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SOUTHERN REVIEW.NO. XIII
MAY, 1831
Art. I.—Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, with Notices of his Life. By Thomas Moore. In 2 Vols. Vol. ii. New York. J. & J.
Harper, 1831.
THE second volume of Mr. Moore’s
work is one of the most interesting books in the language. The success of the author is exactly
in the inverse ratio of the space which he occupies in his own pages—of which he has, for this
time, yielded the almost exclusive possession to the hero of his story. He has, indeed,
presented us with the “Confessions” of Lord
Byron, made up of the most authentic and least suspicious of all possible
materials—his letters, journals and the like relics, thrown off with the impression of every
varying mood upon them, and apparently without any intention, or even the remotest idea of
giving them to the public. They exhibit, accordingly, without disguise or palliation, a view of
his whole course of life during his last residence on the continent. We need not say that the
life of which the secret post-scenia and deepest
recesses are thus unexpectedly laid bare to the gaze of the world, is that of a man of
pleasure—dashed, it is true, with the gloom of a complexional melancholy, or more brilliantly
diversified by the mingled glories of genius and literature, and abruptly and prematurely
terminating in a high tragic catastrophe—an atoning self-sacrifice, and a hero’s grave. A
book of this character, it may very well be conceived, will, in spite of its attractions, or
rather in consequence of them, find a place in the Index Expurgatorius
of the sterner sort of censors—along with the “Memoires de Grammont,” and the “Amours des Gaules” of the Count de
Bussy-Rabutin. Yet, it is fit
and desirable that such truths should he told. They are passages in the book of life which all
would and some should read, and although the example of such a man as Lord
Byron is, no doubt, calculated to do much harm to minds of a certain stamp, we
must only take care to deny it to such people, as edged tools and dangerous drugs are kept out
of the way of children, and adults who are no better than children. In this naive confession,
besides, of all the infirmities and irregularities of the grandest genius, burning and
bewildered with the most ungovernable passions, there is, we conceive, no artificial stimulant
for the morbid appetite of sensuality. It is not addressed to the imagination, to deprave by
exciting it. It is a picture of life and manners, with far more of history and philosophy in
it, than of a voluptuous poetry. Every thing depends, as to the effects of certain exposures,
upon the associations which they have a tendency to call up. The nudities of the
surgeon’s cabinet or the painter’s study, are not those of the bagnio. They are
“the simplicity and spotless innocence,” of Milton’s Paradise, to men who survey such objects with the eye of the
artist or the philosopher.
We repeat, that we have read this book with intense interest. We do not know
where the letters are to be found in any language, which better repay a perusal. Perhaps as
mere models of the epistolary style, they are not so exquisite as some that might be cited.
Even of this, however, we are far from being sure. If they do not equal, for instance, in grace
and elegance, those of Gray, or Lady Mary—if they are not specimens of that inimitable,
ineffable bavardage, which makes those of Madame de Sévigné so entirely unique—they fully rival the best of them in
spirit, piquancy, and, we venture to add, wit, while, like the epistles
of Cicero, they not unfrequently rise from the most familiar
colloquial ease and freedom into far loftier regions of thought and eloquence. We were
particularly struck with this last peculiarity. We scarcely read one of them without being
surprised into a smile—occasionally into a broad laugh—by some felicitous waggery, some sudden
descent from the sublime to the ridiculous, while there is many a passage in which the least
critical reader will not fail to recognize the hand that drew Childe Harold.
Two other general observations have been suggested to us by the perusal of this
volume: the first is, that, although, as we have already remarked, it exhibits a view of
Lord Byron’s life when he had abjured the realm
and put himself out of the pale of English society, denying its authority, defying its power,
setting at nought, with foul scorn, all its conventional decencies and
established opinions, he appears to us in a much more amiable and estimable light as a man,
than he did in the first part of the work. We are not troubled here with any sham pleas—any
laboured and abortive apologies of Mr. Moore, for what
he must have known to be indefensible, if he had any moral sense at all. There is none of that
whining and mawkish hypocrisy which we found so peculiarly disgusting in the history of the
earlier part of Byron’s life. He does not tell a tale of horror, and
affect to palm it off upon his reader as a candid avowal of a peccadillo—he does not charge his
hero with what amounts to parricide, and then lament the unfortunate peculiarities of a parent,
which he more than insinuates, were a justification of such a monstrous perversion of nature—in
short, he does not confess Byron to have been utterly heartless, by his
very attempt (and a most awkward attempt) to find an excuse for him, in the tendency of genius
to “mount me up into the brain,” as honest Falstaff would say, but as Mr. Moore most daintily
expresses it “to transfer the seat of sensibility from the heart to the
fancy.” He tells, or rather he suffers Byron to tell, his story
here without any grimace or dissimulation. The whole truth comes out in a round unvarnished
tale, and yet it is scarcely possible to read these letters and not feel disposed rather to
deplore the fate, than reprobate the conduct of the writer—the gifted and miserable possessor
of so much that might be envied, admired and loved—“a fallen cherub,” not
only majestic, but touchingly beautiful and attractive, “though in ruins,”
with enough of his original goodness as well as brightness about him, to make us feel, what
transcendent and glorious excellence he has forfeited, by those accidental circumstances or
complexional peculiarities, or whatever else it were, by which, like one of his own heroes,
“he was betrayed too early and beguiled too long.”
The gloomy and fierce passions which inspire the muse of Byron seldom break forth in these letters; and as it has been said of Garrick, that it was only when he was off the stage that he
was acting, so, if the epistolary correspondence of the poet is (as we take it to be) a fair
specimen of his ordinary conversation, we should be inclined to look rather to the effusions of
his imagination, than to those which are supposed to flow more immediately from the heart, for
the true image of his character. It is not so with common men—it is not so even with those who,
possessing extraordinary talents, are in the habit, from policy or propriety or other motives,
of exercising a strong self-control when they appear before the public. But
Byron knew no such restraints—and then, all his poetry, as we re-marked on a former occasion, was the language of feelings which he had
brooded over until they were exalted into madness, and his brain burned as in a feverish
delirium. We are glad to have what we then advanced confirmed by the poet himself. From an
unpublished pamphlet, of which Mr. Moore has furnished some passages, we extract the
following, (p. 255.) His lordship is accounting for his having deviated in his own compositions
from the standard of excellence which he maintains in theory. “Those who know me
best,” says he “know this, and that I have been considerably astonished
at the temporary success of my works, &c. Could I have anticipated the degree of
attention which has been awarded, assuredly I would have studied more to deserve it. But I
have lived in far countries abroad, or in the agitating world at home, which was not
favourable to study or reflection: so that almost all I have written has been mere
passion—passion, it is true, of different kinds, but always passion; for, in me (if it be
not an Irishism to say so) my indifference was a kind of passion, the result of experience
and not the philosophy of nature.”* Nor is what he says in another place, (p. 50)
at all inconsistent with this avowal—but rather a confirmation of it:—“As for poesy,
mine is the dream of the sleeping passions; when they are awake, I cannot speak their
language, only in their somnambulism; and just now they are not dormant.” That is
to say, the first paroxysms of his wild emotions were overpowering, and he was silent under
them—Curæ—ingentes stupent. The eloquence of the passions does not begin
until their sharpest fury is spent—until the conflict within, the agony of the tormented
spirit, has been assuaged and subdued by time and reflection—but never was that eloquence
uttered by one who had not felt what it expresses, and felt it to the very bottom of a
thrilling and agitated heart. This is true of every art which professes to hold the mirror up
to human nature, in the scenes of its intensest excitement.—The unbounded control which a
first-rate orator or actor exercises over a popular assembly—the magic of the flashing eye, the
expressive countenance, the melting or piercing tones of a well modulated voice—are these mere
feats of rhetorical artifice—the tricks of a crafty juggler coldly practising upon the
credulity of the vulgar? By no means. The self-control which generally accompanies them, and
which makes them so surely and uniformly effective, is, indeed, the fruit of discipline—but the
potent charm, the breathed spell is from the soul—it is nature and nature alone, which asserts
this dominion over the hearts of men—and cool and concentrated as the successful performer
* See note, infra, p. 10.
may appear to be, he owes his triumphs over the feelings of others, to
still keener sensibilities of his own—to the “pulse which riots and the blood which
burns” within him. But if this is true of all men of genius, as it certainly is,
it is more applicable to poets than to other artists, and more applicable to Lord
Byron than to any other poet. It is impossible to cast the most superficial
glance over bis works, without perceiving that they are the effusions of a morbid and maddened
sensibility—a faithful record of the poet’s own experience in every variety of wild,
tumultuous excitement. Dreams, they may be, of sleeping passions—but they are passions which
have been awake, and they are dreams which do but fashion into more
poetical shapes, and array in more gloomy or glowing colours, the images of woe or of bliss, of
love or of wrath, of beauty or of horror and deformity, which have peopled the waking fancies
of the poet.
He, therefore, that sees Lord Byron only
through the medium of these letters, will form, at once, a very inadequate, and a very
erroneous conception of that extraordinary character. He is looking upon Vesuvius, when his
“grim fires” are covered over with vernal luxuriance and beauty—he is
looking upon the ocean, when the zephyr is scarcely breathing upon its glassy surface: how
should he be able to picture to himself the sublime terrors of the volcano, vomiting forth its
smouldering flames and molten lava, or of the foaming surge, when the lowest depths of the sea
have been torn up by the tempest? Pope excelled all men
in point, terseness and condensation, and he was a very great master of prose, as all true
poets are—yet whenever he wished to be particularly terse, condensed and pointed, he preferred
writing in verse. Byron’s poetry was, in-like manner, the natural
vehicle of his deepest feelings. Masterly as was his prose style, it was no fit channel for
such a burning flood of passion and impassioned thought as he poured out when the estro (to use his favourite phrase) was upon him—when he
had drunk of love and beauty until he was frenzied with their deliciousness, or some dark
fancy, or unfortunate event had occurred to wrap his thoughts in gloom, and “from the
bottom stir the hell within him.” His dæmon, like him of the Delphic shrine, delivered
his inspiration only in numbers. Compare Manfred with some of these playful epistles and such lines as these. “My boat is on the shore And my bark is on the sea; But before I go, Tom Moore, Here’s a double health to thee. Here’s a sigh to those who love me And a smile to those who hate; And whatever sky’s above me, Here’s a heart for every fate,” &c.
Or these, “My dear Mr. Murray, Your’e in a damned hurry To set up this ultimate canto: But if they don’t rob us, You’ll see Mr. Hobhouse Will bring it safe in his portmanteau,” &c. The gulph between them is immeasurable: it separates worlds; yet they are but the two
extremes of Lord Byron’s moral idiosyncracy: the fitful and strange
varieties of an hysterical nervousness. That gay creature, with such redundant animal spirits,
so full of glee and wantonness, apparently so docile and placable, and prepared to encounter
all the vicissitudes of life with irrepressible buoyancy of spirit—what is become of him? In
the twinkling of an eye, he has undergone an entire metamorphosis— “For even in his maddest mirthful mood, Strange pangs would flash across Childe
Harold’s brow, As if the memory of some deadly feud, Or disappointed passion, lurked below”— a cloud is upon his forehead, and woe is in his heart, and his spirit is agitated and
convulsed, as with the agony of a dæmoniacal possession. So we have a right to infer, from what
it is impossible to separate from the man, the poetry of his
passions—which is, at the same time, in perfect analogy with his conduct in certain
important particulars, and with his habits of life in his more unsocial and gloomy moods. We,
of course, speak rather of the capacities of Lord
Byron’s sensibility, than of any permanent, actual state of it. It is very
plain from these letters, as well as from other sources of information, and indeed, from the
common experience of men, that “time and the hour ran” with him as they do
with the rest of the world “thro’ the roughest day.” But it also
appears, that he had his moments of severe anguish, of mortal disgust, of withering ennui,
dejection and despair—that he felt when he was scarcely turned of thirty, the blight of a long
antedated old age, the weariness, the want of interest, the palled appetite and exhausted
sensibility—and that the figments of romance do not often exhibit a combination of per-sonal attributes or a mode of existence, more strange and peculiar, than
those of the poetical exile at Venice or Ravenna.
