munity of nature amongst all the dwellers in this world? Verily there is a soul in everything; in the universe is a soul: be the existence what it will, unhewn or rational, defined or vague, ever beyond its sensible form shines a secret essence and something divine, which we catch sight of by sublime illuminations, never reaching or penetrating it. It is this presentiment and yearning which raises all modern poetry,-now in Christian meditations, as with Campbell and Wordsworth, now in pagan visions, as with Keats and Shelley. They hear the great heart of nature beat; they would reach it; they assay all spiritual and sensible approaches, through Judea and through Greece, by consecrated dogmas and by proscribed dogmas. In this splendid and senseless effort the greatest are exhausted and die. Their poetry, which they drag with them over these sublime tracks, is rent thereby. One alone, Byron, attains the summit; and of all these grand poetic draperies, which float like standards, and seem to summon men to the conquest of supreme truth, we see now but tatters scattered by the wayside. Yet they did their work. Under their multiplied efforts, and by their involuntary concert, the idea of the beautiful is changed, and other ideas change by contagion. Conservatives contribute to it like revolutionaries, and the new spirit breathes through the poems which bless and those which curse Church and State. We learn from Wordsworth and Byron, by profound Protestantism1 and confirmed scepticism, that in this sacred cant-defended establishment there is matter for reform or for revolt; that we may discover moral merits other than those which the law tickets and opinion accepts; that beyond conventional confessions there are truths; that beyond respected conditions there are greatnesses; that beyond regular positions there are virtues; that greatness is in the heart and the genius; and all the rest, actions and beliefs, are subaltern. We have just seen that beyond literary conventionalities there is a poetry, and consequently we are disposed to feel that beyond religious dogmas there may be a faith, and beyond social institutions a justice. The old edifice totters, and the Revolution enters, not by a sudden inundation, as in France, but by slow infiltration. The wall built up against it by public intolerance cracks and opens the war waged against Jacobinism, republican and imperial, ends in victory; and henceforth we may regard opposing ideas, not as opposing enemies, but as ideas. We regard them, and, accommodating them to the different countries, we import them. Catholics are enfranchised, rotten boroughs abolished, the electoral 1 Our life is turned Out of her course, whenever man is made An offering, a sacrifice, a tool, Or implement, a passive thing employed As a brute mean.'-Wordsworth, The Excursion. franchise lowered; unjust taxes, which kept up the price of corn, were repealed; ecclesiastical tithes changed into rent charges; the terrible laws protecting property were modified, the incidence of taxation brought more and more on the rich classes; old institutions, formerly established for the advantage of a race, and in this race of a class, are only maintained when for the advantage of all classes; privileges become functions; and in this triumph of the middle class, which shapes opinion and assumes the ascendency, the aristocracy, passing from sinecures to services, seems now legitimate only as a national nursery, kept up to furnish public men. At the same time narrow orthodoxy is enlarged. Zoology, astronomy, geology, botany, anthropology, all the sciences of observation, so much cultivated and so popular, forcibly introduce their dissolvent discoveries. Criticism comes in from Germany, re-handles the Bible, re-writes the history of dogma, attacks dogma itself. Meanwhile poor Scotch philosophy is dried Amidst the agitations of sects, endeavouring to transform each other, and the rising Unitarianism, we hear at the gates of the sacred ark the Continental philosophy roaring like a wave. Now already has it encroached upon literature: for fifty years all great writers have plunged into it,-Sidney Smith, by his sarcasms against the numbness of the clergy and the oppression of the Catholics; Arnold, by his protests against the religious monopoly of the clergy and the ecclesiastical monopoly of the Anglicans; Macaulay, by his history and panegyric of the liberal revolution; Thackeray, by attacking the nobles, in the interests of the middle class; Dickens, by attacking dignitaries and wealthy men, in the interests of the lowly and poor; Currer Bell and