Art. XI.—Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: with Notices of his Life. By Thomas Moore, Esq. 2 vols. 4to. London: 1830.
We have read this book with the greatest pleasure. Considered merely as a composition, it deserves to be classed among the best specimens of English prose which our age has produced. It contains, indeed, no single passage equal to two or three, which we could select from the Life of Sheridan. But, as a whole, it is immeasurably superior to that work. The style is agreeable, clear, and manly; and, when it rises into eloquence, rises without effort or ostentation. Nor is the matter inferior to the manner.
It would be difficult to name a book which exhibits more of kindness, fairness,
and modesty. It has evidently been written, not for the purpose of showing, what, however, it
often shows, how well its author can write; but for the purpose of vindicating, as far as truth
will permit, the memory of a celebrated man who can no longer vindicate himself. Mr Moore never thrusts himself between Lord Byron and the public. With the strongest temptations to egotism, he has
said no more about himself than the subject absolutely required. A great part—indeed the
greater part of these volumes, consists of extracts from the Letters and Journals of
Lord Byron; and it is difficult to speak too highly of the skill which
has been shown in the selection and arrangement. We will not say that we have not occasionally
remarked in these two large quartos an anecdote which should have been omitted, a letter which
should have been suppressed, a name which should have been concealed by asterisks; or asterisks
which do not answer the purpose of concealing the name. But it is impossible, on a general
survey, to deny that
| Moore's Life of Lord Byron. | 545 |
The extracts from the journals and correspondence of Lord Byron, are in the highest degree valuable—not merely on account of the information which they contain respecting the distinguished man by whom they were written, but on account, also, of their rare merit as compositions. The Letters—at least those which were sent from Italy—are among the best in our language. They are less affected than those of Pope and Walpole;—they have more matter in them than those of Cowper. Knowing that many of them were not written merely for the person to whom they were directed, but were general epistles, meant to be read by a large circle, we expected to find them clever and spirited, but deficient in ease. We looked with vigilance for instances of stiffness in the language, and awkwardness in the transitions. We have been agreeably disappointed; and we must confess, that if the epistolary style of Lord Byron was artificial, it was a rare and admirable instance of that highest art, which cannot be distinguished from nature.
Of the deep and painful interest which this book excites, no abstract can give a just notion. So sad and dark a story is scarcely to be found in any work of fiction; and we are little disposed to envy the moralist who can read it without being softened.
The pretty fable by which the Duchess of
Orleans illustrates the character of her son the
regent, might, with little change, be applied to Byron. All the fairies, save one, had been bidden to his cradle. All the
gossips had been profuse of their gifts. One had bestowed nobility, another genius, a third
beauty. The malignant elf who had been uninvited, came last, and, unable to reverse what her
sisters had done for their favourite, had mixed up a curse with every blessing. In the rank of
Lord Byron, in his understanding, in his character, in his very
person, there was a strange union of opposite extremes. He was born to all that men covet and
admire. But in every one of those eminent advantages which he possessed over others, there was
mingled something of misery and debasement. He was sprung from a house, ancient indeed and
noble, but degraded and impoverished by a series of crimes and follies, which had attained a
scandalous publicity. The kinsman whom he suc-
| 546 | Moore's Life of Lord Byron. |
Every thing that could stimulate, and every thing that could gratify the
strongest propensities of our nature—the gaze of a hundred drawingrooms, the acclamations
of the whole nation, the applause of applauded men, the love of the loveliest women—all
this world, and all the glory of it, were at once offered to a young man to whom nature had
given violent passions, and whom education had never taught to control them. He lived as many
men live who have no similar excuses to plead for their faults. But his countrymen and his
countrywomen would love him and admire him. They were resolved to see in his excesses only the
flash and outbreak of that same fiery mind which glowed in his poetry. He attacked religion;
yet in religious circles his name was mentioned with fondness, and in many religious
publications his works were censured with singular tenderness. He lampooned the prince regent; yet he could not alienate the
| Moore's Life of Lord Byron. | 547 |
Then came the reaction. Society, capricious in its indignation as it had been capricious in its fondness, flew into a rage with its froward and petted darling. He had been worshipped with an irrational idolatry. He was persecuted with an irrational fury. Much has been written about those unhappy domestic occurrences which decided the fate of his life. Yet nothing is, nothing ever was positively known to the public, but this,—that he quarrelled with his lady, and that she refused to live with him. There have been hints in abundance, and shrugs and shakings of the head, and ‘Well, well, we know,’ and ‘We could an if we would,’ and ‘If we list to speak,’ and ‘There be that might an they list.’ But we are not aware that there is before the world, substantiated by credible, or even by tangible evidence, a single fact indicating that Lord Byron was more to blame than any other man who is on bad terms with his wife. The professional men whom Lady Byron consulted, were undoubtedly of opinion that she ought not to live with her husband. But it is to be remembered that they formed that opinion without hearing both sides. We do not say, we do not mean to insinuate, that Lady Byron was in any respect to blame. We think that those who condemn her on the evidence which is now before the public, are as rash as those who condemn her husband. We will not pronounce any judgment; we cannot, even in our own minds, form any judgment on a transaction which is so imperfectly known to us. It would have been well if, at the time of the separation, all those who knew as little about the matter then as we know about it now, had shown that forbearance, which, under such circumstances, is but common justice.
