Studies in Literature and History
must have fought against taking himself so very seriously, relieved
his conscience by lapses into epigram, irony, and persiflage. Thus in
the same year (1818), and from the same place (Venice), he produced
the fourth canto of _Childe Harold_, full of deep longing for unbroken
solitude:
'There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and Music in its roar;'
and also _Beppo_, a satirical sketch of the loose and easy Venetian
society in which he was actually living. Here, again, his somewhat
ribald letters from Venice do his romantic poetry some wrong; but in
fact he had a diabolic pleasure in betraying himself, and his
_Memoires d'Outre Tombe_, if they had been preserved, would have been
very different from Chateaubriand's elaborate autobiography.
It was the spectacle of Christians groaning under Turkish oppression,
and of their heroic resistance, that inspired three of Byron's finest
poems, the _Giaour_, the _Bride of Abydos_, the _Siege of Corinth_. On
this subject he was so heartily in earnest that he could even lose
sight of his own woes; and notwithstanding the exuberance of colour
and sentiment, these tales still hold their place in the first rank of
metrical romance. Their construction is imperfect, even fragmentary;
yet while Scott could put together and tell his story much better, not
even Scott could drive it onward and sustain the verse at a high level
with greater energy, or decorate his narrative with finer description
of scenery, or give more intensity to the moments of fierce action.
The splendid apostrophe to Greece in the _Giaour_--
'Clime of the unforgotten brave!
Whose land from plain to mountain cave
Was Freedom's home or Glory's grave'--
has forty lines of unsurpassed beauty and fire, written in the
manuscript, as a note tells us, in a hurried and almost illegible
hand--an authentic example of true improvisation which the elaborate
poets of our own day may match if they can. The tumid phrase and
melodramatic figuring--
'Dark and unearthly is the scowl
That glares beneath his dusky cowl'--
are now worn-out theatrical properties; yet those who have seen the
untamed Asiatic might find it hard to overdraw the murderous hate and
sullen ferocity that his face, or his victim's, will occasionally
disclose. The heroes, at any rate, love and die in a masculine way; it
is the old tragic theme of bitter unmerited misfortune, of daring
adventure that ends fatally, without any of the wailing sensuality
that infects the more harmonious poetry of a later day. There are,
perhaps, for modern taste, too many outlandish words and references to
Eastern customs or beliefs, requiring glossaries and marginal
explanations; nor does the profuse annotation of the present edition
lighten a reader's burden in this respect. Byron had no business to
write 'By pale Phingari's trembling light,' leaving us at the mercy of
assiduous editors to expound that 'Phingari' is the Greek [Greek:
phengarion], and stands here for the moon. And if he could have spared
us such Orientalisms as 'Al Sirat's arch,' or 'avenging Monkir's
scythe,' we should have mixed up less desultory reading with the
enjoyment of fine passages. He gives us too much of his local
colouring, he checks the rush of his verse by superfluous metaphors,
he has weak and halting lines. The style is heated and fuming, yet the
dainty art-critic who lays hands on such metal thrown red hot from the
forge may chance to burn his fingers over it. Nor must we forget that
in these poems Byron brought the classic lands of Greece and the
Levant within the sphere of modern romance, and has unquestionably
added some 'deathless pages' to English literature.
Byron has told us why he adopted for the _Corsair_, and afterwards for
_Lara_, 'the good old and now neglected heroic couplet':
'The stanza of Spenser is, perhaps, too slow and dignified for
narrative, though I confess it is the measure after my own heart;
Scott alone, of the present generation, has hitherto triumphed
completely over the fatal facility of the octosyllabic verse; and
this is not the least victory of his fertile and mighty genius; in
blank verse Milton, Thomson, and our dramatists are the beacons
that shine along the deep, but warn us from the rough and barren
rocks on which they are kindled.'[25]
We doubt much, from a comparison of the poems, whether the experiment
of changing his metre was successful. The short eight-syllabled line
displayed Byron's capacity for vigorous concision and swift movement;
it is eminently suited for strength and speed; whereas in the slow
processional couplet he becomes diffuse, often tedious; he has room
for more rhetoric and verbosity; he falls more into the error of
describing at length the character and sentiments of his gloomy
heroes, instead of letting them act and speak for themselves. At
moments when inspiration is running low, and a gap has to be filled
up, the shorter line needs less padding, and can be more rapidly run
over when it is weak. Whereas a feeble heroic couplet becomes
ponderous and sinks more quickly into bathos--as in the following
sample from the _Corsair_:
'Oh! burst the Haram, wrong not on your lives
One female form--remember--_we_ have wives.'
And the consequence has been that _Lara_ and the _Corsair_ are now,
we believe, the least readable of Byron's metrical romances.
