No More Learning

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.


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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


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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.
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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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[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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[CH.
Shelley
"L
8
3
IT
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. But their vision of beauty was widely different.
Shelley's vision is more metaphysical; beauty, for him, is 'intel-
lectual,' a spirit living and working through the universe, and,
ultimately, undistinguishable from the 'love' which 'sustains' it ;
the sensuous world, its 'veil,' discloses it, here and there, in
pure, aspiring things-flowers, flame, heroic souls.
The Keatsian vision of beauty, on the other hand, is pre-
dominantly a rapturous exaltation of the senses—but of senses
transfigured by imagination, so that they create as much as they
perceive, making ‘loveliness yet more lovely. '
Both the Shelleyan and the Keatsian vision of beauty are
mirrored, finally, in the poetic instrument of expression itself, in
their speech and verse. Image and personification, condemned by
Wordsworth, reappear in unsurpassed subtlety and splendour.
But both are masters, also, of a noble and passionate simplicity.
And, in both, the inner rhythm of thought is accompanied and
borne out by new and exquisite rhythms of musical verse. The
songs of Shelley and the odes of Keats reach the summit of lyric
achievement in English.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, born on 4 August 1792, at Horsham, came
of a line of frequently notable Sussex squires. His imagination
was early awake, but poetic power came relatively late. At Eton
(1804-10), he wrote fluent Latin verse, hung entranced over the
forbidden marvels of chemistry, stood up single-handed against
fagging, and scribbled incoherent romances after Mrs Radcliffe
>
2
S


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111]
Alastor
59
6
(Zastrozzi, St Irvyne's); there, too, he had that May morning
vision of 'intellectual beauty' (Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,
dedication to The Revolt of Islam) which 'burst his spirit's sleep,'
and became, thenceforward, the 'master light of all his seeing. ' The
circumstances of his brief Oxford career, his expulsion and marriage
with Harriet Westbrook (August 1811) are familiar, and need not be
recalled. In January 1812, he wrote to Godwin, declaring himself
“the pupil of him under whose actualguidance my very thoughts have
hitherto been arranged. ' Godwin's sway, never entirely outgrown,
over a mind remote from his own in gifts and temperament, was due
to his political individualism and to his ethical determinism. The one
appealed to Shelley's hatred of tyranny, the other to his passion for
ideal unity. In Queen Mab (surreptitiously published 1813), his
Godwinian creed is proclaimed from the mouths of legendary
personages, inspired, as is their loose irregular verse, by the
mythical epics of Southey. Shelley was soon to leave Queen Mab
far behind; yet, its passionate sincerity, and the indefinable
promise of genius in its very extravagances, make it very impressive.
Some sections he, later, rehandled as The Daemon of the World.
The following year (1814) saw the gravest crisis of his life. Its
circumstances cannot be discussed here. Finding Harriet spiritually
irresponsive, and believing her to have been unfaithful, he treated
their marriage as dissolved, and, in July, left England with Mary
Godwin. Neither the three months' tour through France and
Switzerland, nor the succeeding winter and spring, bore any
immediate literary fruit; but, during the autumn of 1815, he wrote,
in the glades of Windsor, Alastor, his first authentic and unmis-
takable poem. The harsh notes and crude philosophy of Queen
Mab are no longer heard ; Southey has yielded place to Coleridge
and Wordsworth, to the romantic chasm of Kubla Khan, and the
visionary boy of The Excursion. The blank verse, too, is built
upon the noble, plain music of Wordsworth, but with delicate
suspensions and cadences and wayward undulations of his own.
Yet, the mood and purport of this first genuine achievement of
Shelley is one of frustration and farewell. His reform schemes
had utterly failed, and he believed (on the strength of a medical
report) that he was about to die. Alastor is the tragedy of the
)
idealist who seeks in reality the counterpart of his ideal. In his
preface, Shelley loftily condemns the idealist, but only to pronounce
a sterner condemnation upon the multitude who live untroubled
by generous delusions ; and the final lines, some of the noblest he
ever wrote, are penetrated with the forlornness of a world where