Smooth and smiling, however, as the surface of these letters generally is, there
occur occasionally in the course of them, some passages, fraught with all the wrath and
acerbity of Byron’s ‘inner man.’ Witness,
for instance, the fiendlike joy with which he laughs at the affecting suicide of one of the
best and ablest men of whom England has ever had to boast, Sir
Samuel Romilly. Be it remembered, that the inexpiable offence which drew down
upon him this fierce and implacable hostility was, that he had been professionally engaged by
Lady Byron’s friends. To be sure, his Lordship
charges him with having previously received his retainer—but then, Sir
Samuel offered him, we should think, a satisfactory excuse, when he declared
(what Lord Byron alleges no reason to disbelieve) that in the multiplicity
of his business, his clerk had not informed him of the fact. It appears to us altogether
unreasonable to presume a man of honor guilty of such unhandsome conduct, in the first place,
and of a base falsehood, afterwards, to excuse it. Lord Byron may have had
better grounds than he has chosen to state for his opinion on the subject—at all events, it is
difficult to imagine a sterner or fiercer vindictiveness than is expressed in the following
passages:
“I have never heard any thing of Ada, the little Electra of my Mycenæ. ********. But there will come a day of reckoning,
even if I should not live to see it. I have at least seen *** shivered, who was one of my assassins. When that man was doing his
worst to uproot my whole family, tree, branch and blossoms—when, after taking my retainer,
he went over to them—when he was bringing desolation upon my hearth, and destruction on my
household gods—did he think that in less than three years, a natural event—a severe
domestic, but an expected and common calamity—would lay his carcass in a cross-road or
stamp his name in a verdict of lunacy! Did he (who in his sexagenary ***,) reflect or
consider what my feelings must have been, when wife and child and sister and name and fame
and country, were to be my sacrifice on his legal altar—and this at a moment when my health
was declining, my fortune embarrassed, and my mind had been shaken by many kinds of
disappointment—while I was yet young and might have reformed what might be wrong in my
conduct and retrieved what was perplexing in my affairs! But he is in his grave and
******.” p. 153.
The asterisks in the above passage, no doubt, supply the place of some very
dreadful words, since Mr. Moore has thought fit to
suppress them. Murray, to whom the letter, from which
the passage is extracted, was addressed, seems to have expostulated with Byron on the injustice of his censure, or the excessive ferocity
of his resentment. The poet replies—
“You ask me to spare ****. Ask the worms. His dust can suffer nothing from the truth being
spoken: and if it could, how did he behave to me? You may talk to
the wind, which will carry the sound—and to the caves which will echo you—but not to me, on
the subject of a **** who wrongs me, whether dead or alive.” p. 106.
We feel in duty bound to quote his remarks, in quite a different strain, upon
another instance of suicide. The subject of them, it seems, had been an enemy of Byron, and had assailed him, as we are informed by Mr. Moore, “with peculiar bitterness and insolence,
at a crisis when both his heart and fame were most vulnerable.” Considering this
circumstance, they are certainly very amiable and generous.
“Poor Scott is now
no more. In the exercise of his vocation, he contrived at last to make himself the subject
of a coroner’s inquest. But he died like a brave man, and he lived an able one. I
knew him personally, though slightly. Although several years my senior, we had been
schoolfellows together at the ‘grammar-schule’ (or, as the Aberdonians
pronounce it, ‘squeel’) of New Aberdeen. He did not
behave to me quite handsomely in his capacity of editor a few years ago, but he was under
no obligation to behave otherwise. The moment was too tempting for many friends and for all
enemies. At a time when all my relations (save one) fell from me like leaves from the tree
in autumn winds, and my few friends became still fewer,—when the whole periodical press (I
mean the daily and weekly, not the literary
press) was let loose against me in every shape of reproach, with the two strange exceptions
(from their usual opposition) of ‘the
Courier’ and ‘the
Examiner,’—the paper of which Scott had the direction was
neither the last, nor the least vituperative. Two years ago I met him at Venice, when he
was bowed in griefs by the loss of his son, and had known, by experience, the bitterness of
domestic privation. He was then earnest with me to return to England; and on my telling
him, with a smile, that he was once of a different opinion, he replied to me,
‘that he and others had been greatly misled; and that some pains, and rather
extraordinary means, had been taken to excite them.’
Scott is no more, but there are more than one living who were
present at this dialogue. He was a man of very considerable talents, and of great
acquirements. He had made his way, as a literary character, with high success, and in a few
years. Poor fellow! I recollect his joy at some appointment which he had obtained, or was
to obtain, through Sir James Mackintosh, and which
prevented the further extension (unless by a rapid run to Rome) of his travels in Italy. I
little thought to what it would conduct him. Peace be with him!—and may all such other
faults as are inevitable to humanity be as readily forgiven him, as the little injury which
he had done to one who respected his talents and regrets his loss.”—p. 253.
The other general remark suggested to us by the perusal of these letters is,
that they shew Lord Byron to have been quite as much
distinguished by his knowledge of the world, and his acute, practical
cleverness, as by the highest attributes of genius. That he should write good, or even
admirable prose, is not, in itself, wonderful. Many other poets have excelled in the same way.
But Byron’s style is distinguished by an ease, simplicity, and
abandon rarely equalled even by those most practised in composition, and every thing he utters
is marked with the most accurate and judicious thinking. It is as good a specimen as we have
ever seen of strong healthy English sense—that common sense which is of all things most
uncommon—in pure, idiomatic, expressive and vigorous English. It is, in short, very prose—and although, as we have said, he occasionally rises into a
strain of far loftier mood than is common even in the epistles of the greatest men, his style
never ceases to be perfectly free from affectation of every kind, and with no more of poetical
colouring about it than is inseparable from the expression of a glowing thought or a, deep
feeling. Take the following animated and striking passage as a specimen. It is just one of
those occasions, be it remarked, where, as Pope has it, “if a poet, Shone in description, he might show it,” and where he would be most sorely tempted to show it. Yet nothing could be thrown off more
carelessly. To be sure it is the dash of a master’s pencil, and we are not to wonder that
the sketch is so spirited and fine.
“In reading, I have just chanced upon an expression of
Tom Campbell’s;—speaking of Collins, he says that ‘no reader cares any more about
the characteristic manners of his Eclogues than about the authenticity of the tale of
Troy.’ ’Tis false—we do care about ‘the authenticity
of the tale of Troy.’ I have stood upon that plain daily, for more
than a month, in 1810; and, if any thing diminished my pleasure, it was that the blackguard
Bryant had impugned its veracity. It is true I read
‘Homer Travestied’ (the first
twelve books), because Hobhouse and others bored me with
their learned localities, and I love quizzing. But I still venerated the grand original as the
truth of history (in the material facts) and of
place. Otherwise, it would have given me no delight. Who will
persuade me, when I reclined upon a mighty tomb, that it did not contain a hero?—its very
magnitude proved this. Men do not labour over the ignoble and petty dead—and why should not the
dead be Homer’s dead? The secret of Tom
Campbell’s defence of inaccuracy in costume and
description is, that his Gertrude, &c.
has no more locality in common with Pennsylvania than with Penmanmaur. It is notoriously full
of grossly false scenery, as all Americans declare, though they praise parts of the Poem. It is
thus that self-love for ever creeps out, like a snake, to sting any thing which happens, even
accidentally, to stumble upon it.” p. 279.
We were greatly struck, the first time we read this passage, with the very few
lines in it which relate to Homer and Troy. The style, both
of thought and expression, seems to us remarkable for a noble, and even grand simplicity, while
that “reclining upon a mighty tomb,” presents, in itself, to the fancy of
the reader a complete picture, and brings thronging about it all the great associations of that
holy ground of poetry and arms. It reminded us strongly of some imagery in the letter to Murray upon the Pope and Bowles
controversy. There is no merit of composition more rare and exquisite, than that of thus
exhibiting a perfect image of the object described, suggesting, at the same time, and calling
up, as if by enchantment, the whole scene to which it belongs, without any laboured pomp of
description. Every scholar knows what high encomiums have been deservedly passed by the critics
upon a noted instance of the kind in an oration of Cicero,
in which he paints Verres in an effeminate foreign costume,
reclining upon the shoulder of a courtezan, and looking out upon a fleet at sea from the shore
at Syracuse.* These letters and journals abound with such beauties.
But descriptive talent is not to our present purpose—nor is Byron’s merit as a prose-writer by any means confined to his
style. He is a sound and most ingenious thinker. It is scarcely possible to open this
volume—unequal as familiar epistles generally are—without being struck with this truth, and
wondering how so sensible a man, could have yielded himself up, in the conduct of life, so
unresistingly, to the besetting sins of his temper and temperament. We might easily adduce
instances without number—but we shall confine ourselves to one. We mean his defence of
Pope—a favourite subject, to which he recurs again
and again, with unabated enthusiasm. We venture to back him in this—his chosen vocation of
critic and champion of injured genius—against any Aristarchus of the schools from the first downward. We would willingly reprint
all that he has said upon this subject,—bating the extravagance to which the zeal of the
advocate has, in a single instance, carried him—to aid in the circulation of so much excellent
sense and good writing—especially as this volume may be considered, in some sort, as an
interdicted book. But we will content ourselves with two extracts—one of them containing some
curious remarks upon Pope’s amour with Miss Blount.
“And here I wish to say a few words on the present state
of English poetry. That this is the age of the decline of English poetry will be doubted by
few who have calmly considered the subject. That there
* “In Verrem, act
ii. 1. 5. c. 33.
are men of genius among the present poets makes little against the
fact, because it has been well said, that ‘next to him who forms the taste of his
country, the greatest genius is he who corrupts it.’ No one has ever denied
genius to Marino, who corrupted not merely the taste
of Italy, but that of all Europe for nearly a century. The great cause of the present
deplorable state of English poetry is to be attributed to that absurd and systematic
depreciation of Pope, in which, for the last few
years, there has been a kind of epidemical concurrence. Men of the most opposite opinions
have united upon this topic. Warton and Churchill began it, having borrowed the hint probably from
the heroes of the Dunciad, and their own
internal conviction that their proper reputation can be as nothing till the most perfect
and harmonious of poets—he who, having no fault, has had reason
made his reproach—was reduced to what they conceived to be his level; but even they dared not degrade him below Dryden. Goldsmith, and Rogers, and Campbell, his most successful disciples; and Hayley, who, however feeble, has left one poem ‘that will not be
willingly let die,’ (the
Triumphs of Temper,) kept up the reputation of that pure and perfect style; and
Crabbe, the first of living poets, has almost
equalled the master. Then came Darwin, who was put
down by a single poem in the Antijacobin; and the Cruscans, from Merry to Jerningham, who were annihilated (if Nothing can be said
to be annihilated) by Gifford, the last of the
wholesome English satirists.
* * * * *
“These three personages, S * *, W * *,
and C * *, had all of them a very natural
antipathy to Pope, and I respect them for it, as the
only original feeling or principle which they have contrived to preserve. But they have
been joined in it by those who have joined them in nothing else: by the Edinburgh Reviewers, by the whole heterogeneous mass of
living English poets, excepting Crabbe, Rogers, Gifford,
and Campbell, who, both by precept and practice,
have proved their adherence; and by me, who have shamefully deviated in practice, but have
ever loved and honoured Pope’s poetry with my whole soul, and
hope to do so till my dying day. I would rather see all I have ever written lining the same
trunk in which I actually read the eleventh book of a modern Epic poem at Malta in 1811, (I
opened it to take out a change after the paroxysm of a tertian, in the absence of my
servant and found it lined with the name of the maker, Eyre,
Cockspur-street, and with the Epic poetry alluded to,) than sacrifice what I firmly believe
in as the Christianity of English poetry, the poetry of Pope.