Of Byron's dramas we are obliged to say that, to borrow his own
metaphor, he would have fared better as a poet if he had taken warning
from the beacons, and had given blank verse a wide berth, instead of
setting himself boldly on a course which, as he evidently knew, is
full of peril for fast-sailing, free-going versifiers. He saw that he
could not approach the great masters of this measure, he was resolved
not to imitate them; and so he appears to have chosen the singular
alternative of writing nothing that should in the least resemble them.
His general object as a playwriter is stated, in a letter about
_Sardanapalus_, to have been 'to dramatise striking passages of
history and mythology.'
'You will find,' he adds most truly, 'all this very unlike
Shakespeare; and so much the better in one sense, for I look upon
him to be the worst of models, though the most extraordinary of
writers. It has been my object to be as simple and severe as
Alfieri, and I have broken down the poetry as nearly as I could to
common language.'
And undoubtedly he did break it down so effectually that much of his
blank verse hobbles like a lame horse, being often mere prose printed
in short lines. Here are two specimens, not cut into lengths, which
have no metrical construction at all:
'Unless you keep company with him, and you seem scarce used to such
high society, you can't tell how he approaches.'[26]
'Where thou shalt pass thy days in peace, but on condition that the
three young princes are given up as hostages,'[27]
Many others of the same quality might be given, in which the
_disjecti membra poetae_ would be exceedingly hard to find. It is
surprising that a writer of Byron's experience should have fallen into
the error of supposing that simplicity could be attained by the mere
use of common language. For even Wordsworth, who is a master of simple
strength, could never allow his peasants to talk their ordinary
vernacular without a fatal drop into the commonplace; and all verse
that is to be plain and unaffected in style and thought requires the
most studious composition. Byron seems scarcely to have understood
that blank verse has any rules of scansion, and his signal failure in
this metre has become less tolerable and more conspicuous, since Keats
in his day, and Tennyson after him, have carefully studied the
construction of blank verse, and have left us admirable examples of
its capacity for romantic expression. It is indeed strange that Byron
should have fancied that he could use so delicate an instrument with a
rough unpractised hand.
There are some vigorous passages scattered through the plays, and we
have it on record that Dr. Parr could not sleep a wink after reading
_Sardanapalus_. Nevertheless, we fear that the present generation will
find little cause for demurring to Jeffrey's judgment upon the
tragedies, that they are for the most part 'solemn, prolix, and
ostentatious.' They were not composed, as Byron himself explained,
'with the most remote view to the stage,' so that he had not before
his eyes the wholesome fear of a critical audience. In truth it must
be admitted that he lacked the true dramatic instinct; he could only
set up his leading figures to deliver imposing speeches appropriate to
a tragic situation; and one may guess that the consciousness of
awkward handling weighed upon the spirit and style of his blank verse,
for his ear seems to have completely misled him when it had lost the
guidance of recurrent rhyme. Of _Cain: a Mystery_, one must speak
reverently, since Walter Scott, to whom it was dedicated, wrote that
the author had 'matched Milton on his own ground'; yet in Lucifer, who
leads the dialogue, we have little more than a spectral embodiment of
Byron's own rebellious temper; and in this poem, as in _Manfred_, the
discussion of metaphysical problems carries him beyond his depth.
There are, nevertheless, some fine declamatory passages; and we may
quote as a curiosity one soft line, fresh from the Swiss mountains:
'Pipes in the liberal air
_Mixed with the sweet bells of the sauntering herd_,'
which is to be found in _Manfred_ and might have been taken from the
_Excursion_.
When we turn from the plays to the lyrics, we see at once the
importance, to a poet, of choosing rightly the metrical form that is
the best expression of his peculiar genius. In some of these shorter
poems Byron rises to his highest level, and by these will his
popularity be permanently maintained. They are certainly of very
unequal merit; yet when Byron is condemned for artificiality and
glaring colour, we may point to the poem beginning 'And thou art dead,
as young and fair,' where form and feeling are in harmony throughout
eight long stanzas, without a single line that is feeble or
overcharged:
'The better days of life were ours;
The worst can be but mine;
The sun that cheers, the storm that lowers,
Shall never more be thine.
The silence of that dreamless sleep
I envy now too much to weep;
Nor need I to repine
That all those charms have passed away,
I might have watched through long decay.'
There is no novelty in the ideas, nor does he open the deeper vein of
thoughts that touch the mind with a sense of mortality. Yet the verse
has a masculine brevity that renders effectively the attitude in which
men may well be content firmly to confront an irreparable misfortune.
In his poems of strenuous action, although Byron has not the rare
quality of heroic simplicity, he could at times strike a high
vibrating war note, and could interpret romantically the patriotic
spirit. The two stanzas which we quote from the Hebrew Melodies show
that he could now and then shake off the redundant metaphors and
epithets that overload too much of his impetuous verse, and use his
strength freely:
'Though thou art fall'n, while we are free
Thou shalt not taste of death!
The generous blood that flowed from thee
Disdained to sink beneath;
Within our veins its currents be,
Thy spirit on our breath.
'Thy name, our charging hosts along,
Shall be their battle word!
Thy fall, the theme of choral song