tion; but how partial still was this approach! And how we feel, on reading them, that they would have needed the aid of public culture, and the aptitude of national genius, which Goethe possessed! That which the whole of civilization has alone developed in the Englishman, is energetic will and practical faculties. Here man has braced himself up in his efforts, become concentrated in resistance, fond of action, and hence shut out from pure speculation, from wavering sympathy, and from disinterested art. In him metaphysical liberty has perished under utilitarian preoccupation, and pantheistic reverie under moral prejudices. How would he frame and bend his im His wilfulness is whim, his ideas are longings and dreams. A poet's soul ir a scholar's head, both unfit for action, and not harmonizing well together discord within, and weakness without. in short, character is wanting: it is German all over. By his side, what a man is Manfred! He is a man; there is no fitter word, or one which could depict him better. He will not, at the sight of a spirit, "quake like a craw! ing, cowering, timorous worm." He will not regret that "he has neither land, nor pence, nor worldly honors, nor influence." He will not let him self be duped by the devil like a schoolboy, or go and amuse himself like a cockney with the phantasmagoria of himself. If he has studied magic arts, My spirit walk'd not with the souls of men, agination so as to follow the number- the Brocken. He has lived like a feuless and fugitive outlines of existences, dal chief, not like a scholar who has especially of vague existences? How taken his degree; he has fought, master would he leave his religion so as to re-ed others; he knows how to master produce indifferently the powers of indifferent nature? And who is further it is not from an alchemist's curiosity, from flexibility and indifference than he? The flowing water, which in Goethe ☐ takes the mould of all the contours of the soil, and which we perceive in the sinuous and luminous distance beneath the golden mist which it exhales, was in Byron suddenly frozen into a mass of ice, and makes but a rigid block of crystal. Here, as elsewhere, there is but one character, the same as before. Men, gods, nature, all the changing and multiplex world of Goethe, has vanished. The poet alone subsists, as expressed in his character. Inevitably imprisoned within himself, he could see nothing but himself; if he must come to other existences, it is that they may reply to him; and through this pretended epic he persisted in his eternal monologue. But how all these powers, assembled in a single being make him great! Into what mediocrity and platitude sinks the Faust of Goethe, compared to Manfred! As soon as we cease to see humanity in this Faust, what does he become? Is he a hero? A sad hero, who has no other task but to speak, is afraid, studies the shades of his sensations, and walks about! His worst action is to seduce a grisette, and to go and dance by night in bad company-two exploits which many a German student has accomplished. eyes; The thirst of their ambition was not mine, ers Made me a stranger; though I wore the I had no sympathy with breathing flesh.... wing Filt o'er the herbless granite, or to plunge On the swift whirl of the new breaking wave. To follow through the night the moving moon, The stars and their development; or catch dim; Or to look, list'ning, on the scatter'd leaves, song. These were my pastimes, and to be alone: I could not tame my nature down; for he -and sue And watch all time-and pry into all place- | * Byron's Works, xi.; Manfrech ii. a, 38. Too much as I loved thee: we were not made To torture thus each other, though it were The deadliest sin to love as we have loved. Say that thou loath'st me not-that I de bear deep, But, like an ebbing wave, it dashed me back Into the gulf of my unfathom'd thought.... I dwell in my despair, And live, and live for ever." t Ie only wishes to see her once more: o this sole and all-powerful desire flow all the energies of his soul. He calls her up in the midst of spirits; she appears, but answers not. He prays to her-with what cries, what doleful cries of deep anguish! How he loves! With what yearning and effort all his downtrodden and outcrushed tenderness gushes out and escapes at the sight of those well-beloved eyes, which he sees for the last time! With what enthusiasm his convulsive arms are stretched towards that frail form which, shuddering, has quitted the tomb! towards those cheeks in which the blood, forcibly recalled, plants "a strange hectic-like the unnatural red which Autumn plants upon the perish'd leaf." ... Hear me, hear me Astartel my beloved! speak to me: I have so much endured-so much endureLook on me! the grave hath not changed thee more Than I am changed for thee. Thou lovedst ine This punishment for both that thou wilt be For I have call'd on thee in the still night, boughs, And woke the mountain wolves, and made the caves Acquainted with thy vainly echoed name, Which answer'd me-many things answer'd say I reck not what-but let me hear thee onceThis once-once more!"* She speaks. What a sad and doubt ful reply! Manfred's limbs are con vulsed when she disappears. But an instant after the spirits see that: "... He mastereth himself, and makes His torture tributary to his will. Had he been one of us, he would have made An awful spirit." † Will is the unshaken basis of this soul. He did not bend before the chief of the spirits; he stood firm and calm before the infernal throne, whilst all the demons were raging who would tear him to pieces: now he dies, and they assail him, but he still strives and con quers: "... Thou hast no power upon me, that I * Byron's Works, xi.; Manfred, iii. 1, 36. ↑ Ibid. ii. 2, 35. feel; Thou never shalt possess me, that I know: thine: The mind which is immortal makes itselfi sense, When stripp'd of this mortality, derives * Ibul ii. 4, 47. + Ibid. ii. 4 But is absorb'd in sufferance or in joy, Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me; I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey- My own hereafter.