No More Learning

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CHAPTER II
BYRON
GEORGE GORDON, sixth Lord Byron, and descendant of an
ancient Norman family that accompanied William the Conqueror
to England, was the only son of 'Mad Jack’ Byron by his second
marriage with the Scottish heiress, Catherine Gordon of Gight.
He was born in London, on 22 January 1788; but, shortly after
his birth, owing to his father's withdrawal to France in order to
escape from his creditors, the future poet was brought by his
mother to Aberdeen. Here, his first boyhood was spent, and the
impressions which he received of Deeside, Lochnagar and the
Grampians remained with him throughout his life and have left
their mark upon his poetry. By the death of his great-uncle,
William, fifth Lord Byron, in 1798, the boy succeeded to the title
and to the Byron estates of Newstead priory and Rochdale; in the
year 1801, he entered Harrow school. Up to this time, his life had
been that of a wild mountain colt'; his education, both intel-
lectual and moral, had been neglected, and his mother petted and
abused him in turn; his father had died when he was a child
of three. Sensitive and proud by nature, his sensitiveness was
aggravated by his lameness and his poverty, while his pride was
nurtured by his succession, at the age of ten, to a peerage.
Harrow, he made many friends, read widely and promiscuously
in history and biography, but never became an exact scholar.
To these schoolboy years also belongs the story of his romantic,
unrequited love for Mary Ann Chaworth. From Harrow, Byron
proceeded, in October 1805, to Trinity college, Cambridge ; but
the university, though it widened his circle of friends, never won
his affections in the way that Harrow had. While at Harrow,
he had written a number of short poems, and, in January 1807, he
printed for private circulation a slender volume of verse, Fugitive
Pieces, the favourable reception of which led to the publication,
in the following March, of Hours of Idleness. The contemptuous,


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32
Byron
[ch.
but not wholly unjust, criticism of this volume in The Edinburgh
Review, which is generally supposed to have been the work of Lord
Brougham, while it stung the sensitive poet to the quick, also
spurred him to retaliation, and, early in 1809, appeared the famous
satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, which swiftly ran
through several editions and made its author famous. Shortly
before it appeared, Byron came of age and took his seat in the
House of Lords.
In the following June, accompanied by his friend, John Cam
Hobhouse, Byron left England for a tour in the Mediterranean and
the east. He was away for little more than a year; but the impres-
sions which he received of the life and scenery of Spain, Portugal
and the Balkan peninsula profoundly affected his mind and left an
indelible imprint upon his subsequent work as a poet. The letters
which he wrote at this time furnish a singularly vivid record of the
gay life of Spanish cities, the oriental feudalism of Ali pasha's
Albanian court, and of the memories of, and aspirations for,
political freedom which were quickened within him during his
sojourn at Athens. The first two books of Childe Harold and the
oriental tales—The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair and
The Siege of Corinth-were the immediate outcome of this year
of travel, but the memory of the scenes which he had witnessed
remained freshly in his mind when, years afterwards, he composed
Don Juan, and, at the close of his life, played his heroic part in
the liberation of Greece.
The publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold in
1812, shortly after his return to England, placed Byron on the
summit of the pinnacle of fame, and, from this time onwards to
his death, he remained, through good report and evil report, the
poet most prominently before the minds of Englishmen. The
story of the three years which he spent as the lion of London
society under the regency, and of his marriage with Miss Milbanke
in 1815, is too familiar to need detailed record here; nor is this
the place to dwell upon the causes which led to the separation of
husband and wife shortly after the birth of their only child, Ada,
in 1816. Rightly or wrongly, the sympathies of English society at
this crisis in Byron's life were overwhelmingly on the side of Lady
Byron, and the poet was subjected to the grossest insults. At
first bewildered, and then lacerated in his deepest feelings, by the
hue and cry against him, he perceived that ‘if what was whispered
and muttered and murmured was true, I was unfit for England;
if false, England was unfit for me. ' He accordingly left England


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11] Final Departure from England 33
for the continent in May 1816, and never returned. He proceeded
leisurely up the Rhine to Switzerland, where he made the acquaint-
ance of Shelley and his wife, and spent much time in their society.
Thence, he passed to Italy, and established himself before the end
of the year at Venice, like the stag at bay, who betakes himself
to the waters. '
The events of the year 1816 mark a crisis both in Byron's
domestic life and in his poetic career. The outrage which he
believed, not unreasonably, that he had suffered at the hands
of English society embittered a mind naturally prone to melan-
choly, and equally prone to hide that melancholy beneath a
mask of cynicism. Knowing only too well the hollowness of the
world of English fashion under the regency, he looked upon the
fit of virtuous indignation which made him its victim and drove
him from the land as an outburst of envenomed hypocrisy. And,
just as the contemptuous criticism of Hours of Idleness by the
Edinburgh reviewer had roused him to a satiric onslaught upon
the whole contemporary world of letters, so, now, in his new home,
he prepared himself for the task of levelling against social hypo-
crisy the keenest weapons which a piercing wit and versatile genius
had placed at his command. But, bitter as Byron's feelings
towards England were, it is obvious that the new life which now
opened up to him on the shores of the Adriatic proved congenial
to his tastes and fostered the growth of his poetic genius. If the
loose code of morals accepted by Venetian society plunged him,
for a time, into libertinism, the beauty of the 'sea Cybele' and the
splendour of her historic past fired his imagination.
More or less indifferent to the triumphs of Italian plastic and
pictorial art, he was in full accord with what was best in Italian
poetry. His Lament of Tasso, Prophecy of Dante and Francesca
of Rimini are an imperishable witness to the sympathy which
he felt with the works and tragic destinies of two of Italy's
greatest poets; his Venetian tragedies and Sardanapalus show
the influence upon him of Alfieri, while his indebtedness to the
great Italian mock-heroic school, from Berni to Casti, is every-
where manifest in Beppo and in his great masterpiece, Don Juan.
Finally, his liaison with the countess Guiccioli, which began in
1819 and remained unbroken till his death, brought him into direct
touch with the Carbonari movement and made him the champion
of the cause of national freedom.
An exile from England, and deeply resentful of the wrongs
which he had suffered there, Byron, nevertheless, continued to
3
E. L. XII.
CH. II.


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34
Byron
[ch.
follow with keen interest the course of English political, literary
and domestic affairs. He kept up an active correspondence with
the friends whom he had made there—Moore, Scott and his
publisher, John Murray, among others-studiously read the English
reviews, and remained almost morbidly sensitive to the reception
of his works by the British public. He was, moreover, ever ready
to offer hospitality to English friends in his Venetian home:
Hobhouse was with him in the summer of 1818, and was followed,
soon afterwards, by Shelley, whose intercourse with Byron is ideally
commemorated in Julian and Maddalo; in the next year, he
entertained Moore, who has left a vivid picture of his friend's
domestic life at this time. At no period of his career, moreover,
was Byron's literary activity so great as during the years which
immediately followed his departure from England. His tour
through Germany and Switzerland inspired the third canto of
Childe Harold, The Prisoner of Chillon and his witch-drama,
Manfred, while the concluding canto of Childe Harold was the
outcome of an Italian tour entered upon in the spring of 1817,
before he established himself definitely at Venice. To the year
1818 belong, among other things, Mazeppa, Beppo and the first
canto of Don Juan; about the same time, he began his famous
Memoirs, which he put into the hands of Moore, when his future
biographer and editor visited him at Venice, and which, in accord-
ance with the wishes of the poet's friend Hobhouse and his half-
sister, Augusta Leigh, was committed to the flames after Byron's
death. The publication of his poems—especially the third and
fourth cantos of Childe Harold and Manfred-greatly increased
Byron's reputation as a poet, and his fame spread from England to
the continent. The resemblance of Manfred to Faust stimulated
the interest of the most famous of Byron's literary contemporaries,
Goethe, who, henceforth, showed a lively regard for the younger
poet's genius and character. A correspondence sprang up between
them ; Byron dedicated to Goethe, in language of sincere homage,
his tragedy Sardanapalus (1821), and, after Byron's death, Goethe
honoured his memory by introducing him as Euphorion, child of
Helen and Faust, of Hellenism and the renascence, in the second
part of Faust.
In the spring of 1819 began Byron's connection with Theresa,
countess Guiccioli, the young wife of the sexagenarian count
Guiccioli, whose home was at Ravenna. On either side the attach-
ment was one of passionate devotion: the lady was prepared to
make supreme sacrifices for the man she loved, and her influence


