Only second to the impact of Napoleon on Europe was the impact of Byron.
’Tis Cæsar and Hamlet in contemporary antithesis, for Professor Minto
has well said that Byron played Hamlet with the world for his stage.
While Byron was soliloquising with his pen, Napoleon was energising with
his sword, and whether the pen was really the mightier of the twain is a
nice thesis for debating societies. But in Italy, and by the greatest
modern Italian poet, Byron has been acclaimed as a man of action. In my
hotel in Bologna the landlord had piously—or with an eye to
custom—suspended a tablet, commissioned from Carducci, whereof a
translation would run as follows:
“Here
In August and September 1819
Lodged
And Conspired for Liberty
George Gordon, Lord Byron,
Who Gave to Greece His Life,
To Italy His Heart and Talent,
Than Who
None Arose Among The Moderns More Potent
To Accompany Poetry With Action,
None More Piously Inclined
To Sing The Glories and Adventures
Of our People.”
An epigraph, I fear, involving some poetic licence. True, of course,
that no modern poet’s life or work, save Browning’s, is so
interpenetrated with Italy. But Byron’s amateur relation with the futile
Italian conspirators of the generation before Garibaldi was a somewhat
shadowy contact with action, however generous his impatient ardour for
Italy’s resurrection. Vaporous, too, was the conspiracy of “The Liberal”
to pour new wine into the old British beer-bottle. But even his
membership of the Greek committee or the equipment of a bellicose brig
against Turkey, or his abortive appointment as Commander-in-Chief in an
expedition against Lepanto, scarcely brings Byron into the category of
men of action. He had never the chance of sloughing Hamlet for Cæsar or
even for the Corsair. It was not even given him to die in battle, as he
so ardently desired in the last verse of his last poem. And though his
Hellenic fervour redeemed his closing days from despair and degradation,
still the fever which slew him at Missolonghi hardly warrants the claim
that he gave his life for Greece. Had his microbe met him in marshy
Ravenna instead of marshy Missolonghi, would it have been said that he
died for Italy? For aught we know his sea voyage from Genoa to Greece
may have lengthened his life.
Moreover it was as an ideologue that Byron plunged into affairs. For the
Greeks whom he set out to deliver figured in his mind as direct, if
degenerate, descendants of the great free spirits of old, the creators
of Hellenic culture: the reality was a priest-ridden population debased
by Slav stocks.
Byron had indeed an opulence of temperament which naturally spilt over
into action. Like Sir Walter Scott, he was larger than a writing man,
and he brought the Scott sanity rather than the Byronic ebullience into
his three months’ work at Missolonghi, holding himself aloof from
factions and thus reconciling them in him, throwing his weight on the
side of humanity, and even rising beyond his disappointment in the
Greeks to perceive that their very failings made their regeneration only
the more necessary. There was certainly in him the making of a leader of
men. Nevertheless cerebral ferment and not conspiring for liberty was
his essential form of activity. That cerebral ferment was never more
ebullient and continuous than in those years of Italy and the Countess
Guiccioli. Ravenna was his favourite town, and action is not precisely
the note of Ravenna at whose town-gate I read with my own eyes a
fabulous prohibition against vehicular traffic in the streets.
But did we concede Carducci’s claim to the full, and even supplement it
by Byron’s passing eagerness to mould British politics, the Italian
poet’s characterisation of him as the most striking modern instance of
the union of poetry and action, is a startling reminder of the poverty
and vacuousness of the chronicle of singing men of affairs. If Byron be
indeed Eclipse, truly the rest are nowhere. And the question arises, why
the modern man should be so artificially bifurcated. Æschylus was both
soldier and poet. Cæsar not only made history but wrote it. Dante was
Prior of Florence.
“In rebus publicis administrans,” says the inscription on the absurd
tomb of Ariosto, and we know that Duke Alfonso sent him to suppress
bands of robbers in lawless Garfagnana as well as on that even more
formidable expedition to the Terrible Pontiff who had excommunicated the
ruler of Ferrara. Chaucer was a diplomatist and Government Official. The
ethereal singer of “The Faerie Queene” shared in the bloody attempt at
the Pacification of Ireland. Milton, that virulent pamphleteer, barely
escaped the block. Goethe administered Weimar. Victor Hugo, like Dante,
achieved exile. Björnson contributed to the independence of Norway. The
notion of a poet as aloof from life seems to be largely modern and
peculiarly British. Shelley is probably responsible for this conception
of the “beautiful and ineffectual angel,” and in our own day Swinburne
has helped to carry on the legend. But Swinburne’s fellow-poet, the
self-styled “Singer of an empty day,” was precisely the poet who had the
largest relations with life, and whose wall-papers have spread to
circles where his poetry is unknown or unread.
