of exalted passion over reflection, which is one of the revolutionary
marks. Byron was fundamentally and substantially, as has been already
said, one of the most rational of men. Hence when the passionate fit
grew cold, as it always does in temperaments so mixed, he wanted for
perfect strength a justification in thought. There are men whose being
is so universally possessed by phantasies, that they never feel this
necessity of reconciling the visions of excited emotion with the ideas
of ordered reason. Byron was more vigorously constituted, and his
susceptibility to the necessity of this reconciliation combined with
his inability to achieve it, to produce that cynicism which the simple
charity of vulgar opinion attributes to the possession of him by unclean
devils. It was his refuge, as it sometimes is with smaller men, from the
disquieting confusion which was caused by the disproportion between his
visions and aspirations, and his intellectual means for satisfying
himself seriously as to their true relations and substantive value. Only
the man arrives at practical strength who is convinced, whether rightly
or wrongly, that he knows all about his own ideas that needs to be
known. Byron never did thus know himself, either morally or
intellectually. The higher part of him was consciously dragged down by
the degrading reminiscence of the brutishness of his youth and its
connections and associations; they hung like miasma over his spirit. He
could not rise to that sublimest height of moral fervour, when a man
intrepidly chases from his memory past evil done, suppresses the
recollection of old corruptions, declares that he no longer belongs to
them nor they to him, and is not frightened by the past from a firm and
lofty respect for present dignity and worth. It is a good thing thus to
overthrow the tyranny of the memory, and to cast out the body of our
dead selves. That Byron never attained this good, though he was not
unlikely to have done so if he had lived longer, does not prove that he
was too gross to feel its need, but it explains a moral weakness which
has left a strange and touching mark on some of his later works.
So in the intellectual order, he knew too much in one sense, and in
another too little. The strong man is not conscious of gaps and
cataclysms in the structure of his belief, or else he would in so far
instantly cease to be strong. One living, as Byron emphatically did, in
the truly modern atmosphere, was bound by all the conditions of the
atmosphere to have mastered what we may call the natural history of his
own ideas and convictions; to know something of their position towards
fact and outer circumstance and possibility; above all to have some
trusty standard for testing their value, and assuring himself that they
do really cover the field which he takes them to cover. People with a
faith and people living in frenzy are equally under this law; but they
take the completeness and coherency of their doctrine for granted. Byron
was not the prey of habitual frenzy, and he was without a faith. That is
to say, he had no firm basis for his conceptions, and he was aware that
he had none. The same unrest which drove men of that epoch to Nature,
haunted them to the end, because they had no systematic conception of
her working and of human relations with her. In a word, there was no
science. Byron was a warm admirer of the genius and art of Goethe, yet
he never found out the central secret of Goethe's greatness, his
luminous and coherent positivity. This is the crowning glory of the
modern spirit, and it was the lack of this which went so far to
neutralise Byron's hold of the other chief characteristics of that
spirit, its freedom and spaciousness, its humaneness and wide
sociality, its versatility and many-sidedness and passionate feeling for
the great natural forces.
* * * * *
This positivity is the cardinal condition of strength for times when
theology lies in decay, and the abstractions which gradually replaced
the older gods have in their turn ceased to satisfy the intelligence and
mould the will. All competent persons agree that it is the first
condition of the attainment of scientific truth. Nobody denies that men
of action find in it the first law of successful achievement in the
material order. Its varied but always superlative power in the region of
æsthetics is only an object of recent recognition, though great work
enough has been done in past ages by men whose recognition was informal
and inexpress. It is plain that, in the different classes of æsthetic
manifestation, there will be differences in objective shape and colour,
corresponding to the varied limits and conditions of the matter with
which the special art has to deal; but the critic may expect to find in
all a profound unity of subjective impression, and that, the impression
of a self-sustaining order and a self-sufficing harmony among all those
faculties and parts and energies of universal life, which come within
the idealising range of art. In other words, the characteristically
modern inspiration is the inspiration of law. The regulated play of
forces shows itself as fit to stir those profound emotional impulses
which wake the artistic soul, as ever did the gracious or terrible gods
of antique or middle times. There are glories in Turner's idealisation
of the energies of matter, which are at least as nobly imaginative and
elevated, in spite of the conspicuous absence of the human element in
them, as the highest products of the artists who believed that their
work was for the service and honour of a deity.