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11] Life at Venice and Ravenna
35
upon him was ennobling. She lifted him out of the mire of
Venetian libertinism and aroused his interest in the cause of
Italian freedom; she inspired one of his sublimest poems, The
Prophecy of Dante, while such was her power over him that, for
her sake, he desisted, for a time, from the continuation of Don
Juan after the completion of the fifth canto. In December 1819,
Byron broke up his home at Venice and moved to Ravenna, in
order to be nearer to the countess. Here, he was visited by Shelley,
who, in a letter to Mrs Shelley, dated 8 August 1821, speaks as
follows of the change which had come over his friend:
Lord Byron is greatly improved in every respect. In genius, in temper, in
moral views, in health, in happiness. The connection with La Guiccioli has been
an inestimable benefit to him. . . . He has had mischievous passions, but these
he seems to have subdued, and he is becoming, what he should be, a virtuous
man. The interest which he took in the politics of Italy, and the actions he
performed in consequence of it, are subjects not fit to be written, but are
such as will delight and surprise youl.
In the preceding year, the countess had obtained a papal decree
of separation from her husband, and was now living in a villa
belonging to her brother, count Gamba, about fifteen miles from
Ravenna.
Byron's literary activity remained unabated in his new home.
To the Ravenna period belong, in addition to his Prophecy of
Dante, Francesca of Rimini and his translation of the first canto
of Pulci's Morgante Maggiore, most of his dramatic writings.
Drama had always interested him keenly, and, while living in
London, after his return from the east, he had been elected a member
of the Drury lane theatre committee, and had thus gained some
firsthand knowledge of the stage. His earliest play, Manfred, had
been begun in Switzerland and completed at Venice in the spring
of 1817; after his removal to Ravenna, he turned his attention to
historical tragedy, and, in little more than a year, produced his
two tragedies of Venetian history, Marino Faliero and The Two
Foscari, together with his oriental Sardanapalus. Following upon
these came the two 'mysteries,' Cain and Heaven and Earth, both
written currente calamo between the July and October of 1821.
These plays were not intended for the stage, and the only one
acted during the author's lifetime was Marino Faliero, which was
performed at Drury lane, against Byron's express wish, in April
1821. To the Ravenna period also belongs Byron's Letter to John
Murray, Esq. on the Rev. W. L. Bowles's Strictures on the Life
and Writings of Pope, in which the poet came forward as the
1 Shelley's Prose Works, ed. Shepherd, R. H. , vol. 11, p. 337.
3-2


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36
[CH.
Byron
champion of Pope and the Augustan school of poetry against the
attacks directed upon them by the romanticists. The controversy
is chiefly interesting as an indication of Byron's regard for the
classical principles of literary taste and, arising out of this, his
uncritical exaltation of the poetry of Crabbe and Rogers over the
great romantic poets of his own day. Of far greater consequence
was his attack upon Southey, which followed a little later. The
feud between the two poets was an old one: Southey had attacked
Byron in an article contributed to Blackwood's Magazine (August
1819) and the younger poet had replied with Some Observations
on the attack, in which he brought a charge of apostasy and
F slander against the poet laureate. In 1821 appeared Southey's
fatuous A Vision of Judgment, prefixed to which was a gross on-
slaught upon Don Juan as 'a monstrous combination of horror
and mockery, lewdness and impiety,' and a reference to its author
as the founder of the Satanic school' inspired by
the spirit of Belial in their lascivious parts, and the spirit of Moloch in those
loathsome images of atrocities and horrors which they delight to represent.
To all this, Byron's effective rejoinder was his own The Vision of
Judgment, published in Leigh Hunt's magazine, The Liberal, in
1822. Byron's victory was complete and uncontestable, though
the British government brought against the publisher a charge
of 'calumniating the late King and wounding the feelings of his
present Majesty,' and won their suit.
Byron's connection with countess Guiccioli brought him, as
already stated, into direct relationship with the Carboneria, one
of the many secret societies of the time in Italy, which had its
head-quarters in Naples, and of which count Pietro Gamba was
an enthusiastic leader. Its ultimate aim was the liberation of
Italy from foreign domination and the establishment of constitu-
tional government. To Byron, this was a grand object—the very
poetry of politics,' and to it he devoted, at this time, both his
wealth and his influence. But the movement, owing to lack of
discipline and resolution on the part of its adherents, proved
abortive, and the Papal States confiscated the property of the
Gambas and exiled them from the Romagna. They fled to Pisa
in the autumn of 1821, where Byron soon joined them, and shared
with them the palazzo Lanfranchi. The change of residence
brought Byron into closer contact with Shelley, whose home, at
this time, was in Pisa, and, through Shelley, he made the ac-
quaintance of captain Medwin, the author of the Journal of the


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11]
37
Byron and Leigh Hunt
Conversations of Lord Byron (1824). Here, too, he first met captain
Trelawney, who subsequently accompanied the poet to Greece and,
many years after Byron's death, published his Recollections of the
last days of Shelley and Byron (1858). In April 1822, a heavy
blow fell upon the poet through the death of his natural daughter
Allegra, whose mother was Jane Clairmont, a half-sister of Mary
Shelley; and, in the following month, in consequence of a street-
brawl with an Italian dragoon who had knocked Shelley from his
horse, the little circle of friends at Pisa was broken up. Byron
and the Gambas retired to a villa near Leghorn, while the Shelleys,
with Trelawney, left for Lerici. The tragic death of Shelley in the
gulf of Spezia took place two months later.
Shortly before Shelley’s death, he and Byron had prevailed
upon Leigh Hunt to leave England and come out with his family
to Italy, in order to take part with the two poets in the foundation
of a magazine, The Liberal. The death of Shelley was a severe
blow to this undertaking; but the first number, containing Byron's
The Vision of Judgment, appeared in September 1822; the second
number included among its pages the mystery-play, Heaven and
Earth, while in the third number appeared, as an anonymous
work, the literary eclogue entitled The Blues, which directed a
somewhat ineffective satire upon the literary coteries of London
society. After the appearance of the fourth number, containing
Byron's translation of Morgante Maggiore, in July 1823, The
Liberal came to an untimely end, and the relations between Byron
and Leigh Hunt, which had from the first been strained, ended in
complete rupture.
In the meantime, Byron had once more changed his place
of abode, and was now residing in the villa Saluzzo, Genoa. It
was here that he made the acquaintance of the earl and countess
of Blessington, and to the countess's vivacious, if untrustworthy,
Conversations, we owe much of our knowledge of the poet's
manner of life at this time. During these last years in Italy,
his poetic composition had proceeded apace. Don Juan, after
being laid aside for some time, was now, with the full consent of
countess Guiccioli, continued. The sixth canto was begun in June
1822, and this, with the next two cantos, was published in the
following month; by the end of March 1823, the sixteenth canto
was finished. To the Pisa-Genoa period, also, belong his domestic
tragedy, Werner, founded upon The German's Tale, included in
Sophia and Harriet Lee's Canterbury Tales, his unfinished drama,
The Deformed Transformed, the satiric poem, The Age of Bronze,