* * * * *
“Nevertheless, I will not go so far as * * in his postscript, who pretends that no great poet ever had immediate fame, which, being interpreted,
means that * * is not quite so much read by his cotemporaries as might be desirable.
This assertion is as false as it is foolish. Homer’s glory depended upon his present popularity:—he recited,—and,
without the strongest impression of the moment, who would have gotten the Iliad by heart, and. given it to tradition?
Ennius, Terence,
Plautus, Lucretius, Horace, Virgil, Æschylus,
Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho, Anacreon, Theocritus, all
the great poets of antiquity, were the delight of their
cotemporaries†. The very existence of a poet, previous to the invention of printing,
depended upon his present popularity; and how often has it impaired his future fame? Hardly
ever. History informs us, that the best have come down to us. The reason is evident; the
most popular found the greatest number of transcribers for their MSS., and that the taste
of their cotemporaries was corrupt can hardly be avouched by the moderns, the mightiest of
whom have but barely approached them. Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto,
and Tasso, were all the darlings of the cotemporary
reader. Dante’s Poem was celebrated long before his death; and,
not long after it, States negotiated for his ashes, and disputed for the sites of the
composition of the Divina Commedia.
Petrarch was crowned in the Capitol. Ariosto
was permitted to pass free by the public robber who had read the Orlando Furioso. I would not recommend Mr. * * to
try the same experiment with his Smugglers. Tasso, notwithstanding the
criticisms of the Cruscanti, would have been crowned in the Capitol, but for his death.
“It is easy to prove the immediate popularity of the
chief poets of the only modern nation in Europe that has a poetical language, the Italian.
In our own, Shakspeare, Spenser, Jonson, Waller, Dryden,
Congreve, Pope, Young, Shenstone, Thomson,
Johnson, Goldsmith, Gray, were all as popular
in their lives as since. Gray’s
Elegy pleased instantly, and eternally. His Odes did not, nor yet do they please
like his Elegy. Milton’s politics kept him
down; but the Epigram of Dryden, and the very sale of his work, in proportion to the less
reading time of its publication, prove him to have been honoured by his cotemporaries. I
will venture to assert, that the sale of the Paradise Lost was greater in the first four years after its publication than
that of ‘the Excursion’ in the same number, with the difference of nearly a
century and a half between them of time, and of thousands in point of general
readers.” pp. 253, 254.
* * *
“Pope himself
‘sleeps well-nothing can touch him further;’ but those who love the
honour of their country, the perfection of her literature, the glory of her language, are
not to be expected to permit an atom of his dust to be stirred in his tomb, or a leaf to be
stripped from the laurel which grows over it.
* * *
“To me it appears of no very great consequence whether
Martha Blount was or was not Pope’s mistress, though I could have wished him a
better. She appears to have been a cold-hearted, interested, ignorant, disagreeable woman,
upon whom the tenderness of Pope’s heart in the desolation of
his latter days was cast away, not knowing whither to turn, as he drew towards his
premature old age, childless and lonely,—like the needle which, approaching within a
certain distance of the pole, becomes helpless and useless, and, ceasing to tremble, rusts.
She seems to have been so totally unworthy of tenderness, that it is an additional proof of
the kindness of Pope’s heart to have been able to love such a
being. But we must love something. I agree with Mr.
B. that she ‘could at no time have regarded
Popepersonally, with attachment,’ because she was incapable of
attachment; but I deny that Pope could not be
regarded with personal attachment by a worthier woman. It is not probable, indeed, that a
woman would have fallen in love with him as he walked along the Mall, or in a box at the
opera, nor from a balcony, nor in a ball-room; but in society he seems to have been as
amiable as unassuming, and, with the greatest disadvantages of figure, his head and face
were remarkably handsome, especially his eyes. He was adored by his friends—friends of the
most opposite dispositions, ages, and talents—by the old and wayward Wycherley, by the cynical Swift, the rough Atterbury, the
gentle Spence, the stern attorney-bishop Warburton, the virtuous Berkeley, and the ‘cankered
Bolingbroke.’ Bolingbroke wept over him like a child; and
Spence’s description of his last moments is at least as
edifying as the more ostentatious account of the deathbed of Addison. The soldier Peterborough and
the poet Gay, the witty Congreve and the laughing Rowe, the
eccentric Cromwell and the steady Bathurst, were all his intimates. The man who could
conciliate so many men of the most opposite description, not one of whom but was a
remarkable or a celebrated character, might well have pretended to all the attachment which
a reasonable man would desire of an amiable woman.
“Pope, in fact,
wherever he got it, appears to have understood the sex well. Bolingbroke, ‘a judge of the subject,’ says Warton, thought his ‘Epistle on the Characters of Women’ his
‘masterpiece.’ And even with respect to the grosser passion, which takes
occasionally the name of ‘romantic,’ accordingly as the degree of sentiment
elevates it above the definition of love by Buffon,
it may be remarked, that it does not always depend upon personal appearance, even in a
woman. Madame Cottin was a plain woman, and might
have been virtuous, it may be presumed, without much interruption. Virtuous she was, and
the consequences of this inveterate virtue were that two different admirers (one an elderly
gentleman) killed themselves in despair (see Lady
Morgan’s ‘France’). I would not, however, recommend this rigour to plain women in
general, in the hope of securing the glory of two suicides apiece. I believe that there are
few men who, in the course of their observations on life, may not have perceived that it is
not the greatest female beauty who forms the longest and the strongest passions.
“But, apropos of Pope.—Voltaire tells us that the
Marechal Luxembourg (who had precisely
Pope’s figure) was not only somewhat too amatory for a great
man, but fortunate in his attachments. La Valière,
the passion of Louis XIV., had an unsightly defect. The
Princess of Eboli, the mistress of Philip the Second of Spain, and Maugiron, the minion of Henry the Third of
France, had each of them lost an eye; and the famous Latin epigram was
written upon them, which has, I believe, been either translated or imitated by Goldsmith;— ‘Lumine Acon dextro, capta est Leonilla
sinistro, Et potis est forma vincere uterque Deos; Blande puer, lumen quod habes concede sorori, Sic tu cæcus Amor, sic erit illa Venus.’
“Wilkes, with his
ugliness, used to say that ‘he was but a quarter of an hour behind the handsomest
man in England;’ and this vaunt of his is said not to have been disproved by
circumstances. Swift, when
neither young, nor handsome, nor rich, nor even amiable, inspired the two most
extraordinary passions upon record, Vanessa’s
and Stella’s. ‘Vanessa, aged scarce
a score. Sighs for a gown of forty-four.’
“He requited them bitterly; for he seems to have broken
the heart of the one, and worn out that of the other; and he had his reward, for he died a
solitary idiot in the hands of servants.
“For my own part, I am of the opinion of Pausanias, that success in love depends upon Fortune.
‘They particularly renounce Celestial
Venus, into whose temple, &c. &c. &c. I remember, too, to
have seen a building in Ægina in which there is a statue of Fortune, holding a horn of
Amalthea; and near her there is a winged Love.
The meaning of this is, that the success of men in love-affairs depends more on the
assistance of Fortune than the charms of beauty. I am persuaded, too, with Pindar (to whose opinion I submit in other particulars),
that Fortune is one of the Fates, and that in a certain respect she is more powerful
than her sisters.’—See Pausanias, Achaics, book vii. chap. 26, page 246,
‘Taylor’s Translation.’
“Grimm has a
remark of the same kind on the different destinies of the younger Crebillon and Rousseau. The former writes a licentious novel, and a young English girl of
some fortune and family (a Miss Strafford) runs away, and crosses the
sea to marry him; while Rousseau, the most tender and passionate of
lovers, is obliged to espouse his chambermaid. If I recollect rightly, this remark was also
repeated in the Edinburgh Review of Grimm’s Correspondence,
seven or eight years ago.
“In regard ‘to the strange mixture of indecent,
and sometimes profane levity, which his conduct and language often exhibited,’ and which so much shocks Mr. Bowles, I object to the indefinite word ‘often;’ and in extenuation of the occasional occurrence of
such language it is to be recollected, that it was less the tone of Pope, than the tone of the time. With the exception of the
correspondence of Pope and his friends, not many private letters of
the period have come down to us: but those, such as they are—a few scattered scraps from
Farquhar and others—are more indecent and coarse
than any thing in Pope’s letters. The comedies of Congreve, Vanbrugh,
Farquhar, Cibber, &c.,
which naturally attempted to represent the manners and conversation of private life, are
decisive upon this point; as are also some of Steele’s papers, and even Addison’s. We all know what the conversation of Sir R. Walpole, for seventeen years the prime-minister of
the country, was at his own table, and his excuse for his licentious language, viz.,
‘that every body understood that, but few could talk
rationally upon less common topics.’ The refinement of latter days,—which is
perhaps the consequence of vice, which wishes to mask and soften itself, as much as of
virtuous civilization,—had not yet made sufficient progress. Even Johnson, in his ‘London,’ has two or three passages which cannot
be read aloud, and Addison’s ‘Drummer’ some indelicate allusions.” pp. 321-323.
There are two short paragraphs in this volume, that let us fully into Lord Byron’s theory of the sublime and beautiful in
composition.
“I thought Anastasiusexcellent: did
I not say so? Matthews’s Diary most
excellent; it, and Forsyth, and parts
of Hobhouse, are all we have of
truth or sense upon Italy. The Letter to
Julia very good indeed. I do not despise * * * *
*; but if she knit blue-stockings instead of wearing them, it would be
better. You are taken in by that false stilted trashy style, which
is a mixture of all the styles of the day, which are all bombastic
(I don’t except my own—no one has done more through negligence
to corrupt the language); but it is neither English nor poetry. Time will show.”
p. 240.
“I perceive that in Germany, as well as in Italy, there
is a great struggle about what they call ‘classical’ and
‘romantic,’—terms which were not subjects of classification in England, at
least when I left it four or five years ago. Some of the English scribblers, it is true,
abused Pope and Swift, but the reason was that they themselves did not know how to write
either prose or verse; but nobody thought them worth making a sect of. Perhaps there may be
something of the kind sprung up lately, but I have not heard much about it, and it would be
such bad taste that I shall be very sorry to believe it.” p. 248.
It is plain from these passages that he had formed his taste, or nature had
formed it for him, upon the models of Attic, not of Asiatic eloquence—of classical, not of romantic poetry. His observations upon the
styles of the day (his own included) is perfectly just. They are all bombastic—even Wordsworth’s, who loves
such infantine simplicity—for even his simplicity is often affected, and always visibly
elaborate—as different, as it is possible to imagine any thing, from the naked, unsophisticated
nature of the best Greek writers.* As to Lord Byron himself,
he has pleaded guilty, in anticipation, to a charge which may undoubtedly be alleged against
him with perfect justice. He has done more than any body else to make a vicious style, popular.
The two last Cantos of Childe Harold have, we
believe, generally been considered as his master-pieces. They have been abundantly extolled,
and Mr. Moore mentions that one distinguished writer,
especially, and he an enemy of Byron, at least, an active adversary of his
principles, has pronounced the fourth Canto the most sublime production of human genius.
