duces into his verses. He does not | as the greatest naine in our poetry. Depend upon it, the rest are barbarians. He is a hand, and a Turkish Mosque and all sorts of Greek Temple, with a Gothic Cathedral on one fantastic pagodas and conventicles about him. You may call Shakspeare and Milton pyra mids, but I prefer the Temple of Theseus or the Parthenon to a mountain of burnt brickwork. ... The grand distinction of the underforms of the new school of poets is their vulgarity. By this I do not mean they are coarse, but shabby-genteel.”* invent, he observes; he does not create, he transcribes. His copy is darkly exaggerated, but it is a copy. "I could not write upon any thing," says he, without some personal experience and foundation." We will find in his letters and note-books, almost feature for feature, the most striking of his descriptions. The capture of Ismail, the shipwreck of Don Juan, are, almost And he presently wrote two letters word for word, like two accounts of it with incomparable vivacity and spirit in prose. If none but cockneys could to defend Pope against the scorn o attribute to him the crimes of his he-modern writers. These writers, acroes, none but blind men could fail to cording to him, have spoiled the public see in him the sentiments of his char- taste. The only ones who were worth acters. This is so true, that he has any thing-Crabbe, Campbell, Rogers not created more than one. Childe-imitate the style of Pope. A few Harold, Lara, the Giaour, the Corsair, others had talent; but, take them all Manfred, Sardanapalus, Cain, Tasso, together, those who had come last had Dante, and the rest, are always the perverted literature: they did not know same-one man represented under va- their own language; their expressions rious costumes, in several lands, with are only approximate, above or below different expressions; but just as the true tone, forced or dull. He ranpainters do, when, by change of gar-ges himself amongst the corrupters, t ments, decorations, and attitudes, they draw fifty portraits from the same model. He meditated too much upon himself to be enamored of any thing else. The habitual sternness of his will prevented his mind from being flexible; his force, always concentrated for effort and bent upon strife, shut him up in self-contemplation, and reduced him never to make a poem, save of his own heart. What style would he adopt? With these concentrated and tragic sentiments he had a classical mind. By the strangest mixture, the books, which he preferred, were at once the most violent or the most proper, the Bible above all: "I am a great reader and admirer of those books (the Bible), and had read them through and through before I was eight years old; that is to say, the Old Testament, for the New struck me as a task, but the other as a pleasure.' Observe this word: he did not relish the tender and self-denying mysticism of the gospel, but the cruel sternness and lyrical outcries of the Hebrews. Next to the Bible he loved Pope, the most corect and formal of men: "As to Pope, I have always regarded him * Moore, Byron's Works; Life, v. 265. and we soon see that this theory is not an invention, springing from bad temper and polemics; he returns to it. In his two first attempts-Hours of Idleness, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers-he tried to follow it up. Later, and in almost all his works, we find its effect. He recommends and practises the rule of unity in tragedy. He loves oratorical form, symmetrical phrase, condensed style. He likes to plead his passions. Sheridan tried to induce Byron to devote himself to eloquence; and the vigor, piercing logic, wonderful vivacity, close argument of his prose, prove that he would have taken the first rank amongst pamphleteers. If he attains to it amongst the poets, it is partly due to his classical system. This oratorical form, in which Pope compresses his thought like La Bruyère, magnifies the force and swing of vehement ideas; like a narrow and straight canal, it collec's and dashes them in their right direc tion; there is then nothing which their impetus does not carry away; and it is thus Lord Byron from the first, in the Ibid. 150, Ravenna, May 3, 1821. "All the styles of the day are bombastic. I don't except my own; no one has done more through negligence to corrupt the language." See his English Bards and Scotch Re viewers. face of hostile criticisms, and over jealous reputations, has made his way to the public. * In Thus Childe Harold made its way. At the first onset every man who read it was agitated. It was more than an author who spoke; it was a man. spite of his denial, the author was identified with his hero: he calumniated himself, but still it was himself whom he portrayed. He was recognized in that young voluptuous and disgusted man, ready to weep amidst his orgies, who "Sore sick at heart, And from his fellow bacchanals would flee; 'Tis said, at times the sullen tear would start, But Pride congeal'd the drop within his ee: Apart he stalk'd in joyless reverie, And from his native land resolved to go, woe. e." t Fleeing from his native land, he carried, amongst the splendors and cheerfulness of the south, his unwearying persecutor, "demon thought," implacable behind him. The scenery was recog nized: it had been copied on the spot. And what was the whole book but a diary of travel? He said in it what he had seen and thought. What poetic fiction is so valuable as genuine sensaHon? What is more penetrating than confidence, voluntary or involuntary ? Truly, every word here expressed an emotion of eye or heart: All these beauties, calm or imposing, he had enjoyed, and sometimes suffered through them; and hence we see them through his verse. Whatever he touched, he made palpitate and live; because, when he saw it, his heart had beaten and he had lived. He himself, a little later, quitting the mask of Harold, took up the parable in his own name; and who is not touched by an avowal so passionate and complete? *Thirty thousand copies of the Corsair were sold in one day. Byron's Works, viii.; Childe Harold' Pilgrimage, c. i. 6. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, c. i. 19. 545 Like the Chaldean, he could watch the stars, And human frailties, were forgotten quite: But in Man's dwellings he became a thing To whom the boundless air alone were home: His breast and beak against his wiry dome Till the blood tinge his plumage, so the heat Of this impeded soul would through his bosom cat." Such are the sentiments wherewith he surveyed nature and history, not to comprehend them and forget himself before them, but to seek in them and impress upon them the image of his own passions. He does not leave objects to speak of themselves, but forces them to answer him. Amidst their peace, he is only occupied by his own emotion. He attunes them to his soul, and compels them to repeat is own cries. All is inflated here, as in himself; the vast strophe rolls along, carrying in its overflowing bed the flood of vehement ideas; declamation unficial (it was his first work), but potent, folds itself, pompous, and at times arti* Ibid. c. iii. 7-18. and so often sublime that the rhetorical rubbish, which he yet preserved, disappeared under the afflux of splendors, with which it is loaded. Wordsworth, Walter Scott, by the side of this prod And all things weigh'd in custom's falsest Opinion an omnipotence, whose veil igality of accumulated splendors, And their free thoughts be crimes, and earth seemed poor and dull; never since I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; I saw from out the wave her structures rise have too much light. And thus they plod in sluggish misery, To the new race of inborn slaves, who wage Bleed gladiator-like and still engage Has ever style better expressed a soul? It is seen here laboring and ex Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hun- panding. Long and stormily the ideas dred isles! She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean, boiled within this soul like bars of metal heaped in the furnace. They melted there before the strain of the intense heat; they mingled therein their heated mass amidst convulsions and explosions, and then at last the door is opened; a slow stream of fire descends into the trough prepared beforehand, heating the circumambient air, and its glittering hues scorch the Monarchs partook, and deem'd their dignity eyes which persist in looking upon it. From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East Pour'd in her lap all gems in sparkling showers. In purple was she robed, and of her feast increased. ... III. Description and monologue did not suffice Byron; and he needed, to express his ideas, events and actions. Only events try the force and elasticity of the soul; only actions display and regulate this force and elasticity. Amidst events he sought for the most powerful, amidst actions the strongest ; and we see appear successively The Bride of Abydos, The Giaour, The Cor sair, Lara, Parisina, The Siege of Cor inth, Mazeppa, and The Prisoner of Chillon. I know that these sparkling poems have grown dull in forty years. In their necklace of Oriental pearls have been discovered beads of glass; and Byron, who only half loved them, judged better than his judges. Yet he judged amiss; those which he preHis Corsair ferred are the most false. is marred by classic elegancies: the pirates' song at the beginning is ne * Ibid. c. iv. 93 and 94. truer than a chorus at the Italian | brilliant colors. We are all of the Opera; his scamps propound philo- people, as regards emotion; and the sophical antitheses as balanced as those great lady, like the waiting woman, of Pope. A hundred times ambition, sheds tears, without cavilling with the glory, envy, despair, and the other author as to the means he uses. abstract personages, whose images in the time of the first Empire the French used to set upon their drawing-room clocks, break in amidst living passions. The noblest passages are disfigured by pedantic apostrophes, and the pretentious poetic diction sets up its threadbare frippery and conventional ornaments. † Far worse, he studies effect and follows the fashion. Melodramatic strings pull his characters at the right time, so as to obtain the grimace which shall make his public shudder: "Who thundering comes on blackest steed, With slacken'd bit and hoof of speed! 66 And yet, after all, there is a great deal of truth in Byron's poems. No; this man is not a mere arranger of effects or an inventor of phrases. He has lived amidst the spectacles he de scribed; he has experienced the emotions he relates. He has been in the tent of Ali Pacha, and relished the strong savor of ocean adventure and savage manners. He has been a score of times near death,—in the Morea, in the anguish and the solitude of fever; at Suli, in a shipwreck; at Malta, in England, and in Italy, in the dangers of a duel, plots of insurrection, commencements of sudden attacks, at sea, . Approach, thou craven crouching slave, in arms, on horseback, having seen Say, is not this Thermopyla? assassination, wounds, agonies, close Wretched mannerisms, emphatic and to him, and that more than once. vulgar, imitated from Lucan and our am living here exposed to it (assassinmodern Lucans, but which produce ation) daily, for I have happened to their effect only on a first perusal, and make a powerful and unprincipled man on the common herd of readers. There my enemy; and I never sleep the worse is an infallible means of attracting a for it, or ride in less solitary places, mob, which is, to shout out loud; with because precaution is useless, and shipwrecks, sieges, murders, and com- one thinks of it as of a disease which bats, we shall always interest them; may or may not strike."