You may say that Virgil, who was neither modern nor British, practised
the same attitude of detachment, the same exclusive self-consecration to
letters as Wordsworth or Tennyson. But Virgil had a people to express,
and Wordsworth and Tennyson were passionate politicians, if they made no
incursions into action proper. You may urge that the bards, skalds,
minstrels, troubadours, ballad-mongers, jongleurs, have always been a
class apart from action, but these were at least lauders of action,
laureates of lords, while even the _Minnesingers_ celebrated less their
own mistresses than those of the heroes. ’Tis a parasitism upon action,
to which indeed the meek and prostrate Kipling would confine the rôle of
letters.
But why should the power to feel and express the finer flavours of life
and language paralyse the capacity for action? In the sanest souls both
functions would co-exist in almost equal proportions. Sword in one hand
and trowel in the other, Ezra’s Jews rebuilt the Temple, and the new
Jerusalem will not rise till we can hold both trowel and tablet. In that
Platonic millennium poets must be kings and kings poets.
That fantastic, mutilated, myopic, and inefficient being, known as “the
practical man,” sniffs suspiciously at all movements that have thought
or imagination, or an ideal for their inspiration. It may be conceded to
this crippled soul that action can never take the rigid lines of theory,
and that the forces of deflection must modify, if not indeed prevail
over, the _à priori_ pattern. But he is not truly a thinker whose
thought cannot allow for these deviations in practice, which are as
foreseeable (if not as exactly computable) as the retardation,
acceleration or aberration of a planet by the pull of every other within
whose attraction it rolls. Action is not pure thought but applied
thinking—a species of engineering over, through, or around mountains,
and opposing private domains. “Life caricatures our concepts,” a dreamer
complained to me, after he had stepped down into politics. Is it not
perhaps that our concepts caricature life? Life is too fluid and
asymmetric to bear these fixed forms of constructive polity, and Lord
Acton tells us that in the whole course of history no such rounded
scheme has ever found fulfilment. I do not wonder.
But the poet who has never acted on the stage of affairs is moving in a
padded world of words, and the hero who has never sung, or at least
thrilled with the music in him, is only sub-human. The divorce of life
and letters tends to sterilise letters and to brutalise life. The
British mistrust of poetry in affairs has a solid basis—of stupidity.
Imagination, which is the essential factor in all science, is esteemed a
Jack o’ Lantern to lure astray. And to tap one’s way along, inch by
inch, without any light at all, is held the surest method of
progression.
But Italy, which has known Mazzini, is, I trust, for ever saved from
this Anglo-Saxon shallowness.
“A Revolution is the passing of an idea from theory into practice,” said
Mazzini. And again, “Those who sunder Thought and Action dismember God
and deny the eternal Unity of things.” _Pensiero e Azione_ was the
significant title of the journal he founded to bring about the
redemption of Italy. Garibaldi too was a dreamer, who even wrote poetry.
Cavour, the most worldly of the trio of Italian saviours, owes his
greatness precisely to the imagination which could use all means and all
men to educe the foreseen end.
A sharp distinction should be drawn between those who dream with their
eyes open, and those who dream with their eyes shut. What Cavour saw was
in congruity with fact and possibility. Prevision is not perversion. As
our modern watcher of the skies received the photograph of Halley’s
Comet upon his plate half a year before it became visible to the eye,
and months before it revealed itself to the farthest-piercing telescope,
so upon the sensitised soul coming events cast their configurations
before. This foresight of insight has naught in common with the
nightmares and chimæras of sleep. “The prophetic soul of the wide world
dreaming on things to come” admits the elect to glimpses of its dream.
These be the prophets, conduits through which the universe arrives at
self-consciousness, as the heroes are the conduits through which it
arrives at self-amelioration.