The Review of English Studies/Volume 1/The Present Value of Byron
THE PRESENT VALUE OF BYRON[1]
By Oliver Elton
I have taken some care, for a reason that I hope is not arrogant or depreciatory, to read little or nothing of what has been printed on the occasion of the centenary. For this omission my commercially sounding title must be the excuse. What can be meant, at any time, by the “present value” of a poet? It is not to be measured by sales and editions, or by the rightful if passing glow of enthusiasm that prompts these celebrations. After all, it comes down to each one of us asking, What is Byron to me? To “me and many other mes,” according to the old Oxford rhyme; but, in the long run, to this “me.” And that we shall find out best by reading Byron through again, rather than by reading what better judges than ourselves have said about him. Never mind if he was cursed when alive for his bad morals, and after his death for his bad prosody. Let us try to get our own impressions pure. Above all, let us forget all that we ourselves may have written concerning him. Let us go over him once more and ask how far our confused young enthusiasms and dislikes are wearing. Criticism, possibly, is partly the attempt to recover these first inarticulate feelings, and to understand them; the result may be worth more than the mature official judgment which has been overlaid by much reading or teaching. This, no doubt, is not exactly a Wordsworthian view of the “intimations” of our early years. The starting-point is that old, unpurged, Galignani Byron which somehow had got on to the school shelves. What about it now? I will not inflict the process on your patience, but will simply offer the results of a review, in the form of an answer, which will not be at all startling, to a few simple questions; trying to deal very little either in literary history or in eulogy. A mere show of funeral plumes, a century late, would be still less worthy of the occasion than anything that you may hear to-night.
I have always felt that Byron’s future is safe, not only with critics, and not only with persons who care for poetry, but with persons who do not much care for it at all. This may sound a double-edged saying; but it is meant well. It implies, for one thing, that the man, apart from his writings, can never be forgotten, just as Swift, Johnson, and Carlyle can never be forgotten, whatever becomes, in the judgment of Time, of their formal works. I choose these names because they are the English writers of great rank whom we know best personally; and Byron we know in the same way. All four have told us an immense amount about themselves, and others have told us almost more about them. Over the other three Byron has at least one advantage: he has spoken of himself, and at great length, both in his best prose and in his best verse. I have met various people who have very little sense for literature, but who could not keep away from Byron. Mr. Murray, writing a few years ago, speaks of the stream of pilgrims who come to see his Byron museum. For the man is still an enigma, although the broad lines of his character are familiar. Nor does the interest in Byron depend upon unsolved scandals, which so far as I am concerned may go down to their own place in the gutter. It is doubtful whether, after all, they throw any but a doubtful and indirect light upon his poetry. Nor, again, does the interest depend on any “message,” or deep philosophical idea, that Byron can furnish. It depends on his mixed and large humanity, on his way of continually disappointing us, and of suddenly recovering himself, and triumphing, both as a poet and as a man.
1. The first, then, of my questions is this: Can he tell a story? The gift of narrative is, of course, not implied in, nor does it imply, the poetic gift. The two things may go together; but they need not, in mathematical language, vary together. Even when they go together, as in Chaucer and William Morris they do, they are still different. Gower, Chaucer’s friend, is something of a poet, but he is much more of a tale-teller; and his narrative ease carries him through when the poetry wears thin. When Shelley tries to tell a tale, his poetic gift just carries him through when the narrative wears thin. As to Byron, he begins very ill in this particular, and for a long time he does not improve at all; but at last he disappoints us pleasantly. His series of lays, poured out so fast, and so wildly successful at the time, are mostly, as stories, poor things, not only in subject but in treatment. The Giaour, he said himself, was but a string of passages. The Bride of Abydos is an anecdote. In the Corsair there is a tale, but it is swamped in declamation. The Siege of Corinth, with its rough but not ineffective variations on the subtle rhythms of Christabel, has a splendid descriptive energy. The picture of the siege lives; but it is hardly a story. In Parisina something does happen; there is at least one tragic moment; it is the most genuine of all these early tales; and there is a note of high-strained but sincere pathos. The Prisoner of Chillon does not profess to be a story, except for the slow tortures of the dungeon. In all these poems there is a great momentum, a profusion of rhetorical and passionate matter, which is rather dull to-day, and a halfpennyworth of story. Byron’s lays displaced those of Scott in the ear of the many; and Scott, in his modest way, accepted the finding of the many; too modestly; for his own lays, I think, wear far better than most of Byron’s. His Battle of Flodden and his Lord of the Isles leave a far more satisfactory and distinct impression; and, as the sequel was to show, he was a tale-teller born. But Byron had not come to the end of his tether. He got these lays behind him, and then he found out a better method. And he found it, the moment that he brought to bear, or rather that he ceased to forgo, his gift of humour, of irony, and of portraying real life. This change is evident in Mazeppa, written while he was already deep in Don Juan. Mazeppa, as a poem, and also as a tale, is alive. There is not only the speed and magnificence of the ride, in which Scott for once is matched on Scott’s own ground, but there is the light vivacity of the setting:
There was a certain Palatine,
A count of far and high descent,
Rich as a salt or silver mine;
And he was proud, ye may divine,
As if from heaven he had been sent;
He had such wealth in blood and ore
As few could match beneath the throne;
And he would gaze upon his store,
And o’er his pedigree would pore,
Until by some confusion led,
Which almost look’d like want of head,
He thought their merits were his own.