* He spoke show them pirates, desperate adven- the truth; no one ever held himself turers, these distorted or raging faces more erect and firm in danger. One will draw them out of their regular and day, near the Gulf of San Fiorenzo, monotonous existence; they will go his yacht was thrown on the coast; to see them as they go to melodramas, the sea was terrific, and the rocks in and through the same instinct which sight; the passengers kissed their rcinduces them to read novels in penny saries, or fainted with horror; and the numbers. Add, by way of contrast, two captains being consulted, declared angelic women, tender and submissive, shipwreck inevitable. "Well," said beautiful as angels. Byron describes Lord Byron, "we are all born to die ; all this, and adds to these seductions I shall go with regret, but certainly not a bewitching scenery, oriental or pic-with fear." And he took off his clothes, turesque adornments; old Alpine cas-begging the others to do the same, not tles, the Mediterranean waves, the setting suns of Greece, the whole in high relief, with marked shadows and *For example," as weeping Beauty's cheek at Sorrow's tale." Here are verses like Pope, very beautiful and false: "And havock leath so much the waste of time, She scarce had left an uncommitted crime. One hour beheld him since the tide he stemm'd, Disguised, discover'd, conquering, ta'en, con- A chief on land, an outlaw on the deep, that they could save themselves amidst such waves; but "it is every man's duty to endeavor to preserve the life God has given him; so I advise you all to strip: swimming, indeed, can be of little use in these billows; but as children, when tired with crying, sink placidly to repose, we, when exhausted with struggling, shall die the easi ." He then sat down, folded his arms, very calm; he even joked with er. * Moore's Life, iv. 345 All the captain, who was putting his dolars into his waistcoat pocket. The ship approached the rocks this time Byron was not seen to change countenance. A man thus tried and moulded can paint extreme situations and sentiments. After all, they are never painted otherwise than by expe rience. The most inventive-Dante and Shakspeare-though quite different, yet do the same thing. However high their genius rose, it always had its feet on observation; and their most foolish, as well as their most splendid pictures, never offered to the world more than an image of their age, or of their own heart. At most, they deduce; that is, having derived from two or three features the inward qualities of the man within themselves and of the men around them, they draw thence, by a sudden ratiocination of which they have no consciousness, the varied skein of actions and sentiments. They may be artists, but they are observers. They may invent, but they describe. Their glory does not consist in the dis play of a phantasmagoria, but in the discovery of a truth. They are the first to enter some unexplored province of humanity, which becomes their domain, and thenceforth supports their name like an appanage. Byron found his domain, which is that of sad and tender sentiments: it is a heath, and full of ruins; but he is at home there, and he is alone. What an abode! And it is on this desolation that he dwells. He muses on it. See the brothers of Childe Harold pass the characters who people it. One in his prison, chained up with his two remaining brothers. Their father and three others had perished fighting, or were burnt for their faith. One by one, before the eyes of the eldest, the last two languish and fade: a silent and slow agony amidst the damp darkness into which a beam of the sickly sun pierces through a crevice. After the death of the first, the survivors "begged as a boon" that he shall at least be buried on a spot "whereon the day might shine." The jailers Coldly laugh'd and laid him there. The flat and turfless earth above But the pillars to which they are chained are too far apart,—the elder brother; he listens and hears the failcannot approach his dying younger ing sighs; he cries for succor, and none comes. He bursts his chain with He one strong bound: all is over. takes that cold hand, and then, before lost, his thoughts arrested; he is like the motionless body, his senses are a drowning man, who, after passing sink down like a stone, and no longer through pangs of agony, lets himself feels existence but by a complete petrifaction or horror. Here is another bound naked on a wild horse, rushing brother of Childe Harold, Mazeppa, over the steppes. He writhes, and his swollen limbs, cut by the cords, are bleeding. A whole day the course continues, and behind him the wolves are howling. The night through he hears their long monotonous chase, and at the end his energy fails. The earth gave way, the skies roll'd round, I seem'd to sink upon the ground; Shall I enumera.e them all? Hugo, Parisina, the Foscari, the Giaour, the Corsair. His hero is always a man striving with the worst anguish, face to face with shipwreck, torture, death.— his own painful and prolonged death, the bitter death of his well-beloved, with remorse for his companion, * Byron's Works, x. The Prisoner of Chil lon, C. vii. 234. † Ibid. c. viii 235. ↑ Ibid. xi., Maseppa, c. xiii. 167. |