Without subscribing to this extravagant encomium, we flatter ourselves that we feel all the
grandeur and pathos of that powerful production. Yet we undertake to say it would be difficult
to point out any work of genius of the present age, which is more
* “Voltaire’s
prose style is more Attic than that of any writer, we remember, within the last
century—except, perhaps, Goldsmith.
obnoxious to the sweeping censure pronounced by the author upon himself
and all his contemporaries. In a former article, we adduced several instances to exemplify this
criticism, but we then remarked, that it was not a frigid conceit, or an extravagant hyperbole,
here and there, which we have to find fault with, so much as the general tone of emphasis and
exaggeration—a too visible effort apparent throughout the whole work, to be very original and
striking, or very powerful,grand and impressive. This straining after effect—which produces
what is well described in French as the style gigantesque—seems to us more or less visible in
every part of the poems alluded to, and, no doubt, greatly impairs their general effect, not to
mention the positive faults which it engenders.* Let us cite an example. The description of the
Belvidere Apollo, contains some of the finest lines in the poem.
The whole picture is a magnificent one and worthy of the subject. It is the idea of the
statuary bodied forth in poetical language, or rather a competition between the single visible
form and the whole power of words, which shall convey the most perfect image of beauty to the
mind—such a contest as Roscius and Cicero are said to have instituted, to try the relative compass of gesture, (or
more strictly, mute acting) and oratorical diction. Yet successful as the poet must be admitted
to have been in this lofty enterprize, his verse has faults in it from which the statue is
free. This comparison is the more important, because as Schlegel says, after Winkelmann, they
who wish to conceive a just idea of the standard of excellence which Greek genius proposed to
itself, must study the antique in sculpture. The remark is perfectly sound, and we can only
say, that Sophocles always occurs to us when we think of
the Apollo and vice versa. And so we conceive, that no modern artist
(including the poets) has ever approached so nearly to the severe graces, and the simple
grandeur of the antique, as Raphael,† But to
proceed with the matter in hand. The description is contained in two stanzas—
* Lord Byron speaks in one of his
letters, of the Childe Harold as his
favourite work. We cite the passage more willingly, because it throws still further
light upon the manner in which he identifies himself with his work—the égoisme, in short, which is their pervading
principle and spirit. “I rejoice to hear of your forthcoming in February,
though I tremble for the magnificence which you attribute to the new Childe Harold. I am glad you like it: it is a fine
indistinct piece of poetical desolation, and my favourite. I was
half mad during the time of its composition, between metaphysics,
mountains, lakes, love unextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the night-mare
of my own delinquencies. I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but
for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law; and
even then, if I could have been certain to haunt her, and
fling the shattered scalp of my sinciput and occiput in her frightful
face.”—p. 51.
† With deference to Winkelmann, be it said.
it appears to us that both begin most beautifully and end faultily; a
perfect Apollo sinking (if we may be pardoned a pun,
intelligible only to a foreigner) into a phébus. “Or view the Lord of the unerring bow, The god of life and poesy and light— The sun in human limbs arrayed and brow All radiant from his triumph in the fight. The shaft hath just been shot—the arrow bright With an immortal vengeance; in his eye And nostril beautiful disdain* and mightAnd majesty, flash their full lightnings by Developing in that one glance, the deity.”
The words in italics do not appear to us either in keeping with the image of
the Apollo, or appropriate in themselves. “Majesty flashing
its lightnings,” might be of questionable propriety, i. e. sobriety, any
where—most especially, however, is it so, when applied to this statue. So the epithet
“full” seems to be quite out of place—and the “by” at the end of the line is clearly there only for the rhyme. We
may be wrong, but the pleasure we have uniformly derived from this beautiful stanza, has always
been in some degree marred by these imperfections, as they seem to us. But the second is more
objectionable. “But in his delicate form—a dream of love Shaped by some solitary nymph, whose breast Longed for a deathless lover from above And maddened in that vision—are exprest All that ideal beauty ever bless’d The mind within its most unearthly mood, When each conception was a heavenly guest— A ray of immortality—and stood,Star-like around, until they gathered to a god.”
These last three lines may be fine: there may be some secret meaning in them
which we do not seize: we own, however, that they have always appeared to us vague, mystical
and extravagant. Of one thing we are very sure, they contribute nothing either to the
distinctness or vividness of that image of beauty, which it was the object of the poet to bring
out as strongly as possible, and are not like any thing that is to be found in Greek poetry—not
excepting the odes of Pindar, or the choruses of the
tragedians. Is it good as “romantic” writing?
* This fine line is a reminiscence—in part.
“Oh what a deal of scorn looks beautiful In the contempt and anger of that lip.”—Shakspeare.
This last allusion leads us to remark upon that distinction between the
“classical” and “romantic” styles, which Byron, in one of the passages quoted above, alludes to as a novel, and condemns
as an absurd, one. We are glad to hear an opinion which we ventured to advance in our first
number,* confirmed by so high an authority—for if any writer has a claim to a high place in the
new school, it is undoubtedly Byron. The distinction now alluded to,
originated in Germany. It was seized by Madame de Staël
with avidity, as well adapted to her purposes of metaphysical, mystical and ambitious
declamation, and it has since been entertained with more respect than we conceive it deserves,
in the literary circles of Europe. A. W. Schlegel in his
valuable Lectures upon Dramatic Poetry, makes
it the basis of all his comparisons between the ancients and the moderns in that art. His main
object is to account for the simplicity of the Greek drama, and its close adherence to the
three unities, as well as the rigid exclusion from it of every thing comic and incongruous, on
principles which shall explain the difference between that style and the complicated and
irregular plots and tragi-comic mixtures of Calderon and
Shakspeare, without supposing any inferiority in the
latter. It was not enough for him to say, that ancient taste was too fastidious; or that
ancient criticism was more severe, as the modern is more indulgent—that the former exacted of
genius more than it can perform, at least without a sacrifice of much of its power and
enthusiasm—while the latter unshackles “the muse of fire” and gives it full
scope and boundless regions to soar in—and that this is the reason, in short, why Macbeth and Othello are so much better (as we say they are) than the
Orestiad or the Œdipus. This did not suit with Schlegel’s way of
thinking, first, because he was a good scholar, and knew better; and next and principally,
because he was a German philosopher, and therefore bound to explain the phenomenon by some
subtile process of reasoning of his own invention. This he has attempted to do, and the result
(as we understand it) is, that in all the arts of taste, the genius of modern times is essentially different from that of the Greeks, and requires, for its gratification, works of a structure totally distinct from those
which he admits to have been the best imaginable models of the classic style.
The principle, by which it is attempted to account for this mighty revolution
in art and criticism, is religion. That of the Greeks we are told was
“the deification of the powers of nature and of earthly life.” Under a
southern sky, amidst the
* Article I.—Classical Learning.
sweets of a genial and radiant climate, genius naturally dreams of joy
and beauty, and the forms with which a poetical fancy peopled heaven, were fashioned upon those
with which it was familiar on earth. A gay, sensual, and elegant mythology, grew up under its
plastic hands—its visions of ideal perfection were embodied in the idols of superstitious
worship,—and Venus, Apollo, Minerva, Hercules, &c. have been individualized as images of certain attributes, and
identified with the conceptions of all mankind, by the master-pieces which they may be said to
have patronized, since they were created to adorn their temples or to grace their festivals.
But this system of religious adoration was confined to the present life, addressed itself
exclusively to the senses, exacted of the worshipper only forms and oblations, and confirmed
him in the tranquil self-complacency or the joyous spirit which the face of nature and the
circumstances of his own condition inspired. Christianity was, in all these particulars, the
very opposite of Paganism. It added to the material world, a mysterious world of spirits—it
substituted the infinite for the finite, an endless future for the transitory present—at the
end of every vista in life, it presents the grave, and it has shrouded the grave itself in a
deeper gloom, and made death emphatically the King of Terrors. But Schlegel has expressed himself so well upon this subject, that we are tempted
to quote a long passage from him:
“Among the Greeks, human nature was in itself all sufficient; they
were conscious of no wants, and aspired at no higher perfection than that which they could
actually attain by the exercise of their own faculties. We, however, are taught by superior
wisdom, that man, through a high offence, forfeited the place for which he was originally
destined: and that the whole object of his earthly existence is to strive to regain that
situation which if left to his own strength, he could never accomplish. The religion of the
senses had only in view the possession of outward and perishable blessings; and
immortality, in so far;as it was believed, appeared in an obscure distance like a shadow, a
faint dream of this bright and vivid futurity. The very reverse of all this is the case
with the Christian: every thing finite and mortal is lost in the contemplation of infinity;
life has become shadow and darkness, and the first dawning of our real existence is beyond
the grave. Such a religion must awaken the foreboding, which slumbers in every feeling
heart, to the most thorough consciousness, that the happiness after which we strive, we can
never here obtain: that no external object can ever entirely fill our souls, and that every
mortal enjoyment is but a fleeting and momentary deception. When the
soul resting, as it were, under the willows of exile, breathes out its longing for its
distant home, the prevailing character of its song must be melancholy. Hence the poetry of
the ancients was the poetry of enjoyment, and ours is that of desire; the former has its
foundation in the scene which is present, while the latter hovers between recollection and
hope. Let us not be understood to affirm that every thing flows in one strain of wailing
and complaint, and that the voice of melancholy must always be loudly heard. As the
austerity of tragedy was not incompatible with the joyous views of the Greeks, so the
romantic poetry can assume every tone, even that of the most lively gladness; but still it
will always in some shape or other, bear traces of the source from which it originated. The
feeling of the moderns is, upon the whole, more intense, their fancy
more incorporeal, and their thoughts more contemplative.”*
Now, we are disposed to assent, in general, to the justness of these
observations. We think that modern literature does differ from that of the Greeks in its
complexion and spirit—that it is more pensive, sombre and melancholy, perhaps we may add, more
abstract and metaphysical—and it has, no doubt, been “sicklied o’er”
with this sad hue, by the influence of a religious faith which connects morality with worship,
and teaches men to consider every thought, word and action of their lives as involving, in some
degree, the tremendous issues of eternity. Macchiavelli
has a similar theory of his own. He refers the existence of democratic government among the
ancients, and the almost total absence of it in his time, to the same cause. The spirit of
polytheism he conceives to have been bold, hardy and masculine, that of Christianity to be so
meek, lowly, and self-abasing as to fit its professors for any sort of imposition or
contumely.† This notion has been signally refuted by the history of the last three
centuries—especially by the exploits of our Puritan and Huguenot ancestors—but the theory of
the Florentine secretary is, in practical matters, very much what Schlegel’s is in literature. Certainly we are more given to spiritualizing than the Greeks were—sensible objects suggest moral
reflections more readily—the external world is treated as if it were the symbol of the
invisible, and the superiority of mind to matter, of the soul to the body, is almost as much
admitted by the figures of rhetoric and poetry, as in the dogmas of philosophy. There were no
Herveys and Dr.