His wife was not of his opinion;
His junior she by thirty years,
Grew daily tired of his dominion….
And in the same strain the story closes. Mazeppa has been telling it to the fugitive Charles XII, after the battle of Pultowa, under an oak tree:
And if ye marvel Charles forgot
To thank his tale, he wonder’d not,—
The king had been an hour asleep.
In form, Mazeppa is still a lay; but meanwhile, as we know, Byron had hit on quite a different method of story-telling. It was the old, discursive, ironical Italian method. Beppo is his gay little first adventure of this kind. It is another anecdote: the husband, long thought to be lost, comes home in the guise of a Turk; introduces himself, with politeness and tact, to his wife and to his successor, and all goes smoothly. That is the whole; all the virtue is in the embroidery, in the arabesque; and these are perfect. Such, too, is the method of Don Juan, with its flow of wit, vulgarity—even flat boorishness—confession, observation, colour, and poetry. The poem is a great and permanent landmark in the progress of a particular form; what with its old forerunners, from Pulci to Casti, and what with the successors to whom it gave an impulse, in France, in Spain, and in Russia. For De Musset, for Espronceda, for Pushkin, that form comes through Byron, with the stamp that Byron set upon it, and does not come directly from the Italian originals. Some of them, like the author of Evgeniy Onegin, restored a certain plastic delicacy of which Byron was incapable. The main features of his bequest to these authors are two. First of all, he aims, far more violently than do his models (amongst whom we must reckon Frere with his pleasant Whistlecraft) at producing a continual sense of shock and discord, as much by his sudden soarings into poetry as by his more frequent and sudden drops into anticlimax. And secondly, Byron’s way is to let this mind and story drift—drift back to himself, and then swiftly away again to the subject. And these two traits distinguish him also from Chaucer; who embroiders indeed and digresses, but who leaves a sense of harmony and not of discord; and who, when he speaks of himself from time to time, speaks gently, and not for long. There is, of course, the other old Italian way of narrative, which is seen in the prose of the Decameron and its successors. Here the teller keeps out of sight, and the story is stripped down to its naked perfection. There is something of this quality in Byron’s letters, when he briefly portrays a scene, or recites a scandal.
Byron rises to his full power as a narrator when the tale itself provides the irony, and he feels that he need not comment much; when he can go slowly and delightedly from pageant to pageant, interspersing dialogue in verse, a form in which he can be a master, and showing, what in his dramas he does not show, his dramatic power. The familiar fifth canto of Don Juan is as good an instance as another. Juan is taken into the slave-market at Constantinople, has a tong talk with an older Englishman, who is also on sale; is carried in female dress to the sultana Gulbeyaz who has caught sight of him, and repels her advances; begins to relent, but is saved just in time by the appearance of the Sultan. The old attendant gives warning:
“Bride of the Sun! and Sister of the Moon!”
(’Twas thus he spake,) “and Empress of the Earth!
Whose frown would put the spheres all out of tune,
Whose smile makes all the planets dance with mirth,
Your slave brings tidings—he hopes not too soon—
Which your sublime attention may be worth:
The Sun himself has sent me like a ray,
To hint that he is coming up this way.”
“Is it,” exclaimed Gulbeyaz, “as you say?
I wish to heaven he would not shine till morning!
But bid my women form the Milky-way,
Hence, my old comet! give the stars due warning—
And, Christian! mingle with them as you may,
And as you’d have me pardon your past scorning”—
Here they were interrupted by a humming
Sound, and then by a cry, “The Sultan’s coming!”
Here are the qualities that Goethe liked so well, in Don Juan and in The Vision of Judgment—the nimbleness, the daring, the impudence, the lightsomeness; and that strain is kept up through 159 stanzas, of which I count about thirty, here and there, that are fairly to be called digressive; nor do these come too thick when once the story is set going. Byron is much better when he thus moves free of any documents, sailing buoyantly along. Even the digressions reveal him to us. Just at the start, he breaks off for seven verses to describe a sight he had seen while actually writing the canto—a man, the commandant, lying ferociously killed, shot dead, in the streets of Ravenna; this event he describes, in his terse prose, in a letter. The best parts of Don Juan run thus easily. Often enough the tale is of choicer fabric than the patched-in comment. In this sense, then, Byron takes his rank among the four or five best English story-tellers in rhyme, from Chaucer to Crabbe, and onwards.
2. My second question is this: Could Byron sing? The world for a long time thought so; he sang of himself, and the world thought the subject a good one; and Goethe thought so too, when he said that his Euphorion, who is Byron, had “a song his very own”—ein eigenster Gesang. But it is doubtful whether Goethe was thinking there of strictly lyrical power; he may have been referring to Byron’s general poetic gift. And besides, even a great poet may be fallible about the quality of a lyric gift in a language that is not his own. And then Europe, we remember, from Portugal to Sweden, from Athens to Moscow, mostly read Byron in translation; the library, the mere bibliography, of those translations and of the imitations they bred, can scarcely yet have been catalogued, still less reviewed, as a whole. In England, as we know, the next two generations of poets began to cast doubt on Byron’s purity of poetic gift, long before the rest of the world had done so. The discriminations of Matthew Arnold, and his contrast of Leopardi with Byron as a poetic artist, cut deep; and the still louder disgust of Swinburne, who was a sound judge, when he spoke of Byron’s dissonances, was founded in truth. I shall not waste time by going over that ground; we know pretty well by now what Byron, in the way of song, could not give; we know all about his lapses of ear, about the deadly commonness that intrudes so often even into his lyric; and to know this is no credit to us, who have heard these critics, and whose ears have been sharpened by familiarity with Shelley and other artists who are finer than Byron. But what is it in lyric that Byron can and does give us? This is not so easy to define, but I will try. We need only take him at his best. His best is what it is, and is not affected by the fact that he could be very bad at other times.
We all know the handful of good lyrics that Palgrave saved for his Golden Treasury; and Palgrave’s comment helps us to an answer, though I will put it in my own way. Creature of moods, and chameleon, as Byron was, he was not a child of the eighteenth century for nothing. And in the long run, I believe that what we get down to in him is an eighteenth-century characteristic: I mean, the ascendancy of reason. I shall press this point again; but meantime, he does one of the hardest of things: at his best, he reasons in song, and that without ceasing to sing. Song is winged, no doubt, by feeling; but he reasons about feeling. He keeps firmly to his thread; he is a master of the logic of feeling, which is not the logic of the mere understanding. He reasons about grief, and estrangement, and his tortured heart, and his absence, and his exile. And it is when he does this, and does it sincerely—sincerely, at least, for the moment, which is all that is required—it is then, I say, that his lyrical gift is purest, his phrase most piercing, and his rhythm safest. No matter whether his Thyrza is a real or an imaginary woman. The evidence, on his own word, is that she was real, though we are not sure who she was. Only one, the noblest and most perfect, of his Thyrza poems is very widely known; it is in all the books: “And thou art dead, as young and fair.” It is a masterpiece of thinking about sorrow, and it is in style as pure as anything in Shelley; and it has more shape, it is more definite and plastic, and leaves a deeper dint on the mind, than almost anything in Shelley; though it must lose, no doubt, by the absence of such an aura, or spray of suggestion, as Shelley communicates to his frailest words. There is little of that element in it; nothing is left unsaid; but then, how much is said! I quote, in illustration, from another Thyrza piece, “Without a stone to mark the spot,” which is far less perfect as a whole:
And didst thou not, since Death for thee
Prepared a light and pangless dart,
Once long for him thou ne’er shalt see,
Who held, and holds thee in his heart?
Oh! who like him had watched thee here?
Or sadly mark’d thy glazing eye,
In that dread hour ere Death appear,
When silent sorrow fears to sigh,
Till all was past?
This, in tone and temper, is unlike most of our romantic verse. The strain is older, and can, I think, be traced back into the age which is falsely supposed to be unpoetical and dispassionate. It has the finish and the inscriptional effect that we associate with our so-called classical period. Do we not sometimes hear in Byron an echo of Rochester? I have often thought that Byron, at his best, might have written some of Rochester’s best things; although, it is true, Rochester had more to repent of than Byron, and repented more deeply, and his few singing arrows go home more surely than anything of Byron’s; but the affinity is there:
When, weary’d with a world of woe,
To thy safe bosom I retire,
There Love, and Peace, and Truth does flow,
May I contented there expire….
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.
Even in the Hours of Idleness, his péché de jeunesse, and still more in Hebrew Melodies, with “Oh! snatch’d away in Beauty’s bloom”; and most of all, perhaps, in the three or four poems “To Augusta,” this rarer strain is heard. And the most musical of these has, again, an eighteenth-century measure and melody, the melody of Gray’s Amatory Stanzas, and of Cowper’s “The poplars are felled.” The passionate or affectionate matter is kept in order and solemnised by the restraint and balance of that good tradition—which, of course, in those earlier hands had not always lent itself to vehement feeling. The second verse rises, no doubt, above the first, which is cast in antitheses. I know it is in the anthologies, but it will bear repeating:
Though human, thou didst not deceive me,
Though woman, thou didst not forsake,
Though loved, thou forborest to grieve me,
Though slander’d, thou never couldst shake;
Though trusted, thou didst not disclaim me;
Though parted, it was not to fly;
Though watchful, ’twas not to defame me,
Nor, mute, that the world might belie….
From the wreck of the past, which bath perish’d,
Thus much I at least may recall,
It hath taught me that what I most cherish’d
Deserv’d to be dearest of all;
In the desert a fountain is springing,
In the wide waste there still is a tree,
And a bird in the solitude singing,
Which speak to my spirit of thee.
I am not sure that any of the poets who have been Byron’s critics wrote anything which they should have been prouder to sign than that. It is needless to speak of his other, his martial strain, of the Isles of Greece and kindred pieces. They have all his vivida vis, but seem to be of a lower and louder kind of poetry, with its own rights, no doubt; but they suffer at once when confronted with the sublimer note of Shelley in his mood of patriot or humanitarian ardour:
The world’s great age begins anew,
The golden years return:
Of that ineffable or transcendental note Byron can claim little. But for all that he has a “song his very own.”
3. My third question, which is partly the same as the second, is this: What has Byron to say to our sense of beauty? What kind of feeling has he for beauty—visible beauty—and how far does he manage to get it into his language? Here we are embarrassed by the fact that he came to be more and more ashamed of his feeling, and that it is part of his method, latterly, to interrupt in a brutal way his expression of it. He pours out mockeries and vulgarities and squalors and anticlimaxes in the same breath, when he is describing something or somebody lovely. Here, no doubt, he is true to himself, and it is all part of his method; but we need not feel that we are sentimental if we are sometimes indignant. It is as though Byron could not fix his gaze for long at a time on what is well and fair. One of the old-fashioned reviewers put this point when he remarked that Byron aims “at what we must term the suicidal success of extinguishing in laughter the refined emotions he had raised.” I shalt not give examples, which are on every page. But we must not count amongst these interruptions such gay, human, and corrective passages as temper the idyll of Juan and Haidee. That, surely, in point of clean plastic beauty and harmonious execution, is still Byron’s masterpiece. I do not understand, after reading it again, why some good critics deny to Byron any quality of greatness. Here he is simple, natural, and sincere; the bathing, the handmaid cooking the eggs and coffee, the young sculptured figures who live in the moment—all this is as well done, I dare to say, in verse as that other idyll of Richard Feverel and Lucy is done in prose;—in a prose which, as has more than once been said, is crying out to become verse. Byron’s feeling for external beauty is doubtless not of the subtlest, but it is strong. Nothing is intimate, unearthly, speculative; little is left to the imagination; he sets to work our realising faculty, and makes us see, not dream. I will not quote the description of the couple wandering “over the shining pebbles and the shells,” it is too familiar; and so is the picture of the sleepers in the harem. Less known is that of the English mansion, “Norman Abbey,” in the thirteenth canto of Don Juan:
It stood embosom’d in a happy valley,
Crown’d by high woodlands, where the Druid oak
Stood, like Caractacus, in act to rally
His host, with broad arms gainst the thunderstroke,
And from beneath his boughs were seen to sally
The dappled foresters; as day awoke,
The branching stag swept down with all his herd,
To quaff a brook which murmur’d like a bird.
