These are excellent lines in a satire. But it is not the business of the
dramatist to exhibit characters in this sharp antithetical way. It is
not thus that Shakspeare makes Prince Hal rise from the rake of
{358}Eastcheap into the hero of Shrewsbury, and sink again into the Bike
of Eastcheap. It is not thus that Shakspeare has exhibited the union
of effeminacy and valour in Antony. A dramatist cannot commit a greater
error than that of following those pointed descriptions of character in
which satirists and historians indulge so much. It is by rejecting what
is natural that satirists and historians produce these striking
characters. Their great object generally is to ascribe to every man as
many contradictory qualities as possible: and this is an object easily
attained. By judicious selection and judicious exaggeration, the
intellect and the disposition of any human being might be described as
being made up of nothing but startling contrasts. If the dramatist
attempts to create a being answering to one of these descriptions, he
fails, because he reverses an imperfect analytical process. He produces,
not a man, but a personified epigram. Very eminent writers have fallen
into this snare. Ben Jonson has given us a Hermogenes, taken from the
lively lines of Horace; but the inconsistency which is so amusing in the
satire appears unnatural and disgusts us in the play. Sir Walter Scott
has committed a far more glaring error of the same kind in the novel of
Peveril. Admiring, as every judicious reader must admire, the keen and
vigorous lines in which Dryden satirised the Duke of Buckingham,
Sir Walter attempted to make a Duke of Buckingham to suit them, a
real living Zimri; and he made, not a man, but the most grotesque of
all monsters. A writer who should attempt to introduce into a play or a
novel such a Wharton as the Wharton of Pope, or a Lord Hervey answering
to Sporus, would fail in the same manner.
But to return to Lord Byron; his women, like his men, {359}are all
of one breed. Haidee is a half-savage and girlish Julia; Julia is a
civilised and matronly Haidee. Leila is a wedded Zuleika, Zuleika a
virgin Leila. Gulnare and Medora appear to have been intentionally
opposed to each other. Yet the difference is a difference of situation
only. A slight change of circumstances would, it should seem, have sent
Gulnare to the lute of Medora, and armed Medora with the dagger of
Gulnare.
It is hardly too much to say, that Lord Byron could exhibit only one man
and only one woman, a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his
brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in
revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection: a woman all softness
and gentleness, loving to caress and to be caressed, but capable of
being transformed by passion into a tigress.
Even these two characters, his only two characters, he could not exhibit
dramatically. He exhibited them in the manner, not of Shakspeare, but of
Clarendon. He analysed them; he made them analyse themselves; but he did
not make them show themselves. We are told, for example, in many
lines of great force and spirit, that the speech of Lara was bitterly
sarcastic, that he talked little of his travels, that if he was much
questioned about them, his answers became short, and his brow gloomy.
But we have none of Lara’s sarcastic speeches or short answers. It is
not thus that the great masters of human nature have portrayed human
beings. Homer never tells us that Nestor loved to relate long stories
about his youth. Shakspeare never tells us that in the mind of Iago
every thing that is beautiful and endearing was associated with some
filthy and debasing idea. {360}It is curious to observe the tendency
which the dialogue of Lord Byron always has to lose its character of a
dialogue, and to become soliloquy. The scenes between Manfred and the
Chamois-hunter, between Manfred and the Witch of the Alps, between
Manfred and the Abbot, are instances of this tendency. Manfred, after
a few unimportant speeches, has all the talk to himself. The other
interlocutors are nothing more than good listeners. They drop an
occasional question or ejaculation which sets Manfred off again on the
inexhaustible topic of his personal feelings. If we examine the fine
passages in Lord Byron’s dramas, the description of Rome, for example,
in Manfred, the description of a Venetian revel in Marino Faliero, the
concluding invective which the old doge pronounces against Venice, we
shall find that there is nothing dramatic in these speeches, that they
derive none of their effect from the character or situation of the
speaker, and that they would have been as fine, or finer, if they had
been published as fragments of blank verse by Lord Byron. There is
scarcely a speech in Shakspeare of which the same could be said. No
skilful reader of the plays of Shakspeare can endure to see what are
called the fine things taken out, under the name of “Beauties” or of
“Elegant Extracts,” or to hear any single passage, “To be or not to be,”
for example, quoted as a sample of the great poet. “To be or not to be”
has merit undoubtedly as a composition. It would have merit if put into
the mouth of a chorus. But its merit as a composition vanishes when
compared with its merit as belonging to Hamlet. It is not too much to
say that the great plays of Shakspeare would lose less by being deprived
of all the passages which are commonly called the fine passages, than
those passages {361}lose by being read separately from the play. This is
perhaps the highest praise which can be given to a dramatist.
On the other hand, it may be doubted whether there is, in all Lord
Byron’s plays, a single remarkable passage which owes any portion of its
interest or effect to its connection with the characters or the action.