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38
[CH.
Byron
dealing with the last phase in Napoleon's career and the congress
of Verona, and, finally, his romantic verse-tale, The Island.
The failure of the Carbonari movement, in 1821, put an end,
for the time being, to Byron's active cooperation in the cause of
national freedom. But, even before the final defeat of the
Carboneria, a new liberation movement in a new field had begun,
on behalf of which Byron was destined to lay down his life. The
Greek war of liberation from the thraldom of the Turk was set on
foot in the spring of 1821, and soon won the support of enthusiasts
in England, who formed a committee to help forward the move-
ment and supply the Greeks with the necessary funds. Byron's
sympathy with the cause of Greek freedom dates from his sojourn
in Greece in the years 1810–11, and finds eloquent expression in
the second canto of Childe Harold. In the spring of 1823, his
active support in the Greek cause was solicited by the London
committee, acting through captain Blaquiere and John Bowring,
and, after a little hesitation, Byron decided to devote himself
whole-heartedly to the movement; with that end in view, he
prepared to man an armed brig and set sail for Greece. At the
moment of departure, he received a highly courteous greeting in
verse from Goethe, and, in acknowledging it, declared his intention
of paying a visit to Weimar, should he return in safety from
Greece. On 24 July, accompanied by count Pietro Gamba and
captain Trelawney, he started from Leghorn in the brig 'Hercules,'
and, ten days later, reached the island of Cephalonia in the Ionian
sea. Here, he remained until the close of the year, anxiously
watching developments and endeavouring, with great tact and
patience, to put an end to Greek factions. His presence in Greek
waters inspired enthusiasm among the people struggling for free-
dom; they looked to him as their leader, and some even hinted
that, if success should attend their arms, he might become the
king of an emancipated Greece. Correspondence took place
between Byron and prince Alexander Mavrocordatos, one of the
chief leaders in the war of liberation; and, on the arrival of the
prince at Mesolonghi, with a fleet of ships, Byron joined him
there, after an adventurous voyage, in January 1824. In the
conduct of affairs at this time, Byron showed himself to be a great
statesman and a born leader of men. The work of advocating
unity among the various Greek tribes was no easy task for him,
and he laboured tirelessly in the malarial climate of the gulf of
Patras in the furtherance of this aim. His military project was
to lead an expedition against the Turkish stronghold Lepanto,
2


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11]
Death at Mesolonghi 39
6
and, with this in view, he enlisted the services of five hundred
Suliotes. But mutiny broke out among the soldiers, and, at a
critical moment, an epileptic fit threatened Byron's life. For
a time, he recovered; but, early in April, he caught a severe chill
when sailing, wet to the skin, in an open boat; rheumatic fever
set in, and, on the nineteenth day of the month, he died. His
death was a severe blow to Greece, and plunged the nation into
profound grief; when the news reached England, Tennyson, then
a boy of fourteen, carved the words ‘Byron is dead' upon a rock
at Somersby, and felt that the whole world seemed darkened to
me. ' But the impartial verdict of posterity, looking back upon
his career and endeavouring to see it in its true perspective, has
been that nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.
The ardent wish of Greece was that his body should be buried in
the temple of Theseus at Athens, and thus remain in the land for
which he had laid down his life; but other counsels prevailed, and
Byron found his last resting place in the village church of Hucknall
Torkard, outside the gates of Newstead priory.
In passing from the generation of Wordsworth and Coleridge
to that of Byron and Shelley, we recognise that a certain change
had come over the spirit of English poetry, and that this change,
in no small measure, was determined by the change which had
come over the mind of England and of Europe. Wordsworth and
Coleridge had found inspiration in the large faiths and regener-
ating principles which called into being the French revolution;
Byron and Shelley, on the other hand, produced their most
characteristic works in the days of the reactionary Holy Alliance.
And in the space between the era of faith and the era of reaction
loomed the colossal form of Napoleon astride a blood-stained
Europe. Shelley, though he underwent times of deep depression
and suffered much at the hands of a hostile government, was of
too ethereal a temper to be cowed by the spirit of the time, or to
abandon his faith in man's perfectibility imparted to him by
Godwin; but, Byron, with his feet of clay, and with a mind which,
for good and evil, was profoundly responsive to the prevailing
currents of contemporary thought, remained, from first to last,
the child of his age. And that age was one of profound dis-
illusionment. The implicit trust in the watchwords of the
revolution had long faded from men's minds, while the prin-
ciples by which men hoped to consecrate the settlement of the
congress of Vienna were proving still more illusory. The Holy
Alliance was to bring back the golden age, and the emperor
a


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40
[CH.
Byron
of Russia had proudly declared that, henceforth, princes were to
regard each other as brothers, and their peoples as their children,
and that all their acts were to be founded upon the gospel of
Christ. Yet, within a very few years, the Holy Alliance had
become a byword among men, standing as it did for all that was
tyrannical and reactionary; the attitude of the progressive party
in England towards the principles which really actuated it is
clearly indicated by Moore's Fables for the Holy Alliance,
Shelley's Lines written during the Castlereagh Administration
and many a scathing passage of Don Juan.
The younger generation of poets, romantics though they were,
also differed from their elders in some of the main principles
of literary criticism. The early masters of the romantic school,
in their war against the neo-classic canons of the Augustan,
confounded classicism with the Greek and Roman classics; and,
in their joyous discovery of medieval romance and ballad, paid no
regard to the poetry and mythology of Greece. Reaction in-
evitably followed, and to the younger generation of poets fell the
duty of touching with the magic wand of romance the time-
honoured myths and fables of early Greece. Thus, from out of
the cold ashes of classicism there arose the Hellenism of the early
nineteenth century, with Shelley and Keats as its inspired
prophets. To Byron, the political movements of modern Greece
were of more account than its ancient poetry and mythology,
yet, in him too, there is a strong reaction against the romanticism
of the preface to Lyrical Ballads. When the romantic principles
of the new school seemed everywhere triumphant, he came for-
ward as the dauntless champion of Pope, and, when he essayed
drama, he turned his back upon Shakespeare and sat at the feet
of Alfieri. Byron was ever of the opposition, and, to many, his
championship of classicism has seemed little better than the pose
of perversity; but a close study of his works serves to show that,
while much of his poetry is essentially romantic in spirit, and even
enlarges the horizon of romanticism, he never wholly broke away
from the Augustan poetic diction.
The union of classicism and romanticism is everywhere
apparent in Hours of Idleness. The romantic note is clearly
sounded in such verses as I would I were a careless child, When
I roved a young Highlander and the justly famous Lachin
y Gair; the influence of Macpherson's Ossian is very strong in
The Death of Calmar and Orla, and blends with that of the
ballad-poets in Oscar of Alva. No less apparent is the influence
a
>


