Studies in Literature and History
personality added enormous zest to his poetry. But now that Byron's
whole career has been once more laid out before his countrymen, with
light poured on to it from every cranny and peephole, those who take
up this final edition of his life and works must feel that their main
object and duty should be to form an unbiased estimate of the true
value, apart from the author's rank and private history, of poems
which must always hold a permanent place in the high imaginative
literature of England.
It may be said that every writer of force and originality traverses
two phases of opinion before his substantive rank in the great order
of merit is definitely fixed: he is either depressed or exalted
unduly. He may be neglected or cheapened by his own generation, and
praised to the sides by posterity; or his fame may undergo the inverse
treatment, until he settles down to his proper level. Byron's
reputation has passed through sharper vicissitudes than have befallen
most of his compeers; for though no poet has ever shot up in a brief
lifetime to a higher pinnacle of fame, or made a wider impression upon
the world around him, after his death he seems to have declined
slowly, in England, to a point far below his real merits. And at this
moment there is no celebrated poet, perhaps no writer, in regard to
whom the final judgment of critics and men of letters is so
imperfectly determined. Here is a man whom Goethe accounted a
character of unique eminence, with supreme creative power, whose
poetry, he admitted, had influenced his own later verse--one of those
who gave strenuous impulse to the romantic movement throughout
England, France, and Germany in the first quarter of this century, who
set the fashion of his day in England, stirred and shaped the popular
imagination, and struck a far resonant note in our poetry. Yet after
his death he suffered a kind of eclipse; his work was much more unduly
depreciated than it had been extolled; while in our own time such
critics as Matthew Arnold and Mr. Swinburne have been in profound
disagreement on the question of his worth and value as a poet. Nor is
it possible for impartial persons to accept the judgment of either of
these two eminent artists in poetry, since Arnold placed Wordsworth
and Byron by anticipation on the same level at this century's end,
whereas Wordsworth stands now far higher. And the bitter disdain which
Sir. Swinburne has poured upon Byron's verse and character, though
tempered by acknowledgment of his strength and cleverness, and by
approbation of his political views, excites some indignation and a
sympathetic reaction in his favour. One can imagine the ghost of Byron
rebuking his critic with the words of the Miltonic Satan, 'Ye knew me
once no mate For you, there sitting where ye durst not soar'; for in
his masculine defiant attitude and daring flights the elder poet
overtops and looks down upon the fine musical artist of our own day.
Some of the causes which have combined to lower Byron's popularity are
not far to seek. The change of times, circumstance, and taste has been
adverse to him. The political school which he so ardently represented
has done its work; the Tory statesmen of the Metternich and
Castlereagh type, who laid heavy hands upon nations striving for light
and liberty, have gone down to their own place; the period of stifling
repression has long ended in Europe. Italy and Greece are free, the
lofty appeals to classic heroism are out of date, and such fiery
high-swelling trumpet notes as
'Yet, Freedom! yet, thy banner, torn, but flying,
Streams like a thunderstorm _against_ the wind,'
fall upon cold and fastidious ears. 'The day will come,' said Mazzini
in after-years, 'when the democracy will acknowledge its debt to
Byron;' but the demos is notoriously ungrateful, and the subject races
have now won their independence. The shadow of discouragement and
weariness which passed over sensitive minds at the beginning of this
century, a period of political disillusion, has long been swept away
by the prosperity and sanguine activities of the Victorian era; and
the literary style has changed with the times. Melancholy moods,
attitudes of scornful despair, tales of fierce love and bloody revenge
are strange and improbable to readers who delight in situations and
emotions with which they are familiar, who demand exactitude in detail
and correct versification; while sweet harmonies, perfection of metre,
middle-class pastorals, and a blameless moral tone came in with
Tennyson. In short, many of the qualities which enchanted Byron's own
generation have disenchanted our own, both in his works and his life;
for when Macaulay wrote in 1830 that the time would come when his
'rank and private history will not be regarded in estimating his
poetry,' he took no account of future editions enlarged and annotated,
or of biographies of _The Real Lord Byron_; whereby it has come to
pass, as we suspect, that the present world knows more of Byron's
private history than of his poems. His faults and follies stand out
more prominently than ever; his story is more attractive reading than
most romances; and the stricter morality of the day condemns him more
severely than did the society to which he belonged. Psychological
speculation is now so much more practised in literature than formerly,
there is so much more interest in 'the man behind the book,' that
serious moral delinquencies, authentically recorded and eagerly read,
operate more adversely than ever in affecting the public judgment upon
Byron's poetry, because they provide a damaging commentary upon it.