Youngs at Athens. The spirit, we repeat it is changed—the
* Dramatic
Lit.—Lect. ix. p. 348. † Discorsi.
associations which natural objects suggest, are different, of course—but
does this alter, in any essential degree, the forms of beauty? Does it affect the proportions
which the parts of a work of art ought to bear to each other and to the whole? Does it so far
modify the relations of things that what would be fit and proper in a poem, an oration, a
colonnade, a picture, if it were ancient, is misplaced and incongruous now? In short, has the
philosophy of literature and the arts, the reason, the logic—which controls their execution and
results as much as it does the conclusions of science, though in a less palpable
manner—undergone any serious revolution? Schlegel and the rest of the same
school affirm that such a revolution has taken place. Their favourite illustration of it is, as
we have already remarked, the drama and the unities; Shakspeare and Sophocles are the great
representatives of the “romantic” and the “classical”—and they compare
the former to painting which is various, the latter, to sculpture, which is of course
characterized by singleness and simplicity. “Why,” say they “are
the Greek and romantic poets so different in their practice, with respect to place and
time.” The question is an interesting one. Many solutions may be offered; and the
very last we should adopt would be the following: which, indeed, so far as it is intelligible,
is only a different way of asserting the same thing; in other words, a very palpable
petitio principii. “The principal
cause of the difference is the plastic spirit of the antique and the picturesque spirit of
the romantic poetry. Sculpture directs our attention exclusively to the groupe exhibited to
us, it disentangles it as far as possible from all external accompaniments, and where they
can be altogether dispensed with, they are indicated as lightly us possible. Painting, on
the other hand, delights in exhibiting in a minute manner, along with the principal
figures, the surrounding locality and all the secondary objects, and to open to us in the
background, a prospect into a boundless distance; light and perspective are its peculiar
charms. Hence the dramatic, and especially, the tragic art of the ancients annihilates in
some measure, the external circumstances of space and time; while the romantic drama adorns
by their changes its more diversified pictures. Or to express myself in other terms, the
principles of antique poetry is ideal, that of the romantic mystical; the former subjects,
space and time, to the internal free activity of the mind; the latter adores these
inconceivable essences as supernatural powers, in whom something of the divinity has its
abode.”*
* Dramatic
Lit.—Lect. ix.
We are willing to impute the transcendent, or if the epithet be preferred, the
truly romantic nonsense of the last sentence, to the translator; but we
may conjecture from the context, and from the other parts of his work, what was the drift of
the author. M. Schlegel means to say (as he does affirm
elsewhere) that this difference between ancient and modern genius, which is thus illustrated by
sculpture and painting, or the plastic and the picturesque, pervades all the departments of literature and art, without exception.
In music, for instance, the ancients are said to have preferred melody, the moderns, harmony—in
architecture, compare the Parthenon or the Pantheon with Westminster Abbey, or the Church of
St. Stephen at Vienna—even the sculpture of the moderns, according to the opinion of Hemsterhusius, is too much like painting, as the painting of
the ancients was probably too much like sculpture. Now, in the first place, we deny the fact
that the taste of the moderns is different from that of the Greeks in these particulars. As for
the drama, we have no tragedies but Shakspeare’s
and if we had, his incomparable genius has settled that part of the controversy irreversibly,
so far as popular opinion is concerned. But do not all scholars, without exception, admire and
delight in the Greek tragedy? As for music, we suspect that melody is as much preferred now to
harmony, as it ever was at Athens; but if it were not, it would be for time to decide, whether
the taste of the day were not a transitory and false one. We know too little of the state of
that art among the Greeks, to enable us to draw any sure inferences from it. Besides, the
proper comparison would be not between melody and harmony, but between romantic melody or
harmony, and classical melody or harmony, since both existed at each of the two great periods,
and there can be no fair comparison but between things of the same kind. So with architecture.
A Gothic cathedral has its beauties—it has its own peculiar proportions—it has fitness to the
solemn purpose for which it was designed—it has gorgeous ornament, imposing massiveness,
striking altitude,immense extent—its long-drawn aisle and fretted vault—its storied windows—the
choir, the altar, the crucifixes, the confessional of the penitent, the stones of the pavement
worn by the knees of pilgrims and crusaders, the air of venerable antiquity and religious gloom
pervading the whole interior—a thousand interesting associations of the past and of the future,
of history and the church, conspire to make it one of the most impressive objects that can be
presented to the imagination of man. The origin of the style was in a dark age; but it has
taken root, nor is it at all probable that, so long as Christianity shall
endure, the modern world will ever be brought to think as meanly of these huge piles, as a
Greek architect (if one were suddenly revived) possibly might. Still, there are very few
builders of the present age who do not prefer the orders of Greece—and even if they did not,
how would that prove that future ages would not? “Time will show,” as
Byron says, which taste is the more natural and
reasonable: and time only, and the voice of the majority, can shew it conclusively.
Meanwhile, let us descend to details: suppose a particular object proposed to
be painted or described in the strict sense of those words? Are there two ways of doing that
perfectly, and yet as different from each other as the styles in question are supposed to be? A
portrait, for instance,—is a classical likeness, a different thing from a romantic, and yet
both good likenesses of the same thing? Suppose the object described to be twilight. If the
pictures were confined to the sensible phenomena, it is obvious there
could not be any variety in them, as any one who doubts what is so
obvious to reason, may convince himself by comparing parallel passages in the ancient and
modern classics—e.g. Milton’s lines, “now
came still evening on, and twilight gray”—Virgil’s beautiful verses on midnight, in the fourth Æneid, Homer’s on
moon-light in the eighth Iliad. The exquisite
sketches of these objects executed by the great masters just mentioned, are all in precisely
the same style, and if they were in the same language, might easily be ascribed to the same age
of poetry. To be sure, if without, or besides describing the object, some striking association
of ideas be suggested, that may make a very material difference, because such things are
essentially accidental and mutable. For instance, Dante’s famous lines on the evening, describe it, not as the period of
the day when nature exhibits such or such phenomena, which must always be the same while her
everlasting order shall be maintained, but by certain casual circumstances which may or may not
accompany that hour—the vesper bell, tolling the knell of the dying day, the lonely traveller
looking back with a heart oppressed with fond regrets, to the home which he has just left—very
touching circumstances no doubt, to those who have a home or have lived in Catholic countries,
but still extraneous, and it may be, transitory circumstances.
The same thing may be affirmed of any other particular object, either in the
moral or the material world. A picture of conjugal love, for instance, as in Hector and Andromache—of
maternal despair, as in Shakspeare’sBlanche—of filial devotedness, as in the Antigone. We do not comprehend how it is possible to
exhibit such objects in more than one style that shall be perfect—and that the natural, the universal, the unchangeable—quod semper, quod
ubique, quod ab omnibus. And what is clearly true of the details, we take to be
equally true of the combinations. The spirit may vary, the associations, the colouring or
complexion; but substantially,there can be but one form of ideal beauty, with which human
nature, that never changes, will rest forever satisfied.
We will borrow an illustration, on this subject, from the learned Michaelis. If any two systems of religion and poetry differ in
their spirit, in the associations with which they surround the objects of their adoration and
praise, and the effect they produce upon the mind of the votary, it is the Jewish and the
Pagan—the one dwelling forever in its prophetic raptures, upon the sublime unity of the
Godhead, filling immensity, whose invisible glory it was the guiltiest audacity to degrade by
attempting to represent it in any sensible image; the other crowding all space with a mob of
thirty thousand deities of every rank and shape. The sacred poetry of the Hebrews, besides, is
the great fountain of modern inspiration, strictly so called. Yet differing as widely as it is
possible in the very element of thought and character from which Schlegel deduces such important results, there is no essential difference in
the forms of Hebrew and Classical poetry. The illustration we shall borrow from the learned
author referred to, is the following. He remarks that as the Heathen assigned to Jupiter a chariot and horses of thunder, so the Hebrews have a
similar fable, and the Cherubim are expressly the horses of Jehovah’s chariot. He is
frequently described as sitting upon the Cherubim. He thunders so that the earth shakes—or as
Horace might have expressed it, “Jehovah per cælum tonantes Egit equos, volucremque currum; Quo truta tellus, et vaga flumina Quo Styxet invisi horrida Tœnari Sedes, Atlanteusque finis Concutitur.”* The same observation holds, in the strictest manner true, of Milton and Dante, the two most sublime poets
of modern times, the most Christian in spirit, and the most classical and severe in style.
After all, this classification of styles may be only a more artificial and
scholastic way of confessing, that those irregular works of modern genius which are designated
as romantic, par
* On Lowth’sHebrew Poetry—Lect. ii.
excellence, in fact, deviate very materially from the Greek standard. Of
this no one who has studied criticism in the works of the ancients, can have any doubt at all.
Three things were considered as essential to all excellence in a composition of genius, perfect
unity of purpose, simplicity of style, and ease of execution—and it is in these things that the
literature and art of Greece, exhibit their matchless perfection. Other nations have produced
works indicating as rare and fertile invention, as much depth of thought, as much vigour of
conception, as much intensity of feeling—but no body of literature or of art can be compared to
the antique for the severe reason, the close,
unsparing logic of its criticism. Unity of design, especially, which is
more immediately connected with the subject in hand, they rigorously exacted. They considered a
work of art always, as a whole—a sort of organized body—to the very
structure of which certain parts and proportions, and none others, were essential, and in which
the least violation of this fitness and harmony, was a deformity, more or less uncouth and
monstrous.* The details were sacrificed without mercy to the general effect. In an oration, for
instance, they looked to the end which the speaker had in view, and whatever was not calculated
to further that, however brilliant and impressive in itself, was rejected without reserve. The
notion of Pythagoras, that the sublime order of the
universe was maintained by the secret power of proportion, by the magic
of mathematical relations, probably sprung out of this truly Greek idea of the perfection of
art, applied by analogy to the works of creation.† This unity of thought, this harmony in
composition, this ανάγχη λόγογραφιχη, as Plato calls it, a
sort of necessary connexion, like that of cause and effect, between the parts, every thing
being in its right place, following logically from what goes before it, leading inevitably to
what comes after it, pervades all
* Plato, Phæd. p. 264. c. Socrates says, οίμαι &c. πάντα λόγον
ωσπερ ζωον συεςάναι. σωμά τι εχοντα αυτον αυτουωςε μητε υχέφαλον, &c.
“I think you ought to say that every composition is, as it were, an animal
having a body of its own: so that it should be neither without a head or feet, but
should have its various parts, suitable to one another, and composing one perfect
whole.” μέσα τε εχειν αχρα, πρέποντα άλλήλοις τω ολω
γεγραμμένα.
† There is a remarkable passage in Cicero, (de Finib. l. 3. c. 22) in which this
idea is brought out very vividly and precisely—Quid, enim, aut in rerum
natura, quâ nihil est aptius, nihil descriptius, aut in operibus manu factis, tam
compositum tamque compactum et coagmentatum inveniri potest. Quid posterius priori
non convenit? Quid sequitur quod non respondeat superiori? Quid non sic aliud exalis nectitur, ut non, di unam literam moveris,
labent omnia? &c. We should have translated this, if we
could have ventured to take that liberty with what is so perfect in itself, and so
strikingly illustrates our text. (3) Ubi. sup.
the monuments of genius which that wonderful race has left behind it.
Their superiority in this exquisite logic of literature and the arts—a logic not a jot less
exact and elegant than the demonstrations of their own unrivalled geometry—is, we fear, a
lamentable truth, nor will it help us much to call our deformities, peculiarities, and to
dignify what is only not art with the specious title of the ‘romantic.’
This severe study of unity naturally led, it seems to us, to the two other
prominent excellencies of Greek style, simplicity and ease or grace. Their genius was most
enthusiastic—their sensibilities were acute and even lively to excess. Let any one read those
passages of their best authors wherein they treat of poetry, and he will
not fail to be struck with the force of their expressions. They speak of it as a heavenly
inspiration, a divine fury, the revelry and intoxication of the soul—they compare it to the
madness of the Pythoness, the rage of the bachanal, the convulsive improvisations of the Corybantes awakened by the peculiar μελος
their God.* But their taste was as refined as their temperament was ardent, and hence the
severity of the restraints which they laid upon their own genius. They seem to have been
conscious of their tendency to exceed, rather than be wanting, in energy and warmth, and to
overstep the modesty of nature by indulging her impulses too freely. They studied perpetually
how to speak the language of soberness and truth. The smallest appearance of effort or
exaggeration was particularly disagreeable to them, as leading to the vice they most avoided.