It is as mistaken to suppose that this conviction of the supremacy of a
cold and self-sustained order in the universe is fatal to emotional
expansion, as it would be to suppose it fatal to intellectual curiosity.
Experience has shown in the scientific sphere, that the gradual
withdrawal of natural operations from the grasp of the imaginary
volitions of imaginary beings has not tamed, but greatly stimulated and
fertilised scientific curiosity as to the conditions of these
operations. Why should it be otherwise in the æsthetic sphere? Why
should all that part of our mental composition which responds to the
beautiful and imaginative expression of real truths, be at once inflamed
and satisfied by the thought that our whole lives, and all the movements
of the universe, are the objects of the inexplicable caprice of Makers
who are also Destroyers, and yet grow cold, apathetic, and unproductive,
in the shadow of the belief that we can only know ourselves as part of
the stupendous and inexorable succession of phenomenal conditions,
moving according to laws that may be formulated positively, but not
interpreted morally, to new destinies that are eternally unfathomable?
Why should this conception of a coherent order, free from the arbitrary
and presumptuous stamp of certain final causes, be less favourable,
either to the ethical or the æsthetic side of human nature, than the
older conception of the regulation of the course of the great series by
a multitude of intrinsically meaningless and purposeless volitions? The
alertness of our sensations for all sources of outer beauty remains
unimpaired. The old and lovely attitude of devout service does not pass
away to leave vacancy, but is transformed into a yet more devout
obligation and service towards creatures that have only their own
fellowship and mutual ministry to lean upon; and if we miss something of
the ancient solace of special and personal protection, the loss is not
unworthily made good by the growth of an imperial sense of participation
in the common movement and equal destination of eternal forces.
To have a mind penetrated with this spiritual persuasion, is to be in
full possession of the highest strength that man can attain. It springs
from a scientific and rounded interpretation of the facts of life, and
is in a harmony, which freshly found truths only make more ample and
elaborate, with all the conclusions of the intellect in every order. The
active energies are not paralysed by the possibilities of enfeebling
doubt, nor the reason drawn down and stultified by apprehension lest its
methods should discredit a document, or its inferences clash with a
dogma, or its light flash unseasonably on a mystery. There is none of
the baleful distortion of hate, because evil and wrong-doing and
darkness are acknowledged to be effects of causes, sums of conditions,
terms in a series; they are to be brought to their end, or weakened and
narrowed, by right action and endeavour, and this endeavour does not
stagnate in antipathy, but concentrates itself in transfixing a cause.
In no other condition of the spirit than this, in which firm
acquiescence mingles with valorous effort, can a man be so sure of
raising a calm gaze and an enduring brow to the cruelty of circumstance.
The last appalling stroke of annihilation itself is measured with purest
fortitude by one, whose religious contemplation dwells most habitually
upon the sovereignty of obdurate laws in the vast revolving circle of
physical forces, on the one hand, and, on the other, upon that moral
order which the vision and pity of good men for their fellows, guiding
the spontaneous energy of all men in strife with circumstance, have
raised into a structure sublimer and more amazing than all the majesty
of outer nature.
In Byron's time the pretensions of the two possible answers to the great
and eternally open questions of God, Immortality, and the like, were
independent of that powerful host of inferences and analogies which the
advance of physical discovery, and the establishment of a historical
order, have since then brought into men's minds. The direct aggressions
of old are for the most part abandoned, because it is felt that no
fiercest polemical cannonading can drive away the impalpable darkness
of error, but only the slow and silent presence of the dawning truth.