-Back, ye baffled fiends! hand of death is on me-but not yours!" * This "I," the invincible I, who suffices to himself, on whom nothing has a hold, demons or men, the sole author of his own good and ill, a sort of suffering or fallen god, but god always, even in its quivering flesh, amidst his soiled and blighted destiny, such is the hero and the work of this mind, and of the men of his race. If Goethe was the poet of the universe, Byron was the poet of the individual; and if in one the German genius found its interpreter, the English genius found its inter preter in the other. V. announced. Owing to his title and celebrity, the scandal which he caused was more conspicuous than any other. he was a public sinner. One day an obscure parson sent him a prayer which he had found amongst the papers of his wife-a charming and pious lady, recently dead, and who had secretly prayed to God for the conversion of the great sinner. Conservative and Protestant England, after a quarter of a century of moral wars, and two centuries of moral education, carried its severity and rigor to extremes; and Puritan intolerance, like Catholic intolerance previously in Spain, put recusants out of the pale of the law. The proscription of voluptuous or abandoned life, the narrow observation of order and decency, the respect of all police, human and divine; the neces sary bows at the mere name of Pitt, of the king, the church, the God of the Bible; the attitude of the gentleman in a white tie, conventional, inflexible, implacable, such were the customs then met with across the Channel, a hundred times more tyrannical than now-adays; at that time, as Stendhal says, a peer at his fireside dared not cross his legs, for fear of its being improper. England held herself stiff, uncomfortably laced in her stays of decorum. Hence arose two sources of misery: a man suffers, and is tempted to throw down the ugly choking apparatus, when On one side constraint, on the other hypocrisy-these are the two vices of English civilization; and it was these which Byron, with his poet's discernment and his combative instincts, attacked. We can well imagine that Englishmen clamored at and repudiated the monster. Southey, the poet-laureate, said of him, in good biblical style, that he savored of Moloch and Belial-most of all of Satan; and, with the generosity of a brother poet, called the attention of Government to him. We should fill many pages if we were to copy the reproaches of the respectable reviews against these "men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, he is sure that it can be done secretly forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society, and, hating that revealed religion which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to disbelieve, labor to make others as miserable as themselves, by infecting them with a moral virus that eats into the soul." ↑ This from hearsay and formulas, like cocksounds like the emphasis of an episcopal neys; they, like eccentric beings, from charge and of scholastic pedantry: in accomplished facts, and things: at England the press does the duty of the twenty-two he perceived the tedium police, and it never did it more violently born of constraint desolating all high than at that time. Opinion backed the life press Several times, in Italy, Lord Byron saw gentlemen leave a drawingroom with their wives, when he was He had seen them from the first; true artists are perspicacious: it is in this that they outstrip us; we judge * Byron's Works, xi.; Manfred, iii. 4, 70. † Southey, Preface to A Vision of Fudg ment. sink "'There stands the noble hostess, nor sha brink, 1 'Midst royal dukes and dames condemn'd to ❘ation; and it is the only answer they deserve climb, And gain an inch of staircase at a time." * He wrote also: "He (the Count) ought to have been in the country during the hunting season, with a select party of distinguished guests, as the papers term it. He ought to have seen the gentlemen after dinner (on the hunting days), and the soirée ensuing thereupon, and the women looking as if they had hunted, or rather been hunted; and I could have wished that he had been at a dinner in town, which I recollect Lord C**'s-small, but select, and com¡osed of the most amusing people. The dessert was hard y on the table, when, out of twelve, I counted five asleep." t As for the morals of the upper classes, this is what he says: "Went to my box at Covent Garden tonight.... Casting my eyes round the house, in the next box to me, and the next, and the next, were the most distinguished old and young Babylonians of quality... It was as if the house had been divided between your public and your understood courtesans;-but the intriguantes much outnumbered the regular mercenaries. Now, where lay the difference between Pauline and her mother,... and Lady ** and daughter? except that the two last may enter Carlton and any other house, and the two first are limited to the Opera and b-house. How I do delight in observing life as it really is !-and myself, after all, the worst of any!" ‡ Decorum and debauchery; moral hypocrites, "qui mettent leurs vertus en mettant leurs gants blancs; "§ an oligarchy which, to preserve its places and its sinecures, ravages Europe, preys on Ireland, and excites the people by making use of the grand words, virtue, Christianity, and liberty: there was truth in all these invectives. || It is only thirty years since the ascendency of the middle class diminished the privileges and corruptions of the great; but at that time hard words could with justice be thrown at their heads. Byron said, quoting from Voltaire : ""La Pudeur s'est enfuie des cœurs, et s'est refugiée sur les lèvres.' 'Plus les mœurs sont dépravées, plus les expressions deviennent mesurées; on croit regagner en langage ce qu'on a perdu en vertu. This is the real fact, as applicable to the degraded and hypocritical mass which leavens the present English gener ... Cant is the crying sin of this doubledealing and false-speaking time of selfish spoilers."