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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I, by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I
+       Essay 3: Byron
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: March 22, 2007 [EBook #20879]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES, VOL. I ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Janet Blenkinship and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
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+
+
+CRITICAL MISCELLANIES
+
+BY
+
+JOHN MORLEY
+
+
+VOL. I.
+
+ESSAY 3: BYRON
+
+
+
+
+London
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+1904
+
+
+
+
+BYRON
+
+
+  Byron's influence in Europe                                       203
+
+  In England                                                        204
+
+  Criticism not concerned with Byron's private life                 208
+
+  Function of synthetic criticism                                   210
+
+  Byron has the political quality of Milton and Shakespeare         212
+
+  Contrasted with Shelley in this respect                           213
+
+  Peculiarity of the revolutionary view of nature                   218
+
+  Revolutionary sentimentalism                                      220
+
+  And revolutionary commonplace in Byron                            222
+
+  Byron's reasonableness                                            223
+
+  Size and difficulties of his subject                              224
+
+  His mastery of it                                                 224
+
+  The reflection of Danton in Byron                                 230
+
+  The reactionary influence upon him                                232
+
+  Origin of his apparent cynicism                                   234
+
+  His want of positive knowledge                                    235
+
+  Æsthetic and emotional relations to intellectual positivity       236
+
+  Significance of his dramatic predilections                        240
+
+  His idea of nature less hurtful in art than in politics           241
+
+  Its influence upon his views of duty and domestic sentiment       242
+
+  His public career better than one side of his creed               245
+
+  Absence of true subjective melancholy from his nature             246
+
+  His ethical poverty                                               249
+
+  Conclusion                                                        250
+
+
+
+
+BYRON.
+
+
+It is one of the singular facts in the history of literature, that the
+most rootedly conservative country in Europe should have produced the
+poet of the Revolution. Nowhere is the antipathy to principles and ideas
+so profound, nor the addiction to moderate compromise so inveterate, nor
+the reluctance to advance away from the past so unconquerable, as in
+England; and nowhere in England is there so settled an indisposition to
+regard any thought or sentiment except in the light of an existing
+social order, nor so firmly passive a hostility to generous aspirations,
+as in the aristocracy. Yet it was precisely an English aristocrat who
+became the favourite poet of all the most high-minded conspirators and
+socialists of continental Europe for half a century; of the best of
+those, that is to say, who have borne the most unsparing testimony
+against the present ordering of society, and against the theological and
+moral conceptions which have guided and maintained it. The rank and file
+of the army has been equally inspired by the same fiery and rebellious
+strains against the order of God and the order of man. 'The day will
+come,' wrote Mazzini, thirty years ago, 'when Democracy will remember
+all that it owes to Byron. England, too, will, I hope, one day remember
+the mission--so entirely English yet hitherto overlooked by her--which
+Byron fulfilled on the Continent; the European rôle given by him to
+English literature, and the appreciation and sympathy for England which
+he awakened amongst us. Before he came, all that was known of English
+literature was the French translation of Shakespeare, and the anathema
+hurled by Voltaire against the "drunken savage." It is since Byron that
+we Continentalists have learned to study Shakespeare and other English
+writers. From him dates the sympathy of all the true-hearted amongst us
+for this land of liberty, whose true vocation he so worthily represented
+among the oppressed. He led the genius of Britain on a pilgrimage
+throughout all Europe.'[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: See also George Sand's Preface to _Obermann_, p. 10. _'En
+même temps que les institutions et les coutumes, la littérature anglaise
+passa le détroit, et vint regner chez nous. La poésie britannique nous
+révéla le doute incarné sous la figure de Byron; puis la littérature
+allemande, quoique plus mystique, nous conduisit au même résultat par un
+sentiment de rêverie plus profond.'_
+
+The number of translations that have appeared in Germany since 1830
+proves the coincidence of Byronic influence with revolutionary movement
+in that country.]
+
+The day of recollection has not yet come. It is only in his own country
+that Byron's influence has been a comparatively superficial one, and its
+scope and gist dimly and imperfectly caught, because it is only in
+England that the partisans of order hope to mitigate or avoid the facts
+of the Revolution by pretending not to see them, while the friends of
+progress suppose that all the fruits of change shall inevitably fall, if
+only they keep the forces and processes and extent of the change
+rigorously private and undeclared. That intense practicalness which
+seems to have done so many great things for us, and yet at the same
+moment mysteriously to have robbed us of all, forbids us even to cast a
+glance at what is no more than an aspiration. Englishmen like to be able
+to answer about the Revolution as those ancients answered about the
+symbol of another Revolution, when they said that they knew not so much
+as whether there were a Holy Ghost or not. The same want of kindling
+power in the national intelligence which made of the English Reformation
+one of the most sluggish and tedious chapters in our history, has made
+the still mightier advance of the moderns from the social system and
+spiritual bases of the old state, in spite of our two national
+achievements of punishing a king with death and emancipating our slaves,
+just as unimpressive and semi-efficacious a performance in this country,
+as the more affrontingly hollow and halt-footed transactions of the
+sixteenth century.
+
+Just because it was wonderful that England should have produced Byron,
+it would have been wonderful if she had received any permanently deep
+impression from him, or preserved a lasting appreciation of his work,
+or cheerfully and intelligently recognised his immense force. And
+accordingly we cannot help perceiving that generations are arising who
+know not Byron. This is not to say that he goes unread; but there is a
+vast gulf fixed between the author whom we read with pleasure and even
+delight, and that other to whom we turn at all moments for inspiration
+and encouragement, and whose words and ideas spring up incessantly and
+animatingly within us, unbidden, whether we turn to him or no.
+
+For no Englishman now does Byron hold this highest place; and this is
+not unnatural in any way, if we remember in what a different shape the
+Revolution has now by change of circumstance and occasion come to
+present itself to those who are most ardent in the search after new
+paths. An estimate of Byron would be in some sort a measure of the
+distance that we have travelled within the last half century in our
+appreciation of the conditions of social change. The modern rebel is at
+least half-acquiescence. He has developed a historic sense. The most
+hearty aversion to the prolonged reign of some of the old gods does not
+hinder him from seeing, that what are now frigid and unlovely blocks
+were full of vitality and light in days before the era of their
+petrifaction. There is much less eagerness of praise or blame, and much
+less faith in knife and cautery, less confidence that new and right
+growth will naturally and necessarily follow upon demolition.
+
+The Revolution has never had that long hold on the national imagination
+in England, either as an idol or a bugbear, which is essential to keep
+the poet who sings it in effective harmony with new generations of
+readers. More than this, the Byronic conception was as transitional and
+inadequate as the methods and ideas of the practical movers, who were to
+a man left stranded in every country in Europe, during the period of his
+poetic activity. A transitional and unstable movement of society
+inevitably fails to supply a propulsion powerful enough to make its
+poetic expression eternal. There is no better proof of the enormous
+force of Byron's genius than that it was able to produce so fine an
+expression of elements so intrinsically unfavourable to high poetry as
+doubt, denial, antagonism, and weariness. But this force was no
+guarantee for perpetuity of influence. Bare rebellion cannot endure, and
+no succession of generations can continue nourishing themselves on the
+poetry of complaint, and the idealisation of revolt. If, however, it is
+impossible that Byron should be all to us that he was to a former
+generation, and if we find no direct guidance in his muse, this is no
+reason why criticism should pass him over, nor why there may not be
+something peculiarly valuable in the noble freedom and genuine modernism
+of his poetic spirit, to an age that is apparently only forsaking the
+clerical idyll of one school, for the reactionary mediævalism or
+paganism, intrinsically meaningless and issueless, of another.
+
+More attention is now paid to the mysteries of Byron's life than to the
+merits of his work, and criticism and morality are equally injured by
+the confusion between the worth of the verse he wrote, and the virtue or
+wickedness of the life he lived. The admirers of his poetry appear
+sensible of some obligation to be the champions of his conduct, while
+those who have diligently gathered together the details of an accurate
+knowledge of the unseemliness of his conduct, cannot bear to think that
+from this bramble men have been able to gather figs. The result of the
+confusion has been that grave men and women have applied themselves to
+investigate and judge Byron's private life, as if the exact manner of
+it, the more or less of his outrages upon decorum, the degree of the
+deadness of his sense of moral responsibility, were matter of minute and
+profound interest to all ages. As if all this had anything to do with
+criticism proper. It is right that we should know the life and manners
+of one whom we choose for a friend, or of one who asks us to entrust him
+with the control of public interests. In either of these two cases, we
+need a guarantee for present and future. Art knows nothing of
+guarantees. The work is before us, its own warranty. What is it to us
+whether Turner had coarse orgies with the trulls of Wapping? We can
+judge his art without knowing or thinking of the artist. And in the same
+way, what are the stories of Byron's libertinism to us? They may have
+biographical interest, but of critical interest hardly the least. If the
+name of the author of _Manfred_, _Cain_, _Childe Harold_, were already
+lost, as it may be in remote times, the work abides, and its mark on
+European opinion. '_Je ne considère les gens après leur mort_,' said
+Voltaire, '_que par leurs ouvrages; tout la reste est anéanti pour
+moi_.'
+
+There is a sense in which biographical detail gives light to criticism,
+but not the sense in which the prurient moralist uses or seeks it. The
+life of the poet may help to explain the growth and prominence of a
+characteristic sentiment or peculiar idea. Knowledge of this or that
+fact in his life may uncover the roots of something that strikes, or
+unravel something that perplexes us. Considering the relations between a
+man's character and circumstance, and what he produces, we can from this
+point of view hardly know too much as to the personality of a great
+writer. Only let us recollect that this personality manifests itself
+outwardly in two separate forms, in conduct, and in literary production,
+and that each of these manifestations is to be judged independently of
+the other. If one of them is wholly censurable, the other may still be
+the outcome of the better mind; and even from the purely biographical
+aspect, it is a plain injustice to insist on identifying a character
+with its worse expression only.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Poetry, and not only poetry, but every other channel of emotional
+expression and æsthetic culture, confessedly moves with the general
+march of the human mind, and art is only the transformation into ideal
+and imaginative shapes of a predominant system and philosophy of life.
+Minor verse-writers may fairly be consigned, without disrespect, to the
+region of the literature of taste; and criticism of their work takes the
+shape of a discussion of stray graces, of new turns, of little
+variations of shade and colour, of their conformity to the accepted
+rules that constitute the technique of poetry. The loftier masters,
+though their technical power and originality, their beauty of form,
+strength of flight, music and variousness of rhythm, are all full of
+interest and instruction, yet, besides these precious gifts, come to us
+with the size and quality of great historic forces, for they represent
+the hope and energies, the dreams and the consummation, of the human
+intelligence in its most enormous movements. To appreciate one of these,
+we need to survey it on every side. For these we need synthetic
+criticism, which, after analysis has done its work, and disclosed to us
+the peculiar qualities of form, conception, and treatment, shall collect
+the products of this first process, construct for us the poet's mental
+figure in its integrity and just coherence, and then finally, as the sum
+of its work, shall trace the relations of the poet's ideas, either
+direct or indirect, through the central currents of thought, to the
+visible tendencies of an existing age.
+
+The greatest poets reflect beside all else the broad-bosomed haven of a
+perfect and positive faith, in which mankind has for some space found
+shelter, unsuspicious of the new and distant wayfarings that are ever in
+store. To this band of sacred bards few are called, while perhaps not
+more than four high names would fill the list of the chosen: Dante, the
+poet of Catholicism; Shakespeare, of Feudalism; Milton, of
+Protestantism; Goethe, of that new faith which is as yet without any
+universally recognised label, but whose heaven is an ever-closer harmony
+between the consciousness of man and all the natural forces of the
+universe; whose liturgy is culture, and whose deity is a certain high
+composure of the human heart.
+
+The far-shining pre-eminence of Shakespeare, apart from the incomparable
+fertility and depth of his natural gifts, arises secondarily from the
+larger extent to which he transcended the special forming influences,
+and refreshed his fancy and widened his range of sympathy, by recourse
+to what was then the nearest possible approach to a historic or
+political method. To the poet, vision reveals a certain form of the
+truth, which the rest of men laboriously discover and prove by the
+tardier methods of meditation and science. Shakespeare did not walk in
+imagination with the great warriors, monarchs, churchmen, and rulers of
+history, nor conceive their conduct, ideas, schemes, and throw himself
+into their words and actions, without strengthening that original taste
+which must have first drawn him to historical subjects, and without
+deepening both his feeling for the great progression of human affairs,
+and his sympathy for those relative moods of surveying and dealing with
+them, which are not more positive, scientific, and political, than they
+may be made truly poetic.
+
+Again, while in Dante the inspiring force was spiritual, and in Goethe
+it was intellectual, we may say that both in Shakespeare and Milton it
+was political and social. In other words, with these two, the drama of
+the one and the epic of the other were each of them connected with ideas
+of government and the other external movements of men in society, and
+with the play of the sentiments which spring from them. We assuredly do
+not mean that in either of them, least of all in Shakespeare, there is
+an absence of the spiritual element. This would be at once to thrust
+them down into a lower place; for the spiritual is of the very essence
+of poetry. But with the spiritual there mixes in our Englishmen a most
+abundant leaven of recognition of the impressions and impulses of the
+outer forms of life, as well as of active sympathy with the every-day
+debate of the world. They are neither of them inferior to the highest in
+sense of the wide and unutterable things of the spirit; yet with both of
+them, more than with other poets of the same rank, the man with whose
+soul and circumstance they have to deal is the [Greek: politikon zôon],
+no high abstraction of the race, but the creature with concrete
+relations and a full objective life. In Shakespeare the dramatic form
+helps partly to make this more prominent, though the poet's spirit
+shines forth thus, independently of the mould which it imposes on
+itself. Of Milton we may say, too, that, in spite of the supernatural
+machinery of his greatest poem, it bears strongly impressed on it the
+political mark, and that in those minor pieces, where he is avowedly in
+the political sphere, he still rises to the full height of his majestic
+harmony and noblest dignity.
+
+Byron was touched by the same fire. The contemporary and friend of the
+most truly spiritual of all English poets, Shelley, he was himself among
+the most essentially political. Or perhaps one will be better
+understood, describing his quality as a quality of poetical
+_worldliness_, in its enlarged and generous sense of energetic interest
+in real transactions, and a capacity of being moved and raised by them
+into those lofty moods of emotion which in more spiritual natures are
+only kindled by contemplation of the vast infinitudes that compass the
+human soul round about. That Shelley was immeasurably superior to Byron
+in all the rarer qualities of the specially poetic mind appears to us so
+unmistakably assured a fact, that difference of opinion upon it can only
+spring from a more fundamental difference of opinion as to what it is
+that constitutes this specially poetic quality. If more than anything
+else it consists in the power of transfiguring action, character, and
+thought, in the serene radiance of the purest imaginative intelligence,
+and the gift of expressing these transformed products in the finest
+articulate vibrations of emotional speech, then must we not confess that
+Byron has composed no piece which from this point may compare with
+_Prometheus_ or the _Cenci_, any more than Rubens may take his place
+with Raphael? We feel that Shelley transports the spirit to the highest
+bound and limit of the intelligible; and that with him thought passes
+through one superadded and more rarefying process than the other poet is
+master of. If it be true, as has been written, that 'Poetry is the
+breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,' we may say that Shelley
+teaches us to apprehend that further something, the breath and finer
+spirit of poetry itself. Contrasting, for example, Shelley's _Ode to the
+West Wind_, with the famous and truly noble stanzas on the eternal sea
+which close the fourth canto of _Childe Harold_, who does not feel that
+there is in the first a volatile and unseizable element that is quite
+distinct from the imagination and force and high impressiveness, or from
+any indefinable product of all of these united, which form the glory and
+power of the second? We may ask in the same way whether _Manfred_, where
+the spiritual element is as predominant as it ever is in Byron, is worth
+half a page of _Prometheus_.
+
+To perceive and admit this is not to disparage Byron's achievements. To
+be most deeply penetrated with the differentiating quality of the poet
+is not, after all, to contain the whole of that admixture of varying and
+moderating elements which goes to the composition of the broadest and
+most effective work. Of these elements, Shelley, with all his rare gifts
+of spiritual imagination and winged melodiousness of verse, was markedly
+wanting in a keen and omnipresent feeling for the great course of human
+events. All nature stirred him, except the consummating crown of natural
+growth.
+
+We do not mean anything so untrue as that Shelley was wanting either in
+deep humanity or in active benevolence, or that social injustice was a
+thing indifferent to him. We do not forget the energetic political
+propagandism of his youth in Ireland and elsewhere. Many a furious
+stanza remains to show how deeply and bitterly the spectacle of this
+injustice burnt into his soul. But these pieces are accidents. They do
+not belong to the immortal part of his work. An American original,
+unconsciously bringing the revolutionary mind to the climax of all
+utterances possible to it, has said that 'men are degraded when
+considered as the members of a political organisation.'[2] Shelley's
+position was on a yet more remote pinnacle than this. Of mankind he was
+barely conscious, in his loftiest and divinest flights. His muse seeks
+the vague translucent spaces where the care of man melts away in vision
+of the eternal forces, of which man may be but the fortuitous
+manifestation of an hour.
+
+[Footnote 2: Thoreau.]
+
+Byron, on the other hand, is never moved by the strength of his passion
+or the depth of his contemplation quite away from the round earth and
+the civil animal who dwells upon it. Even his misanthropy is only an
+inverted form of social solicitude. His practical zeal for good and
+noble causes might teach us this. He never grudged either money or time
+or personal peril for the cause of Italian freedom, and his life was the
+measure and the cost of his interest in the liberty of Greece. Then
+again he was full not merely of wit, which is sometimes only an affair
+of the tongue, but of humour also, which goes much deeper; and it is of
+the essence of the humoristic nature, that whether sunny or saturnine,
+it binds the thoughts of him who possesses it to the wide medley of
+expressly human things. Byron did not misknow himself, nor misapprehend
+the most marked turn of his own character when he wrote the lines--
+
+    I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
+    From these our interviews, in which I steal
+    From all I may be, or have been before,
+    To mingle with the universe and feel
+  What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.
+
+It was this which made Byron a social force, a far greater force than
+Shelley either has been or can be. Men read in each page that he was one
+of like passions with themselves; that he had their own feet of clay, if
+he had other members of brass and gold and fine silver which they had
+none of; and that vehement sensibility, tenacious energy of imagination,
+a bounding swell of poetic fancy, had not obliterated, but had rather
+quickened, the sense of the highest kind of man of the world, which did
+not decay but waxed stronger in him with years. His openness to beauty
+and care for it were always inferior in keenness and in hold upon him to
+his sense of human interest, and the superiority in certain respects of
+_Marino Faliero_, for example, where he handles a social theme in a
+worthy spirit, over _Manfred_, where he seeks a something tumultuously
+beautiful, is due to that subordination in his mind of æsthetic to
+social intention, which is one of the most strongly distinctive marks of
+the truly modern spirit. The admirable wit both of his letters, and of
+pieces like the _Vision of Judgment_ and _Don Juan_, where wit reaches
+as high as any English writer has ever carried it, shows in another way
+the same vividness and reality of attraction which every side of human
+affairs possessed for this glowing and incessantly animated spirit.
+
+In spite of a good many surface affectations, which may have cheated the
+lighter heads, but which may now be easily seen through, and counted off
+for as much as they are worth, Byron possessed a bottom of plain
+sincerity and rational sobriety which kept him substantially straight,
+real, and human, and made him the genuine exponent of that immense
+social movement which we sum up as the Revolution. If Keats's whole soul
+was absorbed by sensuous impressions of the outer world, and his art was
+the splendid and exquisite reproduction of these; if Shelley on the
+other hand distilled from the fine impressions of the senses by process
+of inmost meditation some thrice ethereal essence, 'the viewless spirit
+of a lovely sound;' we may say of Byron that, even in the moods when the
+mightiness and wonder of nature had most effectually possessed
+themselves of his imagination, his mind never moved for very long on
+these remote heights, apart from the busy world of men, but returned
+again like the fabled dove from the desolate void of waters to the ark
+of mortal stress and human passion. Nature, in her most dazzling
+aspects or stupendous parts, is but the background and theatre of the
+tragedy of man.
+
+We may find a secondary proof of this in the fewness of those fine
+descriptive strokes and subtle indirect touches of colour or sound which
+arise with incessant spontaneity, where a mastering passion for nature
+steeps the mind in vigilant, accurate, yet half-unconscious,
+observation. It is amazing through how long a catalogue of natural
+objects Byron sometimes takes us, without affixing to one of them any
+but the most conventional term, or a single epithet which might show
+that in passing through his mind it had yielded to him a beauty or a
+savour that had been kept a secret from the common troop. Byron is
+certainly not wanting in commanding image, as when Manfred likens the
+lines of foaming light flung along from the Alpine cataract to 'the pale
+courser's tail, the giant steed, to be bestrode by Death.' But
+imaginative power of this kind is not the same thing as that
+susceptibility to the minutest properties and unseen qualities of
+natural objects which reveals itself in chance epithet of telling
+felicity, or phrase that opens to us hidden lights. Our generation is
+more likely to think too much than too little of this; for its favourite
+poet, however narrow in subject and feeble in moral treatment, is
+without any peer in the exquisitely original, varied, and imaginative
+art of his landscape touches.
+
+This treatment of nature was in exact harmony with the method of
+revolutionary thought, which, from the time of Rousseau downwards, had
+appealed in its profound weariness of an existing social state to the
+solitude and seeming freedom of mountain and forest and ocean, as though
+the only cure for the woes of civilisation lay in annihilating it. This
+was an appeal less to nature than from man, just as we have said that
+Byron's was, and hence it was distinct from the single-eyed appreciation
+and love of nature for her own sake, for her beauty and terror and
+unnumbered moods, which has made of her the mistress and the consoler of
+many men in these times. In the days of old faith while the catholic
+gods sat yet firm upon their thrones, the loveliness of the universe
+shone to blind eyes. Saint Bernard in the twelfth century could ride for
+a whole day along the shore of the Lake of Geneva, and yet when in the
+evening his comrades spoke some word about the lake, he inquired: 'What
+lake?'[3] It was not mere difference of temperament that made the
+preacher of one age pass by in this marvellous unconsciousness, and the
+singer of another burst forth into that tender invocation of 'clear
+placid Leman,' whose 'contrasted lake with the wild world he dwelt in'
+moved him to the very depths. To Saint Bernard the world was as wild and
+confused as it was to Byron; but then he had gods many and saints many,
+and a holy church in this world, and a kingdom of heaven awaiting
+resplendent in the world to come. All this filled his soul with a
+settled certitude, too absorbing to leave any space for other than
+religious emotion. The seven centuries that flowed between the spiritual
+mind of Europe when Saint Bernard was its spokesman, and the spiritual
+mind of which Byron was the interpreter, had gradually dissolved these
+certitudes, and the faint lines of new belief and a more durable order
+were still invisible. The assurance of science was not yet rooted, nor
+had men as yet learned to turn back to the history of their own kind, to
+the long chronicle of its manifold experiences, for an adequate system
+of life and an inspiring social faith. So they fled in spirit or in
+flesh into unfamiliar scenes, and vanished from society, because society
+was not sufficiently social.
+
+[Footnote 3: Morison's _Life of St. Bernard_, p. 68 (2d edit.)]