_Cain_ remains, a stern and lofty statement of the case against that
theological tradition which so outrages, where it has not already too
deeply depraved, the conscience of civilised man. Yet every one who is
competent to judge, must feel how infinitely more free the mind of the
poet would have been, if besides this just and holy rage, most laudable
in its kind, his intellectual equipment had been ample enough and
precise enough to have taught him, that all the conceptions that races
of men have ever held, either about themselves or their deities, have
had a source in the permanently useful instincts of human nature, are
capable of explanation, and of a historical justification; that is to
say, of the kind of justification which is, in itself and of its own
force, the most instant destruction to what has grown to be an
anachronism.
Byron's curiously marked predilection for dramatic composition, not
merely for dramatic poems, as _Manfred_ or _Cain_, but for genuine
plays, as _Marino Faliero_, _Werner_, the _Two Foscari_, was the only
sign of his approach to the really positive spirit. Dramatic art, in its
purest modern conception, is genuinely positive; that is, it is the
presentation of action, character, and motive in a self-sufficing and
self-evolving order. There are no final causes, and the first moving
elements are taken for granted to begin with. The dramatist creates, but
it is the climax of his work to appear to stand absolutely apart and
unseen, while the play unfolds itself to the spectator, just as the
greater drama of physical phenomena unfolds itself to the scientific
observer, or as the order of recorded history extends in natural process
under the eye of the political philosopher. Partly, no doubt, the
attraction which dramatic form had for Byron is to be explained by that
revolutionary thirst for action, of which we have already spoken; but
partly also it may well have been due to Byron's rudimentary and
unsuspected affinity with the more constructive and scientific side of
the modern spirit.
His idea of Nature, of which something has been already said, pointed in
the same direction; for, although he made an abstraction and a goddess
of her, and was in so far out of the right modern way of thinking about
these outer forces, it is to be remembered, that, while this dominant
conception of Nature as introduced by Rousseau and others into politics
was most mischievous and destructive, its place and worth in poetry are
very different; because here in the region of the imagination it had the
effect, without any pernicious practical consequences, of giving shape
and proportion to that great idea of _ensemble_ throughout the visible
universe, which may be called the beginning and fountain of right
knowledge. The conception of the relationship of the different parts and
members of the vast cosmos was not accessible to Byron, as it is to a
later generation, but his constant appeal in season and out of season to
all the life and movement that surrounds man, implied and promoted the
widest extension of consciousness of the wholeness and community of
natural processes.
* * * * *
There was one very manifest evil consequence of the hold which this idea
in its cruder shape, gained over Byron and his admirers. The vastness of
the material universe, as they conceived and half adored it, entirely
overshadowed the principle of moral duty and social obligation. The
domestic sentiment, for example, almost disappears in those works which
made Byron most popular, or else it only appears, to be banished with
reproach. This is quite in accordance with the revolutionary spirit,
which was in one of its most fundamental aspects a revolt on behalf of
unconditioned individual rights, and against the family. If we accept
what seems to be the fatal law of progress, that excess on one side is
only moderated by a nearly corresponding excess of an opposite kind, the
Byronic dissolution of domestic feeling was not entirely without
justification. There is probably no uglier growth of time than that mean
and poor form of domesticity, which has always been too apt to fascinate
the English imagination, ever since the last great effort of the
Rebellion, and which rose to the climax of its popularity when George
III. won all hearts by living like a farmer. Instead of the fierce light
beating about a throne, it played lambently upon a sty. And the nation
who admired, imitated. When the Regent came, and with him that coarse
profligacy which has alternated with cloudy insipidity in the annals of
the line, the honest part of the world, out of antipathy to the son,
was driven even further into domestic sentimentality of a greasy kind,
than it had gone from affection for the sire.