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11]
41
Hours of Idleness
of Moore: one may trace it in the elegiac strain of the love-lyrics
and in the rhetorical trick of repetition at the close of the stanza;
it is obvious, too, that Byron has successfully imitated the ana-
paestic lilt of Irish Melodies in many of his lyric and elegiac
poems. At the same time, he shows no desire to break away from
the eighteenth century traditions. Childish Recollections is con-
ceived and executed in the manner of Pope. The personification
of abstractions, the conventional poetic diction and the fingering
of the heroic couplet, alike recall the Augustan traditions, which
are no less apparent in such poems as Epitaph on a Friend and
To the Duke of Dorset. In the Elegy on Newstead Abbey,
thought, sentiment and verse recall the famous Elegy of Gray,
while, in the lines To Romance, he professes to turn away with
disgust from the motley court of romance where Affectation and
‘sickly Sensibility' sit enthroned, and to seek refuge in the
realms of Truth. Thus already in this early volume of poems we
meet with that spirit of disillusionment which informs much of
Byron's later work, while, in the closing stanza of I would I were
a careless child, we have a foretaste of the Byron of Manfred,
eager to shun mankind and to take refuge in the gloom of the
mountain glens. At the same time, this early volume bears wit-
ness to that which his letters abundantly show-Byron's great
capacity for friendship. In spite of all his misanthropy, no poet
has esteemed more highly than Byron the worth of friendship, or
cherished a deeper affection for scenes around which tender asso-
ciations had grown up; and, in this first volume of verses, the
generous tributes to old school-friends, and the outpouring of his
heart in loyal affection for Harrow, occupy no small space.
In English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, we witness the full
triumph of Byronic classicism. Inspired by Pope, and by Gifford's
Maeviad and Baviad, this high-spirited satire is, indeed, the
Dunciad of romanticism. Its undiscriminating attack upon almost
every member of the romantic school is accompanied by an equally
undiscriminating laudation of Dryden and Pope, together with
those poets of Byron's own generation, Rogers and Campbell,
whose Pleasures of Memory and Pleasures of Hope remained
faithful, in an age of faithlessness, to the classical tradition.
Byron is himself the severest critic of his own satire, and, in a
letter written from Switzerland in July 1816, he censures its tone
and temper, and acknowledges the injustice of much of the
critical and some of the personal part of it. ' In concision and
finish of style, Byron falls far below the level of consummate


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42
Byron
[CH.
mastery of satiric portraiture reached by Pope in the Epistles to
Arbuthnot and To Augustus, while he makes no attempt to imitate
the brilliant mock-heroic framework of the Dunciad: but the
disciple has caught much of his master's art of directing the shafts
of his raillery against the vulnerable places in his adversaries'
armour, and even the most enthusiastic admirer of Scott, Coleridge
or Wordsworth can afford to laugh at the travesty of Marmion
and Lyrical Ballads. In spite of occasional telling phrases,
like that in which he characterises Crabbe as 'nature's sternest
painter yet the best, the satire is of little value as literary
criticism ; while the fact that he directs his attack upon the
romantic poets and, at the same time, upon their arch-adversary,
Jeffrey, is sufficient indication that it was individual prejudice
rather than any fixed conviction which inspired the poem.
It is difficult to overestimate the influence upon Byron's
poetic career of his travels through southern Europe in the years
1809--10; though different in character, it was as far-reaching as
that experienced by Goethe during his tour in Italy twenty-three
years before. For the time being, his sojourn in the Spanish and
Balkan peninsulas put an end to his classical sympathies and made
him a votary of romance. His pictures of Spain, it is true, are
mainly those of a realist and a rhetorician, but, when he has once
set foot upon Turkish soil, a change appears ; here, his life was, in
itself, a romantic adventure, and, among the Albanian fastnesses,
he was brought face to face with a world which was at once
oriental in its colouring, and medieval in its feudalism. The raw
material of romance which Scott, in the shaping of his verse-
tales, had had to gather laboriously from the pages of medieval
chroniclers, was here deployed before Byron's very eyes, and the
lightning speed with which he wrote his oriental tales on his return
to England was due to the fact that he had only to recall the
memories of what he had himself seen while a sojourner in the
empire of the Turk. Hence, too, the superiority of Byron's
eastern pictures to those of Southey and Moore: while they had
been content to draw upon the record of books, he painted from
life.
The surprising success of the first two cantos of Childe Harold
on their first appearance in 1812 was in no small measure due to
the originality of the design, and to Byron's extension of the
horizon of romance. Before this time, poets had made certain
attempts to set forth in verse the experiences of their foreign
travels. Thus, Goldsmith's Traveller is the firstfruits of the tour


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II]
43
Childe Harold
which he had made, flute in hand, through Flanders, France and
Italy, in 1756. But the eighteenth century spirit lay heavy on
Goldsmith : broad generalisations take the place of the vivid,
concrete pictures which, in a more propitious age, he might have
introduced into his poem, and racy description is sacrificed to the
Augustan love of moralising. Byron, for his part, is by no
means averse to sententious rhetoric; but he has, also, the supreme
gift of vivid portrayal, whether it be that of a Spanish bull-fight,
the voice of a muezzin on the minaret of a Turkish mosque, or
the sound of revelry on the night before Waterloo. The creation
of an ideal pilgrim as the central figure before whom this kaleido-
scopic survey should be displayed, though good in idea, proved but
a partial success. There was much that appealed to the jaded
tastes of English society under the regency in the conception of
Childe Harold as 'Pleasure’s palled victim,' seeking distraction
from disappointed love and Comus revelry in travel abroad; but,
placed amid scenes which quiver with an intensity of light and
colour, Childe Harold remains from first to last an unreal, shadowy
form. He is thrust into the picture as fitfully as the Spenserian
archaisms are thrust into the text, and, when, in the last
canto, he disappears altogether, we are scarcely conscious of his
absence. In his prose, Byron denies again and again the identity
of Childe Harold with himself; but, in his verse, he comes
nearer to the truth by his confession that his hero is a projection
of his own intenser self into human form:
'Tis to create, and in creating live
A being more intense, that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as we give
The life we image, even as I do now.
(Childe Harold 111, 6. )
When Childe Harold was begun at Janina in Albania, in 1809,
the hero may well have seemed to his creator as an imaginary
figure; but, between the composition of the first two cantos and
the third, there intervened for Byron a course of experiences
which converted what was ideal and imaginary into bitter reality.
The satiety, the lonely heart-sickness and the loathing for his
native land, with which the poet imbues his hero in the opening
stanzas of the first canto, had won an entrance into Byron's own
heart when he bade farewell to England in 1816. It was, accord-
ingly, no longer necessary for him to create an ideal being, for the
creator and the creation had become one.
The third and fourth cantos show, in comparison with the first


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44
[CH.
Byron
two, a far greater intensity of feeling and a deeper reading of life.
Something of the glitter of rhetoric remains; but it is no longer
cold, for a lava-flood of passion has passed over it. The poet is
still a master of vivid description ; but the objects that he paints
are now seen quivering in an atmosphere of personal emotion.
The human interest of the poem has also deepened; in the second
canto, while recalling the historic associations of Greece, he
sketched no portrait of Athenian poet, sage, or statesman: but,
in his description of Switzerland, he seems unable to escape from
the personality of Rousseau, and, in northern Italy, his progress
is from one poet's shrine to another. Side by side with this deeper
human interest, there is, also, a profounder insight into external
nature. Not only does he describe with incisive power majestic
scenes like that of the Alps towering above the lake of Geneva, or
that of the foaming cataract of Terni: he also enters, though only
as a sojourner, into that mystic communion with nature wherein
mountains, sea and sky are felt to be a part of himself and he of
them. Among the solitudes of the Alps, Byron becomes, for a
while, and, perhaps through his daily intercourse with Shelley, a
true disciple of the great highpriest of nature, Wordsworth, whom
elsewhere he often treats with contemptuous ridicule. Yet, even
when he approaches Wordsworth most nearly, we are conscious of
the gulf which separates them from one another. Byron seeks
communion with nature in order to escape from man; high moun-
tains become a feeling' to him when the hum of human cities is
a torture; but Wordsworth hears in nature the music of humanity,
and the high purpose of his life is to sing the spousal verse of the
mystic marriage between the discerning intellect of man and the
goodly universe.
In his letter to Moore, prefixed to The Corsair, Byron con-
fesses that the Spenserian stanza is the measure most after his
own heart, though it is well to remember that when he wrote
these words he had not essayed the ottava rima. Disfigured as
the stanzas of Childe Harold often are by jarring discords, it
must be confessed that this ambitious measure assumed, in Byron's
hands, remarkable vigour, while its elaborately knit structure saved
him from the slipshod movement which is all too common in his
blank verse.
Yet, this vigour is purchased at a heavy price.
Rarely in Byron do we meet with the stately, if slow-moving,
magnificence with which Spenser has invested the verse of his own
creation; the effect produced on our ears by the music of The
Faerie Queene is that of a symphony of many strings, whereas, in


