No More Learning

'
Scott's curiosity as to idiosyncrasies, though kindly and well bred,
was minute and insatiable ; and it may further be noted that, for
his study of certain types of human nature, he had peculiar
opportunities from his post of observation as clerk to the court
of session. Moreover, he was happily dowered with the power
to combine strenuous literary and other labours with an almost
constant round of social distractions. His mental gifts were
splendidly reinforced by exceptional physical vigour, and, more
particularly, by a nervous system so strongly strung that, for
many years, it was not seriously disquieted by incessant studious
application combined with an almost constant round of con-
viviality. To almost the last, it enabled him to perform prodigies
of literary labour, even after it had begun to show serious signs
of breaking up. Though it must be granted that the infesting
of his border home by a constant influx of 'tourists, wonder
hunters and all that fatal species,' was, even from monetary
considerations—considerations the importance of which were, in
the end, to be calamitously revealed-far from an unmixed
blessing, it had certain compensations. If he occasionally found
it needful—from the behests of literary composition to escape
from it, the social racket, on the whole, gave him more pleasure
than boredom. Lockhart describes the society at Abbotsford as
'a brilliant and ever varying' one; and Scott, evidently, enjoyed
its diversity; and, while responding to its brilliances, took quiet
note of its follies and vanities. Though the daily reception of
new comers' entailed more or less ‘worry and exhaustion of spirit
upon all the family,' he was himself, we are told, proof against
this. The immense geniality of Scott, which qualified him for
80 comprehensive an appreciation of human nature, especially
manifests itself in his method of representing character. His
standpoint is quite the antipodes of that of Swift or Balzac.
Mentally and morally, he was thoroughly healthy and happy ;
there was no taint of morbidity or bitterness in his disposition ;
and, if aspiring, he was so without any tincture of jealousy or
envy. Though possessing potent satiric gifts, he but rarely has
1


## p. 21 (#45) ##############################################

1]
21
Characters in his Novels
runy
6
recourse to them. Generally his humour is of an exceptionally
kindly and sunny character. He hardly ever and only when,
as in the case of the marquis of Argyll, his political prejudices
are strongly stirred-manifests an unfairness that verges on spite.
If a somewhat superficial, he is not a narrow, moralist. The
existence of human frailties does not seriously oppress him; they
appeal, many of them, as much to his sense of humour as to his
judiciary temper. He shows no trace of the uneasy cynicism
which greatly afflicted Thackeray; and, unlike many modern
writers, he displays no absorbing anxiety to explore what they
deem the depths of human nature and expose its general un-
soundness. On the other hand, he is an expert exponent of its
eccentricities and its comical qualities; and, if not one of the
most profoundly instructive, he is one of the most wholesomely
cheerful, of moralists. At the same time, he can admirably depict
certain types of vulgarly ambitious scoundrels, such as the attorney
Glossin in Guy Mannering, and he has a keen eye for a grotesque
hypocrite like Thomas Turnbull in Redgauntlet. Captain Dirk
Hatterick is, also, a splendid ruffian, although a much less difficult
portrait than that of captain Nanty Ewart of 'The Jumping Jenny'
and his pathetic struggle between good and evil. On the other
hand, his merely villainous creations, whether of the diabolically
clever order like Rashleigh, or the somewhat commonplace sort of
Lord Dalgarno, or the low and depraved kind of his eminence of
Whitefriars-grossly impressive after a fashion though he be-
are all a little stagey. In historical characters, his outstanding
successes are Louis XI and James VI and I. Here, of course,
he had the advantage of having to deal with very marked
idiosyncrasies ; but this might well have been a snare to an
inferior romancer. Scott's portraits of them may be more or
less incorrect, but both are very masterly and vivid representa-
tions of very definite embodiments of peculiar royal traits. With
them, he was much more successful than with Mary queen of
Scots, whose stilted heroics do not impress us, and, here, he was
handicapped by the conflict between his sympathies and his
convictions. His strong cavalier bias, also, on other occasions
proved a snare to him. For example, he outrageously exag-
gerates the sinister qualities of the marquis of Argyll; while his
Montrose is a featureless and faultless hero, quite overshadowed
in interest by captain Dugald Dalgetty. Claverhouse, again-
whom, in Old Mortality, he rather infelicitously refers to as
'profound in politics,' and whom, inadvertently, he makes to