+
+The feeling was abnormal, and the method was fundamentally artificial. A
+sentimentalism arose, which is in art what the metaphysical method is in
+philosophy. Yet a literature was born of it, whose freshness, force,
+elevation, and, above all, a self-assertion and peculiar aspiring
+freedom that have never been surpassed, still exert an irresistible
+attraction, even over minds that are furthest removed from the moral
+storm and disorder, and the confused intellectual convictions, of that
+extraordinary group. Perhaps the fact that their active force is spent,
+and that men find in them now only a charm and no longer a gospel,
+explains the difference between the admiration which some of us permit
+ourselves to feel for them, and the impatient dislike which they stirred
+in our fathers. Then they were a danger, because they were a force,
+misleading amiable and high-minded people into blind paths. Now this is
+at an end, and, apart from their historic interest, the permanent
+elements of beauty draw us to them with a delight that does not
+diminish, as we recede further and further from the impotence of the
+aspirations which thus married themselves to lofty and stirring words.
+To say nothing of Rousseau, the father and founder of the
+nature-worship, which is the nearest approach to a positive side that
+the Revolution has ever possessed, how much fine colour and freshness of
+feeling there is in _Réné_, what a sense of air and space in _Paul and
+Virginia_, and what must they have been to a generation that had just
+emerged from the close parlours of Richardson, the best of the
+sentimentalists of the pre-revolutionary type? May we not say, too, in
+parenthesis, that the man is the votary, not of wisdom, but of a bald
+and shapeless asceticism, who is so excessively penetrated with the
+reality, the duties, the claims, and the constant hazards of
+civilisation, as to find in himself no chord responsive to that sombre
+pensiveness into which Obermann's unfathomable melancholy and impotence
+of will deepened, as he meditated on the mean shadows which men are
+content to chase for happiness, and on all the pigmy progeny of giant
+effort? '_C'est peu de chose_,' says Obermann, '_de n'être point comme
+le vulgaire des hommes; mais c'est avoir fait un pas vers la sagesse,
+que de n'être plus comme le vulgaire des sages_.' This penetrating
+remark hits the difference between De Senancourt himself and most of the
+school. He is absolutely free from the vulgarity of wisdom, and
+breathes the air of higher peaks, taking us through mysterious and
+fragrant pine-woods, where more than he may find meditative repose amid
+the heat and stress of that practical day, of which he and his school
+can never bear the burden.
+
+In that _vulgaire des sages_, of which De Senancourt had none, Byron
+abounded. His work is in much the glorification of revolutionary
+commonplace. Melodramatic individualism reaches its climax in that long
+series of Laras, Conrads, Manfreds, Harolds, who present the fatal
+trilogy, in which crime is middle term between debauch and satiety, that
+forms the natural development of an anti-social doctrine in a
+full-blooded temperament. It was this temperament which, blending with
+his gifts of intellect, gave Byron the amazing copiousness and force
+that makes him the dazzling master of revolutionary emotion, because it
+fills his work with such variety of figures, such free change of
+incident, such diversity of passion, such a constant movement and
+agitation. It was this never-ceasing stir, coupled with a striking
+concreteness and an unfailing directness, which rather than any markedly
+correct or wide intellectual apprehension of things, made him so much
+more than any one else an effective interpreter of the moral tumult of
+the epoch. If we look for psychological delicacy, for subtle moral
+traits, for opening glimpses into unobserved depths of character,
+behold, none of these things are there. These were no gifts of his, any
+more than the divine gift of music was his. There are some writers whose
+words but half express the indefinable thoughts that inspired them, and
+to whom we have to surrender our whole minds with a peculiar loyalty and
+fulness, independent of the letter and printed phrase, if we would
+liquefy the frozen speech and recover some portion of its imprisoned
+essence. This is seldom a necessity with Byron. His words tell us all
+that he means to say, and do not merely hint nor suggest. The matter
+with which he deals is gigantic, and he paints with violent colours and
+sweeping pencil.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yet he is free from that declamation with which some of the French poets
+of the same age, and representing a portion of the same movement, blow
+out their cheeks. An angel of reasonableness seems to watch over him,
+even when he comes most dangerously near to an extravagance. He is
+equally free from a strained antithesis, which would have been
+inconsistent, not only with the breadth of effect required by Byron's
+art, but also with the peculiarly direct and forcible quality of his
+genius. In the preface to _Marino Faliero_, a composition that abounds
+in noble passages, and rests on a fine and original conception of
+character, he mentions his 'desire of preserving a nearer approach to
+unity, than the irregularity which is the reproach of the English
+theatre.' And this sound view of the importance of form, and of the
+barbarism to which our English genius is prone, from _Goody Blake and
+Harry Gill_ up to the clownish savagery which occasionally defaces even
+plays attributed to Shakespeare, is collateral proof of the sanity and
+balance which marked the foundations of his character, and which at no
+point of his work ever entirely failed him. Byron's admiration for Pope
+was no mere eccentricity.
+
+We may value this self-control the more, by remembering the nature of
+his subjects. We look out upon a wild revolutionary welter, of vehement
+activity without a purpose, boundless discontent without a hope, futile
+interrogation of nature in questions for which nature can have no
+answer, unbridled passion, despairing satiety, impotence. It is too
+easy, as the history of English opinion about Byron's poetic merit
+abundantly proves, to underrate the genius which mastered so tremendous
+a conflict, and rendered that amazing scene with the flow and energy and
+mingled tempest and forlorn calm which belonged to the original reality.
+The essential futility of the many moods which went to make up all this,
+ought not to blind us to the enormous power that was needed for the
+reproduction of a turbulent and not quite aimless chaos of the soul, in
+which man seemed to be divorced alike from his brother-men in the
+present, and from all the long succession and endeavour of men in the
+past. It was no small feat to rise to a height that should command so
+much, and to exhibit with all the force of life a world that had broken
+loose from its moorings.
+
+It is idle to vituperate this anarchy, either from the point of view of
+a sour and precise Puritanism, or the more elevated point of a rational
+and large faith in progress. Wise men are like Burke, who did not know
+how to draw an indictment against a whole nation. They do not know how
+to think nothing but ill of a whole generation, that lifted up its voice
+in heartfelt complaint and wailing against the conceptions, forms, and
+rulers, human and divine, of a society that the inward faith had
+abandoned, but which clung to every outward ordinance; which only
+remembered that man had property, and forgot that he had a spirit. This
+is the complaint that rings through Byron's verse. It was this complaint
+that lay deep at the bottom of the Revolution, and took form in every
+possible kind of protest, from a dishevelled neckcloth up to a
+profession of atheism. Byron elaborated the common emotion, as the
+earliest modern poets elaborated the common speech. He gave it
+inflections, and distinguished its moods, and threw over it an air of
+system and coherency, and a certain goodly and far-reaching
+sonorousness. This is the usual function of the spiritual leader, who
+leaves in bulk no more in the minds of those whom he attracts than he
+found, but he leaves it articulate with many sounds, and vivid with the
+consciousness of a multitude of defined impressions.
+
+That the whole movement, in spite of its energy, was crude,
+unscientific, virtually abortive, is most true. That it was presided
+over by a false conception of nature as a benign and purifying power,
+while she is in truth a stern force to be tamed and mastered, if society
+is to hold together, cannot be denied of the revolutionary movement
+then, any more than it can be denied of its sequels now. Nor need we
+overlook its fundamental error of tracing half the misfortunes and woes
+of the race to that social union, to which we are really indebted for
+all the happiness we know, including even this dignifying sensibility of
+the woes of the race; and the other half to a fictitious entity styled
+destiny, placed among the nethermost gods, which would be more rightly
+regarded as the infinitely modifiable influence exercised by one
+generation of ourselves upon those that follow.
+
+Every one of these faults of thought is justly chargeable to Byron. They
+were deeply inherent in the Revolution. They coloured thoughts about
+government, about laws, about morals. They effected a transformation of
+religion, but, resting on no basis of philosophical acceptance of
+history, the transformation was only temporary. They spread a fantastic
+passion of which Byron was himself an example and a victim, for
+extraordinary outbreaks of a peculiar kind of material activity, that
+met the exigences of an imperious will, while it had not the irksomeness
+of the self-control which would have exercised the will to more
+permanent profit. They destroyed faith in order, natural or social,
+actual or potential, and substituted for it an enthusiastic assertion of
+the claims of the individual to make his passions, aspirations, and
+convictions, a final and decisive law.
+
+Such was the moral state which Byron had to render and interpret. His
+relation to it was a relation of exact sympathy. He felt the force of
+each of the many currents that united in one destructive stream, wildly
+overflowing the fixed banks, and then, when it had overflowed, often, it
+must be confessed, stagnating in lazy brackish pools, while new
+tributaries began to flow in together from far other quarters. The list
+of his poems is the catalogue of the elements of the revolutionary
+spirit. For of what manner is this spirit? Is it not a masterful and
+impatient yearning after many good things, unsubdued and uninformed
+either by a just knowledge of the time, and the means which are needed
+to bring to men the fruits of their hope, or by a fit appreciation of
+orderly and tranquil activity for the common service, as the normal type
+of the individual life? And this is precisely the temper and the spirit
+of Byron. Nowhere else do we see drawn in such traits that colossal
+figure, which has haunted Europe these fourscore years and more, with
+its new-born passion, its half-controlled will, its constant cry for a
+multitude of unknown blessings under the single name of Freedom, the one
+known and unadulterated word of blessing. If only Truth, which alone of
+words is essentially divine and sacrosanct, had been the chief talisman
+of the Revolution, the movement would have been very different from that
+which we know. But to claim this or that in the name of truth, would
+have been to borrow the language which priests and presbyters, Dominic
+and Calvin, had covered thick with hateful associations. Freedom, after
+all, was the next best thing, for it is an indispensable condition of
+the best of all; but it could not lead men until the spirit of truth,
+which means science in the intellectual order, and justice in the social
+order, had joined company with it.
+
+So there was violent action in politics, and violent and excessive
+stimulation in literature, the positive effects of the force moved in
+each sphere being deplorably small in proportion to the intense moral
+energy which gave the impulse. In literature the straining for mental
+liberty was the more futile of the two, because it expressed the ardent
+and hopeless longing of the individual for a life which we may perhaps
+best call life unconditioned. And this unconditioned life, which the
+Byronic hero vainly seeks, and not finding, he fills the world with
+stormy complaint, is least of all likely to offer itself in any
+approximate form to men penetrated with gross and egotistical passions
+to their inmost core. The Byronic hero went to clasp repose in a frenzy.
+All crimson and aflame with passion, he groaned for evening stillness.
+He insisted on being free, in the corroding fetters of resentment and
+scorn for men. Conrad sought balm for disappointment of spirit in
+vehement activity of body. Manfred represents the confusion common to
+the type, between thirst for the highest knowledge and proud violence of
+unbridled will. Harold is held in a middle way of poetic melancholy,
+equally far from a speechless despair and from gay and reckless licence,
+by contemplation of the loveliness of external nature, and the great
+exploits and perishing monuments of man in the past; but he, equally
+with the others, embodies the paradoxical hope that angry isolation and
+fretful estrangement from mankind are equivalent to emancipation from
+their pettiness, instead of being its very climax and demonstration. As
+if freedom of soul could exist without orderly relations of intelligence
+and partial acceptance between a man and the sum of surrounding
+circumstances. That universal protest which rings through Byron's work
+with a plangent resonance, very different from the whimperings of punier
+men, is a proof that so far from being free, one's whole being is
+invaded and laid waste. It is no ignoble mood, and it was a most
+inevitable product of the mental and social conditions of Western Europe
+at the close of the eighteenth century. Everlasting protest, impetuous
+energy of will, melancholy and despondent reaction;--this is the
+revolutionary course. Cain and Conrad; then Manfred and Lara and Harold.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In studying that portion of the European movement which burst forth into
+flame in France between the fall of the Bastille and those fatal days of
+Vendémiaire, Fructidor, Floréal, Brumaire, in which the explosion came
+convulsively to its end, we seem to see a microcosm of the Byronic
+epos. The succession of moods is identical. Overthrow, rage, intense
+material energy, crime, profound melancholy, half-cynical dejection. The
+Revolution was the battle of Will against the social forces of a dozen
+centuries. Men thought that they had only to will the freedom and
+happiness of a world, and all nature and society would be plastic before
+their daring, as clay in the hands of the potter. They could only
+conceive of failure as another expression for inadequate will. Is not
+this one of the notes of Byron's _Ode on the Fall of Bonaparte_?
+'_L'audace, l'audace, et toujours l'audace._' If Danton could have read
+Byron, he would have felt as one in front of a magician's glass. Every
+passion and fit, from the bloody days of September down to the gloomy
+walks by the banks of the Aube, and the prison-cry that 'it were better
+to be a poor fisherman than to meddle with the governing of men,' would
+have found itself there. It is true that in Byron we miss the firmness
+of noble and generous hope. This makes him a more veritable embodiment
+of the Revolution than such a precursor as Rousseau, in whom were all
+the unclouded anticipations of a dawn, that opened to an obscured noon
+and a tempestuous night. Yet one knows not, in truth, how much of that
+violence of will and restless activity and resolute force was due less
+to confidence, than to the urgent necessity which every one of us has
+felt, at some season and under some influence, of filling up spiritual
+vacuity by energetic material activity. Was this the secret of the
+mysterious charm that scenes of violent strife and bloodshed always had
+for Byron's imagination, as it was perhaps the secret of the black
+transformation of the social faith of '89 into the worship of the
+Conqueror of '99? Nowhere does Byron's genius show so much of its own
+incomparable fire and energy, nor move with such sympathetic firmness
+and amplitude of pinion, as in _Lara_, the _Corsair_, _Harold_, and
+other poems, where 'Red Battle stamps his foot,' and where
+
+    The giant on the mountain stands,
+  His blood-red tresses deep'ning in the sun,
+  With death-shot glowing in his fiery hands,
+  And eye that scorcheth all it glows upon.
+
+Yet other and intrinsically nobler passages, where this splendid
+imaginative energy of the sensations is replaced by the calmer glow of
+social meditation, prove that Byron was penetrated with the
+distinctively modern scorn and aversion for the military spirit, and the
+distinctively modern conviction of its being the most deadly of
+anachronisms. Such indirect satisfaction to the physical energies was to
+him, as their direct satisfaction was to the disillusioned France of
+'99, the relief demanded by a powerful nature for the impotence of hope
+and vision.
+
+However this may have been, it may be confessed that Byron presents less
+of the flame of his revolutionary prototypes, and too much of the ashes.
+He came at the end of the experiment. But it is only a question of
+proportion. The ashes belong as much and as necessarily to the methods
+of the Revolution in that phase, as do the blaze, that first told men
+of possible light and warmth, and the fire, which yet smoulders with
+abundant life underneath the gray cinders. And we have to remember that
+Byron came in the midst of a reaction; a reaction of triumph for the
+partisans of darkness and obstruction, who were assured that the
+exploded fragments of the old order would speedily grow together again,
+and a reaction of despondency for those who had filled themselves with
+illimitable and peremptory hopes. Silly Byronical votaries, who only
+half understood their idol, and loved him for a gloom that in their own
+case was nothing but a graceful veil for selfishness and mental
+indolence, saw and felt only the melancholy conclusion, and had not
+travelled a yard in the burning path that led to it. They hugged
+Conrad's haughty misery, but they would have trembled at the thought of
+Conrad's perilous expedition. They were proud despondent Laræs after
+their manner, 'lords of themselves, that heritage of woe,' but the
+heritage would have been still more unbearable, if it had involved
+Lara's bodily danger.
+
+This shallowness has no part in Byron himself. His weariness was a
+genuine outcome of the influence of the time upon a character consumed
+by passion. His lot was cast among spent forces, and, while it is no
+hyperbole to say that he was himself the most enormous force of his
+time, he was only half conscious of this, if indeed he did not always
+inwardly shrink from crediting his own power and strength, as so many
+strong men habitually do, in spite of noisy and perpetual
+self-assertion. Conceit and presumption have not been any more fatal to
+the world, than the waste which comes of great men failing in their
+hearts to recognise how great they are. Many a man whose affectations
+and assumptions are a proverb, has lost the magnificent virtue of
+simplicity, for no other reason than that he needed courage to take his
+own measure, and so finally confirm to himself the reality of his
+pretensions. With Byron, as with some of his prototypes among the men of
+action in France and elsewhere, theatrical ostentation, excessive
+self-consciousness, extravagant claims, cannot hide from us that their
+power was secretly drained by an ever-present distrust of their own
+aims, their own methods, even of the very results that they seem to have
+achieved.
+
+This diffidence was an inseparable consequence of the vast predominance
+of exalted passion over reflection, which is one of the revolutionary
+marks. Byron was fundamentally and substantially, as has been already
+said, one of the most rational of men. Hence when the passionate fit
+grew cold, as it always does in temperaments so mixed, he wanted for
+perfect strength a justification in thought. There are men whose being
+is so universally possessed by phantasies, that they never feel this
+necessity of reconciling the visions of excited emotion with the ideas
+of ordered reason. Byron was more vigorously constituted, and his
+susceptibility to the necessity of this reconciliation combined with
+his inability to achieve it, to produce that cynicism which the simple
+charity of vulgar opinion attributes to the possession of him by unclean
+devils. It was his refuge, as it sometimes is with smaller men, from the
+disquieting confusion which was caused by the disproportion between his
+visions and aspirations, and his intellectual means for satisfying
+himself seriously as to their true relations and substantive value. Only
+the man arrives at practical strength who is convinced, whether rightly
+or wrongly, that he knows all about his own ideas that needs to be
+known. Byron never did thus know himself, either morally or
+intellectually. The higher part of him was consciously dragged down by
+the degrading reminiscence of the brutishness of his youth and its
+connections and associations; they hung like miasma over his spirit. He
+could not rise to that sublimest height of moral fervour, when a man
+intrepidly chases from his memory past evil done, suppresses the
+recollection of old corruptions, declares that he no longer belongs to
+them nor they to him, and is not frightened by the past from a firm and
+lofty respect for present dignity and worth. It is a good thing thus to
+overthrow the tyranny of the memory, and to cast out the body of our
+dead selves. That Byron never attained this good, though he was not
+unlikely to have done so if he had lived longer, does not prove that he
+was too gross to feel its need, but it explains a moral weakness which
+has left a strange and touching mark on some of his later works.
+
+So in the intellectual order, he knew too much in one sense, and in
+another too little. The strong man is not conscious of gaps and
+cataclysms in the structure of his belief, or else he would in so far
+instantly cease to be strong. One living, as Byron emphatically did, in
+the truly modern atmosphere, was bound by all the conditions of the
+atmosphere to have mastered what we may call the natural history of his
+own ideas and convictions; to know something of their position towards
+fact and outer circumstance and possibility; above all to have some
+trusty standard for testing their value, and assuring himself that they
+do really cover the field which he takes them to cover. People with a
+faith and people living in frenzy are equally under this law; but they
+take the completeness and coherency of their doctrine for granted. Byron
+was not the prey of habitual frenzy, and he was without a faith. That is
+to say, he had no firm basis for his conceptions, and he was aware that
+he had none. The same unrest which drove men of that epoch to Nature,
+haunted them to the end, because they had no systematic conception of
+her working and of human relations with her. In a word, there was no
+science. Byron was a warm admirer of the genius and art of Goethe, yet
+he never found out the central secret of Goethe's greatness, his
+luminous and coherent positivity. This is the crowning glory of the
+modern spirit, and it was the lack of this which went so far to
+neutralise Byron's hold of the other chief characteristics of that
+spirit, its freedom and spaciousness, its humaneness and wide
+sociality, its versatility and many-sidedness and passionate feeling for
+the great natural forces.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This positivity is the cardinal condition of strength for times when
+theology lies in decay, and the abstractions which gradually replaced
+the older gods have in their turn ceased to satisfy the intelligence and
+mould the will. All competent persons agree that it is the first
+condition of the attainment of scientific truth. Nobody denies that men
+of action find in it the first law of successful achievement in the
+material order. Its varied but always superlative power in the region of
+æsthetics is only an object of recent recognition, though great work
+enough has been done in past ages by men whose recognition was informal
+and inexpress. It is plain that, in the different classes of æsthetic
+manifestation, there will be differences in objective shape and colour,
+corresponding to the varied limits and conditions of the matter with
+which the special art has to deal; but the critic may expect to find in
+all a profound unity of subjective impression, and that, the impression
+of a self-sustaining order and a self-sufficing harmony among all those
+faculties and parts and energies of universal life, which come within
+the idealising range of art. In other words, the characteristically
+modern inspiration is the inspiration of law. The regulated play of
+forces shows itself as fit to stir those profound emotional impulses
+which wake the artistic soul, as ever did the gracious or terrible gods
+of antique or middle times. There are glories in Turner's idealisation
+of the energies of matter, which are at least as nobly imaginative and
+elevated, in spite of the conspicuous absence of the human element in
+them, as the highest products of the artists who believed that their
+work was for the service and honour of a deity.
+
+It is as mistaken to suppose that this conviction of the supremacy of a
+cold and self-sustained order in the universe is fatal to emotional
+expansion, as it would be to suppose it fatal to intellectual curiosity.
+Experience has shown in the scientific sphere, that the gradual
+withdrawal of natural operations from the grasp of the imaginary
+volitions of imaginary beings has not tamed, but greatly stimulated and
+fertilised scientific curiosity as to the conditions of these
+operations. Why should it be otherwise in the æsthetic sphere? Why
+should all that part of our mental composition which responds to the
+beautiful and imaginative expression of real truths, be at once inflamed
+and satisfied by the thought that our whole lives, and all the movements
+of the universe, are the objects of the inexplicable caprice of Makers
+who are also Destroyers, and yet grow cold, apathetic, and unproductive,
+in the shadow of the belief that we can only know ourselves as part of
+the stupendous and inexorable succession of phenomenal conditions,
+moving according to laws that may be formulated positively, but not
+interpreted morally, to new destinies that are eternally unfathomable?
+Why should this conception of a coherent order, free from the arbitrary
+and presumptuous stamp of certain final causes, be less favourable,
+either to the ethical or the æsthetic side of human nature, than the
+older conception of the regulation of the course of the great series by
+a multitude of intrinsically meaningless and purposeless volitions? The
+alertness of our sensations for all sources of outer beauty remains
+unimpaired. The old and lovely attitude of devout service does not pass
+away to leave vacancy, but is transformed into a yet more devout
+obligation and service towards creatures that have only their own
+fellowship and mutual ministry to lean upon; and if we miss something of
+the ancient solace of special and personal protection, the loss is not
+unworthily made good by the growth of an imperial sense of participation
+in the common movement and equal destination of eternal forces.
+
+To have a mind penetrated with this spiritual persuasion, is to be in
+full possession of the highest strength that man can attain. It springs
+from a scientific and rounded interpretation of the facts of life, and
+is in a harmony, which freshly found truths only make more ample and
+elaborate, with all the conclusions of the intellect in every order. The
+active energies are not paralysed by the possibilities of enfeebling
+doubt, nor the reason drawn down and stultified by apprehension lest its
+methods should discredit a document, or its inferences clash with a
+dogma, or its light flash unseasonably on a mystery. There is none of
+the baleful distortion of hate, because evil and wrong-doing and
+darkness are acknowledged to be effects of causes, sums of conditions,
+terms in a series; they are to be brought to their end, or weakened and
+narrowed, by right action and endeavour, and this endeavour does not
+stagnate in antipathy, but concentrates itself in transfixing a cause.
+In no other condition of the spirit than this, in which firm
+acquiescence mingles with valorous effort, can a man be so sure of
+raising a calm gaze and an enduring brow to the cruelty of circumstance.
+The last appalling stroke of annihilation itself is measured with purest
+fortitude by one, whose religious contemplation dwells most habitually
+upon the sovereignty of obdurate laws in the vast revolving circle of
+physical forces, on the one hand, and, on the other, upon that moral
+order which the vision and pity of good men for their fellows, guiding
+the spontaneous energy of all men in strife with circumstance, have
+raised into a structure sublimer and more amazing than all the majesty
+of outer nature.