We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical
fits of morality. In general, elopements, divorces, and family quarrels, pass with little
notice. We read the scandal, talk about it for a day, and forget it. But once in six or seven
years, our virtue becomes outrageous. We cannot suffer the laws of religion and decency to be
violated. We must make a stand against vice. We must teach libertines, that the English people
appreciate the importance of domestic ties. Accordingly, some unfortunate man, in no respect
more depraved than hundreds whose offences have been treated with lenity, is singled out as an
expiatory sacrifice. If he has children, they are to be taken from him. If he has a profession,
he is to be driven from it. He is cut by the higher orders, and hissed by the lower. He is, in
truth, a sort of whipping-boy, by whose
| 548 | Moore's Life of Lord Byron. |
It is clear that those vices which destroy domestic happiness, ought to be as much as possible repressed. It is equally clear that they cannot be repressed by penal legislation. It is therefore right and desirable that public opinion should be directed against them. But it should be directed against them uniformly, steadily, and temperately, not by sudden fits and starts. There should be one weight and one measure. Decimation is always an objectionable mode of punishment. It is the resource of judges too indolent and hasty to investigate facts, and to discriminate nicely between shades of guilt. It is an irrational practice, even when adopted by military tribunals. When adopted by the tribunal of public opinion, it is infinitely more irrational. It is good that a certain portion of disgrace should constantly attend on certain bad actions. But it is not good that the offenders merely have to stand the risks of a lottery of infamy; that ninety-nine out of every hundred should escape; and that the hundredth, perhaps the most innocent of the hundred, should pay for all. We remember to have seen a mob assembled in Lincoln’s Inn to hoot a gentleman, against whom the most oppressive proceeding known to the English law was then in progress. He was hooted because he had been an indifferent and unfaithful husband, as if some of the most popular men of the age—Lord Nelson, for example—had not been indifferent and unfaithful husbands. We remember a still stronger case. Will posterity believe, that in an age in which men, whose gallantries were universally known, and had been legally proved, filled some of the highest offices in the state, and in the army, presided at the meetings of religious and benevolent institutions—were the delight of every society, and the favourites of the multitude—a crowd of moralists went to the theatre, in order to pelt a poor actor for disturbing the conjugal felicity of an alderman? What there was in the circumstances, either of the offender, or of the sufferer, to vindicate the zeal of the audience, we could never conceive. It has never been supposed that the situation of an actor is peculiarly favourable to the rigid virtues, or that an alderman enjoys any special immunity from injuries such as that which on this occasion roused the anger of the public. But such is the justice of mankind.
| Moore's Life of Lord Byron. | 549 |
In these cases, the punishment was excessive; but the offence was known and proved. The case of Lord Byron was harder. True Jedwood justice was dealt out to him. First came the execution, then the investigation, and last of all, or rather not at all, the accusation. The public, without knowing any thing whatever about the transactions in his family, flew into a violent passion with him, and proceeded to invent stories which might justify its anger. Ten or twenty different accounts of the separation, inconsistent with each other, with themselves, and with common sense, circulated at the same time. What evidence there might be for any one of these, the virtuous people who repeated them neither knew nor cared. For in fact these stories were not the causes, but the effects of the public indignation. They resembled those loathsome slanders which Goldsmith, and other abject libellers of the same class, were in the habit of publishing about Bonaparte,—how he poisoned a girl with arsenic when he was at the military school,—how he hired a grenadier to shoot Dessaix at Marengo,—how he filled St Cloud with all the pollutions of Capreæ. There was a time when anecdotes like these obtained some credence from persons, who, hating the French emperor, without knowing why, were eager to believe any thing which might justify their hatred. Lord Byron fared in the same way. His countrymen were in a bad humour with him. His writings and his character had lost the charm of novelty. He had been guilty of the offence which, of all offences, is punished most severely; he had been over-praised; he had excited too warm an interest; and the public, with its usual justice, chastised him for its own folly. The attachments of the multitude bear no small resemblance to those of the wanton enchantress in the Arabian Tales, who, when the forty days of her fondness were over, was not content with dismissing her lovers, but condemned them to expiate, in loathsome shapes, and under severe punishments, the crime of having once pleased her too well.
The obloquy which Byron had to endure, was such as might well have shaken a more constant mind. The newspapers were filled with lampoons. The theatres shook with execrations. He was excluded from circles where he had lately been the observed of all observers. All those creeping things that riot in the decay of nobler natures, hastened to their repast; and they were right;—they did after their kind. It is not every day that the savage envy of aspiring dunces is gratified by the agonies of such a spirit, and the degradation of such a name.
The unhappy man left his country for ever. The howl of
| 550 | Moore's Life of Lord Byron. |
He had fixed his home on the shores of the Adriatic, in the most picturesque and interesting of cities, beneath the brightest of skies, and by the brightest of seas. Censoriousness was not the vice of the neighbours whom he had chosen. They were a race corrupted by a bad government and a bad religion; long renowned for skill in the arts of voluptuousness, and tolerant of all the caprices of sensuality. From the public opinion of the country of his adoption, he had nothing to dread. With the public opinion of the country of his birth, he was at open war. He plunged into wild and desperate excesses, ennobled by no generous or tender sentiment. From his Venetian haram he sent forth volume after volume, full of eloquence, of wit, of pathos, of ribaldry, and of bitter disdain. His health sank under the effects of his intemperance. His hair turned grey. His food ceased to nourish him. A hectic fever withered him up. It seemed that his body and mind were about to perish together.
From this wretched degradation he was in some measure rescued by an attachment, culpable indeed, yet such as, judged by the
standard of morality established in the country where he lived, might be called virtuous. But
an imagination polluted by vice, a temper embittered by misfortune, and a frame habituated to
the fatal excitement of intoxication, prevented him from fully enjoying the happiness which he
might have derived from the purest and most tranquil of his many attachments. Midnight draughts
of ardent spirits and Rhenish wines had begun to work the ruin of his fine intellect. His verse
lost much of the energy and condensation which had distinguished it. But he would not resign,
without a struggle, the empire which he had exercised over the men of his generation. A new
dream of ambition arose before him—to be the centre of a literary party; the great mover
of an intellectual revolution;—to guide the public mind of England from his Italian
retreat, as Voltaire had guided the public mind of
France from the villa of Ferney. With this hope, as it should seem, he established The Liberal. But, powerfully
as he had affected the imaginations of his contemporaries, he mistook his own powers, if he
hoped to direct their
| Moore's Life of Lord Byron. | 551 |
A nation, once the first among the nations, pre-eminent in knowledge, pre-eminent in military glory, the cradle of philosophy, of eloquence, and of the fine arts, had been for ages bowed down under a cruel yoke. All the vices which tyranny generates—the abject vices which it generates in those who submit to it—the ferocious vices which it generates in those who struggle against it—had deformed the character of that miserable race. The valour which had won the great battle of human civilisation,—which had saved Europe, and subjugated Asia, lingered only among pirates and robbers. The ingenuity, once so conspicuously displayed in every department of physical and moral science, had been depraved into a timid and servile cunning. On a sudden this degraded people had risen on their oppressors. Discountenanced or betrayed by the surrounding potentates, they had found in themselves something of that which might well supply the place of all foreign assistance,—something of the energy of their fathers.