He has written only one scene, as far as we can recollect, which
is dramatic even in manner, the scene between Lucifer and Cain. The
conference is animated, and each of the interlocutors has a fair share
of it. But this scene, when examined, will be found to be a confirmation
of our remarks. It is a dialogue only in form. It is a soliloquy in
essence. It is in reality a debate carried on within one single unquiet
and sceptical mind. The questions and the answers, the objections and
the solutions, all belong to the same character.
A writer who showed so little dramatic skill in works professedly
dramatic was not likely to write narrative with dramatic effect.
Nothing conld indeed be more rude and careless than the structure of
his narrative poems. He seems to have thought, with the hero of the
Rehearsal, that the plot was good for nothing but to bring in fine
things. His two longest works, Childe Harold and Don Juan, have no plan
whatever. Either of them might have been extended to any length, or cut
short at any point. The state in which the Giaour appears illustrates
the manner in which all Byron’s poems were constructed. They are all,
like the Giaour, collections of fragments; and, though there may be no
empty spaces marked by asterisks, it is still easy to perceive, by the
clumsiness of the joining, where the parts for the sake of which
the whole was composed end and begin. {362}It was in description and
meditation that Byron excelled. “Description,” as he said in Don
Juan, “was his forte.” His manner is indeed peculiar, and is almost
unequalled; rapid, sketchy, full of vigour; the selection happy; the
strokes few and bold. In spite of the reverence which we feel for the
genius of Mr. Wordsworth we cannot but think that the minuteness of his
descriptions often diminishes their effect, He has accustomed himself to
gaze on nature with the eye of a lover, to dwell on every feature, and
to mark every change of aspect. Those beauties which strike the most
negligent observer, and those which only a close attention discovers,
are equally familiar to him and are equally prominent in his poetry.
The proverb of old Hesiod, that half is often more than the whole, is
eminently applicable to description. The policy of the Dutch who cut
down most of the precious trees in the Spice Islands, in order to raise
the value of what remained, was a policy which poets would do well
to imitate. It was a policy which no poet understood better than Lord
Byron. Whatever his faults might be, he was never, while his mind
retained its vigour, accused of prolixity.
His descriptions, great as was their intrinsic merit, derived their
principal interest from the feeling which always mingled with them.
He was himself the beginning, the middle, and the end, of all his own
poetry, the hero of every tale, the chief object in every landscape.
Harold, Lara, Manfred, and a crowd of other characters, were universally
considered merely as loose incognitos of Byron; and there is every
reason to believe that he meant them to be so considered. The wonders of
the outer world, the Tagus, with the mighty fleets of England riding on
its bosom, the towers of {363}Cintra overhanging the shaggy forest of
cork-trees and willows, the glaring marble of Pentelicus, the banks of
the Rhine, the glaciers of Clarens, the sweet Lake of Leman, the dell of
Egeria with its summer-birds and rustling lizards, the shapeless ruins
of Rome overgrown with ivy and wall-flowers, the stars, the sea, the
mountains, all were mere accessaries, the background to one dark and
melancholy figure.
Never had any writer so vast a command of the whole eloquence of scorn,
misanthropy and despair. That Marah was never dry. No art could sweeten,
no draughts could exhaust, its perennial waters of bitterness. Never was
there such variety in monotony as that of Byron. From maniac laughter
to piercing lamentation, there was not a single note of human anguish
of which he was not master. Year after year, and month after month, he
continued to repeat that to be wretched is the destiny of all; that
to be eminently wretched is the destiny of the eminent; that all the
desires by which we are cursed lead alike to misery, if they are not
gratified, to the misery of disappointment, if they are gratified, to
the misery of satiety. His heroes are men who have arrived by different
roads at the same goal of despair, who are sick of life, who are at
war with society, who are supported in their anguish only by an
unconquerable pride resembling that of Prometheus on the rock or of
Satan in the burning marl, who can master their agonies by the force
of their will, and who, to the last, defy the whole power of earth and
heaven. He always described himself as a man of the same kind with
his favourite creations, as a man whose heart had been withered, whose
capacity for happiness was gone and could not be restored, but whose
invincible spirit dared the worst that could befall him here or
hereafter. {364}How much of this morbid feeling sprang from an original
disease of the mind, how much from real misfortune, how much from the
nervousness of dissipation, how much was fanciful, how much was
merely affected, it is impossible for us, and would probably have been
impossible for the most intimate friends of Lord Byron, to decide.
Whether there ever existed, or can ever exist, a person answering to the
description which he gave of himself may be doubted; but that he was not
such a person is beyond all doubt. It is ridiculous to imagine that
a man whose mind was really imbued with scorn of his fellow-creatures
would have published three or four books every year in order to tell
them so; or that a man who could say with truth that he neither sought
sympathy nor needed it would have admitted all Europe to hear his
farewell to his wife, and his blessings on his child. In the second
canto of Childe Harold, he tells us that he is insensible to fame and
obloquy:
“Ill may such contest now the spirit move,