* And ther. he wrote his masterpiece Don Juan.t a and All here was new, form as well as substance; for he had entered into a new world. The Englishman, the Northman, transplanted amongst southern manners and into Italian life, had become imbued with a new sap, which made him bear new fruit. He had been induced to read the rather free satires of Buratti, and the more than voluptuous sonnets of Baffo. He lived in the happy Venetian society, still ex empt from political animosities, where care seemed a folly, where life was looked upon as a carnival, pleasure displayed itself openly, not timid and hypocritical, but loosely arrayed commended. He amused himself here, impetuously at first, more than sufficient, even more than too much, and almost killed himself by these amusements; but after vulgar gallantries, having felt real feeling of love, he became a cavalier' servante, after the fashion of the country where he dwelt, with the consent of the family of the lady, offering his arm, carrying her shawl, a little awkwardly at first, and wonderingly, but on the whole happier than he had ever been, and fanned by a warm breath of pleasure and abandon. He saw in Italy the overthrow of all English morality, conjugal infidelity established as a rule, amorous fidelity raised to a duty: "There is no convincing a woman here that she is in the smallest degree deviating from the rule of right or the fitness of things in having an amoroso.§... Love (the sentiment of love) is not merely an excuse for it, but makes it an actual virtue, provided it is disinterested, and not a caprice, and is confined to one object." || A little later he translated the Morgante Maggiore of Pulci, to show * Byron's Works, xvi. 131; Preface to Don Juan, cantos vi. vii. and viii. + Don Juan is a satire on the abuses in the present state of society, and not a eulogy of vice. Stendhal, Mémoires sur Lord Byron. * Byron's Works, xvii.; Don Juan, C. 11, st. lxvii. ↑ Ibid. vi. 18; Letter 512, April 5, 1823. Ibid. ii. 303; Journal, Dec. 17, 1813. Alfred de Musset. See his terrible satirical poem, The Vision of Judgment, against Southey, George IV., and official pomp. Venice, Jan. 2, 1817. Ibid. iii. 363; Letter to Moore, Venice March 25, 1817. "What was permitted in a Catholic | marriage tie strictly kept, a feeling of country and a bigoted age to a church- duty and self-command. In Italy the man on the score of religion, and to silence those buffoons who accuse me of attacking the Liturgy." * He rejoiced in this liberty and this ease, and resolved never to fall again under the pedantic inquisition, which in his country had condemned and damned him past forgiveness. He wrote his Beppo like an improvisatore, with a charming freedom, a flowing and fantastic light ness of mood, and contrasted in it the recklessness and happiness of Italy with the prejudices and repulsiveness of England: guttural, Which we're obliged to hiss, and spit, and sputter all. I like the women too (forgive my folly), From the rich peasant cheek of ruddy bronze, And large black eyes that flash on you a volley Of rays that say a thousand things at once, To the high dama's brow, more melancholy, But clear, and with a wild and liquid glance, Heart on her lips, and soul within her eyes, Soft as her clime, and sunny as her skies." + With other manners there existed in Italy another morality; there is one for every age, race, and sky-I mean that the ideal model varies with the circumstances which fashion it. In England the severity of the climate, the warlike energy of the race, and the liberty of the institutions prescribe an active life, severe manners, Puritanic religion, the * Byron's Works, iv. 279; Letter to Murray, Ravenna, Feb. 7, 1820. † Ibid. xi.; Beppo, c. xliii.-xlv. 121. beauty of the climate, the innate sense of the beautiful, and the despotism of the government induced an idle life, loose manners, imaginative religion, the culture of the arts, and the search after happiness. Each model has ite beauties and its blots, -the epicurean artist like the political moralist; * each shows by its greatnesses the littlenesses of the other, and, to set in relief the disadvantages of the second, Lord Byron had only to set in relief the se ductions of the first. Thereupon he went in search of a hero, and did not find one, which, in this age of heroes, is "an uncommon want." For lack of a better he chose "our ancient friend, Don Juan,"-a scandalous choice: what an outcry the English moralists will make! But, ta cap the horror, this Don Juan is not. wicked, selfish, odious, like his fellows he does not seduce, he is no corrupter. When an opportunity arises, he lets himself drift; he has a heart and senses, and, under a beautiful sun, they are easily touched: at sixteen a youth cannot help himself, nor at twenty, nor perhaps at thirty. Lay it to the charge of human nature, my dear moralists; it is not I who made it as it is. If you will grumble, address yourselves higher: we are here as painters, not as makers of human puppets, and we da not answer for the inner structure of our dancing-dolls. Our Don Juan is now going about; he goes about in many places, and in all he is young; we will not launch thunderbolts on his head because he is young; that fashion is past: the green devils and their capers only come on the stage in the last act of Mozart's Don Giovanni. And, moreover, Juan is so amiable! After all, what has he done that others don't do? He has been a lover ol Catherine II., but he only followed the lead of the diplomatic corps and the whole Russian army. Let him sow his wild oats; the good grain will spring up in its time Once in England, he * See Stendhal, Vie de Giacomo Rossini, and Dean Stanley's Life of Dr. Arnold. The contrast is complete. See also Mad. de Stael's Corinne, where this opposition is very clearly grasped. |