## p. 22 (#46) ##############################################

22
[CH.
Sir Walter Scott
figure there more as an arrogant coxcomb than as the high-hearted
royalist he would wish him to be—is, in Wandering Willie's
Tale, very impressively revealed to us as he appears in cove-
nanting tradition. On the other hand, the fanaticism of Burley
in Old Mortality is rather overdrawn: the stern indignation
which prompted the murder of archbishop Sharp was not allied
to any form of mental disorder. Still, if not historically correct,
the picturesque luridness of the fanaticism which is ascribed to
him is effectively set forth.
Generally, it may be said that Scott is least successful with
his more morally correct and least eccentric personages. He
specially fails to interest us in his lovers—perfectly proper but
rather buckram young men, with merely average commonplace
characteristics. Of Waverley, he himself said :
The hero is a sneaking piece of imbecility, and if he had married Flora,
she would have set him up upon the chimney piece, as Count Borowlaski's
wife used to do with him.
As for the heroines, their main fault is their faultlessness; they
do and say nothing that provokes criticism; and he is more
careful that we should respect and admire than understand them.
Catherine Seyton is clever, witty and sprightly. Diana Vernon
is rendered interesting by her peculiar surroundings, and, though
in a quite ingenuous fashion, verges on unconventionality. Julia
Mannering, Lucy Bertram, Flora MacIvor, Edith Bellenden, Miss
Wardour are all charming in a slightly different fashion from
each other; but little more than the surface of their natures is
revealed to us. On account of the peculiar prominence of the
love episode in The Bride of Lammermoor, and its strong tragic
characteristics, some have been inclined to pronounce this novel
Scott's masterpiece; but, while the tragic painfulness of portions
of the novel is undeniable, and no small art is shown in creating
a general atmosphere of tragic gloom and conveying a sense of
impending calamity, its tragic greatness is another matter. The
chief personalities hardly possess the qualities needful for evoking
the highest form of tragic pathos. The almost ludicrous sub-
jection of Sir William to his masterful wife is a serious hindrance
to the achievement of the desired effect; while, again, dis-
gust at her besotted prejudice and narrow, stolid pride tends
to prevent us from being roused to any other emotion as to
its consequences. Then, Lucy Ashton is too weak to win our
full sympathy; and her sudden lunacy and mad murderous
act shock, rather than impress, us; while, on the other hand,


## p. 23 (#47) ##############################################

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23
Love Episodes
Ravenswood is at once too readily conciliatory and too darkly
fierce. And, even if the tragic elements were better compounded
than they are, the novel, in other respects, is decidedly inferior
to the best of his productions. It has very patent faults-
sufficiently accounted for by Scott's condition of almost perpetual
torture when he wrote it-and, except in the case of the weird
crones, displays less than his usual graphic felicity in the portrayal
of Scottish characters, Caleb Balderstone, for example, being a
rather wearisome caricature, and the wit expended on his ingenious
devices to hide the extreme destitution of his master's larder being
of the very cheapest kind.
However admirably he could create a strong and thrilling
situation, Scott, in the portrayal of love episodes, fails to interest
his readers so much as do many less distinguished novelists.
Here, he shows little literary kinship with Shakespeare, with
whom he is sometimes compared, with whose influence he was
in many respects strongly saturated, from whom he obtained
important guidance in regard to artistic methods and whose
example is specially apparent in some of his more striking
situations. For his almost gingerly method of dealing with love
affairs, the exceedingly conventional character of the Edinburgh
society in which he moved may, in part, be held responsible.
He had an inveterate respect for the stereotyped proprieties.
By the time, also, that he began to write his prose romances,
love, with him, had mellowed into the tranquil affection of
married life. It was mainly in a fatherly kind of way that he
interested himself in the amatory interludes of his heroes and
heroines, who generally conduct themselves in the same invariably
featureless fashion, and do not, as a rule, play a more important
part in his narration than that of pawns in a game of chess.
With him, romance was not primarily the romance of love, but
the general romance of human life, of the world and its activities,
and, more especially, of the warring, adventurous and, more or
less, strange and curiosity-provoking past. For achieving his
best effects, he required a period removed, if even a little less
than ‘sixty years since,' from his own, a period contrasting more
or less strongly, but in, at least, a great variety of ways, with
it; and he depended largely on the curiosity latent, if not active,
in most persons, about old-time fashions, manners, modes of
life, personal characteristics and, more especially, dangers and
adventures.
'No fresher paintings of Nature,' says Carlyle, can be found


