be immortal. He has said, by the
mouth of one of his heroes, in speaking of political greatness, that “he
must serve who fain would sway;” and this he assigns as a reason for not
entering into political life. He did not consider that the sway which
he had exercised in literature had been purchased by servitude, by the
sacrifice of his own taste to the taste of the public.
He was the creature of his age; and whenever he had lived he would have
been the creature of his age. Under Charles the First Byron would have
been more quaint than Donne. Under Charles the Second the rants of
Byron’s rhyming plays would have pitted it, boxed it, and galleried it,
with those of any Bays or Bilboa. Under George the First the monotonous
{355}smoothness of Byron’s versification and the terseness of his
expression would have made Pope himself envious.
As it was, he was the man of the last thirteen years of the eighteenth
century, and of the first twenty-three years of the nineteenth century.
He belonged half to the old, and half to the new school of poetry.
His personal taste led him to the former; his thirst of praise to the
latter; his talents were equally suited to both. His fame was a common
ground on which the zealots of both sides, Gifford, for example, and
Shelley, might meet. He was the representative, not of either literary
party, but of both at once, and of their conflict, and of the victory
by which that conflict was terminated. His poetry fills and measures the
whole of the vast interval through which our literature has moved since
the time of Johnson. It touches the Essay on Man at the one extremity,
and the Excursion at the other.
There are several parallel instances in literary history. Voltaire,
for example, was the connecting link between the France of Lewis the
Fourteenth and the France of Lewis the Sixteenth, between Racine and
Boileau on the one side, and Condorcet and Beaumarchais on the other.
He, like Lord Byron, put himself at the head of an intellectual
revolution, dreading it all the time, murmuring at it, sneering at it,
yet choosing rather to move before his age in any direction than to be
left behind and forgotten. Dryden was the connecting link between the
literature of the age of James the First, and the literature of the age
of Anne. Oromasdes and Arimanes fought for him. Arimanes carried him
off. But his heart was to the last with Oromasdes. Lord Byron was, in
the same manner. {356}the mediator between two generations, between two
hostile poetical sects. Though always sneering at Mr. Wordsworth, he
was yet, though perhaps unconsciously, the interpreter between Mr.
Wordsworth and the multitude. In the Lyrical Ballads and the Excursion
Mr. Wordsworth appeared as the high priest of a worship, of which nature
was the idol. No poems have ever indicated a more exquisite perception
of the beauty of the outer world, or a more passionate love and
reverence for that beauty. Yet they were not popular; and it is not
likely that they ever will be popular as the poetry of Sir Walter Scott
is popular. The feeling which pervaded them was too deep for
general sympathy. Their style was often too mysterious for general
comprehension. They made a few esoteric disciples, and many scoffers.
Lord Byron founded what may be called an exoteric Lake school; and all
the readers of verse in England, we might say in Europe, hastened to
sit at his feet. What Mr. Wordsworth had said like a recluse, Lord Byron
said like a man of the world, with less profound feeling, but with more
perspicuity, energy, and conciseness. We would refer our readers to
the last two cantos of Childe Harold and to Manfred, in proof of these
observations.
Lord Byron, like Mr. Wordsworth, had nothing dramatic in his genius. He
was indeed the reverse of a great dramatist, the very antithesis to a
great dramatist. All his characters, Harold looking on the sky, from
which his country and the sun are disappearing together, the Giaour,
standing apart in the gloom of the side aisle, and casting a haggard
scowl from under his long hood at the crucifix and the censer, Conrad
leaning on his sword by the watch-tower, Lara smiling on the dancers,
Alp gazing steadily on the fatal cloud {357}as it passes before the
moon, Manfred wandering among the precipices of Berne, Azzo on the
judgment-seat, Ugo at the bar, Lambrol frowning on the siesta of his
daughter and Juan, Cain presenting his unacceptable offering, are
essentially the same. The varieties are varieties merely of age,
situation, and outward show. If ever Lord Byron attempted to exhibit men
of a different kind, he always made them either insipid or unnatural.
Selim is nothing. Bonnivart is nothing. Don Juan, in the first and best
cantos, is a feeble copy of the Page in the Marriage of Figaro. Johnson,
the man whom Juan meets in the slave-market, is a most striking failure.
How differently would Sir Walter Scott have drawn a bluff, fearless
Englishman, in such a situation! The portrait would have seemed to walk
out of the canvass.
Sardanapalus is more coarsely drawn than any dramatic personage that we
can remember. His heroism and his effeminacy, his contempt of death and
his dread of a weighty helmet, his kingly resolution to be seen in the
foremost ranks, and the anxiety with which he calls for a looking-glass,
that he may be seen to advantage, are contrasted, it is true, with all
the point of Juvenal. Indeed the hint of the character seems to have
been taken from what Juvenal says of Otho:
“Speculum civilis sarcina belli.
Nimirum summi ducis est occidere Galbam,
Et curare cutem summi constantia civis,
Bedriaci in campo spolium affectare l’alati,