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60
[CH.
Shelley
‘many worms and beasts and men live on,' while 'soine surpassing
spirit’ is snatched away, leaving to the survivors
But cold despair and pale tranquillity,
Nature's vast frame, the web of human things,
Birth and the grave, that are not as they were.
To Shelley himself, ‘Nature's vast frame' and 'the web of human
things' were not only a source of consolation : they were a
problema problem, however, of which he was assured that he had
the key. Much of this autumn was occupied with attempts to set out
in prose his philosophic convictions. The results remain in a series
of unfinished prose essays : On Love, On life, On a Future State,
On Metaphysics, On Morals, On Christianity. Neither as literature
nor as speculation are they very remarkable; but they help to
determine the character of Shelley's doctrines at a time when the
Godwinian mould of his ideas, still almost untouched by the in-
fluence of either Spinoza or Plato, was already undergoing the
implicit transmutation in his mind which familiarity with them, and
especially with Plato, splendidly completed. His determinism
remains, but is assuming a more and more idealist complexion.
'Necessity,' with Godwin a bulwark against miracles and freewill,
was already, in Queen Mab, a sublime creation and harmonising
power—the mother of the world, and life 'the great miracle. '
Shelley believes, with Berkeley, that 'nothing exists but as it is
perceived,' and reduces mind to a merely perceiving power; but, in
another context, he can assert that man has 'a spirit within him
at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. ' And the Godwinian
individualism is in sore peril when Shelley, in the same essay
(On life), declares that 'I, you, they are not signs of any actual
difference, . . . but merely marks employed to denote the different
modifications of the one mind. '
The author of these fragments was clearly ripe for Plato, and
the ardent Greek studies of the following winter with Hogg and
Peacock brought his later Platonism perceptibly nearer. The
Swiss journey of the following summer (1816) was memorable for
the beginning of his friendship with Byron. To these months of
animated intercourse with a man of genius very unlike his own-
discussions and readings in the villa Diodati, boat explorations
in the footsteps of Julie and St Preux and much else-Shelley
owed stimulus ; but, not like Byron, a poetic new birth. The
Mont Blanc stanzas and the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty mark
no such sudden heightening of vision or matured power as do
Manfred and the third canto of Childe Harold in comparison
a


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111]
61
The Revolt of Islam
with all the writer had done before. Yet they express the
Shelleyan idealism with a new loftiness of assurance, as of one
who had found his dreams unassailably confirmed. The Alps, for
Byron a symbol of nature's ruinous and savage force, were, for
Shelley, the habitation of the secret Strength of Things Which
governs thought and to the infinite dome of heaven is as a law'
-a bond of union, like Wordsworth's Duty, between the visible
universe and the ideal strivings of man.
The state of England during the winter which followed
(1816—17) offered little support to this optimism. The overthrow
of Napoleon had brought about, for the English working class, a
period of intense and widespread misery. Reaction had triumphed,
but the country had never been nearer to revolution. Shelley,
settled with Mary at Marlow on Thames, coped energetically and
generously with the need around him, pouring out his thoughts,
meantime, in a great revolutionary epic. Laon and Cythna (later
renamed The Revolt of Islam), the work of these summer months,
is a brilliant dream-woof of poetry, in which are wrought figures,
now purely allegoric, like the eagle and the snake—the evil and
the noble cause—now symbolic, like the hero and the heroine
themselves, who wage the eternal war of love and truth against
tyranny. Shelley's boundless faith in the might of spiritual forces
permeates and suffuses the whole poem, and to such a degree that
the opposing and resisting powers remain shadowy and incredible.
In vain the most savage tortures and, finally, death at the stake
are inflicted upon Laon and Cythna ; we seem to be onlookers at
a visionary spectacle in which hate is impotent and pain dissolved
in ecstasy. Not till The Cenci did Shelley, handling a real story,
imagine with corresponding power the antagonist of his heroic
spirit, and thus attain true and great drama. The Faerie Queene,
which he read to Mary during these months, counted for something
in the substance as well as in the form. Cythna is the woman
warrior, a Britomart of heroic valour and impassioned purity; but
her ideals are those of a more modern time; she seeks, like Mary
Wollstonecraft, the intellectual liberation of her sex, and she is
mated with Laon in a comradeship of sister spirits such as now
bound Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter to Shelley. The tenderly
intimate dedication to his wife nobly commemorates, also, her
mother and her father.
Kindred impulses inspired the fragment Prince Athanase,
written, likewise, at Marlow. Athanase is a Laon transposed-so far
as the unfinished poem discloses--in a quieter key. The eternal