+
+In Byron's time the pretensions of the two possible answers to the great
+and eternally open questions of God, Immortality, and the like, were
+independent of that powerful host of inferences and analogies which the
+advance of physical discovery, and the establishment of a historical
+order, have since then brought into men's minds. The direct aggressions
+of old are for the most part abandoned, because it is felt that no
+fiercest polemical cannonading can drive away the impalpable darkness
+of error, but only the slow and silent presence of the dawning truth.
+_Cain_ remains, a stern and lofty statement of the case against that
+theological tradition which so outrages, where it has not already too
+deeply depraved, the conscience of civilised man. Yet every one who is
+competent to judge, must feel how infinitely more free the mind of the
+poet would have been, if besides this just and holy rage, most laudable
+in its kind, his intellectual equipment had been ample enough and
+precise enough to have taught him, that all the conceptions that races
+of men have ever held, either about themselves or their deities, have
+had a source in the permanently useful instincts of human nature, are
+capable of explanation, and of a historical justification; that is to
+say, of the kind of justification which is, in itself and of its own
+force, the most instant destruction to what has grown to be an
+anachronism.
+
+Byron's curiously marked predilection for dramatic composition, not
+merely for dramatic poems, as _Manfred_ or _Cain_, but for genuine
+plays, as _Marino Faliero_, _Werner_, the _Two Foscari_, was the only
+sign of his approach to the really positive spirit. Dramatic art, in its
+purest modern conception, is genuinely positive; that is, it is the
+presentation of action, character, and motive in a self-sufficing and
+self-evolving order. There are no final causes, and the first moving
+elements are taken for granted to begin with. The dramatist creates, but
+it is the climax of his work to appear to stand absolutely apart and
+unseen, while the play unfolds itself to the spectator, just as the
+greater drama of physical phenomena unfolds itself to the scientific
+observer, or as the order of recorded history extends in natural process
+under the eye of the political philosopher. Partly, no doubt, the
+attraction which dramatic form had for Byron is to be explained by that
+revolutionary thirst for action, of which we have already spoken; but
+partly also it may well have been due to Byron's rudimentary and
+unsuspected affinity with the more constructive and scientific side of
+the modern spirit.
+
+His idea of Nature, of which something has been already said, pointed in
+the same direction; for, although he made an abstraction and a goddess
+of her, and was in so far out of the right modern way of thinking about
+these outer forces, it is to be remembered, that, while this dominant
+conception of Nature as introduced by Rousseau and others into politics
+was most mischievous and destructive, its place and worth in poetry are
+very different; because here in the region of the imagination it had the
+effect, without any pernicious practical consequences, of giving shape
+and proportion to that great idea of _ensemble_ throughout the visible
+universe, which may be called the beginning and fountain of right
+knowledge. The conception of the relationship of the different parts and
+members of the vast cosmos was not accessible to Byron, as it is to a
+later generation, but his constant appeal in season and out of season to
+all the life and movement that surrounds man, implied and promoted the
+widest extension of consciousness of the wholeness and community of
+natural processes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was one very manifest evil consequence of the hold which this idea
+in its cruder shape, gained over Byron and his admirers. The vastness of
+the material universe, as they conceived and half adored it, entirely
+overshadowed the principle of moral duty and social obligation. The
+domestic sentiment, for example, almost disappears in those works which
+made Byron most popular, or else it only appears, to be banished with
+reproach. This is quite in accordance with the revolutionary spirit,
+which was in one of its most fundamental aspects a revolt on behalf of
+unconditioned individual rights, and against the family. If we accept
+what seems to be the fatal law of progress, that excess on one side is
+only moderated by a nearly corresponding excess of an opposite kind, the
+Byronic dissolution of domestic feeling was not entirely without
+justification. There is probably no uglier growth of time than that mean
+and poor form of domesticity, which has always been too apt to fascinate
+the English imagination, ever since the last great effort of the
+Rebellion, and which rose to the climax of its popularity when George
+III. won all hearts by living like a farmer. Instead of the fierce light
+beating about a throne, it played lambently upon a sty. And the nation
+who admired, imitated. When the Regent came, and with him that coarse
+profligacy which has alternated with cloudy insipidity in the annals of
+the line, the honest part of the world, out of antipathy to the son,
+was driven even further into domestic sentimentality of a greasy kind,
+than it had gone from affection for the sire.
+
+Byron helped to clear the air of this. His fire, his lofty spaciousness
+of outlook, his spirited interest in great national causes, his romance,
+and the passion both of his animosity and his sympathy, acted for a
+while like an electric current, and every one within his influence
+became ashamed to barter the large heritage of manhood, with its many
+realms and illimitable interests, for the sordid ease of the hearth and
+the good word of the unworthy. He fills men with thoughts that shake
+down the unlovely temple of comfort. This was good, to force whoever was
+not already too far sunk into the mire, high up to the larger
+atmosphere, whence they could see how minute an atom is man, how
+infinite and blind and pitiless the might that encompasses his little
+life. Many feeble spirits ran back homewards from the horrid solitudes
+and abysses of _Manfred_, and the moral terrors of _Cain_, and even the
+despair of _Harold_, and, burying themselves in warm domestic places,
+were comforted by the familiar restoratives and appliances. Firmer souls
+were not only exhilarated, but intoxicated by the potent and
+unaccustomed air. They went too far. They made war on the family, and
+the idea of it. Everything human was mischievously dwarfed, and the
+difference between right and wrong, between gratification of appetite
+and its control for virtue's sake, between the acceptance and the
+evasion of clear obligation, all became invisible or of no account in
+the new light. That constancy and permanence, of which the family is the
+type, and which is the first condition alike of the stability and
+progress of society, was obliterated from thought. As if the wonders
+that have been wrought by this regulated constancy of the feeling of man
+for man in transforming human life were not far more transcendently
+exalting than the contemplation of those glories of brute nature, which
+are barbaric in comparison.
+
+It would be unjust not to admit that there are abundant passages in his
+poems of too manifest depth and sincerity of feeling, for us to suppose
+that Byron himself was dead to the beauty of domestic sentiment. The
+united tenderness and dignity of Faliero's words to Angiolina, before he
+goes to the meeting of the conspirators, would, if there were nothing
+else, be enough to show how rightly in his better moods the poet
+appreciated the conditions of the family. Unfortunately the better moods
+were not fixed, and we had _Don Juan_, where the wit and colour and
+power served to make an anti-social and licentious sentiment attractive
+to puny creatures, who were thankful to have their lasciviousness so
+gaily adorned. As for Great Britain, she deserved _Don Juan_. A nation,
+whose disrespect for all ideas and aspirations that cannot be supported
+by a text, nor circulated by a religious tract society, was systematic,
+and where consequently the understanding is least protected against
+sensual sophisms, received no more than a just chastisement in 'the
+literature of Satan.' Here again, in the licence of this literature, we
+see the finger of the Revolution, and of that egoism which makes the
+passions of the individual his own law. Let us condemn and pass on,
+homily undelivered. If Byron injured the domestic idea on this side, let
+us not fail to observe how vastly he elevated it on others, and how,
+above all, he pointed to the idea above and beyond it, in whose light
+only can that be worthy, the idea of a country and a public cause. A man
+may be sure that the comfort of the hearth has usurped too high a place,
+when he can read without response the lines declaring that domestic ties
+must yield in 'those who are called to the highest destinies, which
+purify corrupted commonwealths.'
+
+  We must forget all feelings save the one--
+  We must resign all passions save our purpose--
+  We must behold no object save our country--
+  And only look on death as beautiful,
+  So that the sacrifice ascend to heaven
+  And draw down freedom on her evermore.
+    _Calendaro._        But if we fail----
+    _I. Bertuccio._         They never fail who die
+  In a great cause: the block may soak their gore;
+  Their heads may sodden in the sun; their limbs
+  Be strung to city gates and castle walls--
+  But still their spirit walks abroad. Though years
+  Elapse, and others share as dark a doom,
+  They but augment the deep and sweeping thoughts
+  Which overpower all others, and conduct
+  The world at last to freedom. What were we
+  If Brutus had not lived? He died in giving
+  Rome liberty, but left a deathless lesson--
+  A name which is a virtue, and a soul
+  Which multiplies itself throughout all time,
+  When wicked men wax mighty, and a state
+  Turns servile.
+
+And the man who wrote this was worthy to play an even nobler part than
+the one he had thus nobly described; for it was not many years after,
+that Byron left all and laid down his life for the emancipation of a
+strange land, and 'Greece and Italy wept for his death, as it had been
+that of the noblest of their own sons.' Detractors have done their best
+to pare away the merit of this act of self-renunciation by attributing
+it to despair. That contemporaries of their own humour had done their
+best to make his life a load to him is true, yet to this talk of despair
+we may reply in the poet's own words:
+
+              When we know
+  All that can come, and how to meet it, our
+  Resolves, if firm, may merit a more noble
+  Word than this, to give it utterance.
+
+There was an estimate of the value and purpose of a human life, which
+our Age of Comfort may fruitfully ponder.
+
+To fix upon violent will and incessant craving for movement as the mark
+of a poet, whose contemporaries adored him for what they took to be the
+musing sweetness of his melancholy, may seem a critical perversity.
+There is, however, a momentous difference between that melancholy, which
+is as the mere shadow projected by a man's spiritual form, and that
+other melancholy, which itself is the reality and substance of a
+character; between the soul to whom dejection brings graceful relief
+after labour and effort, and the soul which by irresistible habit and
+constitution dwells ever in Golgotha. This deep and penetrating
+subjective melancholy had no possession of Byron. His character was
+essentially objective, stimulated by outward circumstance, moving to
+outward harmonies, seeking colour and image and purpose from without.
+Hence there is inevitably a certain liveliness and animation, even when
+he is in the depths. We feel that we are watching clouds sweep
+majestically across the sky, and, even when they are darkest, blue
+interspaces are not far off. Contrast the moodiest parts of _Childe
+Harold_ or of _Cain_ with Novalis's _Night Hymns_. Byron's gloom is a
+mere elegance in comparison. The one pipes to us with a graceful
+despondency on the edge of the gulf, while the other carries us actually
+down into the black profound, with no rebellious cry, nor shriek of woe,
+but sombrely awaiting the deliverance of death, with soul absorbed and
+consumed by weariness. Let the reader mark the note of mourning struck
+in the opening stanzas, for instance, of Novalis's _Longing after
+Death_, their simplicity, homeliness, transparent sincerity, and then
+turn to any of the familiar passages where Byron meditates on the good
+things which the end brings to men. How artificial he seems, and
+unseasonably ornate, and how conscious of his public. In the first, we
+sit sadly on the ground in some veritable Place of a Skull; in the
+second, we assist at tragical distress after the manner of the Italian
+opera. We should be disposed to call the first a peculiarly German
+quality, until we remember Pascal. With Novalis, or with Pascal, as with
+all those whom character, or the outer fates, or the two together, have
+drawn to dwell in the valley of the shadow, gloom and despondency are
+the very stuff of their thoughts. Material energy could have done
+nothing for them. Their nerves and sinews were too nearly cut asunder.
+To know the quality of Byron's melancholy, and to recognise how little
+it was of the essence of his character, we have only to consider how far
+removed he was from this condition. In other words, in spite of morbid
+manifestations of one sort and another, he always preserved a salutary
+and vivid sympathy for action, and a marked capacity for it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was the same impetuous and indomitable spirit of effort which moved
+Byron to his last heroic exploit, that made the poetry inspired by it so
+powerful in Europe, from the deadly days of the Holy Alliance onwards.
+Cynical and misanthropical as he has been called, as though that were
+his sum and substance, he yet never ceased to glorify human freedom, in
+tones that stirred the hearts of men and quickened their hope and upheld
+their daring, as with the voice of some heavenly trumpet. You may, if
+you choose, find the splendour of the stanzas in the Fourth Canto on the
+Bourbon restoration, on Cromwell, and Washington, a theatrical
+splendour. But for all that, they touched the noblest parts of men. They
+are alive with an exalted and magnanimous generosity, the one high
+virtue which can never fail to touch a multitude. Subtlety may miss
+them, graces may miss them, and reason may fly over their heads, but the
+words of a generous humanity on the lips of poet or chief have never
+failed to kindle divine music in their breasts. The critic may censure,
+and culture may wave a disdainful hand. As has been said, all such words
+'are open to criticism, and they are all above it.' The magic still
+works. A mysterious and potent word from the gods has gone abroad over
+the face of the earth.
+
+This larger influence was not impaired by Byron's ethical poverty. The
+latter was an inevitable consequence of his defective discipline. The
+triteness of his moral climax is occasionally startling. When
+Sardanapalus, for instance, sees Zarina torn from him, and is stricken
+with profound anguish at the pain with which he has filled her life, he
+winds up with such a platitude as this:
+
+                            To what gulfs
+  A single deviation from the track
+  Of human duties leaves even those who claim
+  The homage of mankind as their born due!
+
+The baldest writer of hymns might work up passion enough for a
+consummation like this. Once more, Byron was insufficiently furnished
+with positive intellectual ideas, and for want of these his most
+exalted words were constantly left sterile of definite and pointed
+outcome.
+
+Byron's passionate feeling for mankind included the long succession of
+generations, that stretch back into the past and lie far on in the misty
+distances of the future. No poet has had a more sublime sense of the
+infinite melancholy of history; indeed, we hardly feel how great a poet
+Byron was, until we have read him at Venice, at Florence, and above all
+in that overpowering scene where the 'lone mother of dead empires'
+broods like a mysterious haunting spirit among the columns and arches
+and wrecked fabrics of Rome. No one has expressed with such amplitude
+the sentiment that in a hundred sacred spots of the earth has
+
+                        Fill'd up
+  As 'twere, anew, the gaps of centuries;
+  Leaving that beautiful which still was so,
+  And making that which was not; till the place
+  Became religious, and the heart ran o'er
+  With silent worship of the great of old--
+  The dead, but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule
+  Our spirits from their urns.
+
+Only he stands aright, who from his little point of present possession
+ever meditates on the far-reaching lines, which pass through his point
+from one interminable star-light distance to another. Neither the stoic
+pagan, nor the disciple of the creed which has some of the peculiar
+weakness of stoicism and not all its peculiar strength, could find
+Manfred's latest word untrue to himself:
+
+  The mind, which is immortal, makes itself
+  Requital for its good or evil thoughts--
+  Is its own origin of ill and end,
+  And its own place and time: its innate sense,
+  When stripped of this mortality, derives
+  No colour from the fleeting things without:
+  But is absorbed in sufferance of joy,
+  Born from the knowledge of its own desert.
+
+It is only when a man subordinates this absorption in individual
+sufferance and joy to the thought that his life is a trust for humanity,
+that he is sure of making it anything other than 'rain fallen on the
+sand.' In the last great episode of his own career Byron was as lofty as
+the noblest side of his creed. The historic feeling for the unseen
+benefactors of old time was matched by vehemence of sympathy with the
+struggles for liberation of his own day. And for this, history will not
+forget him. Though he may have no place in our own Minster, he assuredly
+belongs to the band of far-shining men, of whom Pericles declared the
+whole world to be the tomb.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I, by John Morley
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I, by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
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+
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+Title: Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I
+       Essay 3: Byron
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: March 22, 2007 [EBook #20879]
+
+Language: English
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+
+
+<h1>CRITICAL<br /><br />MISCELLANIES</h1>
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+
+<h2>JOHN MORLEY</h2>
+
+<h3>VOL. I.</h3>
+
+<h3>ESSAY 3: BYRON</h3>
+
+<p class='center'>London<br />
+MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Limited</span><br />
+
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br />
+1904</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="BYRON" id="BYRON"></a>BYRON</h2>
+
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<div class='centered'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="CONTENTS">
+<tr><td align='left'>Byron's influence in Europe</td><td align='left'><a href='#Page_203'><b>203</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>In England</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_204'><b>204</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Criticism not concerned with Byron's private life</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_208'><b>208</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Function of synthetic criticism</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_210'><b>210</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Byron has the political quality of Milton and Shakespeare</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_212'><b>212</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Contrasted with Shelley in this respect</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_213'><b>213</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Peculiarity of the revolutionary view of nature</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_218'><b>218</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Revolutionary sentimentalism</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_220'><b>220</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>And revolutionary commonplace in Byron</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_222'><b>222</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Byron's reasonableness</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_223'><b>223</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Size and difficulties of his subject</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_224'><b>224</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>His mastery of it</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_224'><b>224</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The reflection of Danton in Byron</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_230'><b>230</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>The reactionary influence upon him</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_232'><b>232</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Origin of his apparent cynicism</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_234'><b>234</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>His want of positive knowledge</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_235'><b>235</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>&AElig;sthetic and emotional relations to intellectual positivity</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_236'><b>236</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Significance of his dramatic predilections</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_240'><b>240</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>His idea of nature less hurtful in art than in politics</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_241'><b>241</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Its influence upon his views of duty and domestic sentiment</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_242'><b>242</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>His public career better than one side of his creed</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_245'><b>245</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Absence of true subjective melancholy from his nature</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_246'><b>246</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>His ethical poverty</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_249'><b>249</b></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Conclusion</td><td align='right'><a href='#Page_250'><b>250</b></a></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>BYRON.</h2>
+
+
+<p>It is one of the singular facts in the history of literature, that the
+most rootedly conservative country in Europe should have produced the
+poet of the Revolution. Nowhere is the antipathy to principles and ideas
+so profound, nor the addiction to moderate compromise so inveterate, nor
+the reluctance to advance away from the past so unconquerable, as in
+England; and nowhere in England is there so settled an indisposition to
+regard any thought or sentiment except in the light of an existing
+social order, nor so firmly passive a hostility to generous aspirations,
+as in the aristocracy. Yet it was precisely an English aristocrat who
+became the favourite poet of all the most high-minded conspirators and
+socialists of continental Europe for half a century; of the best of
+those, that is to say, who have borne the most unsparing testimony
+against the present ordering of society, and against the theological and
+moral conceptions which have guided and maintained it. The rank and file
+of the army has been equally inspired by the same fiery and rebellious
+strains against the order of God and the order of man.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> 'The day will
+come,' wrote Mazzini, thirty years ago, 'when Democracy will remember
+all that it owes to Byron. England, too, will, I hope, one day remember
+the mission&mdash;so entirely English yet hitherto overlooked by her&mdash;which
+Byron fulfilled on the Continent; the European r&ocirc;le given by him to
+English literature, and the appreciation and sympathy for England which
+he awakened amongst us. Before he came, all that was known of English
+literature was the French translation of Shakespeare, and the anathema
+hurled by Voltaire against the "drunken savage." It is since Byron that
+we Continentalists have learned to study Shakespeare and other English
+writers. From him dates the sympathy of all the true-hearted amongst us
+for this land of liberty, whose true vocation he so worthily represented
+among the oppressed. He led the genius of Britain on a pilgrimage
+throughout all Europe.'<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p>The day of recollection has not yet come. It is only in his own country
+that Byron's influence has been a comparatively superficial one, and its
+scope and gist dimly and imperfectly caught, because it is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> only in
+England that the partisans of order hope to mitigate or avoid the facts
+of the Revolution by pretending not to see them, while the friends of
+progress suppose that all the fruits of change shall inevitably fall, if
+only they keep the forces and processes and extent of the change
+rigorously private and undeclared. That intense practicalness which
+seems to have done so many great things for us, and yet at the same
+moment mysteriously to have robbed us of all, forbids us even to cast a
+glance at what is no more than an aspiration. Englishmen like to be able
+to answer about the Revolution as those ancients answered about the
+symbol of another Revolution, when they said that they knew not so much
+as whether there were a Holy Ghost or not. The same want of kindling
+power in the national intelligence which made of the English Reformation
+one of the most sluggish and tedious chapters in our history, has made
+the still mightier advance of the moderns from the social system and
+spiritual bases of the old state, in spite of our two national
+achievements of punishing a king with death and emancipating our slaves,
+just as unimpressive and semi-efficacious a performance in this country,
+as the more affrontingly hollow and halt-footed transactions of the
+sixteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>Just because it was wonderful that England should have produced Byron,
+it would have been wonderful if she had received any permanently deep
+impression from him, or preserved a lasting appreciation of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> work,
+or cheerfully and intelligently recognised his immense force. And
+accordingly we cannot help perceiving that generations are arising who
+know not Byron. This is not to say that he goes unread; but there is a
+vast gulf fixed between the author whom we read with pleasure and even
+delight, and that other to whom we turn at all moments for inspiration
+and encouragement, and whose words and ideas spring up incessantly and
+animatingly within us, unbidden, whether we turn to him or no.</p>
+
+<p>For no Englishman now does Byron hold this highest place; and this is
+not unnatural in any way, if we remember in what a different shape the
+Revolution has now by change of circumstance and occasion come to
+present itself to those who are most ardent in the search after new
+paths. An estimate of Byron would be in some sort a measure of the
+distance that we have travelled within the last half century in our
+appreciation of the conditions of social change. The modern rebel is at
+least half-acquiescence. He has developed a historic sense. The most
+hearty aversion to the prolonged reign of some of the old gods does not
+hinder him from seeing, that what are now frigid and unlovely blocks
+were full of vitality and light in days before the era of their
+petrifaction. There is much less eagerness of praise or blame, and much
+less faith in knife and cautery, less confidence that new and right
+growth will naturally and necessarily follow upon demolition.</p>
+
+<p>The Revolution has never had that long hold on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> the national imagination
+in England, either as an idol or a bugbear, which is essential to keep
+the poet who sings it in effective harmony with new generations of
+readers. More than this, the Byronic conception was as transitional and
+inadequate as the methods and ideas of the practical movers, who were to
+a man left stranded in every country in Europe, during the period of his
+poetic activity. A transitional and unstable movement of society
+inevitably fails to supply a propulsion powerful enough to make its
+poetic expression eternal. There is no better proof of the enormous
+force of Byron's genius than that it was able to produce so fine an
+expression of elements so intrinsically unfavourable to high poetry as
+doubt, denial, antagonism, and weariness. But this force was no
+guarantee for perpetuity of influence. Bare rebellion cannot endure, and
+no succession of generations can continue nourishing themselves on the
+poetry of complaint, and the idealisation of revolt. If, however, it is
+impossible that Byron should be all to us that he was to a former
+generation, and if we find no direct guidance in his muse, this is no
+reason why criticism should pass him over, nor why there may not be
+something peculiarly valuable in the noble freedom and genuine modernism
+of his poetic spirit, to an age that is apparently only forsaking the
+clerical idyll of one school, for the reactionary medi&aelig;valism or
+paganism, intrinsically meaningless and issueless, of another.</p>
+
+<p>More attention is now paid to the mysteries of Byron's life than to the
+merits of his work, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> criticism and morality are equally injured by
+the confusion between the worth of the verse he wrote, and the virtue or
+wickedness of the life he lived. The admirers of his poetry appear
+sensible of some obligation to be the champions of his conduct, while
+those who have diligently gathered together the details of an accurate
+knowledge of the unseemliness of his conduct, cannot bear to think that
+from this bramble men have been able to gather figs. The result of the
+confusion has been that grave men and women have applied themselves to
+investigate and judge Byron's private life, as if the exact manner of
+it, the more or less of his outrages upon decorum, the degree of the
+deadness of his sense of moral responsibility, were matter of minute and
+profound interest to all ages. As if all this had anything to do with
+criticism proper. It is right that we should know the life and manners
+of one whom we choose for a friend, or of one who asks us to entrust him
+with the control of public interests. In either of these two cases, we
+need a guarantee for present and future. Art knows nothing of
+guarantees. The work is before us, its own warranty. What is it to us
+whether Turner had coarse orgies with the trulls of Wapping? We can
+judge his art without knowing or thinking of the artist. And in the same
+way, what are the stories of Byron's libertinism to us? They may have
+biographical interest, but of critical interest hardly the least. If the
+name of the author of <i>Manfred</i>, <i>Cain</i>, <i>Childe Harold</i>, were already
+lost, as it may be in remote<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> times, the work abides, and its mark on
+European opinion. '<i>Je ne consid&egrave;re les gens apr&egrave;s leur mort</i>,' said
+Voltaire, '<i>que par leurs ouvrages; tout la reste est an&eacute;anti pour
+moi</i>.'</p>
+
+<p>There is a sense in which biographical detail gives light to criticism,
+but not the sense in which the prurient moralist uses or seeks it. The
+life of the poet may help to explain the growth and prominence of a
+characteristic sentiment or peculiar idea. Knowledge of this or that
+fact in his life may uncover the roots of something that strikes, or
+unravel something that perplexes us. Considering the relations between a
+man's character and circumstance, and what he produces, we can from this
+point of view hardly know too much as to the personality of a great
+writer. Only let us recollect that this personality manifests itself
+outwardly in two separate forms, in conduct, and in literary production,
+and that each of these manifestations is to be judged independently of
+the other. If one of them is wholly censurable, the other may still be
+the outcome of the better mind; and even from the purely biographical
+aspect, it is a plain injustice to insist on identifying a character
+with its worse expression only.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Poetry, and not only poetry, but every other channel of emotional
+expression and &aelig;sthetic culture, confessedly moves with the general
+march of the human mind, and art is only the transformation into ideal
+and imaginative shapes of a predominant system<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> and philosophy of life.
