“That the soul, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.”
I do not share this discontent. To be snuffed out by an article is
precisely the only dignified ending for a soul. This dualism of body and
spirit which has been foisted upon us has degradations enough even in
health. No union was ever worse assorted than this marriage of
inconvenience by which a body with boorish tastes and disgusting habits
is chained to an intelligent and fastidious soul. No wonder their
relations are strained. Such cohabitation is scarcely legitimate. Were
they only to keep their places, a reasonable _modus vivendi_ might be
patched up. The things of the spirit could exercise causation in the
sphere of the spirit, and the things of the body would be restricted to
their corporeal circle. But alas! the partners, like most married
couples, interfere with each other and intrude on each other’s domain.
Body and soul transfuse and percolate each other. Too much
philosophising makes the liver sluggish, and a toothache tampers with
philosophy. Despair slackens the blood and wine runs to eloquence. Body
or soul cannot even die of its own infirmity; the twain must arrange a
_modus moriendi_, each consenting to collapse of the other’s disease.
Thus a body in going order may be stilled by a stroke of bad news, and a
spiritual essence may pass away through a pox.
Think of the most powerful of the Popes, the head of Christendom, the
excommunicator of the Kings of France and Spain, having to succumb to a
fever; think of the great French writer, in whose brain the whole modern
world mirrored itself, having to die of a gas from which even his dog
recovered; think of the giant German philosopher, who had announced the
starry infinitude of the moral law, degenerating into the imbecile who
must tie and untie his necktie many times a minute. Surely it were
worthier of man’s estate had Innocent III perished of an argument in
favour of lay investiture, had Zola been snuffed out by an
anti-Dreyfusard pamphlet or a romantic poem, had Kant succumbed to the
scornful epigram of Herder, or even to the barkings of the priests’ dogs
who had been given his name. And far worthier were it of a poet to die
of a review than of a jaundice, of a criticism than a consumption.
Infinitely more dignified was the death of Keats under the _Quarterly_
than the death of Byron himself under a fever, which some trace to a
microbe, itself possibly injected by a mosquito. That were an
unpardonable oversight of Dame Nature, who in her democratic enthusiasm
forgets that mosquitos are not men’s equals, and that these admirable
insects should be blooded more economically. Assuredly the author of
“The Vision of Judgment” would have preferred to die of a stanza or a
sting-tailed epigram.
Dame Nature had the last word; but was Byron, foreseeing her crushing
repartee, so absolutely unjustified in his criticisms and questionings
of a Power that held him as lightly as the parasite on the hind leg of
any of the fifty thousand species of beetles? For if Fate treads with
equal foot on a Byron and a beetle, the bard may be forgiven if he takes
it less christianly than the coleopteron.
Byron is “cheap” to-day in England, and while Greece celebrates the
centenary of his arrival and Crete calls on his name, while Italy is
full of his glory, his hotels and his piazzas, while Genoa is proud that
he lived in _Il Paradiso_ and the Armenian Monastery at Venice still
cherishes the memory of his sojourn there to learn Armenian, and every
spot he trod is similarly sacred, the Puritan critic reminds us that
“The gods approve
The depth and not the tumult of the soul.”
Yes, we know, but when a poet is disapproving of the gods their
standards matter less. And we are men, not gods, that their standards
should be ours. _Humani sumus_, and nothing of Byron’s passion and pain
can be alien from us. This tumult of the soul, who has escaped it? Not
Wordsworth, assuredly, who wrote those lines. Only the fool hath _not_
said in his heart, “There is no God.” Even Cardinal Manning said it on
his death-bed. Not that death-bed conversions are worth anything.
Matthew Arnold was apt to give us Wordsworth as the reposeful contrast
to the bold, bad Byron. But the calmness of Wordsworth is only in his
style, and if his questionings are cast in bronze, they were often
forged in the same furnace as Byron’s, and fused through and through
with the pain
“Of all this unintelligible world.”
Poets, even the austere, have to learn in suffering what they teach in
song. Only the suffering is always so much clearer than what it teaches
them. And then, as Heine says, comes Death, and with a clod of earth
gags the mouth that sings and cries and questions.
“Aber ist Das eine Antwort?”