As a man of letters, Lord Byron could not but be interested in the event of this contest. His political opinions, though, like all his opinions, unsettled, leaned strongly towards the side of liberty. He had assisted the Italian insurgents with his purse; and if their struggle against the Austrian government had been prolonged, would probably have assisted them with his sword. But to Greece he was attached by peculiar ties. He had, when young, resided in that country. Much of his most splendid and popular poetry had been inspired by its scenery and by its history. Sick of inaction,—degraded in his own eyes by his private vices, and by his literary failures,—pining for untried excitement and honourable distinction,—he carried his exhausted body and his wounded spirit to the Grecian camp.
His conduct in his new situation showed so much vigour and good sense as to justify us in believing, that, if his life had been prolonged, he might have distinguished himself as a soldier and a politician. But pleasure and sorrow had done the work of seventy years upon his delicate frame. The hand of death was on him: he knew it; and the only wish which he uttered was that he might die sword in hand.
This was denied to him. Anxiety, exertion, exposure, and
| 552 | Moore's Life of Lord Byron. |
We cannot even now retrace those events without feeling something of what was felt by the nation, when it was first known that the grave had closed over so much sorrow and so much glory;—something of what was felt by those who saw the hearse, with its long train of coaches, turn slowly northward, leaving behind it that cemetery, which had been consecrated by the dust of so many great poets, but of which the doors were closed against all that remained of Byron. We well remember that, on that day, rigid moralists could not refrain from weeping for one so young, so illustrious, so unhappy, gifted with such rare gifts, and tried by such strong temptations. It is unnecessary to make any reflections. The history carries its moral with it. Our age has indeed been fruitful of warnings to the eminent, and of consolations to the obscure. Two men have died within our recollection, who, at a time of life at which few people have completed their education, had raised themselves, each in his own department, to the height of glory. One of them died at Longwood, the other at Missolonghi.
It is always difficult to separate the literary character of a man who lives in our own time from his personal character. It is peculiarly difficult to make this separation in the case of Lord Byron. For it is scarcely too much to say, that Lord Byron never wrote without some reference, direct or indirect, to himself. The interest excited by the events of his life, mingles itself in our minds, and probably in the minds of almost all our readers, with the interest which properly belongs to his works. A generation must pass away before it will be possible to form a fair judgment of his books, considered merely as books. At present they are not only books, but relics. We will, however, venture, though with unfeigned diffidence, to offer some desultory remarks on his poetry.
His lot was cast in the time of a great literary revolution. That poetical dynasty which had dethroned the successors of Shakspeare and Spenser was, in its turn, dethroned by a race who represented themselves as heirs of the ancient line, so long dispossessed by usurpers. The real nature of this revolution has not, we think, been comprehended by the great majority of those who concurred in it.
| Moore's Life of Lord Byron. | 553 |
If this question were proposed—wherein especially does the poetry of our times differ from that of the last century?—ninety-nine persons out of a hundred would answer that the poetry of the last century was correct, but cold and mechanical, and that the poetry of our time, though wild and irregular, presented far more vivid images, and excited the passions far more strongly than that of Parnell, of Addison, or of Pope. In the same manner we constantly hear it said, that the poets of the age of Elizabeth had far more genius, but far less correctness, than those of the age of Anne. It seems to be taken for granted, that there is some necessary incompatibility, some antithesis between correctness and creative power. We rather suspect that this notion arises merely from an abuse of words; and that it has been the parent of many of the fallacies which perplex the science of criticism.
What is meant by correctness in poetry? If by correctness be meant the conforming to rules which have their foundation in truth, and in the principles of human nature, then correctness is only another name for excellence. If by correctness be meant the conforming to rules purely arbitrary, correctness may be another name for dulness and absurdity.
A writer who describes visible objects falsely, and violates the propriety of character,—a writer who makes the mountains —nod their drowsy heads‘ at night, or a dying man take leave of the world with a rant like that of Maximin, may be said, in the high and just sense of the phrase, to write incorrectly. He violates the first great law of his art. His imitation is altogether unlike the thing imitated. The four poets who are most eminently free from incorrectness of this description are Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Milton. They are, therefore, in one sense, and that the best sense, the most correct of poets.
When it is said that Virgil, though he had less genius than Homer, was a more correct writer, what sense is attached to the word correctness? Is it meant that the story of the Æneid is developed more skilfully than that of the Odyssey?—that the Roman describes the face of the external world, or the emotions of the mind, more accurately than the Greek?—that the characters of Achates and Mnestheus are more nicely discriminated, and more consistently supported, than those of Achilles, of Nestor, and of Ulysses? The fact incontestably is, that for every violation of the fundamental laws of poetry, which can be found in Homer, it would be easy to find twenty in Virgil.
Troilus and Cressida is
perhaps of all the plays of Shakspeare that which is
commonly considered as the most incorrect. Yet it seems to us infinitely more correct, in the
sound sense of
| 554 | Moore's Life of Lord Byron. |
In the sense in which we are now using the word correctness, we think that Sir Walter Scott, Mr Wordsworth, Mr Coleridge, are far more correct writers than those who are commonly extolled as the models of correctness,—Pope, for example, and Addison. The single description of a moonlight night in Pope’s Iliad contains more inaccuracies than can be found in all the Excursion. There is not a single scene in Cato, in which every thing that conduces to poetical illusion,—the propriety of character, of language, of situation, is not more grossly violated than in any part of the Lay of the Last Minstrel. No man can possibly think that the Romans of Addison resemble the real Romans, so closely as the moss-troopers of Scott resemble the real moss-troopers. Watt Tinlinn and William Deloraine are not, it is true, persons of so much dignity as Cato. But the dignity of the persons represented, has as little to do with the correctness of poetry as with the correctness of painting. We prefer a gipsy by Reynolds to his Majesty’s head on a signpost, and a Borderer by Scott to a senator by Addison.