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62
[CH.
Shelley
3
warfare of the idealist must, in some sort, have been its theme, and
the triumph of love its climax; but its most distinct pictures are not
of bridal rapture or martyr ecstasy, but of philosophic converse
between a young disciple and a 'divine old man’ who has nurtured
him in the soul-sustaining songs of ancient Hellas and in the
wisdom of the Symposium.
Yet, Shelley's personal history during these months would have
excused a note of more unequivocal tragedy, a confidence less
exalted in the final triumph of love. The chancery suit brought
by the Westbrooks for the custody of his and Harriet's children
threw him into an agony of apprehension. The threatened loss of
the children touched him less acutely than the consequent ruin,
as he deemed it, of their souls. Harriet's suicide towards the close
of 1816 had affected him little. He had long ceased to love her, and
the pathos of her miserable end failed to touch the springs of
his flowing compassion. The cruelty of his situation makes the
fierce stanzas To the Lord Chancellor impressive; but they are
hardly great poetry. Before Lord Eldon's decree was pronounced,
Shelley and Mary had resolved to leave the country. In March 1818,
they set out for Italy. The stanzas To William Shelley, though
probably written before, breathe the exultant joy and the ideal
hope which qualified for them the regrets of exile.
Rosalind and Helen, begun at Marlow and finished next
summer at the baths of Lucca, has caught little of this afflatus. It
is a Shelleyan essay in the romantic tale to which Scott and Byron
a
had lent a vogue. The influence of Christabel is often felt in the
rhythm, but there is no archaism of style. Shelley calls it, indeed,
'a modern eclogue,' and be experiments, fitfully and somewhat
awkwardly, with the familiar, colloquial manner which he was to
make consonant with poetry in Julian and Maddalo and the
Gisborne letter. In Italy, this manner grew steadily stronger and
richer. The incidents of Rosalind and Helen, however, read like
a bad dream of the Marlow days : Rosalind's child is ravished
from her, Helen's lover fades and dies as Shelley and Mary believed
was soon to be his own destiny. And the close, with its air of
mellowed and assuaged suffering, and its sudden opulence of style,
reads like an awakening amidst the radiance and the security of
Italy.
'Lo, where red morning thro' the wood
Is burning o'er the dew! '
says Rosalind, symbolically.
But the spell of Italy first becomes fully apparent in the poems


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11]
63
Venice and Este
6
written during this summer at Byron's villa near Este-a nest, after
Shelley's own heart, on the jutting brink of a ravine commanding
the Lombard plain, the Adriatic, the towers of Venice and Padua,
the far-off Alps and Apennines and the flame-like Euganean peaks
close at hand. Nature had here, at length, gone out to meet him,
creating visibly before him a scene which might have been a pro-
jection of his imagination. Lines written among the Euganean
Hills express the rapt mood of a mind 'wedded,' as Wordsworth's
habitually, as Shelley's rarely, was, with this goodly universe';
his soul,
which so long
Darkened this swift stream of song,
grows one with the glowing noontide skyand with the flower glimmer-
ing at his feet. The experience is still strange to him and he half
questions whether it be more than the visionary fancy of his mind
peopling’a ‘lone' and empty world. He stands in a flowering
island' of the spirit; but round it surge 'the waters of wide
Agony,' and he is soon to be adrift upon these waters again. In
misery, he, like Tennyson, woos sorrow 'as a bride,' but with a
half-playful sadness wholly his own. And even the 'unspeakable
beauty of Naples,' deeply as it impressed him, could not exorcise
the moods of deep dejection which found utterance in the poignant
Stanzas written there. At Venice, on the other hand, where he
renewed his old comradeship with Byron, the bitter cynicism of
the elder poet called out in protest all Shelley's faith and hope
for men. Julian and Maddalo gives a fascinating account,
undoubtedly true in substance, of their intimate talk; and the
memories of real debate which underlie it helped Shelley to a
speech unwontedly natural and familiar, and to verse which gives
full play to the free movement of conversational sentences, yet
turns its freedom into ever fresh occasions for rhythmic beauty.
In the maniac's story, recounted to the two poets, conversation,
naturally, gives way to narrative; but, with the conversational tone,
the easy grace also passes from the style, and the delicate variety
of pause from the verse. In the previous year, Byron had made
his first essay in the poetic-familiar, and his, too, was a Venetian
story; but there is little affinity between the cynical and ironic
gaiety of Beppo and Shelley's high-bred ease and charm, or between
its smart metallic ringing rimes and Shelley's undulating music.
From Este, Shelley turned south once more, arriving, early in
1819, at Rome. Many vivid letters to Peacock and the Stanzas
written in dejection, near Naples (December 1818), already
2