Byron helped to clear the air of this. His fire, his lofty spaciousness
of outlook, his spirited interest in great national causes, his romance,
and the passion both of his animosity and his sympathy, acted for a
while like an electric current, and every one within his influence
became ashamed to barter the large heritage of manhood, with its many
realms and illimitable interests, for the sordid ease of the hearth and
the good word of the unworthy. He fills men with thoughts that shake
down the unlovely temple of comfort. This was good, to force whoever was
not already too far sunk into the mire, high up to the larger
atmosphere, whence they could see how minute an atom is man, how
infinite and blind and pitiless the might that encompasses his little
life. Many feeble spirits ran back homewards from the horrid solitudes
and abysses of _Manfred_, and the moral terrors of _Cain_, and even the
despair of _Harold_, and, burying themselves in warm domestic places,
were comforted by the familiar restoratives and appliances. Firmer souls
were not only exhilarated, but intoxicated by the potent and
unaccustomed air. They went too far. They made war on the family, and
the idea of it. Everything human was mischievously dwarfed, and the
difference between right and wrong, between gratification of appetite
and its control for virtue's sake, between the acceptance and the
evasion of clear obligation, all became invisible or of no account in
the new light. That constancy and permanence, of which the family is the
type, and which is the first condition alike of the stability and
progress of society, was obliterated from thought. As if the wonders
that have been wrought by this regulated constancy of the feeling of man
for man in transforming human life were not far more transcendently
exalting than the contemplation of those glories of brute nature, which
are barbaric in comparison.
It would be unjust not to admit that there are abundant passages in his
poems of too manifest depth and sincerity of feeling, for us to suppose
that Byron himself was dead to the beauty of domestic sentiment. The
united tenderness and dignity of Faliero's words to Angiolina, before he
goes to the meeting of the conspirators, would, if there were nothing
else, be enough to show how rightly in his better moods the poet
appreciated the conditions of the family. Unfortunately the better moods
were not fixed, and we had _Don Juan_, where the wit and colour and
power served to make an anti-social and licentious sentiment attractive
to puny creatures, who were thankful to have their lasciviousness so
gaily adorned. As for Great Britain, she deserved _Don Juan_. A nation,
whose disrespect for all ideas and aspirations that cannot be supported
by a text, nor circulated by a religious tract society, was systematic,
and where consequently the understanding is least protected against
sensual sophisms, received no more than a just chastisement in 'the
literature of Satan.' Here again, in the licence of this literature, we
see the finger of the Revolution, and of that egoism which makes the
passions of the individual his own law. Let us condemn and pass on,
homily undelivered. If Byron injured the domestic idea on this side, let
us not fail to observe how vastly he elevated it on others, and how,
above all, he pointed to the idea above and beyond it, in whose light
only can that be worthy, the idea of a country and a public cause. A man
may be sure that the comfort of the hearth has usurped too high a place,
when he can read without response the lines declaring that domestic ties
must yield in 'those who are called to the highest destinies, which
purify corrupted commonwealths.'
We must forget all feelings save the one--
We must resign all passions save our purpose--
We must behold no object save our country--
And only look on death as beautiful,
So that the sacrifice ascend to heaven
And draw down freedom on her evermore.
_Calendaro._ But if we fail----
_I. Bertuccio._ They never fail who die
In a great cause: the block may soak their gore;
Their heads may sodden in the sun; their limbs
Be strung to city gates and castle walls--
But still their spirit walks abroad. Though years
Elapse, and others share as dark a doom,
They but augment the deep and sweeping thoughts
Which overpower all others, and conduct
The world at last to freedom. What were we
If Brutus had not lived? He died in giving
Rome liberty, but left a deathless lesson--
A name which is a virtue, and a soul
Which multiplies itself throughout all time,
When wicked men wax mighty, and a state
Turns servile.
And the man who wrote this was worthy to play an even nobler part than
the one he had thus nobly described; for it was not many years after,
that Byron left all and laid down his life for the emancipation of a
strange land, and 'Greece and Italy wept for his death, as it had been
that of the noblest of their own sons.' Detractors have done their best
to pare away the merit of this act of self-renunciation by attributing
it to despair. That contemporaries of their own humour had done their
best to make his life a load to him is true, yet to this talk of despair
we may reply in the poet's own words:
When we know
All that can come, and how to meet it, our
Resolves, if firm, may merit a more noble
Word than this, to give it utterance.