+Minor verse-writers may fairly be consigned, without disrespect, to the
+region of the literature of taste; and criticism of their work takes the
+shape of a discussion of stray graces, of new turns, of little
+variations of shade and colour, of their conformity to the accepted
+rules that constitute the technique of poetry. The loftier masters,
+though their technical power and originality, their beauty of form,
+strength of flight, music and variousness of rhythm, are all full of
+interest and instruction, yet, besides these precious gifts, come to us
+with the size and quality of great historic forces, for they represent
+the hope and energies, the dreams and the consummation, of the human
+intelligence in its most enormous movements. To appreciate one of these,
+we need to survey it on every side. For these we need synthetic
+criticism, which, after analysis has done its work, and disclosed to us
+the peculiar qualities of form, conception, and treatment, shall collect
+the products of this first process, construct for us the poet's mental
+figure in its integrity and just coherence, and then finally, as the sum
+of its work, shall trace the relations of the poet's ideas, either
+direct or indirect, through the central currents of thought, to the
+visible tendencies of an existing age.</p>
+
+<p>The greatest poets reflect beside all else the broad-bosomed haven of a
+perfect and positive faith, in which mankind has for some space found
+shelter, unsuspicious of the new and distant wayfarings that are ever in
+store. To this band of sacred bards few<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> are called, while perhaps not
+more than four high names would fill the list of the chosen: Dante, the
+poet of Catholicism; Shakespeare, of Feudalism; Milton, of
+Protestantism; Goethe, of that new faith which is as yet without any
+universally recognised label, but whose heaven is an ever-closer harmony
+between the consciousness of man and all the natural forces of the
+universe; whose liturgy is culture, and whose deity is a certain high
+composure of the human heart.</p>
+
+<p>The far-shining pre-eminence of Shakespeare, apart from the incomparable
+fertility and depth of his natural gifts, arises secondarily from the
+larger extent to which he transcended the special forming influences,
+and refreshed his fancy and widened his range of sympathy, by recourse
+to what was then the nearest possible approach to a historic or
+political method. To the poet, vision reveals a certain form of the
+truth, which the rest of men laboriously discover and prove by the
+tardier methods of meditation and science. Shakespeare did not walk in
+imagination with the great warriors, monarchs, churchmen, and rulers of
+history, nor conceive their conduct, ideas, schemes, and throw himself
+into their words and actions, without strengthening that original taste
+which must have first drawn him to historical subjects, and without
+deepening both his feeling for the great progression of human affairs,
+and his sympathy for those relative moods of surveying and dealing with
+them, which are not more positive, scientific, and political, than they
+may be made truly poetic.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Again, while in Dante the inspiring force was spiritual, and in Goethe
+it was intellectual, we may say that both in Shakespeare and Milton it
+was political and social. In other words, with these two, the drama of
+the one and the epic of the other were each of them connected with ideas
+of government and the other external movements of men in society, and
+with the play of the sentiments which spring from them. We assuredly do
+not mean that in either of them, least of all in Shakespeare, there is
+an absence of the spiritual element. This would be at once to thrust
+them down into a lower place; for the spiritual is of the very essence
+of poetry. But with the spiritual there mixes in our Englishmen a most
+abundant leaven of recognition of the impressions and impulses of the
+outer forms of life, as well as of active sympathy with the every-day
+debate of the world. They are neither of them inferior to the highest in
+sense of the wide and unutterable things of the spirit; yet with both of
+them, more than with other poets of the same rank, the man with whose
+soul and circumstance they have to deal is the &#960;&#959;&#953;&#964;&#953;&#954;&#8001;&#957; &#950;&#8033;&#959;&#957;,
+no high abstraction of the race, but the creature with concrete
+relations and a full objective life. In Shakespeare the dramatic form
+helps partly to make this more prominent, though the poet's spirit
+shines forth thus, independently of the mould which it imposes on
+itself. Of Milton we may say, too, that, in spite of the supernatural
+machinery of his greatest poem, it bears strongly impressed on it the
+political mark, and that in those<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> minor pieces, where he is avowedly in
+the political sphere, he still rises to the full height of his majestic
+harmony and noblest dignity.</p>
+
+<p>Byron was touched by the same fire. The contemporary and friend of the
+most truly spiritual of all English poets, Shelley, he was himself among
+the most essentially political. Or perhaps one will be better
+understood, describing his quality as a quality of poetical
+<i>worldliness</i>, in its enlarged and generous sense of energetic interest
+in real transactions, and a capacity of being moved and raised by them
+into those lofty moods of emotion which in more spiritual natures are
+only kindled by contemplation of the vast infinitudes that compass the
+human soul round about. That Shelley was immeasurably superior to Byron
+in all the rarer qualities of the specially poetic mind appears to us so
+unmistakably assured a fact, that difference of opinion upon it can only
+spring from a more fundamental difference of opinion as to what it is
+that constitutes this specially poetic quality. If more than anything
+else it consists in the power of transfiguring action, character, and
+thought, in the serene radiance of the purest imaginative intelligence,
+and the gift of expressing these transformed products in the finest
+articulate vibrations of emotional speech, then must we not confess that
+Byron has composed no piece which from this point may compare with
+<i>Prometheus</i> or the <i>Cenci</i>, any more than Rubens may take his place
+with Raphael? We feel that Shelley transports the spirit to the highest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>
+bound and limit of the intelligible; and that with him thought passes
+through one superadded and more rarefying process than the other poet is
+master of. If it be true, as has been written, that 'Poetry is the
+breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,' we may say that Shelley
+teaches us to apprehend that further something, the breath and finer
+spirit of poetry itself. Contrasting, for example, Shelley's <i>Ode to the
+West Wind</i>, with the famous and truly noble stanzas on the eternal sea
+which close the fourth canto of <i>Childe Harold</i>, who does not feel that
+there is in the first a volatile and unseizable element that is quite
+distinct from the imagination and force and high impressiveness, or from
+any indefinable product of all of these united, which form the glory and
+power of the second? We may ask in the same way whether <i>Manfred</i>, where
+the spiritual element is as predominant as it ever is in Byron, is worth
+half a page of <i>Prometheus</i>.</p>
+
+<p>To perceive and admit this is not to disparage Byron's achievements. To
+be most deeply penetrated with the differentiating quality of the poet
+is not, after all, to contain the whole of that admixture of varying and
+moderating elements which goes to the composition of the broadest and
+most effective work. Of these elements, Shelley, with all his rare gifts
+of spiritual imagination and winged melodiousness of verse, was markedly
+wanting in a keen and omnipresent feeling for the great course of human
+events. All nature stirred him, except the consummating crown of natural
+growth.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We do not mean anything so untrue as that Shelley was wanting either in
+deep humanity or in active benevolence, or that social injustice was a
+thing indifferent to him. We do not forget the energetic political
+propagandism of his youth in Ireland and elsewhere. Many a furious
+stanza remains to show how deeply and bitterly the spectacle of this
+injustice burnt into his soul. But these pieces are accidents. They do
+not belong to the immortal part of his work. An American original,
+unconsciously bringing the revolutionary mind to the climax of all
+utterances possible to it, has said that 'men are degraded when
+considered as the members of a political organisation.'<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> Shelley's
+position was on a yet more remote pinnacle than this. Of mankind he was
+barely conscious, in his loftiest and divinest flights. His muse seeks
+the vague translucent spaces where the care of man melts away in vision
+of the eternal forces, of which man may be but the fortuitous
+manifestation of an hour.</p>
+
+<p>Byron, on the other hand, is never moved by the strength of his passion
+or the depth of his contemplation quite away from the round earth and
+the civil animal who dwells upon it. Even his misanthropy is only an
+inverted form of social solicitude. His practical zeal for good and
+noble causes might teach us this. He never grudged either money or time
+or personal peril for the cause of Italian freedom, and his life was the
+measure and the cost of his interest in the liberty of Greece. Then
+again he was full not merely of wit,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> which is sometimes only an affair
+of the tongue, but of humour also, which goes much deeper; and it is of
+the essence of the humoristic nature, that whether sunny or saturnine,
+it binds the thoughts of him who possesses it to the wide medley of
+expressly human things. Byron did not misknow himself, nor misapprehend
+the most marked turn of his own character when he wrote the lines&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">I love not Man the less, but Nature more,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">From these our interviews, in which I steal</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">From all I may be, or have been before,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">To mingle with the universe and feel</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>It was this which made Byron a social force, a far greater force than
+Shelley either has been or can be. Men read in each page that he was one
+of like passions with themselves; that he had their own feet of clay, if
+he had other members of brass and gold and fine silver which they had
+none of; and that vehement sensibility, tenacious energy of imagination,
+a bounding swell of poetic fancy, had not obliterated, but had rather
+quickened, the sense of the highest kind of man of the world, which did
+not decay but waxed stronger in him with years. His openness to beauty
+and care for it were always inferior in keenness and in hold upon him to
+his sense of human interest, and the superiority in certain respects of
+<i>Marino Faliero</i>, for example, where he handles a social theme in a
+worthy spirit, over <i>Manfred</i>, where he seeks a something tumultuously
+beautiful, is due to that subordi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>nation in his mind of &aelig;sthetic to
+social intention, which is one of the most strongly distinctive marks of
+the truly modern spirit. The admirable wit both of his letters, and of
+pieces like the <i>Vision of Judgment</i> and <i>Don Juan</i>, where wit reaches
+as high as any English writer has ever carried it, shows in another way
+the same vividness and reality of attraction which every side of human
+affairs possessed for this glowing and incessantly animated spirit.</p>
+
+<p>In spite of a good many surface affectations, which may have cheated the
+lighter heads, but which may now be easily seen through, and counted off
+for as much as they are worth, Byron possessed a bottom of plain
+sincerity and rational sobriety which kept him substantially straight,
+real, and human, and made him the genuine exponent of that immense
+social movement which we sum up as the Revolution. If Keats's whole soul
+was absorbed by sensuous impressions of the outer world, and his art was
+the splendid and exquisite reproduction of these; if Shelley on the
+other hand distilled from the fine impressions of the senses by process
+of inmost meditation some thrice ethereal essence, 'the viewless spirit
+of a lovely sound;' we may say of Byron that, even in the moods when the
+mightiness and wonder of nature had most effectually possessed
+themselves of his imagination, his mind never moved for very long on
+these remote heights, apart from the busy world of men, but returned
+again like the fabled dove from the desolate void of waters to the ark
+of mortal stress<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> and human passion. Nature, in her most dazzling
+aspects or stupendous parts, is but the background and theatre of the
+tragedy of man.</p>
+
+<p>We may find a secondary proof of this in the fewness of those fine
+descriptive strokes and subtle indirect touches of colour or sound which
+arise with incessant spontaneity, where a mastering passion for nature
+steeps the mind in vigilant, accurate, yet half-unconscious,
+observation. It is amazing through how long a catalogue of natural
+objects Byron sometimes takes us, without affixing to one of them any
+but the most conventional term, or a single epithet which might show
+that in passing through his mind it had yielded to him a beauty or a
+savour that had been kept a secret from the common troop. Byron is
+certainly not wanting in commanding image, as when Manfred likens the
+lines of foaming light flung along from the Alpine cataract to 'the pale
+courser's tail, the giant steed, to be bestrode by Death.' But
+imaginative power of this kind is not the same thing as that
+susceptibility to the minutest properties and unseen qualities of
+natural objects which reveals itself in chance epithet of telling
+felicity, or phrase that opens to us hidden lights. Our generation is
+more likely to think too much than too little of this; for its favourite
+poet, however narrow in subject and feeble in moral treatment, is
+without any peer in the exquisitely original, varied, and imaginative
+art of his landscape touches.</p>
+
+<p>This treatment of nature was in exact harmony with the method of
+revolutionary thought, which,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> from the time of Rousseau downwards, had
+appealed in its profound weariness of an existing social state to the
+solitude and seeming freedom of mountain and forest and ocean, as though
+the only cure for the woes of civilisation lay in annihilating it. This
+was an appeal less to nature than from man, just as we have said that
+Byron's was, and hence it was distinct from the single-eyed appreciation
+and love of nature for her own sake, for her beauty and terror and
+unnumbered moods, which has made of her the mistress and the consoler of
+many men in these times. In the days of old faith while the catholic
+gods sat yet firm upon their thrones, the loveliness of the universe
+shone to blind eyes. Saint Bernard in the twelfth century could ride for
+a whole day along the shore of the Lake of Geneva, and yet when in the
+evening his comrades spoke some word about the lake, he inquired: 'What
+lake?'<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> It was not mere difference of temperament that made the
+preacher of one age pass by in this marvellous unconsciousness, and the
+singer of another burst forth into that tender invocation of 'clear
+placid Leman,' whose 'contrasted lake with the wild world he dwelt in'
+moved him to the very depths. To Saint Bernard the world was as wild and
+confused as it was to Byron; but then he had gods many and saints many,
+and a holy church in this world, and a kingdom of heaven awaiting
+resplendent in the world to come. All this filled his soul with a
+settled certitude, too absorbing to leave<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> any space for other than
+religious emotion. The seven centuries that flowed between the spiritual
+mind of Europe when Saint Bernard was its spokesman, and the spiritual
+mind of which Byron was the interpreter, had gradually dissolved these
+certitudes, and the faint lines of new belief and a more durable order
+were still invisible. The assurance of science was not yet rooted, nor
+had men as yet learned to turn back to the history of their own kind, to
+the long chronicle of its manifold experiences, for an adequate system
+of life and an inspiring social faith. So they fled in spirit or in
+flesh into unfamiliar scenes, and vanished from society, because society
+was not sufficiently social.</p>
+
+<p>The feeling was abnormal, and the method was fundamentally artificial. A
+sentimentalism arose, which is in art what the metaphysical method is in
+philosophy. Yet a literature was born of it, whose freshness, force,
+elevation, and, above all, a self-assertion and peculiar aspiring
+freedom that have never been surpassed, still exert an irresistible
+attraction, even over minds that are furthest removed from the moral
+storm and disorder, and the confused intellectual convictions, of that
+extraordinary group. Perhaps the fact that their active force is spent,
+and that men find in them now only a charm and no longer a gospel,
+explains the difference between the admiration which some of us permit
+ourselves to feel for them, and the impatient dislike which they stirred
+in our fathers. Then they were a danger, because they were a force,
+misleading amiable and high-minded<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> people into blind paths. Now this is
+at an end, and, apart from their historic interest, the permanent
+elements of beauty draw us to them with a delight that does not
+diminish, as we recede further and further from the impotence of the
+aspirations which thus married themselves to lofty and stirring words.
+To say nothing of Rousseau, the father and founder of the
+nature-worship, which is the nearest approach to a positive side that
+the Revolution has ever possessed, how much fine colour and freshness of
+feeling there is in <i>R&eacute;n&eacute;</i>, what a sense of air and space in <i>Paul and
+Virginia</i>, and what must they have been to a generation that had just
+emerged from the close parlours of Richardson, the best of the
+sentimentalists of the pre-revolutionary type? May we not say, too, in
+parenthesis, that the man is the votary, not of wisdom, but of a bald
+and shapeless asceticism, who is so excessively penetrated with the
+reality, the duties, the claims, and the constant hazards of
+civilisation, as to find in himself no chord responsive to that sombre
+pensiveness into which Obermann's unfathomable melancholy and impotence
+of will deepened, as he meditated on the mean shadows which men are
+content to chase for happiness, and on all the pigmy progeny of giant
+effort? '<i>C'est peu de chose</i>,' says Obermann, '<i>de n'&ecirc;tre point comme
+le vulgaire des hommes; mais c'est avoir fait un pas vers la sagesse,
+que de n'&ecirc;tre plus comme le vulgaire des sages</i>.' This penetrating
+remark hits the difference between De Senancourt himself and most of the
+school. He is absolutely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> free from the vulgarity of wisdom, and
+breathes the air of higher peaks, taking us through mysterious and
+fragrant pine-woods, where more than he may find meditative repose amid
+the heat and stress of that practical day, of which he and his school
+can never bear the burden.</p>
+
+<p>In that <i>vulgaire des sages</i>, of which De Senancourt had none, Byron
+abounded. His work is in much the glorification of revolutionary
+commonplace. Melodramatic individualism reaches its climax in that long
+series of Laras, Conrads, Manfreds, Harolds, who present the fatal
+trilogy, in which crime is middle term between debauch and satiety, that
+forms the natural development of an anti-social doctrine in a
+full-blooded temperament. It was this temperament which, blending with
+his gifts of intellect, gave Byron the amazing copiousness and force
+that makes him the dazzling master of revolutionary emotion, because it
+fills his work with such variety of figures, such free change of
+incident, such diversity of passion, such a constant movement and
+agitation. It was this never-ceasing stir, coupled with a striking
+concreteness and an unfailing directness, which rather than any markedly
+correct or wide intellectual apprehension of things, made him so much
+more than any one else an effective interpreter of the moral tumult of
+the epoch. If we look for psychological delicacy, for subtle moral
+traits, for opening glimpses into unobserved depths of character,
+behold, none of these things are there. These were no gifts of his, any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>
+more than the divine gift of music was his. There are some writers whose
+words but half express the indefinable thoughts that inspired them, and
+to whom we have to surrender our whole minds with a peculiar loyalty and
+fulness, independent of the letter and printed phrase, if we would
+liquefy the frozen speech and recover some portion of its imprisoned
+essence. This is seldom a necessity with Byron. His words tell us all
+that he means to say, and do not merely hint nor suggest. The matter
+with which he deals is gigantic, and he paints with violent colours and
+sweeping pencil.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Yet he is free from that declamation with which some of the French poets
+of the same age, and representing a portion of the same movement, blow
+out their cheeks. An angel of reasonableness seems to watch over him,
+even when he comes most dangerously near to an extravagance. He is
+equally free from a strained antithesis, which would have been
+inconsistent, not only with the breadth of effect required by Byron's
+art, but also with the peculiarly direct and forcible quality of his
+genius. In the preface to <i>Marino Faliero</i>, a composition that abounds
+in noble passages, and rests on a fine and original conception of
+character, he mentions his 'desire of preserving a nearer approach to
+unity, than the irregularity which is the reproach of the English
+theatre.' And this sound view of the importance of form, and of the
+barbarism to which our English<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> genius is prone, from <i>Goody Blake and
+Harry Gill</i> up to the clownish savagery which occasionally defaces even
+plays attributed to Shakespeare, is collateral proof of the sanity and
+balance which marked the foundations of his character, and which at no
+point of his work ever entirely failed him. Byron's admiration for Pope
+was no mere eccentricity.</p>
+
+<p>We may value this self-control the more, by remembering the nature of
+his subjects. We look out upon a wild revolutionary welter, of vehement
+activity without a purpose, boundless discontent without a hope, futile
+interrogation of nature in questions for which nature can have no
+answer, unbridled passion, despairing satiety, impotence. It is too
+easy, as the history of English opinion about Byron's poetic merit
+abundantly proves, to underrate the genius which mastered so tremendous
+a conflict, and rendered that amazing scene with the flow and energy and
+mingled tempest and forlorn calm which belonged to the original reality.
+The essential futility of the many moods which went to make up all this,
+ought not to blind us to the enormous power that was needed for the
+reproduction of a turbulent and not quite aimless chaos of the soul, in
+which man seemed to be divorced alike from his brother-men in the
+present, and from all the long succession and endeavour of men in the
+past. It was no small feat to rise to a height that should command so
+much, and to exhibit with all the force of life a world that had broken
+loose from its moorings.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is idle to vituperate this anarchy, either from the point of view of
+a sour and precise Puritanism, or the more elevated point of a rational
+and large faith in progress. Wise men are like Burke, who did not know
+how to draw an indictment against a whole nation. They do not know how
+to think nothing but ill of a whole generation, that lifted up its voice
+in heartfelt complaint and wailing against the conceptions, forms, and
+rulers, human and divine, of a society that the inward faith had
+abandoned, but which clung to every outward ordinance; which only
+remembered that man had property, and forgot that he had a spirit. This
+is the complaint that rings through Byron's verse. It was this complaint
+that lay deep at the bottom of the Revolution, and took form in every
+possible kind of protest, from a dishevelled neckcloth up to a
+profession of atheism. Byron elaborated the common emotion, as the
+earliest modern poets elaborated the common speech. He gave it
+inflections, and distinguished its moods, and threw over it an air of
+system and coherency, and a certain goodly and far-reaching
+sonorousness. This is the usual function of the spiritual leader, who
+leaves in bulk no more in the minds of those whom he attracts than he
+found, but he leaves it articulate with many sounds, and vivid with the
+consciousness of a multitude of defined impressions.</p>
+
+<p>That the whole movement, in spite of its energy, was crude,
+unscientific, virtually abortive, is most true. That it was presided
+over by a false conception<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> of nature as a benign and purifying power,
+while she is in truth a stern force to be tamed and mastered, if society
+is to hold together, cannot be denied of the revolutionary movement
+then, any more than it can be denied of its sequels now. Nor need we
+overlook its fundamental error of tracing half the misfortunes and woes
+of the race to that social union, to which we are really indebted for
+all the happiness we know, including even this dignifying sensibility of
+the woes of the race; and the other half to a fictitious entity styled
+destiny, placed among the nethermost gods, which would be more rightly
+regarded as the infinitely modifiable influence exercised by one
+generation of ourselves upon those that follow.</p>
+
+<p>Every one of these faults of thought is justly chargeable to Byron. They
+were deeply inherent in the Revolution. They coloured thoughts about
+government, about laws, about morals. They effected a transformation of
+religion, but, resting on no basis of philosophical acceptance of
+history, the transformation was only temporary. They spread a fantastic
+passion of which Byron was himself an example and a victim, for
+extraordinary outbreaks of a peculiar kind of material activity, that
+met the exigences of an imperious will, while it had not the irksomeness
+of the self-control which would have exercised the will to more
+permanent profit. They destroyed faith in order, natural or social,
+actual or potential, and substituted for it an enthusiastic assertion of
+the claims of the individual to make his pas<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>sions, aspirations, and
+convictions, a final and decisive law.</p>
+
+<p>Such was the moral state which Byron had to render and interpret. His
+relation to it was a relation of exact sympathy. He felt the force of
+each of the many currents that united in one destructive stream, wildly
+overflowing the fixed banks, and then, when it had overflowed, often, it
+must be confessed, stagnating in lazy brackish pools, while new
+tributaries began to flow in together from far other quarters. The list
+of his poems is the catalogue of the elements of the revolutionary
+spirit. For of what manner is this spirit? Is it not a masterful and
+impatient yearning after many good things, unsubdued and uninformed
+either by a just knowledge of the time, and the means which are needed
+to bring to men the fruits of their hope, or by a fit appreciation of
+orderly and tranquil activity for the common service, as the normal type
+of the individual life? And this is precisely the temper and the spirit
+of Byron. Nowhere else do we see drawn in such traits that colossal
+figure, which has haunted Europe these fourscore years and more, with
+its new-born passion, its half-controlled will, its constant cry for a
+multitude of unknown blessings under the single name of Freedom, the one
+known and unadulterated word of blessing. If only Truth, which alone of
+words is essentially divine and sacrosanct, had been the chief talisman
+of the Revolution, the movement would have been very different from that
+which we know. But to claim this or that in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> the name of truth, would
+have been to borrow the language which priests and presbyters, Dominic
+and Calvin, had covered thick with hateful associations. Freedom, after
+all, was the next best thing, for it is an indispensable condition of
+the best of all; but it could not lead men until the spirit of truth,
+which means science in the intellectual order, and justice in the social
+order, had joined company with it.</p>
+
+<p>So there was violent action in politics, and violent and excessive
+stimulation in literature, the positive effects of the force moved in
+each sphere being deplorably small in proportion to the intense moral
+energy which gave the impulse. In literature the straining for mental
+liberty was the more futile of the two, because it expressed the ardent
+and hopeless longing of the individual for a life which we may perhaps
+best call life unconditioned. And this unconditioned life, which the
+Byronic hero vainly seeks, and not finding, he fills the world with
+stormy complaint, is least of all likely to offer itself in any
+approximate form to men penetrated with gross and egotistical passions
+to their inmost core. The Byronic hero went to clasp repose in a frenzy.