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11]
45
The Verse-Tales
Childe Harold, we listen to a trumpet-call, clear and resonant,
but wanting the subtle cadence and rich vowel-harmonies of the
Elizabethan master.
In the years which elapsed between Byron's return from foreign
travel and his final departure from England in 1816, the form of
poetry which chiefly occupied his mind was the romantic verse-
tale. The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara,
The Siege of Corinth and Parisina all fall within this period;
they were written in hot haste, partly to satisfy the public taste
for work of this character, and partly to wring the poet's thoughts
from reality to imagination. After taking up his residence on the
continent, other forms of poetry claimed his first attention; but
the appearance of The Prisoner of Chillon in 1816, Mazeppa in
1819 and The Island in 1823 shows that Byron never wholly
relinquished his delight in the verse-tale. Moreover, though it
was the early stories of oriental life which most impressed his
contemporaries, it is probable that the later tales will live
longest. In essaying the verse-tale, Byron entered into. direct
rivalry with Scott, imitating his metric art and making the same
bold appeal to the instincts of the age for stirring adventure and
romantic colour. But, whereas Scott sought his themes chiefly in
the pages of history, Byron was content to draw largely upon
personal experience ; instead of the clash of passion between
lowlander and highlander, or cavalier and roundhead, we witness
the antagonism of Christian and Mussulman, of Greek and Turk.
The spirit of medieval chivalry in which the wizard of the north
delighted, is, in Byron, replaced by the fanaticism of the Moslem,
and by that love of melodrama which we invariably associate with
the Byronic hero. Byron lacks Scott's gift of lucid narrative, nor
has he that sense of the large issues at stake which gives to the
Scottish lays something of epic massiveness; but he has greater
passion, and, within certain strictly defined limits, offers a more
searching disclosure of the human heart. In these early oriental
tales, we meet with the true Byronic hero, first faintly outlined in
Childe Harold and culminating, a little later, in Manfred and
Cain. He figures under many names, is sometimes Mussulman
and sometimes Christian, but, amid all his disguises, retains the
same essentials of personality and speaks the same language. He
is a projection of a certain habit of mind on the part of Byron
himself into surroundings which are partly imaginary, and partly
based on personal experience. In The Corsair and Lara, Byron
seems to have outgrown the influence of Scott and to have fallen


## p. 46 (#70) ##############################################

46
[CH.
Byron
م . م
1 "
.
under that of Dryden. With the change from the octosyllabic
to the decasyllabic couplet, the style grows more rhetorical : the
speeches of Conrad-Lara and Gulnare-Kaled acquire something of
that declamatory character which we meet with in the heroes and
heroines of Dryden's Fables, and, though Byron preserves the
romanticist's delight in high-pitched adventure and glowing
colours, he also displays the neo-classic fondness for conventional
epithets and the personification of abstractions. In Parisina,
and, still more, in The Prisoner of Chillon, there is a welcome
return to a simpler style : the gorgeous east no longer holds him
in fee, and he breaks away both from rhetorical speech and melo-
dramatic situations. In Parisina, he invests a repellent, but
deeply tragic, theme with dignity and restrained beauty; no
artifice of rhetoric mars the sincerity of the passion, and nowhere
else does Byron come so near towards capturing the subtle cadence
of the Christabel verse. In The Prisoner of Chillon, he advances
,
still farther in the direction of sincerity of emotion and simplicity
of utterance. Love of political freedom, which was always the
noblest passion in Byron's soul, inspired the poem, and, here, as in
the third canto of Childe Harold, written about the same time,
we are conscious of the influence of Wordsworth. The Sonnet on
Chillon is as generous in emotion and as sonorous in its harmony
as Wordsworth's sonnet on the extinction of the Venetian
Republic; and, in his introduction into the poem itself of the bird
with azure wings that seemed to be the soul of Bonnivard's dead
brother, there is something of that delicate symbolism in which
both Wordsworth and Coleridge found peculiar delight.
A new note is struck in Mazeppa. The mood of The Prisoner
of Chillon is one of elegiac tenderness, whereas, here, we are
conscious of the glory of swift motion, as we follow the Cossack
soldier in his life-in-death ride across the Russian steppes. Scott
had essayed a similar theme in his picture of Deloraine's ride to
Melrose abbey, and, in either case, we feel ourselves spell-bound
by the animation of poets to whom a life of action was a thing
more to be desired than the sedentary ease of a man of letters.
The Island is the last of Byron's verse-tales and the last of his
finished works. Written in 1823, just before he set sail for Greece,
it shows that neither the classic spirit which he displays in many
of his dramas, nor the cynical realism of much of Don Juan,
could stifle in him the glow of high romance. In the love-story
of Torquil and Neuha, we have a variation of the Juan-Haidée
episode, set against a background of tropical magnificence, and


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11]
Manfred
47
told with a zest which shows that advancing years availed
nothing to diminish the youthful ardour of Byron.
Apart from an early draft of the first act of Werner, Byron's
dramatic works all belong to the years that succeed his final de-
parture from England in 1816; and the same alternation between
the romantic and the classic mode, which can be traced in his
early poems, reappears still more clearly in his plays. Manfred,
Cain and Heaven and Earth are romantic alike in spirit and
structure; Marino Faliero, The Two Foscari and Sardanapalus
represent a deliberate attempt on the part of the author to break
loose from that domination of the Elizabethan masters which is so
apparent in most of the poetic dramas of the romantic revival, and
to fashion tragedy on the neo-classic principles of Racine and
Alfieri. In other words, Byron is a romanticist when he intro-
duces into his dramas supernatural beings and a strong lyrical
element, but a classicist when he draws his material from the
beaten track of history and refuses to admit the intervention of
a spirit-world into the affairs of men.
In Manfred, as in the third canto of Childe Harold, we
recognise the spell which the Alps exercised on Byron's genius.
In one of his letters he declares, “It was the Staubach and the
Jungfrau and something else, much more than Faustus, that made
me write Manfred? ? His sense of the spiritual life of nature finds
lofty expression in the songs with which the spirits of the earth
and air greet Manfred in the opening act, while the sublimity
of the mountain scenery reacts upon the hero's soul in somewhat
the same way as the storm on the heath reacts upon the
soul of Lear. Yet, Manfred is, at the same time, the child of
Goethe's Faust; Byron's indebtedness to Goethe is most marked
in the opening soliloquy, but, soon, the younger poet's masterful
individuality breaks the spell, and, in making Manfred reject the
compact with the spirits of Arimanes and thereby remain master
of his fate, Byron introduces a new and eminently characteristic
element into the action. In Manfred, the Byronic hero of the
oriental tales, an outcast from society, stained with crime and
proudly solitary, reappears under a tenser and more spiritualised
form. There is something Promethean in his nature, and he towers
above the earlier Byronic heroes both by the greater intensity
of his anguish of mind and, also, by the iron resolution of his will.
Over the drama there hangs a pall of mystery, which the vision
of Astarte, instead of lightening, serves only to make more
1 Letter to John Murray, 7 June 1820.


## p. 48 (#72) ##############################################

48
[CH.
Byron
impenetrable. Speculation has been rife as to the precise nature
of that 'something else' which, Byron tells us, went to the making
of the play, but all attempts to elucidate the mystery remain
frustrate.
In Cain, we witness the final stage in the evolution of the
Byronic hero. It is a play which bears somewhat the same
relation to Paradise Lost that Manfred bears to Faust. The
note of rebellion against social order and against authority
is stronger than ever ; but the conflict which goes to form the
tragedy is, unlike that of Manfred, one of the intellect rather than
of the passions. Cain is a drama of scepticism-a scepticism
which is of small account in our day, but which, when the ‘mystery'
first appeared, seemed strangely like blasphemy, and called down
upon Byron a torrent of anger and abuse. The scepticism finds
expression, not only on the lips of Cain, but, also, on those of
Lucifer, who is but Cain writ large, and whose spirit of rebellion
against divine government gives to the drama its Titanic character.
The story of Cain had fascinated Byron since the time when, as a
boy of eight, his German master had read to him Gessner's Der
Tod Abels, while the poet's indebtedness—first pointed out by
Coleridge-to Milton's Satan, in his conception of Lucifer, needs
no elaboration here. But what marks Cain off from Manfred
and the verse-tales is that element of idyllic tenderness associated
with the characters of Cain's wife, Adah, and their child, Enoch.
This is beautiful in itself, and also serves as a fitting contrast to
those sublimer scenes in which the hero is borne by Lucifer through
the abysses of space and the dark abodes of Hades. .
Heaven and Earth, written at Ravenna within the space of
fourteen days, seems to have been intended by its author as a
corrective to what the world termed the impiety of Cain. It
appeared almost simultaneously with Moore’s Loves of the Angels,
which deals, though in a vastly different mood, with the same
biblical legend of the marriage of the sons of God to the daughters
of men? In the person of Aholibamah, the note of Byronic revolt
rings out once more ; but the mystery,' quite apart from its frag-
mentary character, lacks human interest and coherency, while its
amorphous choral lyrics are a positive disfigurement.
When we pass from Byron's romantic and supernatural dramas
to his Venetian tragedies and Sardanapalus, we enter a very
different world. Here, in the observance of the unities, the setting
of the scenes and in all that goes to constitute the technique of
i Genesis, chap. vi, verse 2.


## p. 49 (#73) ##############################################

11]
49
Venetian Tragedies : Sardanapalus
drama, the principles of classicism are in force. Byron's reverence
for the classic mould finds expression already in his English Bards
and Scotch Reviewers, in which he makes the following appeal to
Sheridan:
Give, as thy last memorial to the age,
One classic drama, and reform the stage.
The acquaintance which he gained, during his residence in Italy,
with the classical tragedies of Alfieri deepened the convictions of
his youth, and the influence of the Italian tragedian can be traced
in all Byron's historical dramas. This influence is, perhaps, strongest
in Marino Faliero, and is all the more remarkable in that Byron
is following in the path marked out by the romantic masters,
Shakespeare and Otway, in his portrayal of Venetian life under
its doges. But, here, as in The Two Foscari, the dramatic work-
manship, though faithful to that regularity and precision of outline
enjoined by classic tradition, suffers much from the recalcitrant
nature of the material dramatised. The conduct of Marino Faliero,
like that of the younger Foscari, though more or less true to
history, is felt to be dramatically improbable; the motives which
inspire the courses of action are inadequate, and indulgence in
rhetorical declamation—the besetting sin of classical tragedy from
Seneca onwards—adds still further to the sense of unreality in
these plays.
Sardanapalus is, from every point of view, a greater success
than either of the Venetian tragedies. Though the plot is drawn
from historical records—the Bibliothecae Historicae of Diodorus
Siculus-Byron allows himself a free hand in shaping his materials,
and the love-story, with all that concerns the heroine, Myrrha, is
pure invention. The play was written at Ravenna in 1821 and
wes much to the poet's daily intercourse with Theresa Guiccioli.
Indeed, much might be said in favour of the view that the countess
is herself portrayed in the person of Myrrha, who is painted with
far greater sympathy and truth to life than any of the heroines
of the verse-tales, while self-portraiture is seen in every line of the
hero, Sardanapalus. The Assyrian king has far more of Byron in
him than any of the so-called Byronic heroes; for, while they are
but shadowy representations of a certain temper of mind, Sarda-
napalus is a creature of flesh and blood. Nor is the dramatic
interest summed up in a single character: Myrrha, the Greek
slave, Zarina, the wronged queen, and her brother, Salamenes, are
all living characters, lacking, it may be, the subtle complexity of
Shakespeare's dramatis personae, but boldly and firmly outlined
4
а
L. L. XII.
CA. II.


## p. 50 (#74) ##############################################

50
[ch.
Byron
2
in the manner of classic tragedy, to which this play conforms
more closely than any other of Byron's works.
In Werner and The Deformed Transformed, there is a return
to the romantic pattern of dramatic workmanship. The former
is an unconvincing attempt to dramatise one of the Canterbury
Tales of Sophia and Harriet Lee, and is deficient both in poetry
and dramatic power : the latter, also based, to a certain extent,
on a contemporary novel-Joshua Pickersgill's The Three Brothers
(1803) is an excursion into the realms of necromancy, and
daringly presents the figure of a hunchback Julius Caesar en-
gaging in the siege of Rome in 1527, and assuming the role of
a Mephistopheles.
It is an easy transition from Byron's historical dramas to such
poems as The Lament of Tasso and The Prophecy of Dante,
which take the form of dramatic soliloquies and may be looked
upon as the creations of the historic imagination. The former
was written in 1817, after a visit to the scenes of Tasso's life at
Ferrara, while the latter belongs to the year 1819, which the
poet spent in the city of Ravenna, where Dante lies buried.
It is dedicated to countess Guiccioli, who suggested the theme.
The mood of The Lament is one of unavailing sadness, ennobled
by pride and transfigured by the Italian poet's love for Leonora
d'Este; and the expression of this love and grief is marred by no
rhetorical artifice on Byron's part, whose sympathy with Tasso
renders him for once forgetful of self and capable of giving voice
to a passion that was not his own but another’s. The Prophecy
is cast in a more ambitious mould, and is charged with intense
personal emotion. The Dante who speaks is the apostle of that
political liberty which had grown dear to Byron at a time when
he was living in a country that lay under the Austrian yoke
Though written in English, it was, as Medwin tells us, intended
for the Italians, to whom it was to be a glorious vision, revealed
to them by their great national poet, of the risorgimento of Italy
in their own day. Byron has, perhaps, failed to reproduce the
noble clarity of Dante's mind, but he has caught the patriotic
pride and saeva indignatio of the great Florentine, and, in making
him the foreteller of an age when
The Genius of my Country shall arise,
A Cedar towering o'er the Wilderness,
Lovely in all its branches to all eyes,
Fragrant as fair, and recognised afar,
Wafting its native incense through the skies-1
Canto iv, 74–78.
j
1
1


