Studies in Literature and History
The rivers are dry half the year, the plains are barren, the shores
still and tideless, the sky is anything but variegated, being for
months and months beautifully blue.'
This may be thought trivial criticism, yet it is evidence of the
attention given by Byron to precise description. His accuracy in
Oriental costume was also a novelty at that time, when so little was
known of Oriental lore that even Mr. Murray 'doubted the propriety of
putting the name of Cain into the mouth of a Mohammedan.' With regard
to his characters, we may readily admit that in the _Giaour_ or the
_Bride of Abydos_ the heroes and heroines behave and speak after the
fashion of high-flying Western romance, and that their lofty
sentiments in love or death have nothing specifically Oriental about
them. But this was merely the romantic style used by all Byron's
contemporaries, and generally accepted by the taste of that day as
essential to the metrical rendering of a passionate love-story. It may
be argued, with Scott, that when a writer of fiction takes in hand a
distant age or country, he is obliged to translate ideas and their
expression into forms with which his readers are, to some extent,
familiar. Byron seasoned his Oriental tales with phrases and imagery
borrowed from the East; but whatever scenic or characteristic effects
might have thus been produced are seriously marred by the explanatory
notices and erudite references to authorities that are appended to the
text. This fashion of garnishing with far-fetched outlandish words, in
order to give the requisite flavour of time or place, was peculiar to
the new romantic school of his era; it was the poetical dialect of the
time, and Byron employed it too copiously. Yet, with all his faults,
he remains a splendid colourist, who broke through a limited mannerism
in poetry, and led forth his readers into an unexplored region of
cloudless sky and purple sea, where the serene aspect of nature could
be powerfully contrasted with the shadow of death and desolation cast
over it by the violence of man.
Undoubtedly this contrast, between fair scenery and foul barbarism,
had been presented more than once in poetry; yet no one before Byron
had brought it out with the sure hand of an eye-witness, or with such
ardent sympathy for a nation which had been for centuries trodden
under the feet of aliens in race and religion, yet still clung to its
ancient traditions of freedom. Throughout his descriptive poems, from
_Childe Harold_ to _Don Juan_, it is the true and forcible impression,
taken from sight of the thing itself, that gives vigour and animation
to his pictures, and that has stamped on the memory the splendid
opening of the _Giaour_, the meditations in Venice and Rome, the
glorious scenery of the Greek islands, and even such single lines as
'By the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone.'
In the art of painting what may be called historical landscape, where
retrospective associations give intellectual colour to the picture,
Byron has very few rivals. His descriptions of the Lake of Geneva, of
Clarens, of the Trojan plain--
'High barrows, without marble or a name,
A vast, untilled, and mountain-skirted plain,
And Ida in the distance'--
have the quality of faithful drawing illumined by imaginative power.
They have certainly touched the emotions and enhanced the pleasure of
all travellers in the last three generations whose minds are
accessible to poetic suggestion; and if at the present day their style
be thought too elaborate and the allusions commonplace, it cannot be
denied that the fine art of English composition would be poorer
without them. The stanzas in _Childe Harold_ on Waterloo are full of
the energy which takes hold of and poetically elevates the incidents
of war--the distant cannon, the startled dancers, the transition from
the ball-room to the battlefield, from the gaiety of life to the
stillness of death. Nothing very original or profound in all this, it
may be said; yet the great difficulty of dealing adequately with
heroic action in contemporary verse, of writing a poem on a campaign
that has just been reported in the newspapers, is exemplified by the
fact that Walter Scott's two compositions on Waterloo are failures;
nor has any poet since Byron yet succeeded in giving us a good modern
battlepiece.
Nevertheless there is much in Byron's longer poems (excepting always
_Don Juan_) that seems tedious to the modern reader; there are
descriptions and declamations too long drawn-out to sustain the
interest; and there are many lines that are superfluous, untidy, and
sometimes ungrammatical. One can only plead, in extenuation of these
defects, that the fashion of his day was for long metrical romance, in
which it is difficult to maintain the high standard of careful
composition exacted by the latest criticism. It is almost impossible
to tell a long story in verse that shall be throughout poetical. And
one main reason why this fashion has nearly passed away may be
surmised to be that the versified narrative cannot adapt itself in
this respect to the present taste, which is impatient of fluent
lengthy heroics, refusing to accept them for the sake of some finely
executed passages. Southey's epics are now quite unreadable, and many
of the blemishes in Byron's poetry are inseparable from the romantic
style; they are to be found in Scott's metrical tales, which have much
redundancy and some weak versification; while his chiefs and warriors
often talk a stilted chivalrous language which would now be discarded
as theatrical. Byron's personages have the high tragic accent and
costume; yet one must admit that they have also a fierce vitality; and
as for the crimes and passions of his Turkish pashas and Greek
patriots, he had actually seen the men and heard of their deeds. The
fact that he also portrayed more unreal characters in dismal
drapery--Lara, Conrad, and Manfred, as the mouthpieces of splenetic
misanthropy--has led to some unjust depreciation of his capacity for
veritable delineation. Macaulay, for example, in his essay on Byron,
observes that 'Johnson, the man whom Don Juan met in the slave-market,
is a striking failure. How differently would Sir Walter Scott have
drawn a bluff, fearless Englishman in such a situation!' and Mr.