The intense love of beauty which possessed them, the influence of a happy climate and still
happier organization, the native inspiration of genius, were common advantages, and those were
enough, they thought, to insure all the power necessary, (with sufficient discipline) to attain
to a high degree of excellence. The artist was supposed to possess this qualification as of
course. His aim, therefore, was not to shew that he possessed it, by an affected or
ostentatious and unseasonable display of it, but to manage it with a wise economy, to turn it
to the greatest account in creating, in whatever might be his province, some perfect form of
beauty. His study of the ideal led him to think, as we have shown, of the composition of a
whole; for details, however brilliant, were still mere fragments, and as such were unworthy of
his ambition. Any body could accomplish them, and abundance always creates fastidiousness. But
to do all that can be done by the greatest effort of genius, yet to be free from all the faults
into which genius, when it exerts
* See the truly Dithyrambic effusion of Socrates in Plato’sIo.
itself most, is so apt to be betrayed—to put forth his whole power, yet
never to transcend the limits of reason, and to embody the visions of an excited imagination in
a form so perfect as to defy the most fastidious criticism of his country, and to challenge a
place among the imperishable monuments of his art—this was indeed to be a “maker”
ποιητης—this was to be truly Attic and classical. Accordingly, what is
most admirable in that matchless literature, is this simplicity and ease, produced by the study
of unity and the severe reasoning on which we have been dwelling. It is, we conceive,
impossible not to be struck with the difference, in this respect, between its masterpieces, and
those of any other language—for Shakspeare himself
frequently falls into bombast and conceit. In short, the strength of Greek genius is never
discovered in monstrous contortions or laborious struggles—it wields the mightiest subjects,
apparently, without an effort, and with all the grace of conscious superiority. Its beauty is
not confined to a single feature, “to a lip or eye,” but is emphatically
“the joint force and full result of all”—it is not the hectic glow of
disease, or the meretricious lustre of a painted cheek, but the lumen juventæ
purpureum, the bloom of youth, the proper hue, as the natural effect of a
vigorous and robust constitution.
Lord Byron’s speculative opinions in literature, were,
as we have seen, all in favour of the classical models. His preference of Pope is owing to this; though it must be admitted that in spite
of his extraordinary merits, Pope is, in some degree, a mannerist, and, so
far, fulls short of absolute perfection. But theory and practice are unfortunately not more
inseparable in literature than in other matters, and of this truth, there is no more striking
example than the author of Childe Harold. We
stated in our notice of Mr. Moore’s first volume,
that Manfred struck us as decidedly the
master-piece of Lord Byron. The long analysis which we have just gone
through of the principles of the ideal, will, as we flatter ourselves,
have done much towards accounting for this preference. The merit of Manfred has been acknowledged by Göethe, who
thinks he recognizes in it a copy, or an imitation rather, of his Faustus. His remarks are furnished by Mr.
Moore, and are as follows:
“The following is the article from Goëthe’s ‘Kunst und Alterthum,’ enclosed in this letter. The
grave confidence with which the venerable critic traces the fancies of his brother poet to
real persons and events, making no difficulty even of a double murder at Florence to
furnish grounds for his theory, affords an amusing instance of the disposition so prevalent
throughout Europe, to picture Byron as a man of marvels and mysteries, as well in his life
as his poetry. To these ex-aggerated, or wholly false notions of him,
the numerous fictions palmed upon the world of his romantic tours and wonderful adventures,
in places he never saw, and with persons that never existed, have, no doubt, considerably
contributed; and the consequence is, so utterly out of truth and nature are the
representations of his life and character long current upon the continent, that it may be
questioned whether the real ‘flesh and blood’ hero of these pages,—the social,
practical-minded and, with all his faults and eccentricities, EnglishLord Byron,—may not, to the over-exalted
imaginations of most of his foreign admirers, appear but an ordinary, unromantic, and
prosaic personage.
“Byron’s tragedy, Manfred, was to me a wonderful phenomenon,
and one that closely touched me. This singular intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself, and extracted from it
the strongest nourishment for his hypochondriac humour. He has made use of the impelling
principles in his own way, for his own purposes, so that no one of them remains the same;
and it is particularly on this account that I cannot enough admire his genius. The whole is
in this way so completely formed anew, that it would be an interesting task for the critic
to point out not only the alterations he has made, but their degree of resemblance with, or
dissimilarity to, the original: in the course of which I cannot deny that the gloomy heat
of an unbounded and exuberant despair becomes at last oppressive to us. Yet is the
dissatisfaction we feel always connected with esteem and admiration..
“We find thus in this tragedy the quintessence of the
most astonishing talent born to be its own tormenter. The character of Lord Byron’s life and poetry hardly permits a just and
equitable appreciation. He has often enough confessed what it is that torments him. He has
repeatedly portrayed it; and scarcely any one feels compassion for this intolerable
suffering, over which he is ever laboriously ruminating. There are, properly speaking, two
females whose phantoms forever haunt him, and which, in this piece also perform principal
parts—one under the name of Astarte, the other without
form or actual presence, and merely a voice. Of the horrid occurrence which took place with
the former, the following is related. When a bold and enterprizing young man, he won the
affections of a Florentine lady. Her husband discovered the amour, and murdered his wife;
but the murderer was the same night found dead in the street, and there was no one on whom
any suspicion could be attached. Lord Byron removed from Florence, and these spirits
haunted him all his life after.
“This romantic incident is rendered highly probable by
innumerable allusions to it in his poems. As, for instance, when turning his sad
contemplations inwards, he applies to himself the fatal history of the king of Sparta. It
is as follows:—Pausanias, a Lacedemonian general,
acquires glory by the important victory at Platæa, but afterwards forfeits the confidence
of his countrymen through his arrogance, obstinacy, and secret intrigues with the enemies
of his country. This man draws upon himself the heavy guilt of innocent blood, which
attends him to his end; for, while commanding the fleet of the allied Greeks, in the Black
Sea, he is inflamed with a violent passion for a Byzantine maiden.
After long resistance, he at length obtains her from her parents, and she is to be
delivered up to him at night. She modestly desires the servant to put out the lamp, and,
while groping her way in the dark, she overturns it. Pausanias is
awakened from his sleep, apprehensive of an attack from murderers—he seizes his sword, and
destroys his mistress. The horrid sight never leaves him. Her shade pursues him
unceasingly, and be implores for aid in vain from the gods and the exorcising priests.
“That poet must have a lacerated heart who selects such a
scene from antiquity, appropriates it to himself, and burthens his tragic image with it.
The following soliloquy, which is overladen with gloom and a weariness of life, is, by this
remark, rendered intelligible. We recommend it as an exercise to all friends of
declamation. Hamlet’s soliloquy appears improved
upon here.” pp. 229, 230.
As to the imputed imitation, Byron (rather
implicitly than expressly) disavows it in a letter to Murray:
“Enclosed is something which will interest you, to wit,
the opinion of the greatest man of Germany—perhaps of Europe—upon one of the great men of
your advertisements (all ‘famous hands,’ as Jacob
Tonson used to say of his ragamuffins)—in short, a critique of Goëthe’s upon Manfred. There is the
original, an English translation, and an Italian one; keep them all in your archives, for
the opinions of such a man as Goëthe, whether favourable or not, are
always interesting—and this is more so, as favourable. His Faust I never read, for I
don’t know German; but Matthew Monk Lewis, in
1816, at Coligny, translated most of it to me vivâ
voce, and I was naturally much struck with it; but it was the Steinbach and the Jungfrau, and something
else, much more than Faustus, that made me write Manfred. The first scene, however, and that of Faustus, are very similar.” p. 228.
When we speak of Manfred as the
master-piece of Lord Byron, we speak of it as a whole. There
are to be found in most of his other compositions, especially in Childe Harold, many passages of unsurpassed beauty and power.
But in the first place, these passages in the poem just mentioned, are short, isolated,
uncombined. The wandering bard describes the remarkable objects which present themselves to him
in his progress, in a sort of poetical itineracy. He lavishes upon them, it is true, the wealth
of an exuberant imagination—and whether it be Waterloo, or the romantic Rhine, or Lake Leman
and its magic shores, or the Alps, or an Italian sun-set, or the tombs of the famous dead, or
the monuments of Roman magnificence, or the master-pieces of antique art, he is still equal to
his subjects, and crowns them anew with glory and immortality. But such effusions are not,
cæteris paribus, comparable to works, in
which the beauty of design and composition is added to all other
beauties. A lyrical rhapsody is an easier, and much easier thins than a sage and solemn drama,
exhibiting a rare portraiture of character, combining many incidents, introducing the difficult
and even perilous machinery of magic, incantations, and the spirits of the air or the deep, and
withal unfolding an impressive moral truth. There is a great deal more both of invention and of art, more creative genius, in short, required in the
latter than in the former. The very necessity of preserving a uniform tone of colouring, the
harmony, the keeping, of such a work, is a most important addition to
the task of the artist. We have seen what immense emphasis the Greeks laid upon this
circumstance. In the next place, the style of Manfred is more sober
and subdued than that of Childe Harold—and so is, comparatively,
exempt from the faults which we impute to that poem. It is indeed, remarkable for a degree of
austere and rugged force, which reminds us as strongly of Dante, as the spirit and character of the poem itself does of the Inferno. When the Italian poet says of the souls
in his limbo, who shut out from the beatitude of heaven, still endure no other punishment, than
the total want of all interest or enjoyment, a consuming ennui, a dismal desolation of the
heart—non hanno speranza di morte—”
they may not hope for death”—he pronounces the terrible doom of Manfred, in almost his very words: “Accursed! what have I to do with length of days, They are too long already.”
As in the Inferno, too, so also
in Manfred, the darkness and the desolation
that seem to cast a gloom over the whole work, are relieved by gleams of beauty and freshness,
ever and anon breaking forth, the more striking as they are unexpected, the more touching
because softened by melancholy associations, and escaping, as if in spite of it, from a mind in
which neither sorrow nor pain, nor even despair itself, has been able to quench the deep love
of nature. There is an unspeakable charm of the kind in the soliloquy with which the second
scene of the first act opens. Manfred is standing alone upon the
cliffs of the Jungfrau, as the day dawns and reveals to him the magnificent scenery of that
Alpine region, upon which his desolate soul must no more gaze with rapture. He is doomed,
henceforth, to see “undelighted all delight”—to know that what he looks upon
is beauty, to feel it even, but just enough to make him conscious of the curse that is upon his
soul, the blight that has seared his heart, and deadened and destroyed all its capacities of
enjoyment. “******** My mother earth! And thou fresh breaking day, and you, ye mountains, Why are ye beautiful! I cannot love ye. And thou, the bright eye of the universe, That openest over all, and unto all Art a delight—thou shin’st not on my heart *****: * * * Beautiful! How beautiful is all this visible world! How glorious in its action and itself; But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns, we, Half dust, half deity, alike unfit To sink or soar, with our mix’d essence make A conflict of its elements, &c. * * * Hark! the note, The natural music of the mountain reed— For here the patriarchal days are not A pastoral fable—pipes in the liberal air, Mixed with the sweet bells of the sauntering herd; My soul would drink those echoes.—Oh! that I were The viewless spirit of a lovely sound, A living voice, a breathing harmony, A bodiless enjoyment—born and dying With the blest tone which made me!” So in the second scene of the second act. “It is not noon—the sun-bow’s rays still arch The torrent with the many hues of heaven, And rolls the sheeted silver’s waving column > O’er the crag’s headlong perpendicular, And flings its lines of foaming light along, And to and fro, like the pale courser’s tail The giant steed, to be bestrode by death, As told in the Apocalypse. No eyes but mine Now drink this sight of loveliness; I should be sole in this sweet solitude, And with the spirit of the place divide The homage of these waters,—I will call her. * * * * Beautiful spirit! with thy hair of light And dazzling eyes of glory, in whose form The charms of earth’s least mortal daughters grow To an unearthly stature, in an essence Of purer elements; while the hues of youth, Carnationed like a sleeping infant’s cheek, Rocked by the beating of her mother’s heart, Or the rose tints, which summer’s twilight leaves Upon the loftier glacier’s virgin snow, The blush of earth embracing with her
heaven,—[a conceit.] Tinge thy celestial aspects, and make tame The beauties of the sun^bow which bends o’er thee. Beautiful spirit! in thy calm, clear brow, Wherein is glass’d serenity of soul,” &c. &c.