## p. 51 (#75) ##############################################

II] Byron's Lyrics: The Dream, Darkness 51
he has magnificently associated the aspirations of Dante with those
of himself in the days of the Carboneria. Byron’s terza rima does
not lack power or sonority but it is not the terza rima of the
Commedia; for, whereas Dante almost invariably makes a distinct
pause at the close of the stanza, Byron frequently runs on the
sense from one tercet to another and, thereby, goes far to destroy
the metrical effect produced upon the ear by Dante.
In no province of poetry is Byron's command of success so
uncertain as in that of the lyric. He has left us a few songs which
rank high even in an age which was transcendently great in lyric
power and melody. But, only too often, the beauty with which one
of his lyrics opens is not sustained, the passion grows turbid and
the thought passes from pure vision to turgid commonplace. Among
the most impassioned of his love-lyrics is that entitled When we
two parted; it was written in 1808 and may have been inspired by
the poet's hopeless passion for Mary Chaworth. To the same tragic
episode in his career, though written later than the song, we
owe The Dream (1816), in which passion and imagination com-
bine to produce one of the most moving poems that Byron ever
wrote. Intensely lyrical in spirit, the poem is, nevertheless, written
in blank verse, which Byron here manipulates with a dexterity
that he seems to have utterly lost in the loosely knit structure of
his dramatic blank verse. The same volume which contained The
Dream contained, also, another visionary poem in blank verse,
Darkness. To those who assert that Byron, in his serious poetry,
is little more than a poseur and a rhetorician, this poem should be
a sufficient answer. It is the work of an unbridled imagination,
a day-dream of clinging horrors; but, amid all its tumultuous
visions of a world in which cosmos is reduced to chaos, we are made
to feel the naked sincerity of the poet's soul.
The most important group of Byron's poems, those in which
his genius and personality find their fullest expression, still
remains for consideration. His discovery of the Italian medley-
poem, written in the ottava rima, was, for him, the discovery of
a new world; and, just as Scott found free play for the riches of
his mind only when he exchanged the verse-romance for the novel,
so, also, Byron attained the full emancipation of his genius only
when he turned from drama and romance to realistic and satiric
narrative poetry and took as his models the works of the Italian
burlesque poets from Pulci to Casti. This discovery also served to
put an end to the conflict which had gone on in Byron's mind
between the classic and romantic principles of art. What we see
4-2


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52
[Ch.
Byron
w
is the triumph of yet a third combatant, namely realism, which,
entering late into the fray, carries all before it. His latest dramas,
and his verse-tale, The Island, not to mention certain romantic
episodes which find a place in Don Juan, show that Byron never
wholly abandoned romance, but, from the time when he wrote
Beppo (1818), realism was the master-bias of his mind, while the
break with classicism was complete. With this triumph of realism,
satire once more comes into full play: it is no longer the formal
satire of the Augustan school, such as he had essayed in English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers, but burlesque satire, unconstrained
and whimsical, and delighting in the sudden anticlimaxes and
grotesque incongruities which find a spacious hiding-place in
the ottava rima. Byron's study of Italian literature had begun
long before he set foot on Italian soil, and it is curious that, first
of all, he should have employed the octave stanza in his Epistle
to Augusta (1816), in a mood of entire seriousness, apparently
without suspecting its capacity for burlesque. It was Frere's The
Monks, and the Giants (1817) which first disclosed to him, as he
gratefully acknowledges', its fitness for effects of this sort. But
his true masters are the Italians themselves-Pulci in the fifteenth
century, Berni in the sixteenth and Casti in the eighteenth.
Except in his account of the court of Catherine II in Don Juan,
Byron rarely had recourse to the Italian medley-poets for incidents
of narrative; it was manner and not matter which they furnished.
The temper of his mind was similar to theirs, and the mobility of
his genius enabled him to reproduce with consummate ease their
note of light-hearted, cynical banter, their swift transitions from
grave to gay, their humourous digressions and their love of grotesque
images and still more grotesque rimes.
It is, moreover, questionable whether Byron would ever have
written his great comic masterpieces if he had continued to live
under the grey skies of England and amid the restraining conven-
tions of English society. Beppo, from beginning to end, is steeped
in the atmosphere of Italy; its mood is that of the Venetian
carnival ; in tone and temper it is the most alien poem in our
literature. And, without Beppo, there might never have been
a Don Juan. In that case, the student of Byron would have been
compelled to turn to his letters for the full disclosure of his genius
and personality, and for a complete understanding of the fact that
1“I have since written a poem (of 84 octave stanzas), humorous, in or after the
excellent manner of Mr Whistlecraft (whom I take to be Frere) on a Venetian anecdote
which amused me. " (Letter to John Murray, 12 October 1817. )


## p. 53 (#77) ##############################################

11] Beppo and The Vision of Judgment 53
Byron was infinitely greater and more versatile than the Byronic
hero of the verse-tales and the plays. Those letters rank with the
best in a literature singularly rich in epistolography, and, in
them, we see, in boon profusion, the racy wit, the persiflage and
the rare colloquial ease which reappear with dazzling effect in his
later poetry.
In its tolerant, almost genial, portrayal of the social licence of
Italian burgess life, Beppo is the direct descendant of the Italian
novella of the early renascence, while, in its truth to reality and
inimitable gaiety, it rivals the Decameron. To the unwary reader,
the return of Beppo, disguised as a Turkish merchant, may seem
the occasion for a clash of rapiers, but nothing was farther from
Byron's mind, and nothing would have destroyed more effectually
that atmosphere of amused tolerance and polished irony which
hangs over the poem, and keeps heroics at arm's length. The
poem also shows that its author, at one step, had gained full
mastery of those subtle effects of style and rime which are the
peculiar light of ottava rima.
In The Vision of Judgment, the verse is the same, but the
mood is different. In Beppo, the satire is diffused in playful irony;
here, it is direct and personal. The Vision is, indeed, matter for
mirth, but Byron never conceals the spirit of bitter indignation in
which the travesty was conceived. Southey's fulsome adulation of
the dead monarch roused him to anger, and the anger is that of
the impassioned lover of liberty who saw, in George III, the
incarnation of the power of tyranny :
He ever warrd with freedom and the free:
Nations as men, home subjects, foreign foes,
So that they uttered the word 'Liberty!
Found George the Third their first opponent. (st. xlv. )
It cannot be denied that Southey's poem readily lent itself to
travesty, but this fact does not in the least diminish the perfection
of Byron's constructive art or his mastery of satiric portraiture.
The colloquial case of Beppo is maintained, but there are fewer
digressions; while, in the description of Lucifer's approach to the
gates of heaven and of his reception there by Michael, Byron
momentarily rises to the dignity of the epic. One of Southey's
reviewers accused him of profaneness in his attempt to 'convert
the awful tribunal of Heaven into a drawing-room leveel' in which
he himself plays the part of a lord-in-waiting, and it was upon
this scene in Southey's Vision that Byron swooped, with an
1 See Moore's Life and Works of Lord Byron, vol. XII, p. 277.


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54
Byron
[CH.
3
1
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ti
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SA
unerring eye for burlesque effect. Of Southey's cloud of witnesses
only two-Wilkes and Junius-are summoned to the judgment-seat
by Byron, but the part which they play in the action is magnificently
conceived and executed. The full blast of the poet's satiric humour
is, however, held in reserve until Southey himself appears and
recites the ‘spavin’d dactyls' of his Vision to the outraged ears of
the assembled ghosts and archangels; it is satire in which every
line transfixes its quarry. In this concluding scene, Byron scales
the heights of the most exalted form of satire—that in which
keen-edged, humorous portraiture is united with transcendent
constructive and narrative art.
In Don Juan, the work upon which his literary powers were
chiefly expended during his last five years in Italy (1818—23),
Byron attains to the full disclosure of his personality and the final
expression of his genius. It is impossible to quarrel with the poet's
own description of it as an ‘Epic Satire,' but, in the earlier cantos,
at least, the satire is often held in suspense; in the 'Ave Maria
stanzas and the magnificent 'Isles of Greece' song, he gives free
play to his lyricism, while, in his Juan-Haidée idyll, he fashions
a love-romance as passionate as that of Romeo and Juliet and as
virginal as that of Ferdinand and Miranda. In the sixteen thousand
verses of Don Juan, every mood of Byron's complex and para-
doxical nature is vividly reflected: here is the romanticist and the
realist, the voluptuary and the cynic, the impassioned lover of
liberty and the implacable foe of hypocrisy. And this variety of
moods is accompanied by a no less remarkable variety of scenes.
His hero is equally at home in camp and court; he suffers ship-
wreck and storms a fortress, penetrates the seraglio, the palace and
the English country-house; and, true to his fundamental principle of
obedience to nature, bears good and ill fortune with equal serenity.
In a letter to captain Medwin, Byron describes his poem as an
epic—'an epic as much in the spirit of our day as the Iliad was in
that of Homer. ' But it is an epic without a plan, and, rightly
speaking, without a hero. For Don Juan is little more than the
child of circumstance, a bubble tossed hither and thither on the
ocean of life, ever ready to yield to external pressure, and asserting
his own will only in his endeavour to keep his head above water.
Yet, Don Juan is a veritable Comédie Humaine, the work of
a man who has stripped life of its illusions, and has learnt,
through suffering and the satiety of pleasure, to look upon society
with the searching eye of Chaucer and the pitilessness of Mephi-
stopheles. In the comedy which is here enacted, some of the
a