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64
[CH.
Shelley
mentioned, make the journey live for us. Since his arrival in Italy,
he had brooded over the plan of a lyrical drama. Three subjects,
Mrs Shelley reports, attracted him: Tasso, Job, Prometheus. Of the
first two, only a fragment of Tasso remains; but the fact helps
to define his line of approach to the one which he finally adopted
and carried into execution. In all three, a noble character suffers
grievous things at the hands, or by the consent, of a superior all-
powerful will. There is tragedy, of varying quality, in the
situation of all three. The sublime figure of Job, visited with
immeasurable sufferings, but resisting all appeals to submission,
alone in all literature matched the heroic grandeur of the
Aeschylean Prometheus. But that this last subject finally
prevailed is not surprising. Aeschylus had been his constant com-
panion since he crossed the Alps, in the spring of the previous
year. The typical Shelleyan situation-an ideal hero confronting
a tyrant—was far more unequivocally present in the Prometheus
story than in the rest. And this story offered an opening for the
doctrine, yet more intimately Shelleyan, of love as the central
principle of things and the key to the ideal future of humanity.
The figure of Prometheus had appealed powerfully to other idealists
of the revolutionary age. Goethe, in his storm and stress phase,
had seen in him the human creator, shaping men in his own image
and scorning God; and Beethoven found noble music for the
theme. To Byron, in 1816, he was a symbol of the divineness, the
heroic endurance and the 'funereal destiny' of man. To Shelley,
also, he stood for man creating and enduring, endowing the gods
themselves with wisdom and strength, and suffering their vindictive
rage. But, for Shelley, no symbol of humanity could suffice which
excluded the perfected man of the future he confidently foresaw.
Aeschylus had made Prometheus finally surrender to Jupiter, and
become reconciled with him. This conclusion was, to Shelley,
intolerable.
The moral interest of the fable ſhe declares) would be annihilated if we
could conceive him unsaying his high language, and quailing before his
successful and perfidious adversary.
The story thus had to undergo a radical transformation to fit
it to Shelley's boundless faith in the perfectibility of man. His
Godwinian creed had, in this respect, undergone no abatement
whatever. Pain, death and sin were transitory ills. Religion, too,
man would necessarily outgrow, for the gods were phantoms
devised by his brain. A Prometheus who should symbolise
humanity thus conceived necessarily triumphed; there was even


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65
Prometheus Unbound
danger lest his adversary's overthrow—at bottom, a fight with a
figment—should appear too certain and too easy. And this
danger was not diminished by the specifically Shelleyan traits
which transformed the substance without altering the outline of
Godwinian man, and changed the being of pure reason into the
being of absolute love; making earth no mere source of human
utilities, but the mother ‘interpenetrated' in every pore of her
granite mass with love like his own. The sublime doctrine of
love was foreign to Aeschylus and to Greek myth, no less than to
Godwin; but the legend which made Prometheus the son of Earth
provided Shelley with a pregnant symbol for his thought. The earth-
born Titan must partake of the spirit of love which pervades the
earth. Even towards his enemy Jupiter, he cannot, therefore, be
implacable. Yet, since Jupiter stands for the power of evil which
it is his task and destiny to destroy, he cannot be placated. The
allegorical and the literal sense thus thrust the story in different
directions. Prometheus acts, in part, as the spirit of love, hating,
ipso facto, the spirit of hate, and ruthlessly pursuing it to its
doom; in part, as the sublime Christ-like sufferer, who wishes 'no
living thing to suffer pain,' and will not curse even his persecutor.
In the great first act, hanging in torture on the cliffs of Caucasus,
he seeks to recall the curse upon Jupiter which he had once pro-
nounced, and to which all nature had listened appalled. But he will
not disclose the secret which alone can avert Jupiter's ruin. To
the threats and arguments of Mercury—in the most Aeschylean and
least undramatic scene of the poem-and to the torments of the
furies, he remains inflexible. The catastrophe accordingly follows;
Jupiter topples from his throne, as it were, at a touch; indeed, the
stroke of doom is here so instantaneous and so simple as to be
perilously near the grotesque. Jupiter's fall is the signal for the
regeneration, no less instantaneous, of humanity; man's evil nature
slips off like a slough ; Prometheus is ‘unbound. '
But this symbolism leaves the character of Prometheus incom-
pletely portrayed. To be chained and set free is but a slender
portion of his suffering or of his joy. His keenest pangs—the last
—
resource of the furies when other torments fail-are of the soul,
pity for the sufferings of other men, and, worse than blood and fire,
pity for their deadly apathy :
6
Hypocrisy and Custom make their minds
The fanes of many a worship now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man's estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.
E. L. XII.
CH, III.
5