## p. 24 (#48) ##############################################

24
[ch.
Sir Walter Scott
than Scott's; hardly anywhere a wider sympathy with man’; but
a
he affirms that, while
Shakespeare fashions his characters from the heart outwards, your Scott
fashions them from the skin inwards, never getting near the heart of them!
The one set become living men and women, the other amount to little more
than mechanical cases, deceptively painted automatons.
Though a characteristically exaggerated pronouncement, it is
undeniable that there is a soupçon of truth in it. Scott would
have been the last to liken himself to Shakespeare as a delineator
of character. He is a little lacking in depth and subtlety; he
has an eye mainly for strongly marked characteristics, and
certain of his personages are but superficially delineated. He
makes no special intellectual or moral demands on us, as does,
for example, Meredith or Thackeray; he had little sense of
the finer shades, as had Jane Austen ; and he cannot quite
compare with Carlyle in the portrayal of historic personages.
Further, it is a notable circumstance that few or none of his
personages develop under his hands; for the most part, they are,
throughout the narrative, exhibited with characteristics which are
unmodified by time, experience or events. To analyse character
was, in fact, as little his aim, as it was to promulgate any special
social dogma. As Carlyle laments, he was not possessed with
an idea'; but, however predominant and effective a part ideas
may play in modern drama and fiction, they have their dis-
advantages; they are apt to prove rather a hindrance than an
aid to more than temporary success in the more creative forms
of literature. That Scott was not actuated by any more special
purpose than that of giving delight to his readers may even be
reckoned one of the chief sources of his charm and of the widely
beneficent influence he exercises. He attracts us mainly by an
exhibition of the multifarious pageantry of life; or, as Carlyle puts
it, his was a genius in extenso, as we may say, not in intenso. '
Yet, as a delineator of character, he has his strong points.
He had thoroughly studied the lowland Scot. If, not knowing
Gaelic, he never properly understood the Highlander, and portrays
mainly his superficial peculiarities arising from an imperfect
command of lowland Scots and a comparative ignorance of the
arts of civilised life--portrays him as the foreigner is usually
portrayed in English novels—he knew his lowland Scot as few
have ever known him. Here are ‘no deceptively painted auto-
matons, but living men and women. ' He is more especially
successful with the Scot of the humble or burgher class, and with


## p. 25 (#49) ##############################################

1]
25
Humourist and Romance Writer
Scottish eccentrics gentle or simple. Jeanie Deans and her
Cameronian father David, the theologically dull but practically
wide-awake ploughman Cuddie Headrig' and his fanatic mother
the covenanting Mause, Meg Merrilies, even if she be a little
stagey, the border farmer, Dandie Dinmont, Dominie Sampson, Ritt
Master Dalgetty, Baillie Nicol Jarvie, the bedesman Edie Ochil-
tree, that pitiable victim of litigation, the irrepressible Peter
Peebles, the Antiquary himself—these and such as these are all
immortals. His success with such characters was primarily owing
to his genial intercourse with all classes and his peculiar sense
of humour. In depicting eccentrics or persons with striking
idiosyncrasies, or those in the lower ranks of life, he displays
at once an amazing fecundity and a well-nigh matchless efficacy.
Here, he has a supremacy hardly threatened amongst English
writers even by Dickens, for, unlike Dickens, he is never fantastic
or extravagant. If not so mirth-provoking as Dickens, he is, in
his humourous passages, quite as entertaining, and his eccentrics
never, as those of Dickens often do, tax our belief in their
possible existence. As a humourist, his one drawback-a draw-
back which, with many, prevents an adequate appreciation of
his merits—is that his most characteristic creations generally
express themselves in a dialect the idiomatic niceties of which
can be fully appreciated only by Scotsmen, and not now by every
one of that nationality.
But the singularity of Scott is the peculiar combination in
him of the humourist with the romance writer, of the man of
the world with the devoted lover of nature and ardent worshipper
of the past. While, with a certain superficiality in the portrayal
of particular characters, he, pace Carlyle, displays an extra-
ordinary felicity in the portrayal of others, he unites with this
peculiar gift an exceptional power of vivifying the past on a very
extended scale—the past, at least, as conceived by him. The
question has been raised as to the historic value or historic
correctness of his presentations. It need hardly be said that
he was much more minutely and comprehensively versed in
Scottish history and Scottish antiquarianism than in those of
other countries, and had a much better understanding of Scottish
than. of other national characteristics. At the same time, his
training as a Scottish novelist was of immense service to him
when he found it advisable to seek fresh woods and pastures new.
Without his previous Scottish experiences he could, for example,
hardly have been so successful as he was in the case either of
>