Before the mansion lay a lucid Lake,
Broad as transparent, deep, and freshly fed
By a river, which its soften’d way did take
In currents by the calmer water spread
Around: the wildfowl nestled in the brake
And sedges, brooding in their liquid bed:
The woods sloped downwards to its brink, and stood
With their green faces fix’d upon the flood….
Any one can pick holes in this; would Tennyson have allowed the jingle Caractacus … act? Or did take? No, he would not. But stand a little way back, and the broad, free composition tells, and the effect is beautiful. Byron’s plastic sense was not, we may think, originally strong; but his wanderings among the galleries of painting and sculpture, which he describes so rhetorically in Childe Harold, may well have sharpened that sense.
4. But what of his instinct for beauty and harmony in language? We have been told for fifty years what a sinner he is in this respect; and we all know how bad he can be, and how bad he seems to wish to be. No one to-day, perhaps, cares much for the breathless iteration of pseudo-passionate matter which charmed the first readers of his lays. But let us take Byron when we know that he is in earnest—at least for the moment—and where no irony can intrude. It may seem strange to compare him with Wordsworth, whom he both mocked at and venerated. But sometimes he commands a clear and pure fount of diction, one or two degrees above grave prose, which is curiously like Wordsworth’s diction of that order. Byron could often inspire his words with beauty when his feeling itself ran clear and pure. I find this diction in The Dream. Here he imagines, or remembers, how in the hour of his wedding to Miss Milbanke he found himself thinking of Mary Chaworth. The lines will be known here in Nottingham, and to this audience, better than anywhere else; but I quote a few of them to bear out my suggestion that in diction they are Wordsworthian; whether consciously or not, is another matter:
And he stood calm and quiet, and he spoke
The fitting vows, but heard not his own words,
And all things reel’d around him; he could see
Not that which was, nor that which should have been—
But the old mansion, and the accustom’d hall,
And the remember’d chambers, and the place,
The day, the hour, the sunshine, and the shade;
All things pertaining to that place and hour,
And her who was his destiny,—came back
And thrust themselves between him and the light:
What business had they there at such a time?
The last line, as poetry, is audacious; but I think it stands, and clinches the whole. Byron’s blank verse has been so much and so justly raked and scarified that we welcome this level musical strain, caught in a happy moment when his ear and his heart were honest.