Mrs. Browning, by defending the initiative and independence of women; Stanley and Jowett, by introducing the German exegesis, and by fixing biblical criticism; Carlyle, by importing German metaphysics in an English form; Stuart Mill, by importing French positivism in an English form; Tennyson himself, by extending over the beauties of all lands and all ages the protection of his amiable dilettantism and his poetical sympathies,—each according to his pattern and his position, with various profundity; all restrained within reach of the shore by their practical prejudices, all strengthened against falling by their moral prejudices; all bent, some with more of eagerness, others with more of distrust, in welcoming or giving entrance to the growing tide of modern democracy and philosophy in constitution and church, without doing damage, and gradually, so as to destroy nothing, and to make everything bear fruit. cess CHAPTER II. Lord Byron. I. The Man-Family-Impassioned character-Precocious loves-Life of ex-Combative character-Revolt against opinion-English Bards and Scotch Reviewers-Bravado and rashness-Marriage-Extravagance of adverse opinion-Departure-Political life in Italy-Sorrows and violence. II. The poet-Reasons for writing-Manner of writing-How his poetry is personal-Classical taste-How this gift served him-Childe Harold— The hero-The scenery-The style. III. His short poems-Oratorical manner-Melodramatic effects-Truth of his descriptions of scenery-Sincerity of sentiments-Pictures of sad and extreme emotions-Dominant idea of death and despair-Mazeppa, The Prisoner of Chillon, The Siege of Corinth, The Corsair, Lara-Analogy of this conception with the Edda and Shakspeare. IV. Manfred-Comparison of Manfred and Faust-Conception of legend and life in Goethe-Symbolical and philosophical character of Faust Wherein Byron is inferior to Goethe-Wherein he is superior-Conception of character and action in Byron-Dramatic character of his poemContrast between the universal and the personal poet. V. Scandal in England-Constraint and hypocrisy of manners-How and by what law moral conceptions vary-Life and morals of the south-Beppo -Don Juan-Transformation of Byron's talent and style-Picture of sensuous beauty and happiness-Haidee-How he combats British cant -Human hypocrisy-His idea of man-Of woman-Donna Julia-The shipwreck-The capture of Ismail-Naturalness and variety of his style -Excess and wearing out of his poetic vein-His drama-Departure for Greece, and death. VI. Position of Byron in his age-Disease of the age-Divine conceptions of happiness and life-The conception of such happiness by literature-By the sciences-Future stability of reason-Modern conception of nature. I I. HAVE reserved for the last the greatest and most English of these artists; he is so great and so English that from him alone we shall learn more truths of his country and of his age than from all the rest together. His ideas were banned during his life; it has been attempted to depreciate his genius since his death. To this day English critics are unjust to him. He fought all his life against the society from which he came; and during his life, as after his death, he suffered the pain of the resentment which he provoked, and the repugnance to which he gave rise. A foreign critic may be more impartial, and freely praise the powerful hand whose blows he has not felt. If ever there was a violent and madly sensitive soul, but incapable of being otherwise; ever agitated, but in an enclosure without issue; predisposed to poetry by its innate fire, but limited by its natural barriers to a single kind of poetry,-it was Byron's. This promptitude to extreme emotions was with him a family legacy, and the result of education. His great-uncle, a sort of raving and misanthropical maniac, had slain in a tavern brawl, by candlelight, Mr. Chaworth, his relative, and had been tried before the House of Lords. His father, a brutal roysterer, had eloped with the wife of Lord Carmarthen, ruined and ill-treated Miss Gordon, his second wife; and, after living like a madman and dishonest fellow, had gone, with the last of the family property, to die abroad. His mother, in her moments of fury, would tear to pieces her dresses and her bonnets. When her wretched husband died she almost lost her reason, and her cries were heard in the street. What a childhood Byron passed in the care of this lioness;' in what storms of insults, interspersed with softer moods, he himself lived, just as passionate and more bitter, it would take a long story to tell. She ran after him, called him a 'lame brat,' shouted at him, and threw