In what sense, then, is the word correctness used by those who say, with the
author of the Pursuits of Literature, that Pope was the most correct of English Poets, and, that next to
Pope, came the late Mr Gifford?
What is the nature and value of that correctness, the praise of which is denied to Macbeth, to Lear, and to Othello, and given to Hoole’s
translations and to all the Seatonian prize-poems? We
can discover no eternal rule—no rule founded in reason and in the nature of
things—which Shakspeare does not observe much more
strictly than Pope. But if by correctness be meant the conforming to a
narrow legislation, which, while lenient to the mala
in se, multiplies, without the shadow of a reason, the mala prohibita,—if by correctness be meant a
strict attention to certain ceremonious observances, which are no more essential to poetry than
etiquette to good government, or than the washings of a Pharisee to devotion,—
| Moore's Life of Lord Byron. | 555 |
It would be amusing to make a digest of the irrational laws which bad critics have framed for the government of poets. First in celebrity and in absurdity stand the dramatic unities of place and time. No human being has ever been able to find any thing that could, even by courtesy, be called an argument for these unities, except that they have been deduced from the general practice of the Greeks. It requires no very profound examination to discover that the Greek dramas, often admirable as compositions, are, as exhibitions of human character and human life, far inferior to the English plays of the age of Elizabeth. Every scholar knows that the dramatic part of the Athenian tragedies was at first subordinate to the lyrical part. It would, therefore, have been little less than a miracle if the laws of the Athenian stage had been found to suit plays in which there was no chorus. All the greatest masterpieces of the dramatic art have been composed in direct violation of the unities, and could never have been composed if the unities had not been violated. It is clear, for example, that such a character as that of Hamlet could never have been developed within the limits to which Alfieri confined himself. Yet such was the reverence of literary men during the last century for these unities, that Johnson, who, much to his honour, took the opposite side, was, as he says, ‘frighted at his own temerity;’ and ‘afraid to stand against the authorities which might be produced against him.’
There are other rules of the same kind without end. ‘Shakspeare,’ says Rymer, ‘ought not to have made Othello black; for the hero of a tragedy ought always to be white.’ ‘Milton,’ says another critic, ‘ought not to have taken Adam for his hero; for the hero of an epic poem ought always to be victorious.’ ‘Milton,’ says another, ‘ought not to have put so many similes into his first book; for the first book of an epic poem ought always to be the most unadorned. There are no similes in the first book of the Iliad.’ ‘Milton,’ says another, ‘ought not to have placed in an epic poem such lines as these:—
‘I also erred in overmuch admiring.’ |
| 556 | Moore's Life of Lord Byron. |
|
‘As when we lived untouch’d with these disgraces,
When as our kingdom was our dear embraces.’
|
Another law of heroic poetry, which, fifty years ago, was considered as fundamental, was, that there should be a pause—a comma at least, at the end of every couplet. It was also provided that there should never be a full stop except at the end of a couplet. Well do we remember to have heard a most correct judge of poetry revile Mr Rogers for the incorrectness of that most sweet and graceful passage—
‘“Twas thine, Maria, thine, without a sigh,
At midnight in a sister’s arms to die,
Nursing the young to health.’ |
We do not see why we should not make a few more rules of the same kind,—why we should not enact that the number of scenes in every act shall be three, or some multiple of three,—that the number of lines in every scene shall be an exact square, —that the dramatis personæ shall never be more or fewer than sixteen,—and that, in heroic rhymes, every thirty-sixth line shall have twelve syllables. If we were to lay down these canons, and to call Pope, Goldsmith, and Addison, incorrect writers for not having complied with our whims, we should act precisely as those critics act who find incorrectness in the magnificent imagery and the varied music of Coleridge and Shelley.
The correctness which the last century prized so much, resembled the correctness
of those pictures of the garden of Eden which we see in old Bibles,—an exact square,
enclosed by the rivers Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates, each with a convenient bridge in
the centre—rectangular beds of flowers—a long canal, neatly bricked and railed
in—the tree of knowledge, clipped like one of the limes behind the Tuilleries,
| Moore's Life of Lord Byron. | 557 |
But if there were a painter so gifted, that he should place in the canvass that glorious paradise, seen by the interior eye of him whose outward sight had failed with long watching and labouring for liberty and truth,—if there were a painter who could set before us the mazes of the sapphire brook, the lake with its fringe of myrtles, the flowery meadows, the grottoes overhung by vines, the forests shining with Hesperian fruit, and with the plumage of gorgeous birds, the massy shade of that nuptial bower which showered down roses on the sleeping lovers,—what should we think of a connoisseur who should tell us that this painting, though finer than the absurd picture in the old Bible, was not so correct? Surely we should answer—It is both finer and more correct; and it is finer because it is more correct. It is not made up of correctly drawn diagrams; but it is a correct painting—a worthy representation of that which it is intended to represent.
It is not in the fine arts alone that this false correctness is prized by
narrow-minded men,—by men who cannot distinguish means from ends, or what is accidental
from what is essential. M. Jourdain admired correctness in
fencing. ‘You had no business to hit me then. You must never thrust in quart till you have thrust in tierce.’ M. Tomès liked correctness in medical practice. ‘I stand
up for Artemius. That he killed his patient is plain
enough. But still he acted quite according to rule. A man dead is a man dead; and there is
an end of the matter. But if rules are to be broken, there is no saying what consequences
may follow.’ We have heard of an old German officer, who was a great admirer of
correctness in military operations. He used to revile Bonaparte for spoiling the science of war, which had been carried to such
exquisite perfection by Marshal Daun. ‘In my
youth we used to march and countermarch all the summer without gaining or losing a square
league, and then we went into winter quarters. And now comes an ignorant, hotheaded young
man, who flies about from Boulogne to Ulm, and from Ulm to the middle of Moravia, and
fights battles in December. The whole system of his tactics is monstrously
incorrect.’ The world is of opinion, in spite of critics like these, that the end of
fencing is to
| 558 | Moore's Life of Lord Byron. |
And has poetry no end,—no eternal and immutable principles? Is poetry, like heraldry, mere matter of arbitrary regulation? The heralds tell us that certain scutcheons and bearings denote certain conditions, and that to put colours on colours, or metals on metals, is false blazonry. If all this were reversed,—if every coat of arms in Europe were new fashioned,—if it were decreed that or should never be placed but on argent, or argent but on or,—that illegitimacy should be denoted by a lozenge, and widowhood by a bend,—the new science would be just as good as the old science, because both the new and the old would be good for nothing. The mummery of Portcullis and Rouge Dragon, as it has no other value than that which caprice has assigned to it, may well submit to any laws which caprice may impose on it. But it is not so with that great imitative art, to the power of which, all ages, the rudest and the most enlightened, bear witness. Since its first great masterpieces were produced, every thing that is changeable in this world has been changed. Civilisation has been gained, lost, gained again. Religions, and languages, and forms of government, and usages of private life, and modes of thinking, all have undergone a succession of revolutions. Every thing has passed away but the great features of nature, the heart of man, and the miracles of that art, of which it is the office to reflect back the heart of man and the features of nature. Those two strange old poems, the wonder of ninety generations, still retain all their freshness. They still command the veneration of minds, enriched by the literature of many nations and ages. They are still, even in wretched translations, the delight of schoolboys. Having survived ten thousand capricious fashions, having seen successive codes of criticism become obsolete, they still remain, immortal with the immortality of truth,—the same when perused in the study of an English scholar, as when they were first chanted at the banquets of the Ionian princes.
Poetry is, as that most acute of human beings Aristotle said, more than two thousand years ago, imitation. It is an art
analogous in many respects to the arts of painting, sculpture, and acting. The imitations of
the painter, the sculptor, and the actor, are, indeed, within certain limits, more perfect than
those of the poet. The machinery which the poet employs, consists merely of words; and words
cannot, even when employed by such an artist as Homer or
Dante, present to the mind images
| Moore's Life of Lord Byron. | 559 |
An art essentially imitative ought not surely to be subjected to rules which tend to make its imitations less perfect than they would otherwise be; and those who obey such rules ought to be called, not correct, but incorrect artists. The true way to judge of the rules by which English poetry was governed during the last century, is to look at the effects which they produced.
It was in 1780 that Johnson completed his Lives of the Poets. He tells us in that work, that since the time of Dryden, English poetry had shown no tendency to relapse into its original savageness; that its language had been refined, its numbers tuned, and its sentiments improved. It may, perhaps, be doubted whether the nation had any great reason to exult in the refinements and improvements, which gave it Douglas for Othello, and the Triumphs of Temper for the Fairy Queen.
It was during the thirty years which preceded the appearance of Johnson’s Lives, that the diction and versification of English poetry were, in the sense in
which the word is commonly used, most correct. Those thirty years form the most deplorable part
of our literary history. They have bequeathed to us scarcely any poetry which deserves to be
remembered. Two or three hundred lines of Gray, twice as
many of Goldsmith, a few stanzas of Beattie and Collins, a
few strophes of Mason, and a few clever prologues and
satires, were the masterpieces of this age of consummate excellence. They may all be printed in
one volume, and
| 560 | Moore's Life of Lord Byron. |
At last, when poetry had fallen into such utter decay that Mr Hayley was thought a great poet, it began to appear that the excess of the evil was about to work the cure. Men became tired of an insipid conformity to a standard which derived no authority from nature or reason. A shallow criticism had taught them to ascribe a superstitious value to the spurious correctness of poetasters. A deeper criticism brought them back to the free correctness of the first great masters. The eternal laws of poetry regained their power, and the temporary fashions which had superseded those laws went after the wig of Lovelace and the hoop of Clarissa.
It was in a cold and barren season that the seeds of that rich harvest which we have reaped, were first sown. While poetry was every year becoming more feeble and more mechanical,—while the monotonous versification which Pope had introduced, no longer redeemed by his brilliant wit and his compactness of expression, palled on the ear of the public,—the great works of the dead were every day attracting more and more of the admiration which they deserved. The plays of Shakspeare were better acted, better edited, and better known than they had ever been. Our noble old ballads were again read with pleasure, and it became a fashion to imitate them. Many of the imitations were altogether contemptible. But they showed that men had at least begun to admire the excellence which they could not rival. A literary revolution was evidently at hand. There was a ferment in the minds of men,—a vague craving for something new; a disposition to hail with delight any thing which might at first sight wear the appearance of originality. A reforming age is always fertile of impostors. The same excited state of public feeling which produced the great separation from the see of Rome, produced also the excesses of the Anabaptists. The same stir in the public mind of Europe, which overthrew the abuses of the old French government, produced the Jacobins and Theophilanthropists: Macpherson and the Delia Cruscas were to the true reformers of English poetry, what Knipperdolling was to Luther, or what Clootz was to Turgot. The public was never more disposed to believe stories without evidence, and to admire books without merit. Any thing which could break the dull monotony of the correct school was acceptable.