+All crimson and aflame with passion, he groaned for evening stillness.
+He insisted on being free, in the corroding fetters of resentment and
+scorn for men. Conrad sought balm for disappointment of spirit in
+vehement activity of body. Manfred represents the confusion common to
+the type, between thirst for the highest knowledge and proud violence of
+unbridled will.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> Harold is held in a middle way of poetic melancholy,
+equally far from a speechless despair and from gay and reckless licence,
+by contemplation of the loveliness of external nature, and the great
+exploits and perishing monuments of man in the past; but he, equally
+with the others, embodies the paradoxical hope that angry isolation and
+fretful estrangement from mankind are equivalent to emancipation from
+their pettiness, instead of being its very climax and demonstration. As
+if freedom of soul could exist without orderly relations of intelligence
+and partial acceptance between a man and the sum of surrounding
+circumstances. That universal protest which rings through Byron's work
+with a plangent resonance, very different from the whimperings of punier
+men, is a proof that so far from being free, one's whole being is
+invaded and laid waste. It is no ignoble mood, and it was a most
+inevitable product of the mental and social conditions of Western Europe
+at the close of the eighteenth century. Everlasting protest, impetuous
+energy of will, melancholy and despondent reaction;&mdash;this is the
+revolutionary course. Cain and Conrad; then Manfred and Lara and Harold.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>In studying that portion of the European movement which burst forth into
+flame in France between the fall of the Bastille and those fatal days of
+Vend&eacute;miaire, Fructidor, Flor&eacute;al, Brumaire, in which the explosion came
+convulsively to its end, we seem to see a micro<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>cosm of the Byronic
+epos. The succession of moods is identical. Overthrow, rage, intense
+material energy, crime, profound melancholy, half-cynical dejection. The
+Revolution was the battle of Will against the social forces of a dozen
+centuries. Men thought that they had only to will the freedom and
+happiness of a world, and all nature and society would be plastic before
+their daring, as clay in the hands of the potter. They could only
+conceive of failure as another expression for inadequate will. Is not
+this one of the notes of Byron's <i>Ode on the Fall of Bonaparte</i>?
+'<i>L'audace, l'audace, et toujours l'audace.</i>' If Danton could have read
+Byron, he would have felt as one in front of a magician's glass. Every
+passion and fit, from the bloody days of September down to the gloomy
+walks by the banks of the Aube, and the prison-cry that 'it were better
+to be a poor fisherman than to meddle with the governing of men,' would
+have found itself there. It is true that in Byron we miss the firmness
+of noble and generous hope. This makes him a more veritable embodiment
+of the Revolution than such a precursor as Rousseau, in whom were all
+the unclouded anticipations of a dawn, that opened to an obscured noon
+and a tempestuous night. Yet one knows not, in truth, how much of that
+violence of will and restless activity and resolute force was due less
+to confidence, than to the urgent necessity which every one of us has
+felt, at some season and under some influence, of filling up spiritual
+vacuity by energetic material activity. Was this the secret of the
+mysterious charm<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> that scenes of violent strife and bloodshed always had
+for Byron's imagination, as it was perhaps the secret of the black
+transformation of the social faith of '89 into the worship of the
+Conqueror of '99? Nowhere does Byron's genius show so much of its own
+incomparable fire and energy, nor move with such sympathetic firmness
+and amplitude of pinion, as in <i>Lara</i>, the <i>Corsair</i>, <i>Harold</i>, and
+other poems, where 'Red Battle stamps his foot,' and where</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">The giant on the mountain stands,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">His blood-red tresses deep'ning in the sun,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">With death-shot glowing in his fiery hands,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And eye that scorcheth all it glows upon.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Yet other and intrinsically nobler passages, where this splendid
+imaginative energy of the sensations is replaced by the calmer glow of
+social meditation, prove that Byron was penetrated with the
+distinctively modern scorn and aversion for the military spirit, and the
+distinctively modern conviction of its being the most deadly of
+anachronisms. Such indirect satisfaction to the physical energies was to
+him, as their direct satisfaction was to the disillusioned France of
+'99, the relief demanded by a powerful nature for the impotence of hope
+and vision.</p>
+
+<p>However this may have been, it may be confessed that Byron presents less
+of the flame of his revolutionary prototypes, and too much of the ashes.
+He came at the end of the experiment. But it is only a question of
+proportion. The ashes belong as much and as necessarily to the methods
+of the Revolution<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> in that phase, as do the blaze, that first told men
+of possible light and warmth, and the fire, which yet smoulders with
+abundant life underneath the gray cinders. And we have to remember that
+Byron came in the midst of a reaction; a reaction of triumph for the
+partisans of darkness and obstruction, who were assured that the
+exploded fragments of the old order would speedily grow together again,
+and a reaction of despondency for those who had filled themselves with
+illimitable and peremptory hopes. Silly Byronical votaries, who only
+half understood their idol, and loved him for a gloom that in their own
+case was nothing but a graceful veil for selfishness and mental
+indolence, saw and felt only the melancholy conclusion, and had not
+travelled a yard in the burning path that led to it. They hugged
+Conrad's haughty misery, but they would have trembled at the thought of
+Conrad's perilous expedition. They were proud despondent Lar&aelig;s after
+their manner, 'lords of themselves, that heritage of woe,' but the
+heritage would have been still more unbearable, if it had involved
+Lara's bodily danger.</p>
+
+<p>This shallowness has no part in Byron himself. His weariness was a
+genuine outcome of the influence of the time upon a character consumed
+by passion. His lot was cast among spent forces, and, while it is no
+hyperbole to say that he was himself the most enormous force of his
+time, he was only half conscious of this, if indeed he did not always
+inwardly shrink from crediting his own power and strength, as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> so many
+strong men habitually do, in spite of noisy and perpetual
+self-assertion. Conceit and presumption have not been any more fatal to
+the world, than the waste which comes of great men failing in their
+hearts to recognise how great they are. Many a man whose affectations
+and assumptions are a proverb, has lost the magnificent virtue of
+simplicity, for no other reason than that he needed courage to take his
+own measure, and so finally confirm to himself the reality of his
+pretensions. With Byron, as with some of his prototypes among the men of
+action in France and elsewhere, theatrical ostentation, excessive
+self-consciousness, extravagant claims, cannot hide from us that their
+power was secretly drained by an ever-present distrust of their own
+aims, their own methods, even of the very results that they seem to have
+achieved.</p>
+
+<p>This diffidence was an inseparable consequence of the vast predominance
+of exalted passion over reflection, which is one of the revolutionary
+marks. Byron was fundamentally and substantially, as has been already
+said, one of the most rational of men. Hence when the passionate fit
+grew cold, as it always does in temperaments so mixed, he wanted for
+perfect strength a justification in thought. There are men whose being
+is so universally possessed by phantasies, that they never feel this
+necessity of reconciling the visions of excited emotion with the ideas
+of ordered reason. Byron was more vigorously constituted, and his
+susceptibility to the necessity of this reconciliation<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> combined with
+his inability to achieve it, to produce that cynicism which the simple
+charity of vulgar opinion attributes to the possession of him by unclean
+devils. It was his refuge, as it sometimes is with smaller men, from the
+disquieting confusion which was caused by the disproportion between his
+visions and aspirations, and his intellectual means for satisfying
+himself seriously as to their true relations and substantive value. Only
+the man arrives at practical strength who is convinced, whether rightly
+or wrongly, that he knows all about his own ideas that needs to be
+known. Byron never did thus know himself, either morally or
+intellectually. The higher part of him was consciously dragged down by
+the degrading reminiscence of the brutishness of his youth and its
+connections and associations; they hung like miasma over his spirit. He
+could not rise to that sublimest height of moral fervour, when a man
+intrepidly chases from his memory past evil done, suppresses the
+recollection of old corruptions, declares that he no longer belongs to
+them nor they to him, and is not frightened by the past from a firm and
+lofty respect for present dignity and worth. It is a good thing thus to
+overthrow the tyranny of the memory, and to cast out the body of our
+dead selves. That Byron never attained this good, though he was not
+unlikely to have done so if he had lived longer, does not prove that he
+was too gross to feel its need, but it explains a moral weakness which
+has left a strange and touching mark on some of his later works.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>So in the intellectual order, he knew too much in one sense, and in
+another too little. The strong man is not conscious of gaps and
+cataclysms in the structure of his belief, or else he would in so far
+instantly cease to be strong. One living, as Byron emphatically did, in
+the truly modern atmosphere, was bound by all the conditions of the
+atmosphere to have mastered what we may call the natural history of his
+own ideas and convictions; to know something of their position towards
+fact and outer circumstance and possibility; above all to have some
+trusty standard for testing their value, and assuring himself that they
+do really cover the field which he takes them to cover. People with a
+faith and people living in frenzy are equally under this law; but they
+take the completeness and coherency of their doctrine for granted. Byron
+was not the prey of habitual frenzy, and he was without a faith. That is
+to say, he had no firm basis for his conceptions, and he was aware that
+he had none. The same unrest which drove men of that epoch to Nature,
+haunted them to the end, because they had no systematic conception of
+her working and of human relations with her. In a word, there was no
+science. Byron was a warm admirer of the genius and art of Goethe, yet
+he never found out the central secret of Goethe's greatness, his
+luminous and coherent positivity. This is the crowning glory of the
+modern spirit, and it was the lack of this which went so far to
+neutralise Byron's hold of the other chief characteristics of that
+spirit, its freedom and spaciousness, its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> humaneness and wide
+sociality, its versatility and many-sidedness and passionate feeling for
+the great natural forces.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>This positivity is the cardinal condition of strength for times when
+theology lies in decay, and the abstractions which gradually replaced
+the older gods have in their turn ceased to satisfy the intelligence and
+mould the will. All competent persons agree that it is the first
+condition of the attainment of scientific truth. Nobody denies that men
+of action find in it the first law of successful achievement in the
+material order. Its varied but always superlative power in the region of
+&aelig;sthetics is only an object of recent recognition, though great work
+enough has been done in past ages by men whose recognition was informal
+and inexpress. It is plain that, in the different classes of &aelig;sthetic
+manifestation, there will be differences in objective shape and colour,
+corresponding to the varied limits and conditions of the matter with
+which the special art has to deal; but the critic may expect to find in
+all a profound unity of subjective impression, and that, the impression
+of a self-sustaining order and a self-sufficing harmony among all those
+faculties and parts and energies of universal life, which come within
+the idealising range of art. In other words, the characteristically
+modern inspiration is the inspiration of law. The regulated play of
+forces shows itself as fit to stir those profound emotional impulses
+which wake the artistic soul, as ever did the gracious or terrible<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> gods
+of antique or middle times. There are glories in Turner's idealisation
+of the energies of matter, which are at least as nobly imaginative and
+elevated, in spite of the conspicuous absence of the human element in
+them, as the highest products of the artists who believed that their
+work was for the service and honour of a deity.</p>
+
+<p>It is as mistaken to suppose that this conviction of the supremacy of a
+cold and self-sustained order in the universe is fatal to emotional
+expansion, as it would be to suppose it fatal to intellectual curiosity.
+Experience has shown in the scientific sphere, that the gradual
+withdrawal of natural operations from the grasp of the imaginary
+volitions of imaginary beings has not tamed, but greatly stimulated and
+fertilised scientific curiosity as to the conditions of these
+operations. Why should it be otherwise in the &aelig;sthetic sphere? Why
+should all that part of our mental composition which responds to the
+beautiful and imaginative expression of real truths, be at once inflamed
+and satisfied by the thought that our whole lives, and all the movements
+of the universe, are the objects of the inexplicable caprice of Makers
+who are also Destroyers, and yet grow cold, apathetic, and unproductive,
+in the shadow of the belief that we can only know ourselves as part of
+the stupendous and inexorable succession of phenomenal conditions,
+moving according to laws that may be formulated positively, but not
+interpreted morally, to new destinies that are eternally unfathomable?
+Why should this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> conception of a coherent order, free from the arbitrary
+and presumptuous stamp of certain final causes, be less favourable,
+either to the ethical or the &aelig;sthetic side of human nature, than the
+older conception of the regulation of the course of the great series by
+a multitude of intrinsically meaningless and purposeless volitions? The
+alertness of our sensations for all sources of outer beauty remains
+unimpaired. The old and lovely attitude of devout service does not pass
+away to leave vacancy, but is transformed into a yet more devout
+obligation and service towards creatures that have only their own
+fellowship and mutual ministry to lean upon; and if we miss something of
+the ancient solace of special and personal protection, the loss is not
+unworthily made good by the growth of an imperial sense of participation
+in the common movement and equal destination of eternal forces.</p>
+
+<p>To have a mind penetrated with this spiritual persuasion, is to be in
+full possession of the highest strength that man can attain. It springs
+from a scientific and rounded interpretation of the facts of life, and
+is in a harmony, which freshly found truths only make more ample and
+elaborate, with all the conclusions of the intellect in every order. The
+active energies are not paralysed by the possibilities of enfeebling
+doubt, nor the reason drawn down and stultified by apprehension lest its
+methods should discredit a document, or its inferences clash with a
+dogma, or its light flash unseasonably on a mystery. There is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> none of
+the baleful distortion of hate, because evil and wrong-doing and
+darkness are acknowledged to be effects of causes, sums of conditions,
+terms in a series; they are to be brought to their end, or weakened and
+narrowed, by right action and endeavour, and this endeavour does not
+stagnate in antipathy, but concentrates itself in transfixing a cause.
+In no other condition of the spirit than this, in which firm
+acquiescence mingles with valorous effort, can a man be so sure of
+raising a calm gaze and an enduring brow to the cruelty of circumstance.
+The last appalling stroke of annihilation itself is measured with purest
+fortitude by one, whose religious contemplation dwells most habitually
+upon the sovereignty of obdurate laws in the vast revolving circle of
+physical forces, on the one hand, and, on the other, upon that moral
+order which the vision and pity of good men for their fellows, guiding
+the spontaneous energy of all men in strife with circumstance, have
+raised into a structure sublimer and more amazing than all the majesty
+of outer nature.</p>
+
+<p>In Byron's time the pretensions of the two possible answers to the great
+and eternally open questions of God, Immortality, and the like, were
+independent of that powerful host of inferences and analogies which the
+advance of physical discovery, and the establishment of a historical
+order, have since then brought into men's minds. The direct aggressions
+of old are for the most part abandoned, because it is felt that no
+fiercest polemical cannonading can drive away the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> impalpable darkness
+of error, but only the slow and silent presence of the dawning truth.
+<i>Cain</i> remains, a stern and lofty statement of the case against that
+theological tradition which so outrages, where it has not already too
+deeply depraved, the conscience of civilised man. Yet every one who is
+competent to judge, must feel how infinitely more free the mind of the
+poet would have been, if besides this just and holy rage, most laudable
+in its kind, his intellectual equipment had been ample enough and
+precise enough to have taught him, that all the conceptions that races
+of men have ever held, either about themselves or their deities, have
+had a source in the permanently useful instincts of human nature, are
+capable of explanation, and of a historical justification; that is to
+say, of the kind of justification which is, in itself and of its own
+force, the most instant destruction to what has grown to be an
+anachronism.</p>
+
+<p>Byron's curiously marked predilection for dramatic composition, not
+merely for dramatic poems, as <i>Manfred</i> or <i>Cain</i>, but for genuine
+plays, as <i>Marino Faliero</i>, <i>Werner</i>, the <i>Two Foscari</i>, was the only
+sign of his approach to the really positive spirit. Dramatic art, in its
+purest modern conception, is genuinely positive; that is, it is the
+presentation of action, character, and motive in a self-sufficing and
+self-evolving order. There are no final causes, and the first moving
+elements are taken for granted to begin with. The dramatist creates, but
+it is the climax of his work to appear to stand absolutely apart and
+unseen, while<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> the play unfolds itself to the spectator, just as the
+greater drama of physical phenomena unfolds itself to the scientific
+observer, or as the order of recorded history extends in natural process
+under the eye of the political philosopher. Partly, no doubt, the
+attraction which dramatic form had for Byron is to be explained by that
+revolutionary thirst for action, of which we have already spoken; but
+partly also it may well have been due to Byron's rudimentary and
+unsuspected affinity with the more constructive and scientific side of
+the modern spirit.</p>
+
+<p>His idea of Nature, of which something has been already said, pointed in
+the same direction; for, although he made an abstraction and a goddess
+of her, and was in so far out of the right modern way of thinking about
+these outer forces, it is to be remembered, that, while this dominant
+conception of Nature as introduced by Rousseau and others into politics
+was most mischievous and destructive, its place and worth in poetry are
+very different; because here in the region of the imagination it had the
+effect, without any pernicious practical consequences, of giving shape
+and proportion to that great idea of <i>ensemble</i> throughout the visible
+universe, which may be called the beginning and fountain of right
+knowledge. The conception of the relationship of the different parts and
+members of the vast cosmos was not accessible to Byron, as it is to a
+later generation, but his constant appeal in season and out of season to
+all the life and movement that surrounds man, implied and promoted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> the
+widest extension of consciousness of the wholeness and community of
+natural processes.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>There was one very manifest evil consequence of the hold which this idea
+in its cruder shape, gained over Byron and his admirers. The vastness of
+the material universe, as they conceived and half adored it, entirely
+overshadowed the principle of moral duty and social obligation. The
+domestic sentiment, for example, almost disappears in those works which
+made Byron most popular, or else it only appears, to be banished with
+reproach. This is quite in accordance with the revolutionary spirit,
+which was in one of its most fundamental aspects a revolt on behalf of
+unconditioned individual rights, and against the family. If we accept
+what seems to be the fatal law of progress, that excess on one side is
+only moderated by a nearly corresponding excess of an opposite kind, the
+Byronic dissolution of domestic feeling was not entirely without
+justification. There is probably no uglier growth of time than that mean
+and poor form of domesticity, which has always been too apt to fascinate
+the English imagination, ever since the last great effort of the
+Rebellion, and which rose to the climax of its popularity when George
+III. won all hearts by living like a farmer. Instead of the fierce light
+beating about a throne, it played lambently upon a sty. And the nation
+who admired, imitated. When the Regent came, and with him that coarse
+profligacy which has alternated with cloudy insipidity in the annals of
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> line, the honest part of the world, out of antipathy to the son,
+was driven even further into domestic sentimentality of a greasy kind,
+than it had gone from affection for the sire.</p>
+
+<p>Byron helped to clear the air of this. His fire, his lofty spaciousness
+of outlook, his spirited interest in great national causes, his romance,
+and the passion both of his animosity and his sympathy, acted for a
+while like an electric current, and every one within his influence
+became ashamed to barter the large heritage of manhood, with its many
+realms and illimitable interests, for the sordid ease of the hearth and
+the good word of the unworthy. He fills men with thoughts that shake
+down the unlovely temple of comfort. This was good, to force whoever was
+not already too far sunk into the mire, high up to the larger
+atmosphere, whence they could see how minute an atom is man, how
+infinite and blind and pitiless the might that encompasses his little
+life. Many feeble spirits ran back homewards from the horrid solitudes
+and abysses of <i>Manfred</i>, and the moral terrors of <i>Cain</i>, and even the
+despair of <i>Harold</i>, and, burying themselves in warm domestic places,
+were comforted by the familiar restoratives and appliances. Firmer souls
+were not only exhilarated, but intoxicated by the potent and
+unaccustomed air. They went too far. They made war on the family, and
+the idea of it. Everything human was mischievously dwarfed, and the
+difference between right and wrong, between gratification of appetite
+and its control for virtue's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> sake, between the acceptance and the
+evasion of clear obligation, all became invisible or of no account in
+the new light. That constancy and permanence, of which the family is the
+type, and which is the first condition alike of the stability and
+progress of society, was obliterated from thought. As if the wonders
+that have been wrought by this regulated constancy of the feeling of man
+for man in transforming human life were not far more transcendently
+exalting than the contemplation of those glories of brute nature, which
+are barbaric in comparison.</p>
+
+<p>It would be unjust not to admit that there are abundant passages in his
+poems of too manifest depth and sincerity of feeling, for us to suppose
+that Byron himself was dead to the beauty of domestic sentiment. The
+united tenderness and dignity of Faliero's words to Angiolina, before he
+goes to the meeting of the conspirators, would, if there were nothing
+else, be enough to show how rightly in his better moods the poet
+appreciated the conditions of the family. Unfortunately the better moods
+were not fixed, and we had <i>Don Juan</i>, where the wit and colour and
+power served to make an anti-social and licentious sentiment attractive
+to puny creatures, who were thankful to have their lasciviousness so
+gaily adorned. As for Great Britain, she deserved <i>Don Juan</i>. A nation,
+whose disrespect for all ideas and aspirations that cannot be supported
+by a text, nor circulated by a religious tract society, was systematic,
+and where consequently the understanding is least protected<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> against
+sensual sophisms, received no more than a just chastisement in 'the
+literature of Satan.' Here again, in the licence of this literature, we
+see the finger of the Revolution, and of that egoism which makes the
+passions of the individual his own law. Let us condemn and pass on,
+homily undelivered. If Byron injured the domestic idea on this side, let
+us not fail to observe how vastly he elevated it on others, and how,
+above all, he pointed to the idea above and beyond it, in whose light
+only can that be worthy, the idea of a country and a public cause. A man
+may be sure that the comfort of the hearth has usurped too high a place,
+when he can read without response the lines declaring that domestic ties
+must yield in 'those who are called to the highest destinies, which
+purify corrupted commonwealths.'</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">We must forget all feelings save the one&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">We must resign all passions save our purpose&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">We must behold no object save our country&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And only look on death as beautiful,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">So that the sacrifice ascend to heaven</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And draw down freedom on her evermore.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;"><i>Calendaro.</i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; But if we fail&mdash;&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;"><i>I. Bertuccio.</i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; They never fail who die</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">In a great cause: the block may soak their gore;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Their heads may sodden in the sun; their limbs</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Be strung to city gates and castle walls&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">But still their spirit walks abroad. Though years</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Elapse, and others share as dark a doom,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">They but augment the deep and sweeping thoughts</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Which overpower all others, and conduct</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The world at last to freedom. What were we</span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span><span style="margin-left: 1em;">If Brutus had not lived? He died in giving</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Rome liberty, but left a deathless lesson&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">A name which is a virtue, and a soul</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Which multiplies itself throughout all time,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">When wicked men wax mighty, and a state</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Turns servile.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And the man who wrote this was worthy to play an even nobler part than
+the one he had thus nobly described; for it was not many years after,
+that Byron left all and laid down his life for the emancipation of a
+strange land, and 'Greece and Italy wept for his death, as it had been
+that of the noblest of their own sons.' Detractors have done their best
+to pare away the merit of this act of self-renunciation by attributing
+it to despair. That contemporaries of their own humour had done their
+best to make his life a load to him is true, yet to this talk of despair
+we may reply in the poet's own words:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 7em;">When we know</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">All that can come, and how to meet it, our</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Resolves, if firm, may merit a more noble</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Word than this, to give it utterance.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>There was an estimate of the value and purpose of a human life, which
+our Age of Comfort may fruitfully ponder.</p>
+
+<p>To fix upon violent will and incessant craving for movement as the mark
+of a poet, whose contemporaries adored him for what they took to be the
+musing sweetness of his melancholy, may seem a critical perversity.