There was an estimate of the value and purpose of a human life, which
our Age of Comfort may fruitfully ponder.
To fix upon violent will and incessant craving for movement as the mark
of a poet, whose contemporaries adored him for what they took to be the
musing sweetness of his melancholy, may seem a critical perversity.
There is, however, a momentous difference between that melancholy, which
is as the mere shadow projected by a man's spiritual form, and that
other melancholy, which itself is the reality and substance of a
character; between the soul to whom dejection brings graceful relief
after labour and effort, and the soul which by irresistible habit and
constitution dwells ever in Golgotha. This deep and penetrating
subjective melancholy had no possession of Byron. His character was
essentially objective, stimulated by outward circumstance, moving to
outward harmonies, seeking colour and image and purpose from without.
Hence there is inevitably a certain liveliness and animation, even when
he is in the depths. We feel that we are watching clouds sweep
majestically across the sky, and, even when they are darkest, blue
interspaces are not far off. Contrast the moodiest parts of _Childe
Harold_ or of _Cain_ with Novalis's _Night Hymns_. Byron's gloom is a
mere elegance in comparison. The one pipes to us with a graceful
despondency on the edge of the gulf, while the other carries us actually
down into the black profound, with no rebellious cry, nor shriek of woe,
but sombrely awaiting the deliverance of death, with soul absorbed and
consumed by weariness. Let the reader mark the note of mourning struck
in the opening stanzas, for instance, of Novalis's _Longing after
Death_, their simplicity, homeliness, transparent sincerity, and then
turn to any of the familiar passages where Byron meditates on the good
things which the end brings to men. How artificial he seems, and
unseasonably ornate, and how conscious of his public. In the first, we
sit sadly on the ground in some veritable Place of a Skull; in the
second, we assist at tragical distress after the manner of the Italian
opera. We should be disposed to call the first a peculiarly German
quality, until we remember Pascal. With Novalis, or with Pascal, as with
all those whom character, or the outer fates, or the two together, have
drawn to dwell in the valley of the shadow, gloom and despondency are
the very stuff of their thoughts. Material energy could have done
nothing for them. Their nerves and sinews were too nearly cut asunder.
To know the quality of Byron's melancholy, and to recognise how little
it was of the essence of his character, we have only to consider how far
removed he was from this condition. In other words, in spite of morbid
manifestations of one sort and another, he always preserved a salutary
and vivid sympathy for action, and a marked capacity for it.
* * * * *
It was the same impetuous and indomitable spirit of effort which moved
Byron to his last heroic exploit, that made the poetry inspired by it so
powerful in Europe, from the deadly days of the Holy Alliance onwards.
Cynical and misanthropical as he has been called, as though that were
his sum and substance, he yet never ceased to glorify human freedom, in
tones that stirred the hearts of men and quickened their hope and upheld
their daring, as with the voice of some heavenly trumpet. You may, if
you choose, find the splendour of the stanzas in the Fourth Canto on the
Bourbon restoration, on Cromwell, and Washington, a theatrical
splendour. But for all that, they touched the noblest parts of men. They
are alive with an exalted and magnanimous generosity, the one high
virtue which can never fail to touch a multitude. Subtlety may miss
them, graces may miss them, and reason may fly over their heads, but the
words of a generous humanity on the lips of poet or chief have never
failed to kindle divine music in their breasts. The critic may censure,
and culture may wave a disdainful hand. As has been said, all such words
'are open to criticism, and they are all above it.' The magic still
works. A mysterious and potent word from the gods has gone abroad over
the face of the earth.
This larger influence was not impaired by Byron's ethical poverty. The
latter was an inevitable consequence of his defective discipline. The
triteness of his moral climax is occasionally startling. When
Sardanapalus, for instance, sees Zarina torn from him, and is stricken
with profound anguish at the pain with which he has filled her life, he
winds up with such a platitude as this: