Studies in Literature and History Part 9

'Clime of the unforgotten brave!

Whose land from plain to mountain cave Was Freedom's home or Glory's grave'--

has forty lines of unsurpa.s.sed beauty and fire, written in the ma.n.u.script, as a note tells us, in a hurried and almost illegible hand--an authentic example of true improvisation which the elaborate poets of our own day may match if they can. The tumid phrase and melodramatic figuring--

'Dark and unearthly is the scowl That glares beneath his dusky cowl'--

are now worn-out theatrical properties; yet those who have seen the untamed Asiatic might find it hard to overdraw the murderous hate and sullen ferocity that his face, or his victim's, will occasionally disclose. The heroes, at any rate, love and die in a masculine way; it is the old tragic theme of bitter unmerited misfortune, of daring adventure that ends fatally, without any of the wailing sensuality that infects the more harmonious poetry of a later day. There are, perhaps, for modern taste, too many outlandish words and references to Eastern customs or beliefs, requiring glossaries and marginal explanations; nor does the profuse annotation of the present edition lighten a reader's burden in this respect. Byron had no business to write 'By pale Phingari's trembling light,' leaving us at the mercy of a.s.siduous editors to expound that 'Phingari' is the Greek [Greek: phengarion], and stands here for the moon. And if he could have spared us such Orientalisms as 'Al Sirat's arch,' or 'avenging Monkir's scythe,' we should have mixed up less desultory reading with the enjoyment of fine pa.s.sages. He gives us too much of his local colouring, he checks the rush of his verse by superfluous metaphors, he has weak and halting lines. The style is heated and fuming, yet the dainty art-critic who lays hands on such metal thrown red hot from the forge may chance to burn his fingers over it. Nor must we forget that in these poems Byron brought the cla.s.sic lands of Greece and the Levant within the sphere of modern romance, and has unquestionably added some 'deathless pages' to English literature.

Byron has told us why he adopted for the _Corsair_, and afterwards for _Lara_, 'the good old and now neglected heroic couplet':

'The stanza of Spenser is, perhaps, too slow and dignified for narrative, though I confess it is the measure after my own heart; Scott alone, of the present generation, has. .h.i.therto triumphed completely over the fatal facility of the octosyllabic verse; and this is not the least victory of his fertile and mighty genius; in blank verse Milton, Thomson, and our dramatists are the beacons that shine along the deep, but warn us from the rough and barren rocks on which they are kindled.'[25]

We doubt much, from a comparison of the poems, whether the experiment of changing his metre was successful. The short eight-syllabled line displayed Byron's capacity for vigorous concision and swift movement; it is eminently suited for strength and speed; whereas in the slow processional couplet he becomes diffuse, often tedious; he has room for more rhetoric and verbosity; he falls more into the error of describing at length the character and sentiments of his gloomy heroes, instead of letting them act and speak for themselves. At moments when inspiration is running low, and a gap has to be filled up, the shorter line needs less padding, and can be more rapidly run over when it is weak. Whereas a feeble heroic couplet becomes ponderous and sinks more quickly into bathos--as in the following sample from the _Corsair_:

'Oh! burst the Haram, wrong not on your lives One female form--remember--_we_ have wives.'

And the consequence has been that _Lara_ and the _Corsair_ are now, we believe, the least readable of Byron's metrical romances.

Of Byron's dramas we are obliged to say that, to borrow his own metaphor, he would have fared better as a poet if he had taken warning from the beacons, and had given blank verse a wide berth, instead of setting himself boldly on a course which, as he evidently knew, is full of peril for fast-sailing, free-going versifiers. He saw that he could not approach the great masters of this measure, he was resolved not to imitate them; and so he appears to have chosen the singular alternative of writing nothing that should in the least resemble them.

His general object as a playwriter is stated, in a letter about _Sardanapalus_, to have been 'to dramatise striking pa.s.sages of history and mythology.'

'You will find,' he adds most truly, 'all this very unlike Shakespeare; and so much the better in one sense, for I look upon him to be the worst of models, though the most extraordinary of writers. It has been my object to be as simple and severe as Alfieri, and I have broken down the poetry as nearly as I could to common language.'

And undoubtedly he did break it down so effectually that much of his blank verse hobbles like a lame horse, being often mere prose printed in short lines. Here are two specimens, not cut into lengths, which have no metrical construction at all:

'Unless you keep company with him, and you seem scarce used to such high society, you can't tell how he approaches.'[26]

'Where thou shalt pa.s.s thy days in peace, but on condition that the three young princes are given up as hostages,'[27]

Many others of the same quality might be given, in which the _disjecti membra poetae_ would be exceedingly hard to find. It is surprising that a writer of Byron's experience should have fallen into the error of supposing that simplicity could be attained by the mere use of common language. For even Wordsworth, who is a master of simple strength, could never allow his peasants to talk their ordinary vernacular without a fatal drop into the commonplace; and all verse that is to be plain and unaffected in style and thought requires the most studious composition. Byron seems scarcely to have understood that blank verse has any rules of scansion, and his signal failure in this metre has become less tolerable and more conspicuous, since Keats in his day, and Tennyson after him, have carefully studied the construction of blank verse, and have left us admirable examples of its capacity for romantic expression. It is indeed strange that Byron should have fancied that he could use so delicate an instrument with a rough unpractised hand.

There are some vigorous pa.s.sages scattered through the plays, and we have it on record that Dr. Parr could not sleep a wink after reading _Sardanapalus_. Nevertheless, we fear that the present generation will find little cause for demurring to Jeffrey's judgment upon the tragedies, that they are for the most part 'solemn, prolix, and ostentatious.' They were not composed, as Byron himself explained, 'with the most remote view to the stage,' so that he had not before his eyes the wholesome fear of a critical audience. In truth it must be admitted that he lacked the true dramatic instinct; he could only set up his leading figures to deliver imposing speeches appropriate to a tragic situation; and one may guess that the consciousness of awkward handling weighed upon the spirit and style of his blank verse, for his ear seems to have completely misled him when it had lost the guidance of recurrent rhyme. Of _Cain: a Mystery_, one must speak reverently, since Walter Scott, to whom it was dedicated, wrote that the author had 'matched Milton on his own ground'; yet in Lucifer, who leads the dialogue, we have little more than a spectral embodiment of Byron's own rebellious temper; and in this poem, as in _Manfred_, the discussion of metaphysical problems carries him beyond his depth.

There are, nevertheless, some fine declamatory pa.s.sages; and we may quote as a curiosity one soft line, fresh from the Swiss mountains:

'Pipes in the liberal air _Mixed with the sweet bells of the sauntering herd_,'

which is to be found in _Manfred_ and might have been taken from the _Excursion_.

When we turn from the plays to the lyrics, we see at once the importance, to a poet, of choosing rightly the metrical form that is the best expression of his peculiar genius. In some of these shorter poems Byron rises to his highest level, and by these will his popularity be permanently maintained. They are certainly of very unequal merit; yet when Byron is condemned for artificiality and glaring colour, we may point to the poem beginning 'And thou art dead, as young and fair,' where form and feeling are in harmony throughout eight long stanzas, without a single line that is feeble or overcharged:

'The better days of life were ours; The worst can be but mine; The sun that cheers, the storm that lowers, Shall never more be thine.

The silence of that dreamless sleep I envy now too much to weep; Nor need I to repine That all those charms have pa.s.sed away, I might have watched through long decay.'

There is no novelty in the ideas, nor does he open the deeper vein of thoughts that touch the mind with a sense of mortality. Yet the verse has a masculine brevity that renders effectively the att.i.tude in which men may well be content firmly to confront an irreparable misfortune.

In his poems of strenuous action, although Byron has not the rare quality of heroic simplicity, he could at times strike a high vibrating war note, and could interpret romantically the patriotic spirit. The two stanzas which we quote from the Hebrew Melodies show that he could now and then shake off the redundant metaphors and epithets that overload too much of his impetuous verse, and use his strength freely:

'Though thou art fall'n, while we are free Thou shalt not taste of death!

The generous blood that flowed from thee Disdained to sink beneath; Within our veins its currents be, Thy spirit on our breath.

'Thy name, our charging hosts along, Shall be their battle word!

Thy fall, the theme of choral song From virgin voices poured!

To weep would do thy glory wrong; Thou shalt not be deplored.'

And we have another magnificent example of Byron's lyrical power in the _Isles of Greece_, where the two lines,

'Ah, no! the voices of the dead Sound like a distant torrent's fall,'

drop suddenly into the elegiac strain, into a mournful echo that dwells upon the ear, followed by the rising note of a call to arms. It must be remembered that nothing is so rare as a stirring war-song, and that in our time we have had a good many attempts--almost all failures; whereas the _Isles of Greece_ will long continue to stir the masculine imagination of Englishmen.

On the other hand, it must be admitted that Byron's Occasional Pieces abound with cheap pathos, dubious fervour, and a kind of commonplace sentimentality that comes out in the form as well as in the feeling of his inferior work. The rhymes are apt to be hackneyed, the similes are sometimes tagged on awkwardly instead of being weaved into the texture, the expression has often lost its strength, and the emotion lacks sincerity. Byron, like his brother poets, wrote copiously what was published indiscriminately; but if the first-cla.s.s work had not been very good it would never have buoyed up above sheer oblivion so much that was third-rate and bad. His pieces are much _too_ occasional, for he was p.r.o.ne to indulgence in hasty verse whenever the fit was upon him, or as a method of enlisting public sympathy with his own misconduct, so that he was constantly appearing before the world as a perfidious sentimentalist, with a false air of lamentation over the misfortunes which he had brought upon himself, as in the Poems of the Separation. Yet when he shook off his personal grief and took to politics, no other poet could more vividly express his intense living interest in the great events of his time, or strike the proper note of some great catastrophe. It may be affirmed that the _Ode to Napoleon_ is better than anything else that has been written in English upon the most astonishing career in modern history:

'The triumph and the vanity, The rapture of the strife-- The earthquake-voice of Victory, To thee the breath of life; The sword, the sceptre, and that sway Which man seemed made but to obey, Wherewith renown was rife-- All quelled; Dark Spirit, what must be The madness of thy memory!

'The Desolator desolate!

The Victor overthrown!

The Arbiter of others' fate A suppliant for his own!

Is it some yet imperial hope That with such change can calmly cope?

Or dread of death alone?

To die a prince--or live a slave-- Thy choice is most ign.o.bly brave.'

In the first of these two stanzas the seventh line is weak and breaks the rapid rush of the verse; but the high pressure and impetus of the poem are sustained throughout twenty stanzas, producing the effect of an improvisatore who stops rather from want of breath than from any other lack of inspiration. In this respect the ode is a rare poetical exploit; for all poems composed under the spur of the moment, upon some memorable incident that has just startled the world, must be more or less improvised, and must hit the right pitch of extraordinary popular emotion. It is the difficulty of turning out good work under such arduous conditions that has too often shipwrecked or stranded some unlucky laureate.

There is one province of verse, if not exactly of poetry, in which Byron reigns undisputedly, though it is far distant from the land of lyrics. In his latest and longest production, _Don Juan_, he tells us that his 'sere fancy has fallen into the yellow leaf':

'And the sad truth which hovers o'er my desk Turns what was once romantic to burlesque.'

