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CHAPTER IX.

BYRON.

"Toi, dont le monde encore ignore le vrai nom,
Esprit mystérieux, mortel, ange ou démon."

Such are the three aspects under which at different times we are apt to regard Byron, as he appeals to our various sympathies or antipathies. And what is true of the man is true of his poems; for perhaps no poet is so inseparable from his writings he lived them, and lives in them.

Therefore it is of less importance to relate his life and to discuss his character. There is also no lack of books and essays on the subject, of which I might mention Moore's life, and Trelawny's vigorous narrative, besides what Hobhouse (Lord Broughton), the Countess Guiccioli, Karl Elze, and others have to say, in praise or abuse.

So much indeed has been written and is read on the subject of Byron, that to most an abstract of his life, or an analysis of his personal character, would probably convey little new information. Besides which, I feel that his life and character, however in

teresting, are not subjects that tend to much practical good. The intensity of his genius seems to throw a halo round the man, and dazzles us, so that we cannot distinguish his real outlines.

I intend therefore, as far as may be possible, to avoid this Charybdis, and trust that I shall not in so doing run upon the Scylla of dry disquisition.

And, first of all, what were his own ideas on the subject of poetry? In this, as in all things, Byron's expressed opinions were of almost no value. No man ever meant so little what he said, or said so little that he meant. No man ever had such a bottomless pit of negation in his nature. To disbelieve, is (as Paley tells us) merely to believe in doubt instead of certainty. It is itself a kind of belief. But Byron's was doubt within doubt, one within the other interminably, like Ezekiel's wheels.

“When Bishop Berkeley * said 'there was no matter,'
And proved it, 'twas no matter what he said.”

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"There's no such thing as certainty, that's plain ;

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So little do we know what we're about in

This world, I doubt if doubt itself be doubting."

And again—

*

*

"O Doubt; if thou be'st Doubt, for which some take thee, But which I doubt extremely."

Such was Byron's opinion about certainty, if indeed

*Bishop Berkeley wrote the "Minute Philosopher." He denied the objective existence of the material world.

it can be called an opinion. It is not badly summed up by the author of the parody on Byron in the "Rejected Addresses: "

"Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,

And nought is everything, and everything is nought."

He certainly laid very little importance himself on these opinions of his-these doubts within doubts— and I think he was right. We learn but little from them, which we can apply as a test to his poems. But it will be well to glance at them. It seems to me that Byron's expressed opinions—like almost all his conduct-were the result of a spirit of opposition, not unmixed with motives of pride and a petty ambition. It was a sense of his inferiority, of the hopelessness of ever rivalling such a poet, that made him speak slightingly of Shakespeare. Milton and Shakespeare, according to him, are but transitory glories; they have risen, and they will set in oblivion. "If. you like you may call Shakespeare and Milton pyramids," he says, "but I prefer a temple of Theseus or a Parthenon to a mountain of burnt bricks." What then was this Parthenon? It was Pope's poetry. All his contemporaries, and all the great poets of the Renaissance, and he himself in so far as against his own theory he allowed himself to be influenced by them, were, in language that he borrowed from Voltaire, nothing but barbarians. In this opinion I can see nothing but a spirit of contradiction and a desire to attract notice. Had he really believed in it he would

have practised it to better purpose; but the force of his innate genius swept him down its natural course, and made him in his greater poems practise the very reverse of what he preached.

Karl Elze, who, with German assiduity, has written a book of four hundred and thirty pages on Lord Byron, conceives it possible that the sympathies of the poet for Pope were partly excited by the fact that both suffered from bodily deformity. It is just possible, although I think stronger motives may be discovered, namely, intolerance of rivalry, and a consequent depreciation of what he really felt to be inimitably great. On the other hand, I fancy that Byron's and Pope's characters had some affinities. They were both cynics, not in the ancient but the modern sense of the word. This cynicism is so apparent in most of Byron's poems, that we may pause for a few moments to consider it. I think if we view the character of Byron in contrast with that of Shelley, we may see the real nature of this quality. No one would accuse Shelley of cynicism, whereas it is a word that naturally occurs to one as soon as we hear the name of Byron. What is this quality that forms the contrast?

Shelley and Byron are often classed together as men who both sinned against the forms of society, and suffered to some extent social excommunication. Thus far they may justly be so classed. Both were genii of destruction. But Shelley was more, and just in so far as he was more he is to be valued.

The world is so overbuilt nowadays that perhaps before we can construct we are compelled to pull down and remove what occupies our ground. Yet this is only a preliminary work-it is a work not for the architect or builder's art, but for the hodmanno less than is that of collecting material.

The only reality is perfection: the only true belief is a certainty of the existence of perfection, and the only true work is work in that direction. One act, one word, one thought-ay, one look-that to ourselves or to others reveals the existence of what is good excels, and excels by the sum total of its own value, all the destruction wrought in the earth by those whose mission has been to destroy rather than to fulfil-by all cynics, satirists and critics, in so far as theirs has been merely a destructive energy.

Has it not happened that in some mood of bitterness, when the world and all the inhabiters thereof were to us a thing of contempt or even hate, as we wandered perhaps through the filthy crowded streets, while past us flowed a stream of faces-children's faces once, but now with pallid cheeks, and fevered lips, and shrunken eyes, glittering with the lust for gold, or fierce with disappointed greed, or dulled with stupid satiety, and staring in vacant insolence,-when for very sadness we could scarcely smile in bitterness; -has it not happened that there has passed by, amid that throng, some sweet face with eyes of patient love and purity? Or has some bright rippling laughter

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