But what struck Goëthe in this fine
poem, and what entitles it more, perhaps, than its other merits, to the rank which we assign to
it among the productions of its author, is the conception of Manfred’s character and situation. To judge from our own experience,
nothing can be more profoundly interesting. Often as we have read it, it has lost none of its
effect. We never take it up but with some such feeling as we conceive to have possessed of old
the pilgrims of Delphi and Dodona, or those anxious mortals, who, like Count Manfred himself, have sought to learn the secrets of their own destiny,
by dealing with evil spirits. The book contains a spell for us, and we lay our hands upon it
with awe. It brings us into actual contact with the beings that wait upon the hero’s
bidding. We are transported, by an ideal presence, to that Alpine solitude in which this second
Cain—this child of an accursed destiny—is alternately agitated by the
furies of remorse, or “wrapt as with a shroud” in the darkness and
desolation of a sullen despair. “Daughter of air! I tell thee since that hour— But words are breath—look on me in my sleep, Or watch my watchings—come and sit by me! My solitude is solitude no more, But peopled with the furies;—I have gnash’d My teeth in darkness till returning morn, Then cursed myself till sunset;—I have prayed For madness as a blessing—’tis denied me. I have affronted death—but in the war Of elements the waters shrunk from me, And fatal things pass’d harmless—the cold hand Of an all-pitiless demon held me back, Back by a single hair, which would not break. In phantasy, imagination, all The affluence of my soul—which one day was A Crœsus in creation—I
plunged deep, But, like an ebbing wave, it dash’d me back Into the gulf of my unfathomed thought. I plunged amidst mankind—Forgetfulness I sought in all, save, where ’tis to be found.”
It would be worth while to compare Manfred
in detail with the Orestes of the Greek tragedy. We regret
that it is not in our power to do so at present; but we should be glad if some one, who has more leisure to trace the contrasts and coincidences of
literature, would take our hint.
We will venture a few remarks of our own, having a bearing upon a topic already
discussed. Manfred, like the Eumenides of
Æschylus, is a picture of remorse, but there can be no
better illustration of the difference which we admit to exist between ancient and modern
dramatic literature, than is afforded by the manner in which this affection is exhibited,
respectively, in the Greek tragedy and the English drama.* In the former it is made a sensible
object—it is personified—its office is performed by the Furies. They have pursued the wretched
parricide with wild rage, until he takes refuge in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Here the tragedy opens. The fugitive stained with the blood
of his guilty mother, is seen supplicating the protection of the god. The vindictive goddesses,
attired in their robes of black, add with serpents entwined in their horrid tresses, are
sleeping? around him—having apparently sunk under the effort of their long and unremitted
pursuit. When the young man, has by the contrivance of Apollo, stolen out of the Temple, to make his way to Athens, where Minerva is to decide finally upon his innocence or guilt, the
shade of Clytemnestra gashed with the fatal wounds,
appears, and calling aloud to the Furies in reproachful language, vanishes again. The Furies,
aroused by her voice, discover that Orestes has made his
escape. Their rage is greatly excited—they dance about the stage in frantic disorder—they renew
the pursuit with fresh keenness, and are next seen at Athens, near the overtaken fugitive, who
has embraced the statue of Minerva. They claim his head as
justly forfeited to the laws—the goddess listens to both parties, and agrees to become their
umpire—the cause is regularly discussed, and the unfortunate young man is at last acquitted by
an equality of suffrages.
* This is worthy of further observation. The spirit of Manfred is strictly modern or romantic The
air of abstract reflection, the moral musing, the pensive wo, which pervade it, are a
contrast to the sensible imagery and the lively personifications of the Greek play. Yet its
frame and structure, are strictly ‘classical.’ Byron, in all his dramatic compositions, professed to copy after the Greek
models,—as much so as Milton in the Samson Agonistes. But besides discarding
the chorus, he has not in other respects approached those models so closely as
Milton. From what he has done, however, and from the character of
his genius, we think, as we remarked in a former number, that had he been born an Athenian,
he would have excelled peculiarly in that walk. Manfred proves it—and here we will add,
that his aerial chorus of sprites and fiends, is quite equal in that kind, to any thing in
the grandest conceptions of Æschylus, and nothing can
be more felicitous, in the way of choral ode, than some of their hymns—witness, especially,
the grand anthem in honor of Arimanes.
It is evident that the moral lesson conveyed by such an exhibition as this, is
rather the secondary, than the principal object; nor will those who are versed in the dramatic
history of the Greeks, be at all at a loss to account for the apparent dimness of the allegory
in which the truth is veiled. Yet to one who looks attentively into the hidden sense, the
picture of remorse thus presented, as it were, by types and sensible images, is equally
remarkable for scenic effect and profound philosophical analysis. But Byron in Manfred derives no
help from such external symbols—nor does he darkly shadow his purpose in allegory. It is spread
out over the whole surface. His hero is alone. He flies from the commerce of his own species,
and communes only with those aerial shapes, whose office it is to “tend on mortal
thoughts”—to do the behests, to consult the wishes, to echo the voice of their master—in
short, to be hi9 slave and his shadow, so long as they are under his spells. This, indeed, is
the purpose, and a very important one, which the spirits of the drama
answer. Manfred, really tells his own story—his attendants
are no better than the chorus of a Greek tragedy—good listeners. He might have done
substantially what he has done in a long monologue; or he might have addressed himself in a
voice of lamentation, to the mountains and the desert caves. But a perpetual soliloquy of three
acts would have been equally tiresome and irregular, and yet, to have introduced such a being
into a common drama—to have represented him as moving in the dull round of life, and
interchanging sentiments with vulgar interlocutors, would not have been in keeping with the
unearthly grandeur of his character, and would have defeated what we take to have been the
great purpose of the poet. Like Faustus, therefore,
Manfred, by his aspiring genius, must compass such a
knowledge of the visible world, as shall enable him to control the invisible—that he may summon
a disembodied auditory from the depths of the sea, or the remotest star in the firmament, and
proclaim his remediless woes and his irreversible doom, by this same preternatural agency, to
the most distant parts of the universe, and all orders of created being. The machinery of the
poem then answers two great purposes—it relieves its monotony, without violating its plan, and
it exalts the dignity of the hero without disturbing the characteristic solitude—the essential
loneliness of his being. This needs a few more words of explanation.
We have said that this drama is a picture of remorse;
and so it is, but of a peculiar kind of remorse. It is not self-condemnation for a mere crime
or sin committed. Manfred’s conscience was made of
sterner stuff than that. Above all, it was not, as a late writer
supposes,* because his sister Astarte, had fallen a
sacrifice to some diabolical piece of magic, in which she was at once an accomplice and a
victim. Byron was not a man to make a book of sentimental raving à la
Kotzebue, upon such a fantastical and ludicrous
subject. He aimed at exhibiting what may be called his ruling idea, in
the strongest of all possible forms. That idea is that without a deep and engrossing passion, without love, in short, intense, devoted
love; no power, nor influence in the world, nor genius, nor knowledge, nor Epicurean bliss, can
“bestead or fill the fixed mind with all their toys;” and that a man may
be completely miserable for want of such a passion, though blessed, to all appearances, with
whatever can make life desirable. This idea is, in reference to very excitable natures,
certainly just—and is thus expressed in the soliloquy with which that drama opens. “I have no dread, And feel the curse to have no natural fear Nor fluttering throb, that beats with hopes or wishes, Or lurking love of something on the earth.”— Here is evidently “the leafless desert of the soul,” “the
vacant bosom’s wilderness,” the dreary vacuity, the mortal apathy upon
which so many changes are rung in all his other poems.
But this is not all; for if it were, Manfred would be no better than the Giaour. The merit that raises him to his bad eminence, among these heroes of
“disappointed passion,” is twofold—in the first place, it is darkly
hinted that his love was unnatural or, at least, unlawful, and so dishonorable to her whom he
adored; and, secondly, that he was either the wilful or involuntary instrument of her
destruction—her blood was upon his hands, and her curse upon his soul. “And a magic voice and verse Hath baptized thee with a curse; And a spirit of the air Hath begirt thee with a snare; In the wind there is a voice Shall forbid thee to rejoice; And to thee shall night deny All the quiet of her sky; And the day shall have a sun, Which shall make thee wish it done. From thy false tears I did distil An essence which hath strength to kill;
* Galt.—We happened to
look for the first time into his work a few hours ago, and have been quite shocked at a coincidence or
two in the previous pages, which were in type before we saw his book.
From thy own heart I then did wring The black blood in its blackest spring; From thy own smile I snatch’d the snake, For there it coiled as in a brake; From thy own lip I drew the charm Which gave all this their chiefest harm; In proving every poison known, I found the strongest was thine own. By thy cold breast and serpent smile, By thy unfathomed gulfs of guile, By that most seeming virtuous eye, By thy shut soul’s hypocrisy; By the perfection of thine art Which passed for human, thine own heart; By thy delight in other’s pain, And by thy brotherhood of Cain, I call upon thee! and compel Thyself to be thy proper hell! “
Whatever had been the conduct alluded to in these terrible lines, he clearly
regards himself as the murderer of Astarte. He had
murdered—by what means, is not material— “———her whom of all earthly things That lived the only thing he seemed to love.” The only tie of existence had been severed—the single feeling that made the world
bearable, and without which it was no better than a vast Bastile, had been extinguished—the
being that loved him with the devotedness of woman’s love, while all mankind besides,
were cold or hostile to him, and who was to him, amidst the weariness of life or its severest
wo, real or imaginary, an interest, a passion and an unfailing resource and a sweet
consolation, had been destroyed—and by him. This catastrophe was, it is
evident, a moral suicide, and he became afterwards, as he expresses it, “his soul’s
sepulchre.” His hope, his love, his dream of bliss, made more ravishing by the contrasted
gloom of his ordinary life, was gone—he is condemned to that dreariest of all solitudes, the
utter loneliness of the blighted heart—he now, at last, perceives all the guilt of the
coldness, or perversness, or cruelty, or whatever else it was, that led to the event which he
has such bitter cause to lament—the worth, the loveliness of his victim is felt in the
sufferings which the loss of her has inflicted—and he repents what he has done and curses the
destiny which ordered or permitted it, and addicts himself more exclusively than ever, to the
society of evil spirits, and devotes himself to the tortures of hell as a relief from the more intolerable agony of a wounded spirit! This
is his remorse!La
Rochefoucault says, that men repent of their offences only when they feel, or
are likely to feel some inconvenience from their consequences. Certainly, penitence is made
more lively by a little suffering, and the whole force of this selfish theory is exhibited in
the remorse of Manfred. But in what heart-rending language
is this late awakening of lost love expressed! “Hear me, hear me! Astarte! my beloved! speak to me; I have so much endured—so much endure— Look on me! the grave hath not changed thee more, Than I am changed for thee. Thou lovest me Too much, as I loved thee: we were not made To torture thus each other, tho’ it were The deadliest sin to love as we have loved. Say that thou loath’st me not—that I do bear This punishment for both—that thou wilt be One of the blessed—and that I shall die; For hitherto all hateful things conspire To bind me in existence—in a life, Which makes me shrink from immortality— A future like the past. I cannot rest; I know not what I asked, nor what I seek: I feel but what thou art—and what I am; And I would hear yet once before I perish The voice which was my music—speak to me! For I have called on thee in the still night, Startled the slumbering birds from the hush’d boughs, And woke the mountain wolves, and made the caves Acquainted with thy vainly echoed name, Which answered me—many things answered me— Spirits and men—but thou wert silent all. Yet speak to me! I have out watch’d the stars, And gazed o’er heav’n in vain in search of thee. Speak to me! I have wandered o’er the earth And never found thy likeness—speak to me! Look on the fiends around—they feel for me; I fear them not, and feel for thee alone— Speak to me!—tho’ it be in wrath;—but say— I reck not what—but let me hear thee once— This once—once more!