The forerunner of the great restoration of our literature was
| Moore's Life of Lord Byron. | 561 |
‘The vision and the faculty divine;’ |
These great men were not free from affectation. But their affectation was
directly opposed to the affectation which gene-
| 562 | Moore's Life of Lord Byron. |
‘Manner is all in all, whate‘er is writ,
The substitute for genius, taste, and wit.’ |
‘Made poetry a mere mechanic art,
And every warbler had his tune by heart.’ |
To men thus sick of the languid manner of their contemporaries, ruggedness seemed a venial fault, or rather a positive merit. In their hatred of meretricious ornament, and of what Cowper calls ‘creamy smoothness,’ they erred on the opposite side. Their style was too austere, their versification too harsh. It is not easy, however, to overrate the service which they rendered to literature. Their merit is rather that of demolition than that of construction. The intrinsic value of their poems is considerable. But the example which they set of mutiny against an absurd system was invaluable. The part which they performed was rather that of Moses than that of Joshua. They opened the house of bondage;—but they did not enter the promised land.
During the twenty years which followed the death of Cowper, the revolution in English poetry was fully consummated. None of the
writers of this period, not even Sir Walter Scott,
contributed so much to the consummation as Lord Byron. Yet
he, Lord Byron, contributed to it unwillingly, and with constant
self-reproach and shame. All his tastes and inclinations led him to take part with the school
of poetry which was going out, against the school which was coming in. Of Pope himself he spoke with extravagant admiration. He did not
venture directly to say that the little man of Twickenham was a greater poet than Shakspeare or Milton.
But he hinted pretty clearly that he thought so. Of his contemporaries, scarcely any had so
much of his admiration as Mr Gifford, who, considered as
a poet, was merely Pope, without Pope’s wit and
fancy; and whose satires are decidedly inferior in vigour and poignancy to the very imperfect
juvenile performance of Lord Byron himself. He now and then
| Moore's Life of Lord Byron. | 563 |
For the great old masters of the art he had no very enthusiastic veneration. In his Letter to Mr Bowles he uses expressions which clearly indicate that he preferred Pope’s Iliad to the original. Mr Moore confesses that his friend was no very fervent admirer of Shakspeare. Of all the poets of the first class, Lord Byron seems to have admired Dante and Milton most. Yet in the fourth canto of Childe Harold he places Tasso—a writer not merely inferior to them, but of quite a different order of mind—on at least a footing of equality with them. Mr Hunt is, we suspect, quite correct in saying, that Lord Byron could see little or no merit in Spenser.
But Lord Byron the critic, and Lord
Byron the poet, were two very different men. The effects of his theory may
indeed often be traced in his practice. But his disposition led him to accommodate himself to
the literary taste of the age in which he lived; and his talents would have enabled him to
accommodate himself to the taste of any age. Though he said much of his contempt for men, and
though he boasted that amidst all the inconstancy of fortune and of fame he was
all—sufficient to himself, his literary career indicated nothing of that lonely and
unsocial pride which he affected. We cannot conceive him, like Milton or Wordsworth,
| 564 | Moore's Life of Lord Byron. |
He was the creature of his age; and wherever he had lived, he would have been the creature of his age. Under Charles I. he would have been more quaint than Donne. Under Charles II. the rants of his rhyming plays would have pitted it, boxed it, and galleried it, with those of any Bayes or Bilboa. Under George I. the monotonous smoothness of his versification, and the terseness of his expression, would have made Pope himself envious.
As it was, he was the man of the last thirteen years of the eighteenth century, and of the first twenty-three years of the nineteenth century. He belonged half to the old, and half to the new school of poetry. His personal taste led him to the former; his thirst of fame to the latter;—his talents were equally suited to both. His fame was a common ground on which the zealots of both sides—Gifford, for example, and Shelley—might meet. He was the representative, not of either literary party, but of both at once, and of their conflict, and of the victory by which that conflict was terminated. His poetry fills and measures the whole of the vast interval through which our literature has moved since the time of Johnson. It touches the Essay on Man at the one extremity, and the Excursion at the other.
There are several parallel instances in literary history. Voltaire, for example, was the connecting link between the
France of Louis the Fourteenth, and the France of Louis the Sixteenth,—between Racine and Boileau on the one side, and
Condorcet and Beaumarchais on the other. He, like Lord
Byron, put himself at the head of an intellectual revolution,—dreading it
all the time,—murmuring at it,—sneering at it,—yet choosing rather to move before
his age in any direction, than to be left behind and forgotten. Dryden was the connecting link between the literature of the age of James the First, and the literature of the age of Anne. Oromandes and Arimanes fought for him—Arimanes carried him off. But his heart was to the last with Oromandes. Lord Byron was, in the same
manner, the mediator between two generations—between two hostile poetical sects. Though
always sneering at Mr Wordsworth, he was yet, though
perhaps unconsciously, the interpreter between Mr
| Moore's Life of Lord Byron. | 565 |
Lord Byron, like Mr Wordsworth, had nothing dramatic in his genius. He was indeed the reverse of a great dramatist; the very antithesis to a great dramatist. All his characters,—Harold looking back on the western sky, from which his country and the sun are receding together,—the Giaour, standing apart in the gloom of the side-aisle, and casting a haggard scowl from under his long hood at the crucifix and the censer,—Conrad, leaning on his sword by the watch-tower,—Lara, smiling on the dancers,—Alp, gazing steadily on the fatal cloud as it passes before the moon,—Manfred, wandering among the precipices of Berne,—Azzo, on the judgment-seat,—Ugo, at the bar,—Lambro, frowning on the siesta of his daughter and Juan,—Cain, presenting his unacceptable offering,—are all essentially the same. The varieties are varieties merely of age, situation, and costume. If ever Lord Byron attempted to exhibit men of a different kind, he always made them either insipid or unnatural. Selim is nothing. Bonnivart is nothing. Don Juan, in the first and best cantos, is a feeble copy of the Page in the Marriage of Figaro. Johnson, the man whom Juan meets in the slave-market, is a most striking failure. How differently would Sir Walter Scott have drawn a bluff, fearless Englishman, in such a situation! The portrait would have seemed to walk out of the canvass.
Sardanapalus is more hardly drawn than any dramatic
personage that we can remember. His heroism and his effeminacy, —his contempt of death,
and his dread of a weighty helmet,—his kingly resolution to be seen in the foremost ranks, and
the anxiety with which he calls for a looking-glass, that he may be
| 566 | Moore's Life of Lord Byron. |
|
‘Speculum civilis sarcina belli.
Nimirum summi ducis estoccidere Galbam,
Et curare cutem summi constantia civis,
Bebriaci in campo spolium affectare Palati,
Et pressum in facie digitis extendere panem.’
|
These are excellent lines in a satire. But it is not the business of the dramatist to exhibit characters in this sharp antithetical way. It is not in this way that Shakspeare makes Prince Hal rise from the rake of Eastcheap into the hero of Shrewsbury, and sink again into the rake of Eastcheap. It is not thus that Shakspeare has exhibited the union of effeminacy and valour in Antony. A dramatist cannot commit a greater error than that of following those pointed descriptions of character, in which satirists and historians indulge so much. It is by rejecting what is natural, that satirists and historians produce these striking characters. Their great object generally is to ascribe to every man as many contradictory qualities as possible: and this is an object easily attained. By judicious selection and judicious exaggeration, the intellect and the disposition of any human being might be described as being made up of nothing but startling contrasts. If the dramatist attempts to create a being answering to one of these descriptions, he fails, because he reverses an imperfect analytical process. He produces, not a man, but a personified epigram. Very eminent writers have fallen into this snare. Ben Jonson has given us a Hermogenes, taken from the lively lines of Horace; but the inconsistency which is so amusing in the satire, appears unnatural, and disgusts us, in the play. Sir Walter Scott has committed a far more glaring error of the same kind in the novel of Peveril. Admiring, as every reader must admire, the keen and vigorous lines in which Dryden satirized the Duke of Buckingham, he attempted to make a Duke of Buckingham to suit them,—a real living Zimri;—and he made, not a man, but the most grotesque of all monsters. A writer who should attempt to introduce into a play or a novel such a Wharton as the Wharton of Pope, or a Lord Hervey answering to Sporus, would fail in the same manner.
But to return to Lord Byron: his women, like
his men, are all of one breed. Haidee is a half-savage and
girlish Julia; Julia is
a civilized and matronly Haidee. Leila is a wedded Zuleika—Zuleika a virgin Leila.
Gulnare and Medora
appear to have been intentionally opposed to each other. Yet the dif-
| Moore's Life of Lord Byron. | 567 |
It is hardly too much to say, that Lord Byron could exhibit only one man and only one woman,—a man proud, moody, cynical,—with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart; a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection;—a woman all softness and gentleness, loving to caress and to be caressed, but capable of being transformed by love into a tigress.
Even these two characters, his only two characters, he could not exhibit dramatically. He exhibited them in the manner, not of Shakspeare, but of Clarendon. He analyzed them. He made them analyze themselves, but he did not make them show themselves. He tells us, for example, in many lines of great force and spirit, that the speech of Lara was bitterly sarcastic,—that he talked little of his travels,—that if much questioned about them, his answers became short, and his brow gloomy. But we have none of Lara’s sarcastic speeches, or short answers. It is not thus that the great masters of human nature have pourtrayed human beings. Homer never tells us that Nestor loved to tell long stories about his youth; Shakspeare never tells us that in the mind of Iago every thing that is beautiful and endearing was associated with some filthy and debasing idea.
It is curious to observe the tendency which the dialogue of Lord Byron always has to lose its character of dialogue, and to
become soliloquy. The scenes between Manfred and the
Chamois-hunter,—between Manfred and the Witch of the Alps,—between
Manfred and the Abbot, are instances of this tendency. Manfred, after a
few unimportant speeches, has all the talk to himself. The other interlocutors are nothing more
than good listeners. They drop an occasional question, or ejaculation, which sets Manfred off
again on the inexhaustible topic of his personal feelings. If we examine the fine passages in
Lord Byron’s dramas,—the description of Rome, for example,
in Manfred,—the description of a Venetian
revel in Marino Faliero,—the dying
invective which the old Doge pronounces against Venice, we shall find there is nothing dramatic
in them; that they derive none of their effect from the character or situation of the speaker;
and that they would have been as fine, or finer, if they had been published as fragments of
blank verse by Lord Byron. There is scarcely a speech in Shakspeare of which the same could be said. No skilful reader
of the plays of Shakspeare can endure to see what are called the fine
things taken out, under the name of‘Beauties’ or of‘Elegant Extracts;’
or to hear any single pas-
| 568 | Moore's Life of Lord Byron. |
On the other hand, it may be doubted whether there is, in all Lord Byron’s plays, a single remarkable passage which owes any portion of its interest or effect to its connexion with the characters or the action. He has written only one scene, as far as we can recollect, which is dramatic even in manner—the scene between Lucifer and Cain. The conference in that scene is animated, and each of the interlocutors has a fair share of it. But this scene, when examined, will be found to be a confirmation of our remarks. It is a dialogue only in form. It is a soliloquy in essence. It is in reality a debate carried on within one single unquiet and sceptical mind. The questions and the answers, the objections and the solutions, all belong to the same character.
A writer who showed so little of dramatic skill in works professedly dramatic, was not likely to write narrative with dramatic effect. Nothing could indeed be more rude and careless than the structure of his narrative poems. He seems to have thought, with the hero of the Rehearsal, that the plot was good for nothing but to bring in fine things. His two longest works, Childe Harold and Don Juan, have no plan whatever. Either of them might have been extended to any length, or cut short at any point. The state in which the Giaour appears, illustrates the manner in which all his poems were constructed. They are all, like the Giaour, collections of fragments; and, though there may be no empty spaces marked by asterisks, it is still easy to perceive, by the clumsiness of the joining, where the parts, for the sake of which the whole was composed, end and begin.
It was in description and meditation that he excelled.
