Or Thames, or Tweed), and ’midst them an old man
With an old soul, and both extremely blind,
Halted before the gate, and in his shroud
Seated their fellow-traveller on a cloud.
Then comes Milton’s arch-rebel:
But bringing up the rear of this bright host
A Spirit of a different aspect waved
His wings, like thunderclouds above some coast
Whose barren beach with frequent wrecks is paved;
His brow was like the deep when tempest-tossd;
Fierce and unfathomable thoughts engraved
Eternal wrath on his immortal face,
And where he gazed a gloom pervaded space.
It is certainly magnificent; and if Satan is here rather too like the familiar Byronic hero, it is just because that unsatisfactory personage, in his origins, goes back, through a mass of forgotten stories—the so-called “fiction of terror”—to whom but to Milton’s Satan?
6. But the Vision of Judgment suggests a last question, and a serious one, which takes us out of the confines of poetry, into the region where prose and poetry meet; and it is this: What can Byron do to amuse us? Amuse, that is either grimly or lightly, over the whole range, from high satire down to facetious high spirits? Nothing, we know, is so precarious, or wears out so easily, as the wit and satire of a given age. How much, in this line, of Shakespeare, of Swift, of Dickens, has become, to speak honestly, impossible to laugh at totally! I have a private belief that as humorists Fielding and Goldsmith stand almost undimmed; but let that pass. There is plenty in Byron that makes us echo the famed words of Queen Victoria when she was told a certain story. We have to pass over a good deal of mere horseplay, blunt farce, blunter innuendo, and what may be called a prolonged sniggering over the obvious. Byron is amused; we are not. He remained young after all, and on a certain side he never quite grew up. But then, we discount this fact, we know all about it, and all about Byron’s streak of commonness, and no more need be said on that score. He remains, I think, when all is said, a true wit, and, using the term in its bolder not its finer sense, a true humorist. We should all agree that his general progress as a poet, leaving out his first essays, was from romance and declamation to satire and portraiture. Romance, indeed, remains to the last, and blends with satire into a most singular flashing web; but satire, after all,