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[ch.
Shelley
6
And, as his pains are spiritual, so, while he is still bound, are his joys.
The earth, his mother, sends the spirits of heroes and martyrs to cheer
him; lovely phantasmal shapes of faith and hope hover round him;
and he knows that there awaits him, still afar and invisible, his
bride, Asia, the spirit of love in nature—'Lamp of the earth,'
'whose footsteps pave the world with light'-but whose transform-
ing presence will fade 'unless it be mingled with his own. ' The love
that is ‘blindly wove through all the web of being’is incomplete until
the love that pervades nature has also triumphed in man made
one harmonious soul of many a soul. ' Long before that blissful
hour arrived, nature and man had mingled in the glowing speech
of poetry; into her 'golden chalice,' when his being overflowed,
he poured the bright wine' of his impassioned thought. Such
moments Prometheus remembers, though Asia is afar, and 'vain
all hope but love. '
Prometheus has thus, from the first, great allies '; even when
anguish is loudest, a hushed rapture of expectation is not far off.
Everything in the drama seems to support the faith of Shelley's
most exalted hours, that love, even here and now, is the substance
of things, and evil a phantasmal shadow. In such hours, we know,
it was written : the vigorous awakening of the Roman spring
around him as he wrote, and the new life with which it drenches
the spirits even to intoxication, were the inspiration of this drama';
The speech is almost everywhere lyrical in temper where not in
form, and the ardour of Shelley suffuses itself into the atmosphere,
compelling even the forces of evil to speak in accents like his, as
if secretly persuaded of the fatuity of their own cause. Jupiter
speaks in lovely images of stars and sun, as if he, too, were a lover
of Asia, the lamp of earth; the fury, in the very act of tormenting
Prometheus, speaks as one who herself suffers what she inflicts.
Finally, in the fourth act, added as an afterthought, some
months later, this implicit lyricism becomes a sustained rapture of
song. Considered as the closing act of a drama, it is otiose, for it
adds nothing to the action ; but it is rather to be regarded as the
final movement of a symphony; a completion necessary in the
logic of emotion, though superfluous in the logic of event. In
the great choric songs of the earth and the moon, and in the
triumphant strains of the hours and the spirits of the mind, Shelley
reaches the sublimest note of his lyric. No modern poet has come
nearer than he to making the morning stars sing together. '
Almost all his other modes of song, from the simplest to the most
intricate, are to be found in the earlier acts; and on the deep organ