+There is, however, a momentous difference between that melancholy, which
+is as the mere shadow projected by a man's spiritual form, and that
+other<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> melancholy, which itself is the reality and substance of a
+character; between the soul to whom dejection brings graceful relief
+after labour and effort, and the soul which by irresistible habit and
+constitution dwells ever in Golgotha. This deep and penetrating
+subjective melancholy had no possession of Byron. His character was
+essentially objective, stimulated by outward circumstance, moving to
+outward harmonies, seeking colour and image and purpose from without.
+Hence there is inevitably a certain liveliness and animation, even when
+he is in the depths. We feel that we are watching clouds sweep
+majestically across the sky, and, even when they are darkest, blue
+interspaces are not far off. Contrast the moodiest parts of <i>Childe
+Harold</i> or of <i>Cain</i> with Novalis's <i>Night Hymns</i>. Byron's gloom is a
+mere elegance in comparison. The one pipes to us with a graceful
+despondency on the edge of the gulf, while the other carries us actually
+down into the black profound, with no rebellious cry, nor shriek of woe,
+but sombrely awaiting the deliverance of death, with soul absorbed and
+consumed by weariness. Let the reader mark the note of mourning struck
+in the opening stanzas, for instance, of Novalis's <i>Longing after
+Death</i>, their simplicity, homeliness, transparent sincerity, and then
+turn to any of the familiar passages where Byron meditates on the good
+things which the end brings to men. How artificial he seems, and
+unseasonably ornate, and how conscious of his public. In the first, we
+sit sadly on the ground in some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> veritable Place of a Skull; in the
+second, we assist at tragical distress after the manner of the Italian
+opera. We should be disposed to call the first a peculiarly German
+quality, until we remember Pascal. With Novalis, or with Pascal, as with
+all those whom character, or the outer fates, or the two together, have
+drawn to dwell in the valley of the shadow, gloom and despondency are
+the very stuff of their thoughts. Material energy could have done
+nothing for them. Their nerves and sinews were too nearly cut asunder.
+To know the quality of Byron's melancholy, and to recognise how little
+it was of the essence of his character, we have only to consider how far
+removed he was from this condition. In other words, in spite of morbid
+manifestations of one sort and another, he always preserved a salutary
+and vivid sympathy for action, and a marked capacity for it.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>It was the same impetuous and indomitable spirit of effort which moved
+Byron to his last heroic exploit, that made the poetry inspired by it so
+powerful in Europe, from the deadly days of the Holy Alliance onwards.
+Cynical and misanthropical as he has been called, as though that were
+his sum and substance, he yet never ceased to glorify human freedom, in
+tones that stirred the hearts of men and quickened their hope and upheld
+their daring, as with the voice of some heavenly trumpet. You may, if
+you choose, find the splendour of the stanzas in the Fourth Canto on the
+Bourbon restoration, on Cromwell, and Wash<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>ington, a theatrical
+splendour. But for all that, they touched the noblest parts of men. They
+are alive with an exalted and magnanimous generosity, the one high
+virtue which can never fail to touch a multitude. Subtlety may miss
+them, graces may miss them, and reason may fly over their heads, but the
+words of a generous humanity on the lips of poet or chief have never
+failed to kindle divine music in their breasts. The critic may censure,
+and culture may wave a disdainful hand. As has been said, all such words
+'are open to criticism, and they are all above it.' The magic still
+works. A mysterious and potent word from the gods has gone abroad over
+the face of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>This larger influence was not impaired by Byron's ethical poverty. The
+latter was an inevitable consequence of his defective discipline. The
+triteness of his moral climax is occasionally startling. When
+Sardanapalus, for instance, sees Zarina torn from him, and is stricken
+with profound anguish at the pain with which he has filled her life, he
+winds up with such a platitude as this:</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">To what gulfs</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">A single deviation from the track</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Of human duties leaves even those who claim</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The homage of mankind as their born due!</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The baldest writer of hymns might work up passion enough for a
+consummation like this. Once more, Byron was insufficiently furnished
+with positive intellectual ideas, and for want of these his most
+exalted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> words were constantly left sterile of definite and pointed
+outcome.</p>
+
+<p>Byron's passionate feeling for mankind included the long succession of
+generations, that stretch back into the past and lie far on in the misty
+distances of the future. No poet has had a more sublime sense of the
+infinite melancholy of history; indeed, we hardly feel how great a poet
+Byron was, until we have read him at Venice, at Florence, and above all
+in that overpowering scene where the 'lone mother of dead empires'
+broods like a mysterious haunting spirit among the columns and arches
+and wrecked fabrics of Rome. No one has expressed with such amplitude
+the sentiment that in a hundred sacred spots of the earth has</p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 12em;">Fill'd up</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">As 'twere, anew, the gaps of centuries;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Leaving that beautiful which still was so,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And making that which was not; till the place</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Became religious, and the heart ran o'er</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">With silent worship of the great of old&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The dead, but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Our spirits from their urns.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>Only he stands aright, who from his little point of present possession
+ever meditates on the far-reaching lines, which pass through his point
+from one interminable star-light distance to another. Neither the stoic
+pagan, nor the disciple of the creed which has some of the peculiar
+weakness of stoicism and not all its peculiar strength, could find
+Manfred's latest word untrue to himself:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The mind, which is immortal, makes itself</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Requital for its good or evil thoughts&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Is its own origin of ill and end,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And its own place and time: its innate sense,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">When stripped of this mortality, derives</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">No colour from the fleeting things without:</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">But is absorbed in sufferance of joy,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Born from the knowledge of its own desert.</span><br />
+</p>
+
+<p>It is only when a man subordinates this absorption in individual
+sufferance and joy to the thought that his life is a trust for humanity,
+that he is sure of making it anything other than 'rain fallen on the
+sand.' In the last great episode of his own career Byron was as lofty as
+the noblest side of his creed. The historic feeling for the unseen
+benefactors of old time was matched by vehemence of sympathy with the
+struggles for liberation of his own day. And for this, history will not
+forget him. Though he may have no place in our own Minster, he assuredly
+belongs to the band of far-shining men, of whom Pericles declared the
+whole world to be the tomb.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<div class='footnotes'>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES</h3>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> See also George Sand's Preface to <i>Obermann</i>, p. 10. <i>'En
+m&ecirc;me temps que les institutions et les coutumes, la litt&eacute;rature anglaise
+passa le d&eacute;troit, et vint regner chez nous. La po&eacute;sie britannique nous
+r&eacute;v&eacute;la le doute incarn&eacute; sous la figure de Byron; puis la litt&eacute;rature
+allemande, quoique plus mystique, nous conduisit au m&ecirc;me r&eacute;sultat par un
+sentiment de r&ecirc;verie plus profond.'</i>
+</p><p>
+The number of translations that have appeared in Germany since 1830
+proves the coincidence of Byronic influence with revolutionary movement
+in that country.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Thoreau.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Morison's <i>Life of St. Bernard</i>, p. 68 (2d edit.)</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I, by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I
+       Essay 3: Byron
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: March 22, 2007 [EBook #20879]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES, VOL. I ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Janet Blenkinship and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CRITICAL MISCELLANIES
+
+BY
+
+JOHN MORLEY
+
+
+VOL. I.
+
+ESSAY 3: BYRON
+
+
+
+
+London
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+1904
+
+
+
+
+BYRON
+
+
+  Byron's influence in Europe                                       203
+
+  In England                                                        204
+
+  Criticism not concerned with Byron's private life                 208
+
+  Function of synthetic criticism                                   210
+
+  Byron has the political quality of Milton and Shakespeare         212
+
+  Contrasted with Shelley in this respect                           213
+
+  Peculiarity of the revolutionary view of nature                   218
+
+  Revolutionary sentimentalism                                      220
+
+  And revolutionary commonplace in Byron                            222
+
+  Byron's reasonableness                                            223
+
+  Size and difficulties of his subject                              224
+
+  His mastery of it                                                 224
+
+  The reflection of Danton in Byron                                 230
+
+  The reactionary influence upon him                                232
+
+  Origin of his apparent cynicism                                   234
+
+  His want of positive knowledge                                    235
+
+  AEsthetic and emotional relations to intellectual positivity       236
+
+  Significance of his dramatic predilections                        240
+
+  His idea of nature less hurtful in art than in politics           241
+
+  Its influence upon his views of duty and domestic sentiment       242
+
+  His public career better than one side of his creed               245
+
+  Absence of true subjective melancholy from his nature             246
+
+  His ethical poverty                                               249
+
+  Conclusion                                                        250
+
+
+
+
+BYRON.
+
+
+It is one of the singular facts in the history of literature, that the
+most rootedly conservative country in Europe should have produced the
+poet of the Revolution. Nowhere is the antipathy to principles and ideas
+so profound, nor the addiction to moderate compromise so inveterate, nor
+the reluctance to advance away from the past so unconquerable, as in
+England; and nowhere in England is there so settled an indisposition to
+regard any thought or sentiment except in the light of an existing
+social order, nor so firmly passive a hostility to generous aspirations,
+as in the aristocracy. Yet it was precisely an English aristocrat who
+became the favourite poet of all the most high-minded conspirators and
+socialists of continental Europe for half a century; of the best of
+those, that is to say, who have borne the most unsparing testimony
+against the present ordering of society, and against the theological and
+moral conceptions which have guided and maintained it. The rank and file
+of the army has been equally inspired by the same fiery and rebellious
+strains against the order of God and the order of man. 'The day will
+come,' wrote Mazzini, thirty years ago, 'when Democracy will remember
+all that it owes to Byron. England, too, will, I hope, one day remember
+the mission--so entirely English yet hitherto overlooked by her--which
+Byron fulfilled on the Continent; the European role given by him to
+English literature, and the appreciation and sympathy for England which
+he awakened amongst us. Before he came, all that was known of English
+literature was the French translation of Shakespeare, and the anathema
+hurled by Voltaire against the "drunken savage." It is since Byron that
+we Continentalists have learned to study Shakespeare and other English
+writers. From him dates the sympathy of all the true-hearted amongst us
+for this land of liberty, whose true vocation he so worthily represented
+among the oppressed. He led the genius of Britain on a pilgrimage
+throughout all Europe.'[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: See also George Sand's Preface to _Obermann_, p. 10. _'En
+meme temps que les institutions et les coutumes, la litterature anglaise
+passa le detroit, et vint regner chez nous. La poesie britannique nous
+revela le doute incarne sous la figure de Byron; puis la litterature
+allemande, quoique plus mystique, nous conduisit au meme resultat par un
+sentiment de reverie plus profond.'_
+
+The number of translations that have appeared in Germany since 1830
+proves the coincidence of Byronic influence with revolutionary movement
+in that country.]
+
+The day of recollection has not yet come. It is only in his own country
+that Byron's influence has been a comparatively superficial one, and its
+scope and gist dimly and imperfectly caught, because it is only in
+England that the partisans of order hope to mitigate or avoid the facts
+of the Revolution by pretending not to see them, while the friends of
+progress suppose that all the fruits of change shall inevitably fall, if
+only they keep the forces and processes and extent of the change
+rigorously private and undeclared. That intense practicalness which
+seems to have done so many great things for us, and yet at the same
+moment mysteriously to have robbed us of all, forbids us even to cast a
+glance at what is no more than an aspiration. Englishmen like to be able
+to answer about the Revolution as those ancients answered about the
+symbol of another Revolution, when they said that they knew not so much
+as whether there were a Holy Ghost or not. The same want of kindling
+power in the national intelligence which made of the English Reformation
+one of the most sluggish and tedious chapters in our history, has made
+the still mightier advance of the moderns from the social system and
+spiritual bases of the old state, in spite of our two national
+achievements of punishing a king with death and emancipating our slaves,
+just as unimpressive and semi-efficacious a performance in this country,
+as the more affrontingly hollow and halt-footed transactions of the
+sixteenth century.
+
+Just because it was wonderful that England should have produced Byron,
+it would have been wonderful if she had received any permanently deep
+impression from him, or preserved a lasting appreciation of his work,
+or cheerfully and intelligently recognised his immense force. And
+accordingly we cannot help perceiving that generations are arising who
+know not Byron. This is not to say that he goes unread; but there is a
+vast gulf fixed between the author whom we read with pleasure and even
+delight, and that other to whom we turn at all moments for inspiration
+and encouragement, and whose words and ideas spring up incessantly and
+animatingly within us, unbidden, whether we turn to him or no.
+
+For no Englishman now does Byron hold this highest place; and this is
+not unnatural in any way, if we remember in what a different shape the
+Revolution has now by change of circumstance and occasion come to
+present itself to those who are most ardent in the search after new
+paths. An estimate of Byron would be in some sort a measure of the
+distance that we have travelled within the last half century in our
+appreciation of the conditions of social change. The modern rebel is at
+least half-acquiescence. He has developed a historic sense. The most
+hearty aversion to the prolonged reign of some of the old gods does not
+hinder him from seeing, that what are now frigid and unlovely blocks
+were full of vitality and light in days before the era of their
+petrifaction. There is much less eagerness of praise or blame, and much
+less faith in knife and cautery, less confidence that new and right
+growth will naturally and necessarily follow upon demolition.
+
+The Revolution has never had that long hold on the national imagination
+in England, either as an idol or a bugbear, which is essential to keep
+the poet who sings it in effective harmony with new generations of
+readers. More than this, the Byronic conception was as transitional and
+inadequate as the methods and ideas of the practical movers, who were to
+a man left stranded in every country in Europe, during the period of his
+poetic activity. A transitional and unstable movement of society
+inevitably fails to supply a propulsion powerful enough to make its
+poetic expression eternal. There is no better proof of the enormous
+force of Byron's genius than that it was able to produce so fine an
+expression of elements so intrinsically unfavourable to high poetry as
+doubt, denial, antagonism, and weariness. But this force was no
+guarantee for perpetuity of influence. Bare rebellion cannot endure, and
+no succession of generations can continue nourishing themselves on the
+poetry of complaint, and the idealisation of revolt. If, however, it is
+impossible that Byron should be all to us that he was to a former
+generation, and if we find no direct guidance in his muse, this is no
+reason why criticism should pass him over, nor why there may not be
+something peculiarly valuable in the noble freedom and genuine modernism
+of his poetic spirit, to an age that is apparently only forsaking the
+clerical idyll of one school, for the reactionary mediaevalism or
+paganism, intrinsically meaningless and issueless, of another.
+
+More attention is now paid to the mysteries of Byron's life than to the
+merits of his work, and criticism and morality are equally injured by
+the confusion between the worth of the verse he wrote, and the virtue or
+wickedness of the life he lived. The admirers of his poetry appear
+sensible of some obligation to be the champions of his conduct, while
+those who have diligently gathered together the details of an accurate
+knowledge of the unseemliness of his conduct, cannot bear to think that
+from this bramble men have been able to gather figs. The result of the
+confusion has been that grave men and women have applied themselves to
+investigate and judge Byron's private life, as if the exact manner of
+it, the more or less of his outrages upon decorum, the degree of the
+deadness of his sense of moral responsibility, were matter of minute and
+profound interest to all ages. As if all this had anything to do with
+criticism proper. It is right that we should know the life and manners
+of one whom we choose for a friend, or of one who asks us to entrust him
+with the control of public interests. In either of these two cases, we
+need a guarantee for present and future. Art knows nothing of
+guarantees. The work is before us, its own warranty. What is it to us
+whether Turner had coarse orgies with the trulls of Wapping? We can
+judge his art without knowing or thinking of the artist. And in the same
+way, what are the stories of Byron's libertinism to us? They may have
+biographical interest, but of critical interest hardly the least. If the
+name of the author of _Manfred_, _Cain_, _Childe Harold_, were already
+lost, as it may be in remote times, the work abides, and its mark on
+European opinion. '_Je ne considere les gens apres leur mort_,' said
+Voltaire, '_que par leurs ouvrages; tout la reste est aneanti pour
+moi_.'
+
+There is a sense in which biographical detail gives light to criticism,
+but not the sense in which the prurient moralist uses or seeks it. The
+life of the poet may help to explain the growth and prominence of a
+characteristic sentiment or peculiar idea. Knowledge of this or that
+fact in his life may uncover the roots of something that strikes, or
+unravel something that perplexes us. Considering the relations between a
+man's character and circumstance, and what he produces, we can from this
+point of view hardly know too much as to the personality of a great
+writer. Only let us recollect that this personality manifests itself
+outwardly in two separate forms, in conduct, and in literary production,
+and that each of these manifestations is to be judged independently of
+the other. If one of them is wholly censurable, the other may still be
+the outcome of the better mind; and even from the purely biographical
+aspect, it is a plain injustice to insist on identifying a character
+with its worse expression only.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Poetry, and not only poetry, but every other channel of emotional
+expression and aesthetic culture, confessedly moves with the general
+march of the human mind, and art is only the transformation into ideal
+and imaginative shapes of a predominant system and philosophy of life.
+Minor verse-writers may fairly be consigned, without disrespect, to the
+region of the literature of taste; and criticism of their work takes the
+shape of a discussion of stray graces, of new turns, of little
+variations of shade and colour, of their conformity to the accepted
+rules that constitute the technique of poetry. The loftier masters,
+though their technical power and originality, their beauty of form,
+strength of flight, music and variousness of rhythm, are all full of
+interest and instruction, yet, besides these precious gifts, come to us
+with the size and quality of great historic forces, for they represent
+the hope and energies, the dreams and the consummation, of the human
+intelligence in its most enormous movements. To appreciate one of these,
+we need to survey it on every side. For these we need synthetic
+criticism, which, after analysis has done its work, and disclosed to us
+the peculiar qualities of form, conception, and treatment, shall collect
+the products of this first process, construct for us the poet's mental
+figure in its integrity and just coherence, and then finally, as the sum
+of its work, shall trace the relations of the poet's ideas, either
+direct or indirect, through the central currents of thought, to the
+visible tendencies of an existing age.
+
+The greatest poets reflect beside all else the broad-bosomed haven of a
+perfect and positive faith, in which mankind has for some space found
+shelter, unsuspicious of the new and distant wayfarings that are ever in
+store. To this band of sacred bards few are called, while perhaps not
+more than four high names would fill the list of the chosen: Dante, the
+poet of Catholicism; Shakespeare, of Feudalism; Milton, of
+Protestantism; Goethe, of that new faith which is as yet without any
+universally recognised label, but whose heaven is an ever-closer harmony
+between the consciousness of man and all the natural forces of the
+universe; whose liturgy is culture, and whose deity is a certain high
+composure of the human heart.
+
+The far-shining pre-eminence of Shakespeare, apart from the incomparable
+fertility and depth of his natural gifts, arises secondarily from the
+larger extent to which he transcended the special forming influences,
+and refreshed his fancy and widened his range of sympathy, by recourse
+to what was then the nearest possible approach to a historic or
+political method. To the poet, vision reveals a certain form of the
+truth, which the rest of men laboriously discover and prove by the
+tardier methods of meditation and science. Shakespeare did not walk in
+imagination with the great warriors, monarchs, churchmen, and rulers of
+history, nor conceive their conduct, ideas, schemes, and throw himself
+into their words and actions, without strengthening that original taste
+which must have first drawn him to historical subjects, and without
+deepening both his feeling for the great progression of human affairs,
+and his sympathy for those relative moods of surveying and dealing with
+them, which are not more positive, scientific, and political, than they
+may be made truly poetic.
+
+Again, while in Dante the inspiring force was spiritual, and in Goethe
+it was intellectual, we may say that both in Shakespeare and Milton it
+was political and social. In other words, with these two, the drama of
+the one and the epic of the other were each of them connected with ideas
+of government and the other external movements of men in society, and
+with the play of the sentiments which spring from them. We assuredly do
+not mean that in either of them, least of all in Shakespeare, there is
+an absence of the spiritual element. This would be at once to thrust
+them down into a lower place; for the spiritual is of the very essence
+of poetry. But with the spiritual there mixes in our Englishmen a most
+abundant leaven of recognition of the impressions and impulses of the
+outer forms of life, as well as of active sympathy with the every-day
+debate of the world. They are neither of them inferior to the highest in
+sense of the wide and unutterable things of the spirit; yet with both of
+them, more than with other poets of the same rank, the man with whose
+soul and circumstance they have to deal is the [Greek: politikon zoon],
+no high abstraction of the race, but the creature with concrete
+relations and a full objective life. In Shakespeare the dramatic form
+helps partly to make this more prominent, though the poet's spirit
+shines forth thus, independently of the mould which it imposes on
+itself. Of Milton we may say, too, that, in spite of the supernatural
+machinery of his greatest poem, it bears strongly impressed on it the
+political mark, and that in those minor pieces, where he is avowedly in
+the political sphere, he still rises to the full height of his majestic
+harmony and noblest dignity.
+
+Byron was touched by the same fire. The contemporary and friend of the
+most truly spiritual of all English poets, Shelley, he was himself among
+the most essentially political. Or perhaps one will be better
+understood, describing his quality as a quality of poetical
+_worldliness_, in its enlarged and generous sense of energetic interest
+in real transactions, and a capacity of being moved and raised by them
+into those lofty moods of emotion which in more spiritual natures are
+only kindled by contemplation of the vast infinitudes that compass the
+human soul round about. That Shelley was immeasurably superior to Byron
+in all the rarer qualities of the specially poetic mind appears to us so
+unmistakably assured a fact, that difference of opinion upon it can only
+spring from a more fundamental difference of opinion as to what it is
+that constitutes this specially poetic quality. If more than anything
+else it consists in the power of transfiguring action, character, and
+thought, in the serene radiance of the purest imaginative intelligence,
+and the gift of expressing these transformed products in the finest
+articulate vibrations of emotional speech, then must we not confess that
+Byron has composed no piece which from this point may compare with
+_Prometheus_ or the _Cenci_, any more than Rubens may take his place
+with Raphael? We feel that Shelley transports the spirit to the highest
+bound and limit of the intelligible; and that with him thought passes
+through one superadded and more rarefying process than the other poet is
+master of. If it be true, as has been written, that 'Poetry is the
+breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,' we may say that Shelley
+teaches us to apprehend that further something, the breath and finer
+spirit of poetry itself. Contrasting, for example, Shelley's _Ode to the
+West Wind_, with the famous and truly noble stanzas on the eternal sea
+which close the fourth canto of _Childe Harold_, who does not feel that
+there is in the first a volatile and unseizable element that is quite
+distinct from the imagination and force and high impressiveness, or from
+any indefinable product of all of these united, which form the glory and
+power of the second? We may ask in the same way whether _Manfred_, where
+the spiritual element is as predominant as it ever is in Byron, is worth
+half a page of _Prometheus_.