It was in _Beppo: a Venetian Story_ that he dropped, for the first time, the weapon of trenchant sarcasm and invective, with no very fine edge upon it, which he flourished in his youth, and took up the tone of light humorous satire upon society. He soon acquired mastery over the metre (which was suggested, as is well known, by Hookham Frere's _Whistlecraft_); and in _Don Juan_ he produced a long, rambling poem of a kind never before attempted, and still far beyond any subsequent imitations, in the English language. Of a certainty there is much that it is by no means desirable to imitate, for the English literature does not a.s.similate the element of cynical libertinism, which indeed becomes coa.r.s.e on an English tongue. Yet it is remarkable that the Whistlecraft metre, although Byron could manage it with point and spirit, has never produced more than insipid _pastiche_ in later hands. But while _Beppo_ may be cla.s.sed as pure burlesque, _Don Juan_ strikes various keys, ironical and voluptuous, grave and gay, rising sometimes to the level of strenuous realistic narrative in the episodes of the shipwreck and the siege, falling often into something like grotesque buffoonery, with much picturesque description, many animated lines, and occasional touches of effective pathos. As a story it has the picaresque flavour of _Gil Blas_, presenting a variety of scenes and adventures strung together without any definite plot; as a poem its reputation rests upon some pa.s.sages of indisputable beauty; while Byron's own experiences, grievances, and animosities, personal or political, run through the whole performance like an accompaniment, and break out occasionally into humorous sarcasm or violent denunciations. That the overheated fervour of a stormy youth should cool down into disdainful irony, under the chill of disappointment and exhaustion, was natural enough; and this unfinished poem may be regarded as typical of Byron's erratic life, full of loose intrigue and adventure, with its sudden and premature ending.

It is in _Don Juan_ that Byron stands forth as the founder and precursor of modern realism in poetry. He has now finally exorcised the hyperbolic fiend that vexed his youth, he has cast off the illusions of romance, he knows the ground he treads upon, and his pictures are drawn from life; he is the foremost of those who have ventured boldly upon the sombre actualities of war and bloodshed:--

'But let me put an end unto my theme, There was an end of Ismail, hapless town, Far flashed her burning towers o'er Danube's stream, And redly ran his blushing waters down.

The horrid warwhoop and the shriller scream Rose still; but fainter were the thunders grown; Of forty thousand that had manned the wall Some hundreds breathed, the rest were silent all.'

'A versified paraphrase,' it may be said, 'of sober history,' yet withal very different from the most animated prose, which must be kept at a lower temperature of intense expression. If we turn to quieter scenes--which are called picturesque because the artist, like a painter, has selected the right subject and point of view, and has grouped his details with exquisite skill--we may take the stanzas describing the return of the pirate Lambro to his Greek island--

'He saw his white walls shining in the sun, His garden trees all shadowy and green'--

as a fine example of pure objective writing, which lays out the whole scene truthfully, with the direct vision of one who has seen it. One does not find here the suggestive intimations, the wide imaginative horizon of higher poetry; there are no musical blendings of sound and sense, as in such lines as Tennyson's

'By the long wash of Australasian seas.'

Yet in these pa.s.sages Byron has after his own fashion served Nature faithfully, and he has preserved to us some masterly sketches of life and manners that have long since disappeared. The Greek islands have since fallen under the dominion of European uniformity; the costume of the people, the form of their government, are shabby imitations of Western models. But the cloudless sky, the sun slowly sinking behind Morea's hills, the sea on whose azure brow Time writes no wrinkle, and the marbled steep of Sunium, are still unchanged; and the peaceful tourist in these waters will see at once that Byron was a true workman in line and colour, and will feel the intellectual pleasure that comes from accurate yet artistic interpretation of natural beauties.