fire-shovel and tongs at his head. He held his tongue, bowed, and none the less felt the outrage. One day, when he was 'in one of his silent rages,' they had to take out of his hand a knife which he had taken from the table, and which he was already raising to his throat. Another time the quarrel was so terrible, that son and mother, each privately, went to the apothecary's, inquiring anxiously whether the other had been to purchase poison, and cautioning the vendor of drugs not to attend to such an application, if made.' When he went to school, his friendships were passions.' Many years afterwards, he never heard the name of Lord Clare, one of his old schoolfellows, pronounced, without a beating of the heart.'2 A score of times he got himself into trouble for his friends, offering them his time, his pen, his purse. One day, at Harrow, a big boy claimed the right to fag his friend, little Peel, and finding him refractory, gave him a beating on the inner fleshy side of his arm, which he had twisted round to make it more sensitive. Byron, too small to fight the rascal, came up to him, 'blushing with rage,' tears in his eyes, and asked with a trembling voice how many stripes he meant to inflict. 'Why,' returned the executioner, 'you little rascal, what is that to you?' 'Because, if you please,' said Byron, holding out his arm, 'I would take half.' 93 He never met an object of distress without affording him succour. Later, in Italy, he gave away a thousand pounds out of every four thousand he spent. The sources of life in this heart were too full, 1 1 Byron's Works, ed. Moore, 17 vols. 1832; Life, i. 102. 3 Ibid. i. 69. 2 Ibid. i. 63. 4 Ibid. 137. and flooded forth good and evil impetuously, at the least shock. Like Dante, at the age of eight he fell in love with a child named Mary Duff. ... 'How very odd that I should have been so utterly, devotedly fond of that girl, at an age when I could neither feel passion, nor know the meaning of the word! ... I recollect all our caresses, my restlessness, my sleeplessness. My misery, my love for that girl were so violent, that I sometimes doubt if I have ever been really attached since. When I heard of her being married, . . . it nearly threw me into convulsions.'1 'My passion had its usual effects upon me. I could not sleep-I could not eat-I could not rest; and although I had reason to know that she loved me, it was the texture of my life to think of the time which must elapse before we could meet again, being usually about twelve hours of separation. But I was a fool then, and am not much wiser now. 12 At twelve years he fell in love with his cousin, Margaret Parker. He never was wiser. Hard reading at school; vehement exercise, later on, at Cambridge, Newstead, and London; prolonged watches, debauches, long fasts, a destructive way of living, he rushed to the extreme of every taste and every excess. As he was a dandy, and one of the most brilliant, he nearly let himself die of hunger for fear of becoming fat, then drank and ate greedily during his nights of recklessness. Moore said: 'Lord Byron, for the last two days, had done nothing towards sustenance beyond eating a few biscuits and (to appease appetite) chewing mastic. . . . He confined himself to lobsters, and of these finished two or three to his own share,interposing, sometimes, a small liqueur-gláss of strong white brandy, sometimes a tumbler of very hot water, and then pure brandy again, to the amount of near half a dozen small glasses of the latter. . . . After this we had clareț, of which having despatched two bottles between us, at about four o'clock in the morning we parted.' 3 Another day we find in Byron's journal the following words: 'Yesterday, dined tête-à-tête at the "Cocoa" with Scrope Davies-sat from six till midnight-drank between us one bottle of champagne and six of claret, neither of which wines ever affect me.' + Later, at Venice: 'I have hardly had a wink of sleep this week past. I have had some curious masking adventures this carnival. . . . I will work the mine of my youth to the last vein of the ore, and then-good night. I have lived, and am content.' At this rate the organs wear out, and intervals of temperance are not sufficient to repair them. The stomach does not continue to act, the nerves get out of order, and the soul undermines the body, and the body the soul. I always wake in actual despair and despondency, in all respects, even of that which pleased me over-night. In England, five years ago, I had the same 1 Byron's Works, Life, i. 26. 2 Ibid. i. 53. Ibid. iii. 83. Ibid. iv. 81; Letter to Moore, Feb. 12, 1818. |