+
+To perceive and admit this is not to disparage Byron's achievements. To
+be most deeply penetrated with the differentiating quality of the poet
+is not, after all, to contain the whole of that admixture of varying and
+moderating elements which goes to the composition of the broadest and
+most effective work. Of these elements, Shelley, with all his rare gifts
+of spiritual imagination and winged melodiousness of verse, was markedly
+wanting in a keen and omnipresent feeling for the great course of human
+events. All nature stirred him, except the consummating crown of natural
+growth.
+
+We do not mean anything so untrue as that Shelley was wanting either in
+deep humanity or in active benevolence, or that social injustice was a
+thing indifferent to him. We do not forget the energetic political
+propagandism of his youth in Ireland and elsewhere. Many a furious
+stanza remains to show how deeply and bitterly the spectacle of this
+injustice burnt into his soul. But these pieces are accidents. They do
+not belong to the immortal part of his work. An American original,
+unconsciously bringing the revolutionary mind to the climax of all
+utterances possible to it, has said that 'men are degraded when
+considered as the members of a political organisation.'[2] Shelley's
+position was on a yet more remote pinnacle than this. Of mankind he was
+barely conscious, in his loftiest and divinest flights. His muse seeks
+the vague translucent spaces where the care of man melts away in vision
+of the eternal forces, of which man may be but the fortuitous
+manifestation of an hour.
+
+[Footnote 2: Thoreau.]
+
+Byron, on the other hand, is never moved by the strength of his passion
+or the depth of his contemplation quite away from the round earth and
+the civil animal who dwells upon it. Even his misanthropy is only an
+inverted form of social solicitude. His practical zeal for good and
+noble causes might teach us this. He never grudged either money or time
+or personal peril for the cause of Italian freedom, and his life was the
+measure and the cost of his interest in the liberty of Greece. Then
+again he was full not merely of wit, which is sometimes only an affair
+of the tongue, but of humour also, which goes much deeper; and it is of
+the essence of the humoristic nature, that whether sunny or saturnine,
+it binds the thoughts of him who possesses it to the wide medley of
+expressly human things. Byron did not misknow himself, nor misapprehend
+the most marked turn of his own character when he wrote the lines--
+
+    I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
+    From these our interviews, in which I steal
+    From all I may be, or have been before,
+    To mingle with the universe and feel
+  What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.
+
+It was this which made Byron a social force, a far greater force than
+Shelley either has been or can be. Men read in each page that he was one
+of like passions with themselves; that he had their own feet of clay, if
+he had other members of brass and gold and fine silver which they had
+none of; and that vehement sensibility, tenacious energy of imagination,
+a bounding swell of poetic fancy, had not obliterated, but had rather
+quickened, the sense of the highest kind of man of the world, which did
+not decay but waxed stronger in him with years. His openness to beauty
+and care for it were always inferior in keenness and in hold upon him to
+his sense of human interest, and the superiority in certain respects of
+_Marino Faliero_, for example, where he handles a social theme in a
+worthy spirit, over _Manfred_, where he seeks a something tumultuously
+beautiful, is due to that subordination in his mind of aesthetic to
+social intention, which is one of the most strongly distinctive marks of
+the truly modern spirit. The admirable wit both of his letters, and of
+pieces like the _Vision of Judgment_ and _Don Juan_, where wit reaches
+as high as any English writer has ever carried it, shows in another way
+the same vividness and reality of attraction which every side of human
+affairs possessed for this glowing and incessantly animated spirit.
+
+In spite of a good many surface affectations, which may have cheated the
+lighter heads, but which may now be easily seen through, and counted off
+for as much as they are worth, Byron possessed a bottom of plain
+sincerity and rational sobriety which kept him substantially straight,
+real, and human, and made him the genuine exponent of that immense
+social movement which we sum up as the Revolution. If Keats's whole soul
+was absorbed by sensuous impressions of the outer world, and his art was
+the splendid and exquisite reproduction of these; if Shelley on the
+other hand distilled from the fine impressions of the senses by process
+of inmost meditation some thrice ethereal essence, 'the viewless spirit
+of a lovely sound;' we may say of Byron that, even in the moods when the
+mightiness and wonder of nature had most effectually possessed
+themselves of his imagination, his mind never moved for very long on
+these remote heights, apart from the busy world of men, but returned
+again like the fabled dove from the desolate void of waters to the ark
+of mortal stress and human passion. Nature, in her most dazzling
+aspects or stupendous parts, is but the background and theatre of the
+tragedy of man.
+
+We may find a secondary proof of this in the fewness of those fine
+descriptive strokes and subtle indirect touches of colour or sound which
+arise with incessant spontaneity, where a mastering passion for nature
+steeps the mind in vigilant, accurate, yet half-unconscious,
+observation. It is amazing through how long a catalogue of natural
+objects Byron sometimes takes us, without affixing to one of them any
+but the most conventional term, or a single epithet which might show
+that in passing through his mind it had yielded to him a beauty or a
+savour that had been kept a secret from the common troop. Byron is
+certainly not wanting in commanding image, as when Manfred likens the
+lines of foaming light flung along from the Alpine cataract to 'the pale
+courser's tail, the giant steed, to be bestrode by Death.' But
+imaginative power of this kind is not the same thing as that
+susceptibility to the minutest properties and unseen qualities of
+natural objects which reveals itself in chance epithet of telling
+felicity, or phrase that opens to us hidden lights. Our generation is
+more likely to think too much than too little of this; for its favourite
+poet, however narrow in subject and feeble in moral treatment, is
+without any peer in the exquisitely original, varied, and imaginative
+art of his landscape touches.
+
+This treatment of nature was in exact harmony with the method of
+revolutionary thought, which, from the time of Rousseau downwards, had
+appealed in its profound weariness of an existing social state to the
+solitude and seeming freedom of mountain and forest and ocean, as though
+the only cure for the woes of civilisation lay in annihilating it. This
+was an appeal less to nature than from man, just as we have said that
+Byron's was, and hence it was distinct from the single-eyed appreciation
+and love of nature for her own sake, for her beauty and terror and
+unnumbered moods, which has made of her the mistress and the consoler of
+many men in these times. In the days of old faith while the catholic
+gods sat yet firm upon their thrones, the loveliness of the universe
+shone to blind eyes. Saint Bernard in the twelfth century could ride for
+a whole day along the shore of the Lake of Geneva, and yet when in the
+evening his comrades spoke some word about the lake, he inquired: 'What
+lake?'[3] It was not mere difference of temperament that made the
+preacher of one age pass by in this marvellous unconsciousness, and the
+singer of another burst forth into that tender invocation of 'clear
+placid Leman,' whose 'contrasted lake with the wild world he dwelt in'
+moved him to the very depths. To Saint Bernard the world was as wild and
+confused as it was to Byron; but then he had gods many and saints many,
+and a holy church in this world, and a kingdom of heaven awaiting
+resplendent in the world to come. All this filled his soul with a
+settled certitude, too absorbing to leave any space for other than
+religious emotion. The seven centuries that flowed between the spiritual
+mind of Europe when Saint Bernard was its spokesman, and the spiritual
+mind of which Byron was the interpreter, had gradually dissolved these
+certitudes, and the faint lines of new belief and a more durable order
+were still invisible. The assurance of science was not yet rooted, nor
+had men as yet learned to turn back to the history of their own kind, to
+the long chronicle of its manifold experiences, for an adequate system
+of life and an inspiring social faith. So they fled in spirit or in
+flesh into unfamiliar scenes, and vanished from society, because society
+was not sufficiently social.
+
+[Footnote 3: Morison's _Life of St. Bernard_, p. 68 (2d edit.)]
+
+The feeling was abnormal, and the method was fundamentally artificial. A
+sentimentalism arose, which is in art what the metaphysical method is in
+philosophy. Yet a literature was born of it, whose freshness, force,
+elevation, and, above all, a self-assertion and peculiar aspiring
+freedom that have never been surpassed, still exert an irresistible
+attraction, even over minds that are furthest removed from the moral
+storm and disorder, and the confused intellectual convictions, of that
+extraordinary group. Perhaps the fact that their active force is spent,
+and that men find in them now only a charm and no longer a gospel,
+explains the difference between the admiration which some of us permit
+ourselves to feel for them, and the impatient dislike which they stirred
+in our fathers. Then they were a danger, because they were a force,
+misleading amiable and high-minded people into blind paths. Now this is
+at an end, and, apart from their historic interest, the permanent
+elements of beauty draw us to them with a delight that does not
+diminish, as we recede further and further from the impotence of the
+aspirations which thus married themselves to lofty and stirring words.
+To say nothing of Rousseau, the father and founder of the
+nature-worship, which is the nearest approach to a positive side that
+the Revolution has ever possessed, how much fine colour and freshness of
+feeling there is in _Rene_, what a sense of air and space in _Paul and
+Virginia_, and what must they have been to a generation that had just
+emerged from the close parlours of Richardson, the best of the
+sentimentalists of the pre-revolutionary type? May we not say, too, in
+parenthesis, that the man is the votary, not of wisdom, but of a bald
+and shapeless asceticism, who is so excessively penetrated with the
+reality, the duties, the claims, and the constant hazards of
+civilisation, as to find in himself no chord responsive to that sombre
+pensiveness into which Obermann's unfathomable melancholy and impotence
+of will deepened, as he meditated on the mean shadows which men are
+content to chase for happiness, and on all the pigmy progeny of giant
+effort? '_C'est peu de chose_,' says Obermann, '_de n'etre point comme
+le vulgaire des hommes; mais c'est avoir fait un pas vers la sagesse,
+que de n'etre plus comme le vulgaire des sages_.' This penetrating
+remark hits the difference between De Senancourt himself and most of the
+school. He is absolutely free from the vulgarity of wisdom, and
+breathes the air of higher peaks, taking us through mysterious and
+fragrant pine-woods, where more than he may find meditative repose amid
+the heat and stress of that practical day, of which he and his school
+can never bear the burden.
+
+In that _vulgaire des sages_, of which De Senancourt had none, Byron
+abounded. His work is in much the glorification of revolutionary
+commonplace. Melodramatic individualism reaches its climax in that long
+series of Laras, Conrads, Manfreds, Harolds, who present the fatal
+trilogy, in which crime is middle term between debauch and satiety, that
+forms the natural development of an anti-social doctrine in a
+full-blooded temperament. It was this temperament which, blending with
+his gifts of intellect, gave Byron the amazing copiousness and force
+that makes him the dazzling master of revolutionary emotion, because it
+fills his work with such variety of figures, such free change of
+incident, such diversity of passion, such a constant movement and
+agitation. It was this never-ceasing stir, coupled with a striking
+concreteness and an unfailing directness, which rather than any markedly
+correct or wide intellectual apprehension of things, made him so much
+more than any one else an effective interpreter of the moral tumult of
+the epoch. If we look for psychological delicacy, for subtle moral
+traits, for opening glimpses into unobserved depths of character,
+behold, none of these things are there. These were no gifts of his, any
+more than the divine gift of music was his. There are some writers whose
+words but half express the indefinable thoughts that inspired them, and
+to whom we have to surrender our whole minds with a peculiar loyalty and
+fulness, independent of the letter and printed phrase, if we would
+liquefy the frozen speech and recover some portion of its imprisoned
+essence. This is seldom a necessity with Byron. His words tell us all
+that he means to say, and do not merely hint nor suggest. The matter
+with which he deals is gigantic, and he paints with violent colours and
+sweeping pencil.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yet he is free from that declamation with which some of the French poets
+of the same age, and representing a portion of the same movement, blow
+out their cheeks. An angel of reasonableness seems to watch over him,
+even when he comes most dangerously near to an extravagance. He is
+equally free from a strained antithesis, which would have been
+inconsistent, not only with the breadth of effect required by Byron's
+art, but also with the peculiarly direct and forcible quality of his
+genius. In the preface to _Marino Faliero_, a composition that abounds
+in noble passages, and rests on a fine and original conception of
+character, he mentions his 'desire of preserving a nearer approach to
+unity, than the irregularity which is the reproach of the English
+theatre.' And this sound view of the importance of form, and of the
+barbarism to which our English genius is prone, from _Goody Blake and
+Harry Gill_ up to the clownish savagery which occasionally defaces even
+plays attributed to Shakespeare, is collateral proof of the sanity and
+balance which marked the foundations of his character, and which at no
+point of his work ever entirely failed him. Byron's admiration for Pope
+was no mere eccentricity.
+
+We may value this self-control the more, by remembering the nature of
+his subjects. We look out upon a wild revolutionary welter, of vehement
+activity without a purpose, boundless discontent without a hope, futile
+interrogation of nature in questions for which nature can have no
+answer, unbridled passion, despairing satiety, impotence. It is too
+easy, as the history of English opinion about Byron's poetic merit
+abundantly proves, to underrate the genius which mastered so tremendous
+a conflict, and rendered that amazing scene with the flow and energy and
+mingled tempest and forlorn calm which belonged to the original reality.
+The essential futility of the many moods which went to make up all this,
+ought not to blind us to the enormous power that was needed for the
+reproduction of a turbulent and not quite aimless chaos of the soul, in
+which man seemed to be divorced alike from his brother-men in the
+present, and from all the long succession and endeavour of men in the
+past. It was no small feat to rise to a height that should command so
+much, and to exhibit with all the force of life a world that had broken
+loose from its moorings.
+
+It is idle to vituperate this anarchy, either from the point of view of
+a sour and precise Puritanism, or the more elevated point of a rational
+and large faith in progress. Wise men are like Burke, who did not know
+how to draw an indictment against a whole nation. They do not know how
+to think nothing but ill of a whole generation, that lifted up its voice
+in heartfelt complaint and wailing against the conceptions, forms, and
+rulers, human and divine, of a society that the inward faith had
+abandoned, but which clung to every outward ordinance; which only
+remembered that man had property, and forgot that he had a spirit. This
+is the complaint that rings through Byron's verse. It was this complaint
+that lay deep at the bottom of the Revolution, and took form in every
+possible kind of protest, from a dishevelled neckcloth up to a
+profession of atheism. Byron elaborated the common emotion, as the
+earliest modern poets elaborated the common speech. He gave it
+inflections, and distinguished its moods, and threw over it an air of
+system and coherency, and a certain goodly and far-reaching
+sonorousness. This is the usual function of the spiritual leader, who
+leaves in bulk no more in the minds of those whom he attracts than he
+found, but he leaves it articulate with many sounds, and vivid with the
+consciousness of a multitude of defined impressions.
+
+That the whole movement, in spite of its energy, was crude,
+unscientific, virtually abortive, is most true. That it was presided
+over by a false conception of nature as a benign and purifying power,
+while she is in truth a stern force to be tamed and mastered, if society
+is to hold together, cannot be denied of the revolutionary movement
+then, any more than it can be denied of its sequels now. Nor need we
+overlook its fundamental error of tracing half the misfortunes and woes
+of the race to that social union, to which we are really indebted for
+all the happiness we know, including even this dignifying sensibility of
+the woes of the race; and the other half to a fictitious entity styled
+destiny, placed among the nethermost gods, which would be more rightly
+regarded as the infinitely modifiable influence exercised by one
+generation of ourselves upon those that follow.
+
+Every one of these faults of thought is justly chargeable to Byron. They
+were deeply inherent in the Revolution. They coloured thoughts about
+government, about laws, about morals. They effected a transformation of
+religion, but, resting on no basis of philosophical acceptance of
+history, the transformation was only temporary. They spread a fantastic
+passion of which Byron was himself an example and a victim, for
+extraordinary outbreaks of a peculiar kind of material activity, that
+met the exigences of an imperious will, while it had not the irksomeness
+of the self-control which would have exercised the will to more
+permanent profit. They destroyed faith in order, natural or social,
+actual or potential, and substituted for it an enthusiastic assertion of
+the claims of the individual to make his passions, aspirations, and
+convictions, a final and decisive law.
+
+Such was the moral state which Byron had to render and interpret. His
+relation to it was a relation of exact sympathy. He felt the force of
+each of the many currents that united in one destructive stream, wildly
+overflowing the fixed banks, and then, when it had overflowed, often, it
+must be confessed, stagnating in lazy brackish pools, while new
+tributaries began to flow in together from far other quarters. The list
+of his poems is the catalogue of the elements of the revolutionary
+spirit. For of what manner is this spirit? Is it not a masterful and
+impatient yearning after many good things, unsubdued and uninformed
+either by a just knowledge of the time, and the means which are needed
+to bring to men the fruits of their hope, or by a fit appreciation of
+orderly and tranquil activity for the common service, as the normal type
+of the individual life? And this is precisely the temper and the spirit
+of Byron. Nowhere else do we see drawn in such traits that colossal
+figure, which has haunted Europe these fourscore years and more, with
+its new-born passion, its half-controlled will, its constant cry for a
+multitude of unknown blessings under the single name of Freedom, the one
+known and unadulterated word of blessing. If only Truth, which alone of
+words is essentially divine and sacrosanct, had been the chief talisman
+of the Revolution, the movement would have been very different from that
+which we know. But to claim this or that in the name of truth, would
+have been to borrow the language which priests and presbyters, Dominic
+and Calvin, had covered thick with hateful associations. Freedom, after
+all, was the next best thing, for it is an indispensable condition of
+the best of all; but it could not lead men until the spirit of truth,
+which means science in the intellectual order, and justice in the social
+order, had joined company with it.
+
+So there was violent action in politics, and violent and excessive
+stimulation in literature, the positive effects of the force moved in
+each sphere being deplorably small in proportion to the intense moral
+energy which gave the impulse. In literature the straining for mental
+liberty was the more futile of the two, because it expressed the ardent
+and hopeless longing of the individual for a life which we may perhaps
+best call life unconditioned. And this unconditioned life, which the
+Byronic hero vainly seeks, and not finding, he fills the world with
+stormy complaint, is least of all likely to offer itself in any
+approximate form to men penetrated with gross and egotistical passions
+to their inmost core. The Byronic hero went to clasp repose in a frenzy.
+All crimson and aflame with passion, he groaned for evening stillness.
+He insisted on being free, in the corroding fetters of resentment and
+scorn for men. Conrad sought balm for disappointment of spirit in
+vehement activity of body. Manfred represents the confusion common to
+the type, between thirst for the highest knowledge and proud violence of
+unbridled will. Harold is held in a middle way of poetic melancholy,
+equally far from a speechless despair and from gay and reckless licence,
+by contemplation of the loveliness of external nature, and the great
+exploits and perishing monuments of man in the past; but he, equally
+with the others, embodies the paradoxical hope that angry isolation and
+fretful estrangement from mankind are equivalent to emancipation from
+their pettiness, instead of being its very climax and demonstration. As
+if freedom of soul could exist without orderly relations of intelligence
+and partial acceptance between a man and the sum of surrounding
+circumstances. That universal protest which rings through Byron's work
+with a plangent resonance, very different from the whimperings of punier
+men, is a proof that so far from being free, one's whole being is
+invaded and laid waste. It is no ignoble mood, and it was a most
+inevitable product of the mental and social conditions of Western Europe
+at the close of the eighteenth century. Everlasting protest, impetuous
+energy of will, melancholy and despondent reaction;--this is the
+revolutionary course. Cain and Conrad; then Manfred and Lara and Harold.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In studying that portion of the European movement which burst forth into
+flame in France between the fall of the Bastille and those fatal days of
+Vendemiaire, Fructidor, Floreal, Brumaire, in which the explosion came
+convulsively to its end, we seem to see a microcosm of the Byronic
+epos. The succession of moods is identical. Overthrow, rage, intense
+material energy, crime, profound melancholy, half-cynical dejection. The
+Revolution was the battle of Will against the social forces of a dozen
+centuries. Men thought that they had only to will the freedom and
+happiness of a world, and all nature and society would be plastic before
+their daring, as clay in the hands of the potter. They could only
+conceive of failure as another expression for inadequate will. Is not
+this one of the notes of Byron's _Ode on the Fall of Bonaparte_?
+'_L'audace, l'audace, et toujours l'audace._' If Danton could have read
+Byron, he would have felt as one in front of a magician's glass. Every
+passion and fit, from the bloody days of September down to the gloomy
+walks by the banks of the Aube, and the prison-cry that 'it were better
+to be a poor fisherman than to meddle with the governing of men,' would
+have found itself there. It is true that in Byron we miss the firmness
+of noble and generous hope. This makes him a more veritable embodiment
+of the Revolution than such a precursor as Rousseau, in whom were all
+the unclouded anticipations of a dawn, that opened to an obscured noon
+and a tempestuous night. Yet one knows not, in truth, how much of that
+violence of will and restless activity and resolute force was due less
+to confidence, than to the urgent necessity which every one of us has
+felt, at some season and under some influence, of filling up spiritual
+vacuity by energetic material activity. Was this the secret of the
+mysterious charm that scenes of violent strife and bloodshed always had
+for Byron's imagination, as it was perhaps the secret of the black
+transformation of the social faith of '89 into the worship of the
+Conqueror of '99? Nowhere does Byron's genius show so much of its own
+incomparable fire and energy, nor move with such sympathetic firmness
+and amplitude of pinion, as in _Lara_, the _Corsair_, _Harold_, and
+other poems, where 'Red Battle stamps his foot,' and where
+
+    The giant on the mountain stands,
+  His blood-red tresses deep'ning in the sun,
+  With death-shot glowing in his fiery hands,
+  And eye that scorcheth all it glows upon.
+
+Yet other and intrinsically nobler passages, where this splendid
+imaginative energy of the sensations is replaced by the calmer glow of
+social meditation, prove that Byron was penetrated with the
+distinctively modern scorn and aversion for the military spirit, and the
+distinctively modern conviction of its being the most deadly of
+anachronisms. Such indirect satisfaction to the physical energies was to
+him, as their direct satisfaction was to the disillusioned France of
+'99, the relief demanded by a powerful nature for the impotence of hope
+and vision.
+
+However this may have been, it may be confessed that Byron presents less
+of the flame of his revolutionary prototypes, and too much of the ashes.
+He came at the end of the experiment. But it is only a question of
+proportion. The ashes belong as much and as necessarily to the methods
+of the Revolution in that phase, as do the blaze, that first told men
+of possible light and warmth, and the fire, which yet smoulders with
+abundant life underneath the gray cinders. And we have to remember that
+Byron came in the midst of a reaction; a reaction of triumph for the
+partisans of darkness and obstruction, who were assured that the
+exploded fragments of the old order would speedily grow together again,
+and a reaction of despondency for those who had filled themselves with
+illimitable and peremptory hopes. Silly Byronical votaries, who only
+half understood their idol, and loved him for a gloom that in their own
+case was nothing but a graceful veil for selfishness and mental
+indolence, saw and felt only the melancholy conclusion, and had not
+travelled a yard in the burning path that led to it. They hugged
+Conrad's haughty misery, but they would have trembled at the thought of
+Conrad's perilous expedition. They were proud despondent Laraes after
+their manner, 'lords of themselves, that heritage of woe,' but the
+heritage would have been still more unbearable, if it had involved
+Lara's bodily danger.
+
+This shallowness has no part in Byron himself. His weariness was a
+genuine outcome of the influence of the time upon a character consumed
+by passion. His lot was cast among spent forces, and, while it is no
+hyperbole to say that he was himself the most enormous force of his
+time, he was only half conscious of this, if indeed he did not always
+inwardly shrink from crediting his own power and strength, as so many
+strong men habitually do, in spite of noisy and perpetual
+self-assertion. Conceit and presumption have not been any more fatal to
+the world, than the waste which comes of great men failing in their
+hearts to recognise how great they are. Many a man whose affectations
+and assumptions are a proverb, has lost the magnificent virtue of
+simplicity, for no other reason than that he needed courage to take his
+own measure, and so finally confirm to himself the reality of his
+pretensions. With Byron, as with some of his prototypes among the men of
+action in France and elsewhere, theatrical ostentation, excessive
+self-consciousness, extravagant claims, cannot hide from us that their
+power was secretly drained by an ever-present distrust of their own
+aims, their own methods, even of the very results that they seem to have
+achieved.
+
+This diffidence was an inseparable consequence of the vast predominance
+of exalted passion over reflection, which is one of the revolutionary
+marks. Byron was fundamentally and substantially, as has been already
+said, one of the most rational of men. Hence when the passionate fit
+grew cold, as it always does in temperaments so mixed, he wanted for
+perfect strength a justification in thought. There are men whose being
+is so universally possessed by phantasies, that they never feel this
+necessity of reconciling the visions of excited emotion with the ideas
+of ordered reason. Byron was more vigorously constituted, and his
+susceptibility to the necessity of this reconciliation combined with
+his inability to achieve it, to produce that cynicism which the simple
+charity of vulgar opinion attributes to the possession of him by unclean
+devils. It was his refuge, as it sometimes is with smaller men, from the
+disquieting confusion which was caused by the disproportion between his
+visions and aspirations, and his intellectual means for satisfying
+himself seriously as to their true relations and substantive value. Only
+the man arrives at practical strength who is convinced, whether rightly
+or wrongly, that he knows all about his own ideas that needs to be
+known. Byron never did thus know himself, either morally or
+intellectually. The higher part of him was consciously dragged down by
+the degrading reminiscence of the brutishness of his youth and its
+connections and associations; they hung like miasma over his spirit. He
+could not rise to that sublimest height of moral fervour, when a man
+intrepidly chases from his memory past evil done, suppresses the
+recollection of old corruptions, declares that he no longer belongs to
+them nor they to him, and is not frightened by the past from a firm and
+lofty respect for present dignity and worth. It is a good thing thus to
+overthrow the tyranny of the memory, and to cast out the body of our
+dead selves. That Byron never attained this good, though he was not
+unlikely to have done so if he had lived longer, does not prove that he
+was too gross to feel its need, but it explains a moral weakness which
+has left a strange and touching mark on some of his later works.
+
+So in the intellectual order, he knew too much in one sense, and in
+another too little. The strong man is not conscious of gaps and
+cataclysms in the structure of his belief, or else he would in so far
+instantly cease to be strong. One living, as Byron emphatically did, in
+the truly modern atmosphere, was bound by all the conditions of the
+atmosphere to have mastered what we may call the natural history of his
+own ideas and convictions; to know something of their position towards
+fact and outer circumstance and possibility; above all to have some
+trusty standard for testing their value, and assuring himself that they
+do really cover the field which he takes them to cover. People with a
+faith and people living in frenzy are equally under this law; but they
+take the completeness and coherency of their doctrine for granted. Byron
+was not the prey of habitual frenzy, and he was without a faith. That is
+to say, he had no firm basis for his conceptions, and he was aware that
+he had none. The same unrest which drove men of that epoch to Nature,
+haunted them to the end, because they had no systematic conception of
+her working and of human relations with her. In a word, there was no
+science. Byron was a warm admirer of the genius and art of Goethe, yet
+he never found out the central secret of Goethe's greatness, his
+luminous and coherent positivity. This is the crowning glory of the
+modern spirit, and it was the lack of this which went so far to
+neutralise Byron's hold of the other chief characteristics of that
+spirit, its freedom and spaciousness, its humaneness and wide
+sociality, its versatility and many-sidedness and passionate feeling for
+the great natural forces.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This positivity is the cardinal condition of strength for times when
+theology lies in decay, and the abstractions which gradually replaced
+the older gods have in their turn ceased to satisfy the intelligence and
+mould the will. All competent persons agree that it is the first
+condition of the attainment of scientific truth. Nobody denies that men
+of action find in it the first law of successful achievement in the
+material order. Its varied but always superlative power in the region of
+aesthetics is only an object of recent recognition, though great work
+enough has been done in past ages by men whose recognition was informal
+and inexpress. It is plain that, in the different classes of aesthetic
+manifestation, there will be differences in objective shape and colour,
+corresponding to the varied limits and conditions of the matter with
+which the special art has to deal; but the critic may expect to find in
+all a profound unity of subjective impression, and that, the impression
+of a self-sustaining order and a self-sufficing harmony among all those
+faculties and parts and energies of universal life, which come within
+the idealising range of art. In other words, the characteristically
+modern inspiration is the inspiration of law. The regulated play of
+forces shows itself as fit to stir those profound emotional impulses
+which wake the artistic soul, as ever did the gracious or terrible gods
+of antique or middle times. There are glories in Turner's idealisation
+of the energies of matter, which are at least as nobly imaginative and
+elevated, in spite of the conspicuous absence of the human element in
+them, as the highest products of the artists who believed that their
+work was for the service and honour of a deity.
+
+It is as mistaken to suppose that this conviction of the supremacy of a
+cold and self-sustained order in the universe is fatal to emotional
+expansion, as it would be to suppose it fatal to intellectual curiosity.
+Experience has shown in the scientific sphere, that the gradual
+withdrawal of natural operations from the grasp of the imaginary
+volitions of imaginary beings has not tamed, but greatly stimulated and
+fertilised scientific curiosity as to the conditions of these
+operations. Why should it be otherwise in the aesthetic sphere? Why
+should all that part of our mental composition which responds to the
+beautiful and imaginative expression of real truths, be at once inflamed
+and satisfied by the thought that our whole lives, and all the movements
+of the universe, are the objects of the inexplicable caprice of Makers
+who are also Destroyers, and yet grow cold, apathetic, and unproductive,
+in the shadow of the belief that we can only know ourselves as part of
+the stupendous and inexorable succession of phenomenal conditions,
+moving according to laws that may be formulated positively, but not
+interpreted morally, to new destinies that are eternally unfathomable?
+Why should this conception of a coherent order, free from the arbitrary
+and presumptuous stamp of certain final causes, be less favourable,
+either to the ethical or the aesthetic side of human nature, than the
+older conception of the regulation of the course of the great series by
+a multitude of intrinsically meaningless and purposeless volitions? The
+alertness of our sensations for all sources of outer beauty remains
+unimpaired. The old and lovely attitude of devout service does not pass
+away to leave vacancy, but is transformed into a yet more devout
+obligation and service towards creatures that have only their own
+fellowship and mutual ministry to lean upon; and if we miss something of
+the ancient solace of special and personal protection, the loss is not
+unworthily made good by the growth of an imperial sense of participation
+in the common movement and equal destination of eternal forces.
+
+To have a mind penetrated with this spiritual persuasion, is to be in
+full possession of the highest strength that man can attain. It springs
+from a scientific and rounded interpretation of the facts of life, and
+is in a harmony, which freshly found truths only make more ample and
+elaborate, with all the conclusions of the intellect in every order. The
+active energies are not paralysed by the possibilities of enfeebling
+doubt, nor the reason drawn down and stultified by apprehension lest its
+methods should discredit a document, or its inferences clash with a
+dogma, or its light flash unseasonably on a mystery. There is none of
+the baleful distortion of hate, because evil and wrong-doing and
+darkness are acknowledged to be effects of causes, sums of conditions,
+terms in a series; they are to be brought to their end, or weakened and
+narrowed, by right action and endeavour, and this endeavour does not
+stagnate in antipathy, but concentrates itself in transfixing a cause.
+In no other condition of the spirit than this, in which firm
+acquiescence mingles with valorous effort, can a man be so sure of
+raising a calm gaze and an enduring brow to the cruelty of circumstance.
+The last appalling stroke of annihilation itself is measured with purest
+fortitude by one, whose religious contemplation dwells most habitually
+upon the sovereignty of obdurate laws in the vast revolving circle of
+physical forces, on the one hand, and, on the other, upon that moral
+order which the vision and pity of good men for their fellows, guiding
+the spontaneous energy of all men in strife with circumstance, have
+raised into a structure sublimer and more amazing than all the majesty
+of outer nature.
+
+In Byron's time the pretensions of the two possible answers to the great
+and eternally open questions of God, Immortality, and the like, were
+independent of that powerful host of inferences and analogies which the
+advance of physical discovery, and the establishment of a historical
+order, have since then brought into men's minds. The direct aggressions
+of old are for the most part abandoned, because it is felt that no
+fiercest polemical cannonading can drive away the impalpable darkness
+of error, but only the slow and silent presence of the dawning truth.
+_Cain_ remains, a stern and lofty statement of the case against that
+theological tradition which so outrages, where it has not already too
+deeply depraved, the conscience of civilised man. Yet every one who is
+competent to judge, must feel how infinitely more free the mind of the
+poet would have been, if besides this just and holy rage, most laudable
+in its kind, his intellectual equipment had been ample enough and
+precise enough to have taught him, that all the conceptions that races
+of men have ever held, either about themselves or their deities, have
+had a source in the permanently useful instincts of human nature, are
+capable of explanation, and of a historical justification; that is to
+say, of the kind of justification which is, in itself and of its own
+force, the most instant destruction to what has grown to be an
+anachronism.
+
+Byron's curiously marked predilection for dramatic composition, not
+merely for dramatic poems, as _Manfred_ or _Cain_, but for genuine
+plays, as _Marino Faliero_, _Werner_, the _Two Foscari_, was the only
+sign of his approach to the really positive spirit. Dramatic art, in its
+purest modern conception, is genuinely positive; that is, it is the
+presentation of action, character, and motive in a self-sufficing and
+self-evolving order. There are no final causes, and the first moving
+elements are taken for granted to begin with. The dramatist creates, but
+it is the climax of his work to appear to stand absolutely apart and
+unseen, while the play unfolds itself to the spectator, just as the
+greater drama of physical phenomena unfolds itself to the scientific
+observer, or as the order of recorded history extends in natural process
+under the eye of the political philosopher. Partly, no doubt, the
+attraction which dramatic form had for Byron is to be explained by that
+revolutionary thirst for action, of which we have already spoken; but
+partly also it may well have been due to Byron's rudimentary and
+unsuspected affinity with the more constructive and scientific side of
+the modern spirit.
+
+His idea of Nature, of which something has been already said, pointed in
+the same direction; for, although he made an abstraction and a goddess
+of her, and was in so far out of the right modern way of thinking about
+these outer forces, it is to be remembered, that, while this dominant
+conception of Nature as introduced by Rousseau and others into politics
+was most mischievous and destructive, its place and worth in poetry are
+very different; because here in the region of the imagination it had the
+effect, without any pernicious practical consequences, of giving shape
+and proportion to that great idea of _ensemble_ throughout the visible
+universe, which may be called the beginning and fountain of right
+knowledge. The conception of the relationship of the different parts and
+members of the vast cosmos was not accessible to Byron, as it is to a
+later generation, but his constant appeal in season and out of season to
+all the life and movement that surrounds man, implied and promoted the
+widest extension of consciousness of the wholeness and community of
+natural processes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was one very manifest evil consequence of the hold which this idea
+in its cruder shape, gained over Byron and his admirers. The vastness of
+the material universe, as they conceived and half adored it, entirely
+overshadowed the principle of moral duty and social obligation. The
+domestic sentiment, for example, almost disappears in those works which
+made Byron most popular, or else it only appears, to be banished with
+reproach. This is quite in accordance with the revolutionary spirit,
+which was in one of its most fundamental aspects a revolt on behalf of
+unconditioned individual rights, and against the family. If we accept
+what seems to be the fatal law of progress, that excess on one side is
+only moderated by a nearly corresponding excess of an opposite kind, the
+Byronic dissolution of domestic feeling was not entirely without
+justification. There is probably no uglier growth of time than that mean
+and poor form of domesticity, which has always been too apt to fascinate
+the English imagination, ever since the last great effort of the
+Rebellion, and which rose to the climax of its popularity when George
+III. won all hearts by living like a farmer. Instead of the fierce light
+beating about a throne, it played lambently upon a sty. And the nation
+who admired, imitated. When the Regent came, and with him that coarse
+profligacy which has alternated with cloudy insipidity in the annals of
+the line, the honest part of the world, out of antipathy to the son,
+was driven even further into domestic sentimentality of a greasy kind,
+than it had gone from affection for the sire.
+
+Byron helped to clear the air of this. His fire, his lofty spaciousness
+of outlook, his spirited interest in great national causes, his romance,
+and the passion both of his animosity and his sympathy, acted for a
+while like an electric current, and every one within his influence
+became ashamed to barter the large heritage of manhood, with its many
+realms and illimitable interests, for the sordid ease of the hearth and
+the good word of the unworthy. He fills men with thoughts that shake
+down the unlovely temple of comfort. This was good, to force whoever was
+not already too far sunk into the mire, high up to the larger
+atmosphere, whence they could see how minute an atom is man, how
+infinite and blind and pitiless the might that encompasses his little
+life. Many feeble spirits ran back homewards from the horrid solitudes
+and abysses of _Manfred_, and the moral terrors of _Cain_, and even the
+despair of _Harold_, and, burying themselves in warm domestic places,
+were comforted by the familiar restoratives and appliances. Firmer souls
+were not only exhilarated, but intoxicated by the potent and
+unaccustomed air. They went too far. They made war on the family, and
+the idea of it. Everything human was mischievously dwarfed, and the
+difference between right and wrong, between gratification of appetite
+and its control for virtue's sake, between the acceptance and the
+evasion of clear obligation, all became invisible or of no account in
+the new light. That constancy and permanence, of which the family is the
+type, and which is the first condition alike of the stability and
+progress of society, was obliterated from thought. As if the wonders
+that have been wrought by this regulated constancy of the feeling of man
+for man in transforming human life were not far more transcendently
+exalting than the contemplation of those glories of brute nature, which
+are barbaric in comparison.
+
+It would be unjust not to admit that there are abundant passages in his
+poems of too manifest depth and sincerity of feeling, for us to suppose
+that Byron himself was dead to the beauty of domestic sentiment. The
+united tenderness and dignity of Faliero's words to Angiolina, before he
+goes to the meeting of the conspirators, would, if there were nothing
+else, be enough to show how rightly in his better moods the poet
+appreciated the conditions of the family. Unfortunately the better moods
+were not fixed, and we had _Don Juan_, where the wit and colour and
+power served to make an anti-social and licentious sentiment attractive
+to puny creatures, who were thankful to have their lasciviousness so
+gaily adorned. As for Great Britain, she deserved _Don Juan_. A nation,
+whose disrespect for all ideas and aspirations that cannot be supported
+by a text, nor circulated by a religious tract society, was systematic,
+and where consequently the understanding is least protected against
+sensual sophisms, received no more than a just chastisement in 'the
+literature of Satan.' Here again, in the licence of this literature, we
+see the finger of the Revolution, and of that egoism which makes the
+passions of the individual his own law. Let us condemn and pass on,
+homily undelivered. If Byron injured the domestic idea on this side, let
+us not fail to observe how vastly he elevated it on others, and how,
+above all, he pointed to the idea above and beyond it, in whose light
+only can that be worthy, the idea of a country and a public cause. A man
+may be sure that the comfort of the hearth has usurped too high a place,
+when he can read without response the lines declaring that domestic ties
+must yield in 'those who are called to the highest destinies, which
+purify corrupted commonwealths.'
+
+  We must forget all feelings save the one--
+  We must resign all passions save our purpose--
+  We must behold no object save our country--
+  And only look on death as beautiful,
+  So that the sacrifice ascend to heaven
+  And draw down freedom on her evermore.
+    _Calendaro._        But if we fail----
+    _I. Bertuccio._         They never fail who die
+  In a great cause: the block may soak their gore;
+  Their heads may sodden in the sun; their limbs
+  Be strung to city gates and castle walls--
+  But still their spirit walks abroad. Though years
+  Elapse, and others share as dark a doom,
+  They but augment the deep and sweeping thoughts
+  Which overpower all others, and conduct
+  The world at last to freedom. What were we
+  If Brutus had not lived? He died in giving
+  Rome liberty, but left a deathless lesson--
+  A name which is a virtue, and a soul
+  Which multiplies itself throughout all time,
+  When wicked men wax mighty, and a state
+  Turns servile.
+
+And the man who wrote this was worthy to play an even nobler part than
+the one he had thus nobly described; for it was not many years after,
+that Byron left all and laid down his life for the emancipation of a
+strange land, and 'Greece and Italy wept for his death, as it had been
+that of the noblest of their own sons.' Detractors have done their best
+to pare away the merit of this act of self-renunciation by attributing
+it to despair. That contemporaries of their own humour had done their
+best to make his life a load to him is true, yet to this talk of despair
+we may reply in the poet's own words:
+
+              When we know
+  All that can come, and how to meet it, our
+  Resolves, if firm, may merit a more noble
+  Word than this, to give it utterance.
+
+There was an estimate of the value and purpose of a human life, which
+our Age of Comfort may fruitfully ponder.
+
+To fix upon violent will and incessant craving for movement as the mark
+of a poet, whose contemporaries adored him for what they took to be the
+musing sweetness of his melancholy, may seem a critical perversity.
+There is, however, a momentous difference between that melancholy, which
+is as the mere shadow projected by a man's spiritual form, and that
+other melancholy, which itself is the reality and substance of a
+character; between the soul to whom dejection brings graceful relief
+after labour and effort, and the soul which by irresistible habit and
+constitution dwells ever in Golgotha. This deep and penetrating
+subjective melancholy had no possession of Byron. His character was
+essentially objective, stimulated by outward circumstance, moving to
+outward harmonies, seeking colour and image and purpose from without.
+Hence there is inevitably a certain liveliness and animation, even when
+he is in the depths. We feel that we are watching clouds sweep
+majestically across the sky, and, even when they are darkest, blue
+interspaces are not far off. Contrast the moodiest parts of _Childe
+Harold_ or of _Cain_ with Novalis's _Night Hymns_. Byron's gloom is a
+mere elegance in comparison. The one pipes to us with a graceful
+despondency on the edge of the gulf, while the other carries us actually
+down into the black profound, with no rebellious cry, nor shriek of woe,
+but sombrely awaiting the deliverance of death, with soul absorbed and
+consumed by weariness. Let the reader mark the note of mourning struck
+in the opening stanzas, for instance, of Novalis's _Longing after
+Death_, their simplicity, homeliness, transparent sincerity, and then
+turn to any of the familiar passages where Byron meditates on the good
+things which the end brings to men. How artificial he seems, and
+unseasonably ornate, and how conscious of his public. In the first, we
+sit sadly on the ground in some veritable Place of a Skull; in the
+second, we assist at tragical distress after the manner of the Italian
+opera. We should be disposed to call the first a peculiarly German
+quality, until we remember Pascal. With Novalis, or with Pascal, as with
+all those whom character, or the outer fates, or the two together, have
+drawn to dwell in the valley of the shadow, gloom and despondency are
+the very stuff of their thoughts. Material energy could have done
+nothing for them. Their nerves and sinews were too nearly cut asunder.
+To know the quality of Byron's melancholy, and to recognise how little
+it was of the essence of his character, we have only to consider how far
+removed he was from this condition. In other words, in spite of morbid
+manifestations of one sort and another, he always preserved a salutary
+and vivid sympathy for action, and a marked capacity for it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was the same impetuous and indomitable spirit of effort which moved
+Byron to his last heroic exploit, that made the poetry inspired by it so
+powerful in Europe, from the deadly days of the Holy Alliance onwards.
+Cynical and misanthropical as he has been called, as though that were
+his sum and substance, he yet never ceased to glorify human freedom, in
+tones that stirred the hearts of men and quickened their hope and upheld
+their daring, as with the voice of some heavenly trumpet. You may, if
+you choose, find the splendour of the stanzas in the Fourth Canto on the
+Bourbon restoration, on Cromwell, and Washington, a theatrical
+splendour. But for all that, they touched the noblest parts of men. They
+are alive with an exalted and magnanimous generosity, the one high
+virtue which can never fail to touch a multitude. Subtlety may miss
+them, graces may miss them, and reason may fly over their heads, but the
+words of a generous humanity on the lips of poet or chief have never
+failed to kindle divine music in their breasts. The critic may censure,
+and culture may wave a disdainful hand. As has been said, all such words
+'are open to criticism, and they are all above it.' The magic still
+works. A mysterious and potent word from the gods has gone abroad over
+the face of the earth.
+
+This larger influence was not impaired by Byron's ethical poverty. The
+latter was an inevitable consequence of his defective discipline. The
+triteness of his moral climax is occasionally startling. When
+Sardanapalus, for instance, sees Zarina torn from him, and is stricken
+with profound anguish at the pain with which he has filled her life, he
+winds up with such a platitude as this:
+
+                            To what gulfs
+  A single deviation from the track
+  Of human duties leaves even those who claim
+  The homage of mankind as their born due!
+
+The baldest writer of hymns might work up passion enough for a
+consummation like this. Once more, Byron was insufficiently furnished
+with positive intellectual ideas, and for want of these his most
+exalted words were constantly left sterile of definite and pointed
+outcome.
+
+Byron's passionate feeling for mankind included the long succession of
+generations, that stretch back into the past and lie far on in the misty
+distances of the future. No poet has had a more sublime sense of the
+infinite melancholy of history; indeed, we hardly feel how great a poet
+Byron was, until we have read him at Venice, at Florence, and above all
+in that overpowering scene where the 'lone mother of dead empires'
+broods like a mysterious haunting spirit among the columns and arches
+and wrecked fabrics of Rome. No one has expressed with such amplitude
+the sentiment that in a hundred sacred spots of the earth has
+
+                        Fill'd up
+  As 'twere, anew, the gaps of centuries;
+  Leaving that beautiful which still was so,
+  And making that which was not; till the place
+  Became religious, and the heart ran o'er
+  With silent worship of the great of old--
+  The dead, but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule
+  Our spirits from their urns.
+
+Only he stands aright, who from his little point of present possession
+ever meditates on the far-reaching lines, which pass through his point
+from one interminable star-light distance to another. Neither the stoic
+pagan, nor the disciple of the creed which has some of the peculiar
+weakness of stoicism and not all its peculiar strength, could find
+Manfred's latest word untrue to himself:
+
+  The mind, which is immortal, makes itself
+  Requital for its good or evil thoughts--
+  Is its own origin of ill and end,
+  And its own place and time: its innate sense,
+  When stripped of this mortality, derives
+  No colour from the fleeting things without:
+  But is absorbed in sufferance of joy,
+  Born from the knowledge of its own desert.
+
+It is only when a man subordinates this absorption in individual
+sufferance and joy to the thought that his life is a trust for humanity,
+that he is sure of making it anything other than 'rain fallen on the
+sand.' In the last great episode of his own career Byron was as lofty as
+the noblest side of his creed. The historic feeling for the unseen
+benefactors of old time was matched by vehemence of sympathy with the
+struggles for liberation of his own day. And for this, history will not
+forget him. Though he may have no place in our own Minster, he assuredly
+belongs to the band of far-shining men, of whom Pericles declared the
+whole world to be the tomb.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I, by John Morley
+
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