5. But if we enlarge our question regarding beauty, and ask whether Byron can also give us grandeur of language, or what in his age was still called the Sublime, we must go carefully. This quality we should expect to find, if anywhere, in the Cain which Goethe admired so highly. And a certain grandeur of conception in that poem it would be hard to deny. Byron himself, in the person of Cain, is reasoning passionately, with unfettered brain, on life and death and divine responsibility. If they are not original reasonings, but old familiar eighteenth-century ones, the poet, with a freedom and fierceness as of the sea-eagle, makes them his own. Still, there is very little realised grandeur of expression. It is just in Cain that his sins of diction and metre swarm most abundantly. Continually, the eagle comes to earth, and walks, or hops, and is absurd. After Milton, you can hardly read Cain. Not that Byron is lacking in the sublime of a certain order. It comes in unexpected places, no doubt. Once again Goethe may be quoted. Talking to Crabb Robinson, as they read over the Vision of Judgment together, Goethe picked out certain stanzas for especial praise, and one, he said, was “sublime.” At any rate it shows Byron’s nearest to that quality, and it wins its effect and relief by being set between two purely satiric stanzas. The first of these, preceding the “sublime” one, introduces George the Third arriving at Heaven-Gate:
While thus they spake, the angelic caravan,
Arriving like a rush of mighty wind,
Cleaving the fields of space, as doth the swan
Some silver stream (say Ganges, Nile, or Inde,
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, comes to rule. Now the principle of satire is reason, reason commenting mockingly upon absurd or base realities. Its natural medium is prose; but it invests itself, by right, in verse instead, whenever the gaiety of the mocker sings itself into a tune, and demands the cymbals, or when the wrath of the moralist demands a louder blast for accompaniment. Byron, as we know, used both prose and verse. When he was young, they thought that he would be an orator; and he says himself that as a schoolboy “my qualities were much more oratorical than poetical”; and oratory, we know, is own brother to satire and invective. There is wit, I think, even in Byron’s young speeches in the House of Lords; when, for instance, he pleads for the removal of oppression from the Irish Catholics, and, pointing out that even the negroes had been set free, exclaims, “I pity the Catholic peasantry for not having had the good fortune to be born black.” I do not dwell on the English Bards, of which he was afterwards ashamed, the satire having fallen wildly on many innocent heads. It is Pope, or Crabbe, blunted and coarsened. But it is worth noting that Childe Harold itself, but for the timid dissuasion of friends, might have been something of a medley of jest and earnest, like Don Juan later. The suppressed stanzas have been saved; and there is the satire on the mock inquiry into the conduct of the generals after the Convention of Cintra:
Thus unto Heav’n appeal’d the people; Heaven,
Which loves the lieges of our gracious king,
Decreed, that ere our Generals were forgiven,
Inquiry should be held about the thing.
But Mercy cloak’d the babes beneath her wing;
And as they spar’d our foes, so spar’d we them;
(Where was the pity of our sires for Byng?)
Yet knaves, not idiots, should the law condemn;
Then live, ye gallant knights! and bless your judges’ phlegm.
More of this ingredient would have lightened the tension of Childe Harold; but when Byron got to Venice, and had purged his bosom of his hectic tales and of some of his confessions, he found his real vein and his real form, or mould, and he commenced humorist. The true accompaniment to Don Juan and Beppo are Byron’s letters of the period. It seems to be admitted that his prose, which is chiefly found in his letters, will live; and it will live by its rich, rough, rapid, spontaneous humour, as well as by its manliness. He is perfectly natural and untrammelled in his pictures of his various Venetian establishments, and afterwards in the tale of his dealings with the Countess Guiccioli. There is very little romance or sentiment in the matter; much more of a cool, careless intelligence and reckless humour. He becomes a positive, anti-sentimental Italian. Stendhal, an excellent witness, who met Byron, remarked on his freedom from the childish vanity of “turning a phrase.” “He was exactly the reverse,” says Stendhal, “of an academician; his thoughts flowed with greater rapidity than his words, and were free from all affectation or studied grace.” And this, too, is the charm of his satires; you do not know, nor does he, what will come next; except that the jest will never be far off. It is very odd that amidst these brilliant achievements, he went on writing his duller dramas, the Sardanapaluses and Werners, of which I need only say that he meant them as a tribute to the classic proprieties and unities, which in his naïf way he thought were still respectable. He sacrificed to the goddess of beauty, the goddess of dullness, and the muse of comedy, all at once.
All three, no doubt, received their offering in Don Juan; dullness is not absent, especially in the more roughly jeering portions; much of it now reads cheap enough. But beauty, as I have said, is there; and comedy, or satire, prevails. Lord Beaconsfield, in 1875, pitching his words, as his fashion was, rather high, remarked that “Don Juan will remain, as it is now recognised, an unexampled picture of human nature, and the triumph of the English language.” Lord Beaconsfield, with his un-English mind, his vein of not wholly false romance, and his genius as a fellow-satirist, is another good witness. True, he could hardly have said more of Shakespeare’s best comedies. But an unexampled picture, speaking literally, Don Juan is. Allow for all the blemishes, and there remains a surprising overplus of wit, observation, and also of a certain not contemptible kind of pathos. His hero is a peg for the adventures, which are mostly amorous; as for the impropriety, I will for the last time quote Goethe, who said that “poets and romancers, bad as they may be, have not yet learned to be more pernicious than the daily newspapers which lie on every table.” It may be added that the amorous scenes, though they do not satisfy and clear the imagination like Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, do not, for adult readers, either baulk and chill the imagination, or merely heat it. Juan, moreover, apart from these affairs, and even whilst he is in the thick of them, is made, very skilfully, to retain our regard. He is brave and humane, and there is no cruelty or “bilking” in his composition; and, except in the bad episode, where he is a half-reluctant party, with Catherine of Russia, he retains many traces of honour. (“In royalty’s vast arms he sigh’d for beauty.”) The spirit, however, of gaiety and irony that pervades the whole work, though it might at first seem to make matters worse, is really the solvent and antidote. There is, once more, that curious fundamental coolness and freedom of mind, and that dominance of reason, which emerges from Byron’s torments, mysteries, posings, and more or less factitious confessions of wickedness and weakness. As a painter of manners, who leaves a true document behind him, his position seems to be safe. The Near East, and the London of the Regency—these are his two great hunting-grounds; and the latter cantos of Don Juan are a real addition to the memoirs of Regency England. Again we go back to the previous century for our comparisons. The real parallel to these scenes and persons, and to Byron’s letters, is to be found not in the literature of romance at all, but in the letters and records of the serene, imperturbable old patrician free-living wits of the middle and later eighteenth century. Such are George Selwyn, and “Gilly” Williams, and that old Marquis of Queensberry who is not so bad as he has been painted. And Byron’s strong, natural prose, as he pours out his stories and memories, is in essence their prose; it is not that of the age or set of Keats, and Leigh Hunt, and Wordsworth and Shelley. It is penetrated throughout with a masculine humour, coarse no doubt in fibre, but not in the least feeble or insidious or precious. And the same tone, the same diction, reign in his verse, in the pliable octave measure, which wavers and changes with every mood and gust. Why, you hear the gay light old verse of the last age even in the Hours of Idleness:
Why should you weep like Lydia Languish
And fret with self-created anguish?
Or doom the lover you have chosen
On winter nights to sigh half-frozen;
In leafless shades to sue for pardon,
Only because the scene’s a garden?
I will add, that if we are asking what Byron can give us to-day, and to what gap in contemporary poetry his performance points, one reply will be, that we have had no new Don Juan. We have no great satirist in verse; the art seems to be lost. We have nobody with a large, free, gay, unflinching knowledge of the world, and with the ability to express that knowledge in verse. Allowing for the vast and obvious differences, Byron, at the opening of the nineteenth century, occupies a position not wholly unlike that of Swift at the opening of the eighteenth. Have we a Swift? We have, in prose, Bernard Shaw; but I will not dwell on the difference in power, or on Swift’s vastly sounder humanity. We certainly have had no Byron. In one sense, in the sense in which Flaubert said, “Tous les époques sont atroces,” every age is fodder for the satirist. In another sense, our own age seems especially vulnerable. But the paralysis of great literary art which has been caused by the world-convulsion, and which seems to have inhibited the largest kinds of poetry, has also left poetic satire comparatively mute. Moreover, if we look far back, do we find any English satire in rhyme that approaches Don Juan, if we reckon quality, variety, and mass all together? The Dunciad shows great power; but who except a student can read it for amusement? Absalom and Achitophel is a great and finished production, but it is only of the middle length.
In trying to sketch an answer to a few leading questions I have naturally left a great deal out. Nothing has been said of the Byron who went to Greece, who upheld the freedom of little nations, and who exclaimed that “the peoples will conquer in the end.” Nor has anything been said of his sufferings or of their problematical causes. People will always make books about Byron, as they do about Hamlet; for it is the man that tells us most about himself, who remains the most mysterious. These are only stray notes on Byron’s art and genius; they are an effort to intimate what he still can say to us when all mere enthusiasm, and all mere revulsion, have cleared themselves away.
- ↑ The Byron Lecture, delivered at University College, Nottingham, March 7, 1924 (slightly revised).