His contemporaries--Coleridge, Keats, Shelley--lived so much apart
from the great world of their day that important changes in manners
and social opinion have made much less difference in the standard by
which their lives are compared with their work. Their poetry,
moreover, was mainly impersonal. Whereas Byron, by stamping his own
character on so much of his verse, created a dangerous interest in the
man himself; and his _empeiria_ (as Goethe calls it), his too
exclusively worldly experience, identified him with his particular
class in society, rendering him largely the responsible representative
of a libertinism in habits and sentiments that was more pardonable in
his time than in our own. His poetry belongs also in another sense to
the world he lived in: it is incessantly occupied with current events
and circumstance, with Spain, Italy, and Greece as he actually saw
them, with comparisons of their visible condition and past glories,
with Peninsular battlefields, and with Waterloo. Of worldliness in
this objective meaning his contemporaries had some share, yet they
instinctively avoided the waste of their power upon it; and so their
finest poetry is beautiful by its detachment, by a certain magical
faculty of treating myth, romance, and the mystery of man's
sympathetic relations with universal Nature.
A recent French critic of Chateaubriand, who defines the 'romantisme'
of that epoch as no more than a great waking up of the poetic spirit,
says that the movement was moral and psychological generally before it
spread into literature. In criticising Byron's poetry we have to bear
in mind that he came in on the first wave of this flood, which
overflowed the exhausted and arid field of poetry at the end of the
last century, fertilising it with colour and emotion. The comparison
between Byron in England and Chateaubriand in France must have been
often drawn. The similarity in their style, their moody, melancholy
outlook upon common humanity, their aristocratic temper, their
self-consciousness, their influence upon the literature of the two
countries, the enthusiasm that they excited among the ardent spirits
of the generation that reached manhood immediately after them, and the
vain attempts of the elder critics to resist their popularity and deny
their genius--form a remarkable parallel in literary history. As
Jeffrey failed at first to discern the promise of Byron, so Morellet
could only perceive the obviously weak points of Chateaubriand, laying
stress on his affectations, his inflated language, his sentimental
exaggeration, upon all the faults which were common to these two men
of genius, the defects of their qualities, the energetic rebound from
the classic level of orderly taste and measured style. It was the
ancient _regime_ contending against a revolutionary uprising, and in
poetry, as in politics, the leaders of revolution are sure to be
excessive, to force their notes, to frighten their elders, and to
scandalise the conservative mind. Yet just as Chateaubriand, after
passing through his period of depression, is now rising again to his
proper place in French literature, so we may hope that an impartial
survey of Byron's verse will help to determine the rank that he is
likely to hold permanently, although the high tide of Romance in
poetry has at this moment fallen to a low ebb, and the spell which it
laid upon our forefathers may have lost its power in an altered world.
It must be counted to the credit of these Romantic writers that at any
rate they widened and varied the sphere and the resources of their
art, by introducing the Oriental element, so to speak, into the
imaginative literature of modern Europe. They brought the lands of
ancient civilisation again within the sphere of poetry, reviving into
fresh animation the classic glories of Hellas, reopening the gates of
the mysterious East, and showing us the Greek races still striving, as
they were twenty-two centuries earlier, for freedom against the
barbarous strength of an Asiatic empire. Byron was the first of the
poets who headed this literary crusade for the succour of Christianity
against Islam in the unending contest between East and West on the
shores of the Mediterranean, and in this cause he eventually died.
Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Victor Hugo were also travellers in
Asia, and had drawn inspiration from that source; they all
instinctively obeyed, like Bonaparte, the impulse which sends
adventurous and imaginative spirits toward that region of strong
passions and primitive manners, where human life is of little matter,
and where the tragic situations of drama and fiction may at any time
be witnessed in their simple reality. The effect was to introduce
fresh blood into the veins of old romance; and Byron led the van of an
illustrious line of poets who turned their _impressions de voyage_
into glowing verse, for the others only trod in his footsteps and
wrote on his model, while Lamartine openly imitated him in his
_Dernier Chant de Childe Harold_. For the first time the Eastern tale
was now told by a poet who had actually seen Eastern lands and races,
their scenery and their cities, who drew his figures and landscape
with his eye on the objects, and had not mixed his local colours by
the process of skimming books of travel for myths, legends, costume,
or customs, with such result as may be seen in Moore's _Lalla Rookh_
and in Southey's _Thalaba_, or even in Scott's _Talisman_. The preface
to this novel shows that Scott fully appreciated the risk of competing
with Byron, albeit in prose, in the field of Asiatic romance, yet all
his skill avails little to diminish the sense of conventional
figure-drawing and of uncertainty in important details when they are
not gathered in the field, but only transplanted from the library.
Byron has noticed in one of his letters the errors of this kind into
which a great poet must fall whose accurate observation has been
confined mainly to his own country. 'There is much natural talent,' he
writes, 'spilt over the _Excursion_, yet Wordsworth says of Greece
that it is a land of
'Rivers, fertile plains, and sounding shores
Under a cope of variegated sky.