The poem of _Don Juan_ is, therefore, a miscellany, connected on the picturesque side with _Childe Harold_, and by its mocking spirit with _Beppo_ and the _Vision of Judgment_, the two pieces that may be cla.s.sed as pure burlesque. The irreverent persiflage of the _Vision_ belongs to the now obsolete school of Voltaire, and in biting wit and daring ridicule the performance is not unworthy of that supreme master in _diablerie_. Nor can it be a.s.serted that this lashing sarcasm was undeserved, or that all the profanity was in Byron's parody, for Southey's conception of the Almighty as a High Tory judge, with an obsequious jury of angels, holding a trial of George III., browbeating the witnesses against him and acquitting him with acclamation, so that he leaves the court without a stain on his character, was false and abject enough to stir the bile of a less irritable Liberal than Byron.

There exists, moreover, in the mind of every good English Whig a lurking sympathy with the Miltonic Satan, insomuch that all subsequent attempts by minor poets to humiliate and misrepresent him have invariably failed. Southey's _Vision_, and Robert Montgomery's libel upon Satan, have each undergone the same fate of being utterly extinguished, knocked clean out of English literature by one single crushing onslaught of Byron and Macaulay respectively.

Our conclusion must be brief, for in fact it is not easy to propound to the readers of this Review any general observations, which shall be new as well as true, upon a man's life and works that have been subjected to incessant scrutiny and criticism throughout the nineteenth century. At the beginning of this period Byron found himself matched, in the poetic arena, against contemporary rivals of first-cla.s.s genius and striking originality. And from his death almost up to the century's close there has been no time when some considerable poet has not occupied the forefront of English letters, and stamped his impression on the public mind. Variety in style and ideas has produced many vicissitudes of taste in poetry; it has been discovered that narrative can be better done in prose, and so the novel has largely superseded story-telling in verse. There have also been great political and social changes, and all these things have severely tested the staying powers of a writer who is too closely a.s.sociated with his own period to be reckoned among those wide-ranging spirits whom Sh.e.l.ley has called 'the kings of thought.' Nevertheless the new edition of Byron is appearing at a moment which is, we think, not inopportune. There is just now, as by a coincidence there was in the year 1800, a dearth of poetic production; we have fallen among lean years; we have come to a break in the succession of notable poets; the Victorian celebrities have one by one pa.s.sed away; and we can only hope that the first quarter of the twentieth century may bring again some such bountiful harvest as was vouchsafed to our grandfathers at the beginning of the nineteenth. In the meantime the reading of Byron may operate as a wholesome tonic upon the literary nerves of the rising generation; for, as Mr. Swinburne has generously acknowledged, with the emphatic concurrence of Matthew Arnold, his poems have 'the excellence of sincerity and strength.' Now one tendency of latter-day verse has been toward that over-delicacy of fibre which has been termed decadence, toward the preference of correct metrical harmonies over distinct and incisive expression, toward vague indications of meaning. In this form the melody prevails over the matter; the style inclines to become precious and garnished with verbal artifice. Some recent French poets, indeed, in their anxiety to correct the troublesome lucidity of their mother-tongue, have set up the school of symbolism, which deals in half-veiled metaphor and sufficiently obscure allusion, relying upon subtly suggestive phrases for evoking a.s.sociations. For ephemeral infirmities of this kind the straightforward virility of Byron's best work may serve as an antidote. On the other hand, we have the well-knit strenuous verse of extreme realism, wrought out by a poet in his shirt-sleeves, with rhymes clear-sounding like the tap of hammer on anvil, who sings of rough folk by sea and land, and can touch national emotion in regard to the incidents or politics of the moment. He paints without varnish, in hard outline, avoiding metaphor and ornamental diction generally; taking his language so freely out of the mouths of men in actual life that he makes occasional slips into vulgarity. He is at the opposite pole from the symbolist; but true poetry demands much more distinction of style and n.o.bility of thought.

And here again Byron's high lyrical notes may help to maintain elevation of tone and to preserve the romantic tradition. His poetry, like his character, is full of glaring imperfections; yet he wrote as one of the great world in which he made for a time such a noise; and after all that has been said about his moral delinquencies, it is certain that we could have better spared a better man.