We must now bring these remarks, which have unexpectedly run out to an
unconscionable length under our pen, to an abrupt close. But we cannot consent to end this
article without doing Lord Byron the justice to quote the
whole of a most animated and eloquent defence of his conduct, which Mr. Moore has furnished from an unpublished MS. Let him be
heard, and let the reader judge for himself.
“My learned brother proceeds to observe, that ‘it
is in vain for Lord B. to attempt in any way to justify his own
behaviour in that affair; and now that he has so openly and audaciously invited inquiry and
reproach, we do not see any good reason why he should not be plainly told so by the voice
of his countrymen.’ How far the ‘openness’ of an anonymous poem, and the
‘audacity’ of an imaginary character, which the writer supposes to be meant for
Lady B., may be deemed to merit this formidable
denunciation from their ‘most sweet voices,’ I neither know nor care; but when
he tells me that I cannot ‘in any way justify my own behaviour
in that affair,’ I acquiesce, because no man can ‘justify’ himself until he knows of what he is accused; and I have never
had—and, God knows, my whole desire has ever been to obtain it—any specific charge, in a
tangible shape, submitted to me by the adversary, nor by others, unless the atrocities of
public rumour and the mysterious silence of the lady’s legal advisers may be deemed
such. But is not the writer content with what has been already said and done? Has not
‘the general voice of his countrymen’ long ago pronounced upon the
subject—sentence without trial, and condemnation without a charge? Have I not been exiled
by ostracism, except that the shells which proscribed me were anonymous? Is the writer
ignorant of the public opinion and the public conduct upon that occasion? If he is, I am
not: the public will forget both long before I shall cease to remember either.
“The man who is exiled by a faction has the consolation
of thinking that he is a martyr; he is upheld by hope and the dignity of his cause, real or
imaginary: he who withdraws from the pressure of debt may indulge in the thought that time
and prudence will retrieve his circumstance: he who is condemned by the law has a term to
his banishment, or a dream of its abbreviation; or, it may be, the knowledge or the belief
of some injustice of the law, or of its administration in his own particular: but he who is
outlawed by general opinion, without the intervention of hostile politics, illegal
judgement, or embarrassed circumstances, whether he be innocent or guilty, must undergo all
the bitterness of exile, without hope, without pride, without alleviation. This case was
mine. Upon what grounds the public founded their opinion, I am not aware; but it was
general, and it was decisive. Of me or of mine they knew little, except that I had written
what is called poetry, was a nobleman, had married, became a father, and was involved in
differences with my wife and her relatives, no one knew why, because the persons
complaining refused to state their grievances. The fashionable world was divided into
parties, mine consisting of a very small minority: the reasonable world was naturally on
the stronger side, which happened to be the lady’s, as was most proper and polite.
The press was active and scurrilous; and such was the rage of the day, that the unfortunate
publication of two copies of verses, rather complimentary than otherwise to the subjects of
both, was tortured into a species of crime, or constructive petty
treason. I was accused of every monstrous vice, by public rumour and private rancour: my
name, which had been a knightly or a noble one since my fathers helped to conquer the
kingdom for William the Norman, was tainted. I felt
that, if what was whispered, and muttered, and murmured was true, I was unfit for England;
if false, England was unfit for me. I withdrew: but this was not enough. In other
countries, in Switzerland, in the shadow of the Alps, and by the blue depth of the lakes, I
was pursued and breathed upon by the same blight. I crossed the mountains, but was the
same; so I went a little farther, and settled myself by the waves of the Adriatic, like the
stag at bay, who betakes him to the waters.
“If I may judge by the statements of the few friends who
gathered round me, the outcry of the period to which I allude was beyond all precedent, all
parallel, even in those cases where political motives have sharpened slander and doubled
enmity. I was advised not to go to the theatres, lest I should be hissed, nor to my duty in
Parliament, lest I should be insulted by the way; even on the day of my departure, my most
intimate friend told me afterwards that he was under apprehensions of violence from the
people who might be assembled at the door of the carriage. However, I was not deterred by
these counsels from seeing Kean in his best
characters, nor from voting according to my principles; and, with regard to the third and
last apprehensions of my friends, I could not share in them, not being made acquainted with
their extent till some time after I had crossed the channel. Even if I had been so, I am
not of a nature to be much affected by men’s anger, though I may feel hurt by their
aversion. Against all individual outrage, I could protect or redress myself; and against
that of a crowd, I should probably have been enabled to defend myself, with the assistance
of others, as has been done on similar occasions.
“I retired from the country, perceiving that I was the
object of general obloquy; I did not indeed imagine, like Jean
Jacques Rousseau, that all mankind was in a conspiracy against me, though I
had perhaps as good grounds for such a chimera as ever he had: but I perceived that I had
to a great extent become personally obnoxious in England, perhaps through my own fault, but
the fact was indisputable; the public in general would hardly have been so much excited
against a more popular character, without at least an accusation or a charge of some kind
actually expressed or substantiated, for I can hardly conceive that the common and
every-day occurrence of a separation between man and wife could in itself produce so great
a ferment. I shall say nothing of the usual complaints of ‘being prejudged,’
‘condemned unheard,’ ‘unfairness,’ ‘partiality,’ and so
forth, the usual changes rung by parties who have had, or are to have, a trial; but I was a
little surprised to find myself condemned without being favoured with the act of
accusation, and to perceive in the absence of this portentous charge or charges, whatever
it or they were to be, that every possible or impossible crime was rumoured to supply its
place, and taken for granted. This could only occur in the case of a person very much
disliked, and I knew no remedy, having already used to their extent whatever little powers
I might possess of pleasing in society. I had no party in fashion,
though I was afterwards told that there was one—but it was not of my formation, nor did I
then know of its existence—none in literature; and in politics I had voted with the Whigs,
with precisely that importance which a Whig vote possesses in these Tory days, and with
such personal acquaintance with the leaders in both houses as the society in which I lived
sanctioned, but without claim or expectation of any thing like friendship from any one,
except a few young men of my own age and standing, and a few others more advanced in life,
which last it had been my fortune to serve in circumstances of difficulty. This was, in
fact, to stand alone: and I recollect, some time after, Madame
de Staël said to me in Switzerland, ‘You should not have warred
with the world—it will not do—it is too strong always for any individual: I myself once
tried it in early life, but it will not do.’ I perfectly acquiesce in the
truth of this remark; but the world had done me the honour to begin the war; and,
assuredly, if peace is only to be obtained by courting and paying tribute to it, I am not
qualified to obtain its countenance. I thought, in the words of Campbell, ‘Then wed thee to an exiled lot, And if the world bath loved thee not, Its absence may be borne.’
“I recollect, however, that having been much hurt by
Romilly’s conduct (he, having a general
retainer for me, had acted as adviser to the adversary, alleging, on being reminded of his
retainer, that he had forgotten it, as his clerk had so many), I observed that some of
those who were now eagerly laying the axe to my roof-tree, might see their own shaken, and
feel a portion of what they had inflicted. His fell, and crushed him.
“I have heard of, and believe, that there are human
beings so constituted as to be insensible to injuries; but I believe that the best mode to
avoid taking vengeance is to get out of the way of temptation. I hope that I may never have
the opportunity, for I am not quite sure that I could resist it, having derived from my
mother something of the ‘perfervidum ingenium
Scotorurm.’ I have not sought, and shall not seek it, and
perhaps it may never come in my path. I do not in this allude to the party, who might be
right or wrong; but to many who made her cause the pretext of their own bitterness. She,
indeed, must have long avenged me in her own feelings, for whatever her reasons may have
been (and she never adduced them to me, at least) she probably neither contemplated nor
conceived to what she became the means of conducting the father of her child, and the
husband of her choice.
“So much for ‘the general voice of his
countrymen:’ I will now speak of some in particular.
“In the beginning of the year 1817, an article appeared in the Quarterly Review, written, I believe, by
Walter Scott, doing great honour to him, and no
disgrace to me, though both poetically and personally more than sufficiently favourable to
the work and the author of whom it treated. It was written at a time when a selfish man would not, and a timid one dared not, have said a word in favour of
either; it was written by one to whom temporary public opinion had elevated me to the rank
of a rival—a proud distinction, and unmerited; but which has not prevented me from feeling
as a friend, nor him from more than corresponding to that sentiment. The article in
question was written upon the Third Canto of Childe Harold, and after many observations, which it would as ill become me to
repeat as to forget, concluded with ‘a hope that I might yet return to
England.’ How this expression was received in England itself I am not
acquainted, but it gave great offence at Rome to the respectable ten or twenty thousand
English travellers then and there assembled. I did not visit Rome till some time after, so
that I had no opportunity of knowing the fact; but I was informed, long afterwards, that
the greatest indignation had been manifested in the enlightened Anglo-circle of that year,
which happened to comprise within it—amidst a considerable leaven of Welbeck-street and
Devonshire-place, broken loose upon their travels several really well-born and well-bred
families, who did not the less participate in the feeling of the hour. ‘Why should he return to England?’ was the general
exclamation—I answer why? It is a question I have occasionally asked
myself, and I never yet could give it a satisfactory reply. I had then no thoughts of
returning, and if I have any now, they are of business, and not of pleasure. Amidst the
ties that have been dashed to pieces, there are links yet entire, though the chain itself
be broken. There are duties, and connexions, which may one day require my presence—and I am
a father. I have still some friends whom I wish to meet again, and, it may be, an enemy.
These things, and those minuter details of business, which time accumulates during absence,
in every man’s affairs and property, may, and probably will, recall me to England;
but I shall return with the same feelings with which I left it, in respect to itself,
though altered with regard to individuals, as I have been more or less informed of their
conduct since my departure; for it was only a considerable time after it that I was made
acquainted with the real facts and full extent of some of their proceedings and language.
My friends, like other friends, from conciliatory motives, withheld from me much that they
could, and some things which they should have unfolded; however,
that which is deferred is not lost—but it has been no fault of mine that it has been
deferred at all.
“I have alluded to what is said to have passed at Rome
merely to show that the sentiment which I have described was not confined to the English in
England, and as forming part of my answer to the reproach cast upon what has been called my
‘selfish exile,’ and my ‘voluntary exile.’
‘Voluntary’ it has been; for who would dwell among a people
entertaining strong hostility against him? How far it has been ‘selfish’
has been already explained.” pp. 249-253.
For our own part, we must say, that our opinion have undergone no material
change in relation to the essential points of Lord
Byron’s character and conduct. No one ever denied that he was formed for better things—or that he had with all his peculiarities, what the world
calls amiable manners—nay, that his natural impulses were good, and that he had a heart full of
kindness to those who did not, and especially who could not provoke his resentment or mortify his sensitive, selfish and gloomy pride.
But winning as he is in his moments of good nature—interesting and amiable, for instance, as he
appears throughout almost the whole of this voluminous compilation of letters and confessions,
we see nothing to make us think differently of his principles or his ruling passion—the things by which a man’s conduct in life, will,
in the long run, be determined. We apply to him without changing a syllable, his own lines in
relation to Manfred. “This should have been a noble creature; he Hath all the energy which would have made A goodly frame of glorious elements, Had they been wisely mingled; as it is, It is an awful chaos—light and darkness— And mind and dust—and passions and pure thoughts, Mixed, and contending without end or order.”