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The Cenci
67
tone of Demogorgon, proclaiming that love and wisdom and
endurance are of the eternal truth of things, the poem closes.
Prometheus Unbound is not to be judged as an essay in the
philosophy of progress ; but neither is it to be treated merely as a
tissue of lovely imagery and music. Shelley's ardour, fortified and
misled by the cold extravagances of Godwin, hurried him over the
slow course of social evolution. He conceived both the evil in
human nature and the process of overcoming it with strange, sublime
simplicity. But the ideal of love and endurance, which he sees
fulfilled by regenerated man, stands on a different plane; it is
rooted in existing human nature, and expresses a state towards
which all genuine progress must advance. And, when he portrays
the universe as at one with the moral strivings of man, he is
uttering no fugitive or isolated extravagance, but the perennial
faith of idealists in all ages. Under forms of thought derived
from the atheist and materialist Godwin, Shelley has given, in
Prometheus Unbound, magnificent expression to the faith of
Plato and of Christ.
Though written at Rome, Prometheus does not bear any direct
trace of its origin. Any other flowering glades than those that
crowned the baths of Caracalla, and any other glowing Italian sky,
would have provided a like intoxicating milieu. Nor was Shelley
easily accessible to the specific traditions and character of Rome.
It was no city of the soul for him, as for Byron, but a beautiful
tomb, 'where empires and religions lie buried in the ravage they
have wrought'; and neither Vergil nor Lucretius, nor Lucan-a
name more honoured by Shelley than either—availed to endear to
him the metropolis of papacy. But one tradition of modern Rome
had, since his arrival in Italy, moved his deepest interest. The story
of Beatrice Cenci, in a form, as is now known, more favourable to
her than history warrants, was universally current among the Roman
populace, and ‘not to be mentioned in Roman society without
awakening a deep and breathless interest. ' Guido's portrait of
Beatrice, in the Colonna palace, heightened Shelley's passionate sym-
pathy with her personality. Her story was already a tragedy, and
' nothing remained, as I imagined, but to clothe it to the apprehen-
sions of my countrymen in such language and action as would bring
it home to their hearts. ' To bring his thoughts and convictions
home to the hearts of his countrymen had never been an aim
foreign to Shelley ; but he had never, as now, subordinated his
own artistic bent and technique to this aim. Though distrustful
of his power to write a drama for the stage, he yet chose this
a
a
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Shelley
7
11
incomparable means of popular appeal; and he held his visionary
imagination in severe control, avoiding all ‘mere poetry,' and using
a speech which differs from the 'familiar speech of men' only in
its nobler, more classical, simplicity. That Shelley, after a few weeks'
interval, could carry out, with unfaltering hand, and with supreme
success, a poetic transition not less astonishing than would have
been the appearance of Samson Agonistes on the morrow of Comus,
marks his will power no less than his imaginative range.
The central theme and situation of The Cenci are still, it
is true, the heroic resistance to tyranny, of all situations the most
kindling to Shelley. It is no longer a mythic symbol, however, but
an actual event. And the chief actor and sufferer is a woman.
Shelley, by merely following the lead of his own ardent and
indignant sympathy, struck out a tragic type in effect new, and to
none of the great masters stranger than to Shakespeare himself.
Euripides, Sophocles, Massinger, Webster had nobly handled the
tragedy of heroic womanhood; but neither Medea nor Antigone,
nor Vittoria, nor Dorothea, nor the duchess of Malfi anticipated
Beatrice Cenci in her way of meeting an intolerable wrong. She
strikes down the criminal, not with the fierce vengeance of a Medea,
but as the instrument of divine justice-
Because my father's honour did demand
My father's life.
This is the Shelleyan magnanimity, and Shelley found no hint of it
in his source. But he wove into her character every positive trait
that it supplied ; his Beatrice, therefore, with all her ideal great-
ness of soul, is no abstraction, but an Italian girl, with flashing
moods and impulses. She thinks, in her agony, of suicide
Lucretia’s remedy-before she finds her own ; she is as sure as
Antigone that her guilt is innocence, yet fights her accusers with
the rare cunning of an advocate; she confronts the faltering
murderers with more than the fierce energy of Lady Macbeth,
yet has her moment of a young girls anguish at the thought of
passing for ever from the sunshine into a 'wide, grey, lampless,
deep, unpeopled world. Analysis may pronounce this or that
trait inconsistent; but the qualified reader will feel himself
in the grip of a character of Shakespearean richness of texture,
irradiated through and through by a flawless splendour of soul.
If Beatrice recalls Greek, as well as Elizabethan, analogies,
count Cenci is of the race of the Barabbases and Volpones who
mark the extremest divergence of Elizabethan from Greek tragedy.
Yet, he is drawn with a reticence of which no Elizabethan would


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Politics
have been capable, and the horror of his act is so far mitigated
that its motive is hate, not lust.