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II]
55
Don Juan
characters are great historic figures, others thinly veiled portraits
of men and women who had helped to shape the poet's own
chequered career, while others, again, are merely creatures of the
imagination or serve as types of the modern civilisation with which
Byron was at war.
In Don Juan, Byron, in the main, is content to draw his
materials out of the rich resources of his own personal experience,
and it was only when experience failed him that he drew upon
books. In such cases, he proved a royal borrower. It is well
known that his description of the shipwreck in canto II, and of
the siege of Ismail in canto VIII—where he combines the realism
of Zola with the irony of Swift in his most savage mood-is very
—
largely drawn from the narratives of actual shipwrecks and sieges
recorded by voyagers or historians. What is not so familiar is the
fact that the whole mise-en-scène, together with many of the inci-
dents, of Juan's adventures at the court of Catherine II of Russia,
are drawn from Casti's satiric epic, Poema Tartaro', and
materially add to Byron's indebtedness to the eighteenth century
master of the ottava rima. In his early manhood, Casti had spent
several years at the Russian court, and, in his satire, he describes,
under the thinnest of topographical disguises, the career of an Irish
adventurer, Tomasso Scardassale, who has escaped with a Turkish
girl from the clutches of the caliph of Bagdad, and, arriving at
Caracona (Petrograd), becomes the prime favourite of the empress
Cattuna (Catherine II). The resemblance between the two poems
is enhanced by the fact that many of the details in the siege of
Ismail, and much of Byron's diatribe against war, find a close
parallel in Il Poema Tartaro.
Judged as a work of art, Don Juan is well-nigh perfect. Byron's
indebtedness to his Italian masters is almost as great in diction as
in verse, but what he borrowed he made peculiarly his own; a bold
imitator, he is himself inimitable. He is triumphantly successful
in the art of harmonising manner to matter and form to spirit.
His diction, in the main, is low-toned and conversational, as befits
a poem in which digression plays an important part; but it is, at
the same time, a diction which is capable of sustained elevation
when occasion demands, or of sinking to bathos when the end is
burlesque. No less remarkable is the harmony which is estab-
lished between his diction and his verse; the astonishingly clever
a
i The relation of Don Juan to Il Poema Tartaro was first pointed out by C. M.
Fuess in his monograph, Lord Byron as a Satirist in Verse, 1912. Byron's indebtedness
to Casti is, probably, even greater than Fuess thinks it wise to admit.


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56
[CH. II
Byron
burlesque effects which he produces with his double and triple
rimes lie equally within the provinces of diction and metre, while
the epigrammatic gems with which his cantos are bestrewn gain
half their brilliance by being set within the bounds of the couplet
that rounds off the ottava rima.
It is in Byron's digressions that the reader comes nearest to him.
Swift and Sterne, each in his turn, had employed the digression
with telling effect in prose narrative, but Byron was the first
Englishman to make a free use of it in verse. Here, again, he was
under the spell of the Italians, Pulci, Berni and Casti, though the
wit and humour and caustic criticism of life which find a place in
these digressions are all his own. In them, the dominant mood is
that of mockery. Byron, indeed, would have us believe that
if I laugh at any mortal thing,
'Tis that I may not weep;
but it would be idle to deny that, in these digressions, the motley
of the jester, for him, was the only wear. Their very brilliance is
a proof of the delight which their author found in girding at the
world and waging war upon 'cant political, cant religious, cant
moral. ' Europe has long looked upon Byron as the inspired
prophet of political liberty, but it is the Byron who wrote The
Prophecy of Dante and who laid down his life in the cause of
Greek freedom, rather than the author of Don Juan, that justly
awakens this regard and evokes this homage. In his 'epic satire,'
his criticism of life is almost wholly destructive. We take delight
in his pitiless exposure of effete institutions and false ideals, and
gladly acknowledge that the hammer-blows which he delivers at
hypocrisy are as salutary in their effect as they are delightful to
watch; but we must, at the same time, confess that he lacks the
constructive genius of his friend and contemporary, Shelley, who
sapped the foundations of society with equal resolution, but who
razed only in order to rebuild.


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CHAPTER III
SHELLEY
a
Two decades, approximately, separate the emergence of
the younger group of the poets of this period, Byron, Shelley
and Keats, from that of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Scott. To the
elder group, all three were both deeply indebted and, in various
,
subtle and intricate ways, akin. Yet, the younger group stand
sharply and definitely apart; they are not merely of a younger
generation but of a different age. The revolution, which had pro-
foundly disturbed the elder poets, had, for the younger, already
become history; the ideas and aspirations which Wordsworth and
Coleridge first embraced and then did battle with, and which
Scott consistently abhorred, had passed into the blood of Byron and
Shelley, and kindled humanitarian ardours even in the artist
Keats. And they are all, definitely, less English. Poetry, in their
hands, loses almost entire touch with the national life and the
historic traditions of England ; nor was it mere accident that
Shelley and Byron lived their best years, and produced their
greatest poetry, in Italy, or that Keats, in his London suburb, sang
of Endymion and the moon, of magic casements and perilous seas.
For the younger group were not merely less English; they were
less near to nature, in a significant and far-reaching sense less
natural. Existence, as such-the world as it is, with its ritual, or
routine, of use and wont-was less characteristically the home and
haunt of their imagination. To brood over the poetry of common
things, to explore the workings of the untaught mind, to reanimate,
for its own sake, the adventure and romance of the past, were no
longer their inspiring aim. Nature, to Wordsworth, was a con-
servative ideal; but the ideals of freedom, beauty, love, which
enthralled the imagination of Byron and Shelley and Keats became,
in their hands, anarchic and revolutionary, challenging the old
order, breaking down its classifications and limits, yet, in the case
of the two younger poets, building up visionary fabrics controlled


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58
[CH.
Shelley
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3
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by the law of the spirit. And their very detachment from the
despotism of fact enabled them to range more freely over existence
than did their predecessors; they are more versatile ; neglected
treasures swim into their ken; nature and art, legend and romance,
lose their old solitary and exclusive lure, to become the many-
coloured woof of the living garment of beauty. That which for
Wordsworth was, preeminently, if not exclusively, a living Presence
of the Earth,' spoke to the imagination of Shelley and Keats no
less from painting and sculpture, from the poetry of Greeks and
Elizabethans and of Boccaccio and Dante, from the splendid
creations of primeval myth. Medusa and the Grecian Urn,
Prometheus Unbound and the sonnet On sitting down to read King
Lear once again, Isabella and The Triumph of Life, Endymion
and Alastor, mark, merely in conception and cast of subject, so
many advances of the existing boundaries of English poetry.
Shelley and Keats were thus, for their generation, creators
of beauty, as Wordsworth and Coleridge had been prophets
of nature.