Swinburne echoes this criticism. But it is unfair to compare a minor
character, slightly sketched into a poem for the purposes of the plot,
with the full-length portrait that might have been made of him by a
first-class artist in prose. The proper comparison would be between
the figures in the metrical romances of the two poets, whereby it
might be shown that Scott could take as little trouble as Byron did
about an unimportant subsidiary actor. In regard to the leading heroes
and heroines, Scott's poetic creations are hardly more interesting or
dramatic than Byron's; and whenever he makes, even in prose, an
excursion into Asia, his figure-drawing becomes conventional. But he
was usually at the disadvantage, from which Byron was certainly free,
of being hampered by an inartistic propensity to make virtuous heroes
triumph in the long run.
Yet it must be admitted that no poet of the same calibre has turned
out so much loose uneven work as Byron. His lapses into lines that are
lame or dull are the more vexatious to the correct modern ear when, as
sometimes happens, they spoil a fine passage, and in the midst of a
superb flight his muse comes down with a broken wing. In the subjoined
stanza, for example, from the Waterloo episode in _Childe Harold_, the
first five lines are clear, strenuous, and concise, while the next
three are confused and clumsy; so that though he recovers himself in
the final line, the general effect is much damaged:
'Last noon beheld them full of lusty life,
Last eve in Beauty's circle proudly gay,
The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife,
The morn the marshalling in arms--the day
Battle's magnificently stern array.
The thunder-clouds close o'er it, _which when rent,
The earth is covered thick with other clay,
Which her own clay shall cover_, heaped and pent,
Rider and horse--friend, foe--in one red burial blent.'
These blots, and there are many, become less pardonable when we
observe, from the new edition, that Byron by no means neglected
revision of his work. But his impetuous temper, and the circumstance
of his writing far from the printing-press, encouraged hasty
execution; and though the most true remark that 'easy writing is
devilish hard reading' is his own, though he praised excessively the
chiselled verse of Pope, he was always inclined to pose as one who
threw off jets of boiling inspiration, and in one letter he compares
himself to the tiger who makes or misses his point in one spring. He
ranked Pope first among English poets, yet he learnt nothing in that
school; he pretended to undervalue Shakespeare, yet he must have had
the plays by heart, for his letters bristle with quotations from them.
His avowed taste in poetry is hard to reconcile with his own
performances: his verse was rushing, irregular, audacious, yet he
overpraises the smooth composition of Rogers; he dealt in heroic
themes and passionate love-stories, yet Crabbe's humble pastorals had
their full charm for him. Except Crabbe and Rogers, he declared, 'we
are all--Scott, Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell, and I--upon a wrong
revolutionary poetical system, not worth a damn in itself;' but among
these are some leaders of the great nineteenth-century renaissance in
English verse; and Byron was foremost in the revolt against unnatural
insipidity which has brought us through romance to realism, by his
clear apprehension of natural form and colour, and even by the havoc
which he made among conventional respectabilities. He dwelt too
incessantly upon his own sorrows and sufferings; and in the gloomy
soliloquies of his dramatic characters we have an actor constantly
reappearing in his favourite part. Yet this also was a novelty to the
generation brought up on the impersonal poetry of the classic school;
and here, again, he is a forerunner of the self-reflecting analytical
style that is common in our own day; for there is a Byronic echo in
the 'divine despair' of Tennyson. The melancholy brooding spirit,
dissatisfied with society and detesting complacency, had for some time
been in the air; it had affected the literature of France and Germany;
Werther, Obermann, and Rene are all moulded on the same type with
Childe Harold; yet Sainte-Beuve rightly says that this identity of
type does not mean imitation--it means that the writers were all in
the same atmosphere. There is everywhere the same reaction against
philosophic optimism and the same antipathy to the ways of mankind 'so
vain and melancholy,' They sought refuge from inborn ennui or
irritability among the mountains, on the sea, or in distant voyages,
and they instinctively embodied these moods and feelings in various
personages of fiction, in the solitary wanderer, in the fierce outlaw,
in the man 'with chilling mystery of mien,' who rails against heaven
and humanity. Their literature, in short, however overcoloured it may
have been, did represent a generally prevailing characteristic among
men of excessive sensibility at a time of stir and tumult in the world
around them; it was not a mere unnatural invention, though we must
leave to the psychologist the task of tracing a connection between
this mental attitude and the circumstances that generated it. But the
self-occupied mind has no dramatic power, and so their repertory
contained one single character, a reproduction of their own in
different attitudes and situations. Chateaubriand may be said never to
have dropped his mask; whereas Byron, whose English sense of humour