‘Description,’ as he said in Don
Juan, ‘was his forte.’ His manner is
indeed peculiar, and is almost unequalled,—rapid, sketchy, full of vigour; the selection
happy; the strokes few and bold. In spite of the reverence which we feel for the genius of
Mr Wordsworth, we cannot but think that the
minuteness of his descriptions often diminishes their effect. He has accustomed himself to gaze
on nature with the eye of a lover—to
| Moore's Life of Lord Byron. | 569 |
His descriptions, great as was their intrinsic merit, derived their principal interest from the feeling which always mingled with them. He was himself the beginning, the middle, and the end, of all his own poetry—the hero of every tale—the chief object in every landscape. Harold, Lara, Manfred, and a crowd of other characters, were universally considered merely as loose incognitos of Byron; and there is every reason to believe that he meant them to be so considered. The wonders of the outer world—the Tagus, with the mighty fleets of England riding on its bosom—the towers of Cintra overhanging the shaggy forest of cork-trees and willows—the glaring marble of Pentelicus—the banks of the Rhine—the glaciers of Clarens—the sweet Lake of Leman—the dell of Egeria, with its summer-birds and rustling lizzards—the shapeless ruins of Rome, overgrown with ivy and wall-flowers—the stars, the sea, the mountains;—all were mere accessaries—the background to one dark and melancholy figure.
Never had any writer so vast a command of the whole eloquence of scorn,
misanthropy, and despair. That Marah was never dry. No art could sweeten, no draughts could
exhaust, its perennial waters of bitterness. Never was there such variety in monotony as that
of Byron. From maniac laughter to piercing lamentation,
there was not a single note of human anguish of which he was not master. Year after year, and
month after month, he continued to repeat that to be wretched is the destiny of all; that to be
eminently wretched, is the destiny of the eminent; that all the desires by which we are cursed
lead alike to misery;—if they are not gratified, to the misery of disappointment—if they
are gratified, to the misery of satiety. His principal heroes are men who have arrived by
different roads at the same goal of despair—who are sick of life—who are at war
with society—who are supported in their anguish only by an unconquerable pride,
resembling that of Prometheus on the rock, or of
| 570 | Moore's Life of Lord Byron. |
How much of this morbid feeling sprung from an original disease of the mind—how much from real misfortune—how much from the nervousness of dissipation—how much of it was fanciful—how much of it was merely affected—it is impossible for us, and would probably have been impossible for the most intimate friends of Lord Byron, to decide. Whether there ever existed, or can ever exist, a person answering to the description which he gave of himself, may be doubted: but that he was not such a person is beyond all doubt. It is ridiculous to imagine that a man, whose mind was really imbued with scorn of his fellow creatures, would have published three or four books every year in order to tell them so; or that a man, who could say with truth that he neither sought sympathy nor needed it, would have admitted all Europe to hear his farewell to his wife, and his blessings on his child. In the second canto of Childe Harold, he tells us that he is insensible to fame and obloquy—
‘Ill may such contest now the spirit move,
Which heeds nor keen reproof nor partial praise.’ |
We are far, however, from thinking that his sadness was altogether feigned. He
was naturally a man of great sensibility—he had been ill educated—his feelings had
been early exposed to sharp trials—he had been crossed in his boyish love—he had
been mortified by the failure of his first literary efforts—he was straitened in
pecuniary circumstances—he was unfortunate in his domestic relations—the public
treated him with cruel injustice—his health and spirits suffered from his dissipated
habits of life—he was, on the whole, an unhappy man. He early discovered that, by
parading his unhappiness before the multitude, he excited an unrivalled interest. The world
gave him every encouragement to talk about his mental sufferings. The effect which his first
confessions produced, induced him to affect much that he did not feel; and the affectation
probably reacted on his feelings. How far the character in which he exhibited himself
| Moore's Life of Lord Byron. | 571 |
There can be no doubt that this remarkable man owed the vast influence which he exercised over his contemporaries, at least as much to his gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry. We never could very clearly understand how it is that egotism, so unpopular in conversation, should be so popular in writing; or how it is that men who affect in their compositions qualities and feelings which they have not, impose so much more easily on their contemporaries than on posterity. The interest which the loves of Petrarch excited in his own time, and the pitying fondness with which half Europe looked upon Rousseau, are well known. To readers of our time, the love of Petrarch seems to have been love of that kind which breaks no hearts; and the sufferings of Rousseau to have deserved laughter rather than pity—to have been partly counterfeited, and partly the consequences of his own perverseness and vanity. What our grandchildren may think of the character of Lord Byron, as exhibited in his poetry, we will not pretend to guess. It is certain, that the interest which he excited during his life is without a parallel in literary history. The feeling with which young readers of poetry regarded him, can be conceived only by those who have experienced it. To people who are acquainted with real calamity, ‘nothing is so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.’ This faint image of sorrow has in all ages been considered by young gentlemen as an agreeable excitement. Old gentlemen, and middle-aged gentlemen, have so many real causes of sadness, that they are rarely inclined ‘to be as sad as night only for wantonness.’ Indeed they want the power almost as much as the inclination. We know very few persons engaged in active life, who, even if they were to procure stools to be melancholy upon, and were to sit down with all the premeditation of Master Stephen, would be able to enjoy much of what somebody calls the ‘ecstasy of woe.’
Among that large class of young persons whose reading is almost entirely
confined to works of imagination, the popularity of Lord
Byron was unbounded. They bought pictures of him; they treasured up the smallest
relics of him; they learned his poems by heart, and did their best to write like him, and to
look like him. Many of them practised at the glass, in the hope of catching the curl of the
upper lip, and the scowl of the brow, which appear in some of his portraits. A few discarded
their neckcloths, in imitation of their great leader. For some years the Minerva press sent
forth no novel without a mysterious, unhappy, Lara-like
peer. The number of hopeful under graduates and
| 572 | Moore's Life of Lord Byron. |
This affectation has passed away; and a few more years will destroy whatever yet remains of that magical potency which once belonged to the name of Byron. To us he is still a man, young, noble, and unhappy. To our children he will be merely a writer; and their impartial judgment will appoint his place among writers, without regard to his rank, or to his private history. That his poetry will undergo a severe sifting; that much of what has been admired by his contemporaries will be rejected as worthless, we have little doubt. But we have as little doubt, that, after the closest scrutiny, there will still remain much that can only perish with the English language.