## p. 26 (#50) ##############################################

26
[ch.
Sir Walter Scott
Quentin Durward or of Ivanhoe, which may be deemed his
purely romantic masterpieces. He had no original mastery of
the period of Louis XI. He had not even visited the scenes
of his story; for these, he relied mainly on certain drawings of
landscapes and ancient buildings made by his friend Skene
of Rubislaw, who had just returned from a tour in the district.
Lockhart, also, observed him 'many times in the Advocates'
Library, poring over maps and gazetteers with care and anxiety. '
For his historical and biographical inspiration, he was dependent
mainly on the Mémoires of Philippe de Comines, supplemented
by details from the chronicles of the period. We have only to turn
to these authorities in order to see with what deftness he created
his living world from a few records of the past, and the striking
character of his success was attested by the admiring enthusiasm
with which the work was received in France.
As regards Ivanhoe, it has been shown that he is glaringly
at fault in regard to some of the main features of the Norman
period, and more particularly as to the relations between Saxons
and Normans, on which the main tenor of the narrative depends.
Nevertheless, he had so minute a mastery of the manners,
customs, cardinal characteristics and circumstances of the chivalric
past, and was so profoundly in sympathy with its spirit, that he
is able to confer an atmosphere of reality on the period he seeks
to illustrate, for which we may look in vain in the records of
careful scientific historians.
In the case of the purely Scottish novels, he was more at
home and more completely master of his materials; but, for that
reason, he was, perhaps, less careful about historic accuracy in
details; as he puts it,'a romancer wants but a hair to make a
tether of. ' No such persons, for example, as Rashleigh, or Francis
Osbaldistone, or Miss Vernon, or her father, were associated in
the manner these persons are represented to have been with
any Jacobite rising; and, in addition, the whole financial story
on which the plot turns is hopelessly muddled. Further, Rob Roy,
a historical personage, never played any part in connection with
Jacobitism at all similar to that assigned him in the novel. Then,
in Waverley, the Fergus MacIvor whose ambitions occupy much
of our attention is a mere interpolation, and by no means a happy
portrait of a Highland chief; and, in Redgauntlet, the second
appearance of prince Charlie in the north of England is without
foundation either in fact or in tradition. Again, in The Abbot,
historic truth is even more wantonly violated violated after a


## p. 27 (#51) ##############################################

1]
27
Historical Inaccuracies
fashion that tends to bewilder the reader. While the Setons
were very devoted followers of queen Mary, the Henry Seton
and Catherine Seton of the novel are merely imaginary creations.
Although Mary Seton, one of the four Marys,' was sent for by the
queen to attend on her in England, and Lord Seton met her
shortly after her escape from Lochleven, no lady of the name
of Seton was in attendance on her in Lochleven castle. What
is worse, the Lady Mary Fleming, whom Scott represents as in
attendance on her there is apt to be confounded either with
Lady Fleming, who was the queen's governess in France, or
with Mary Fleming, one of the four Marys, who, by this time,
was the wife of Maitland of Lethington. Further, while Scott
may partly be excused for his version of the nature of the
pressure on the queen to cause her to demit her crown, he is
specially unfortunate in representing Sir Robert Melville as
deputed by the council to accompany Lord Lindsay on his
mission, though his presence, undoubtedly adds to the effective-
ness of the scene with the queen. Again, in Old Mortality, Scott
found it advisable, for artistic purposes, to place Henry Morton
in a more immediately dangerous position than could possibly
have been his; and, on the other hand, the indulged minister
Poundtext, whom he represents as seeking to exercise a moderating
influence in the council of the rebels, could not have been there,
since none of the indulged ministers took part in the rebellion.
Many minor errors of detail in his Scottish novels have also been
pointed out by critics; but the important matter is his mastery
of the multifarious characteristics of the period with which he
deals and his power to bring home to the reader its outstanding
peculiarities.
In the non-Scottish novels, and in Scottish novels of earlier
periods of history, the spirit of romance is the prevailing
element. Here, the portraiture of characters, except in the case
of main figures, is generally superficial. Such humorous or
eccentric personages as are introduced cannot compare with those
who, in the novels of the more modern periods, indulge in the
vernacular; they are a kind of hybrid creation, suggested, partly,
from the author's own observation and, partly, by books. In the
Scottish novels of the more modern periods, while the romance is
of a more homely kind, and has, also, for us, lost its freshness
in a manner that the earlier or the foreign element has not,
there is included, on the other hand, that immortal gallery of
Scottish characters to which allusion has already been made,
a


## p. 28 (#52) ##############################################

28
[CH.
Sir Walter Scott
and the creation of which—however highly his purely romantic
genius may be estimated—is the most unequivocal testimony
to his greatness.
Great as was the actual achievement of Scott, it has reasonably
been doubted whether he made the most of his extraordinary
endowments. It was hardly contributory to this that, though by
.
no means a poor man, he set himself with desperate eagerness
to enrich himself by literature. While he had a deep enthusiasm
for the literary vocation ; while the hours he spent in writing
were mostly hours of keen delight to him and he never apparently
deemed it a toil; yet, his social aspirations seem to have been
stronger than his literary ambition. As Lockhart states:
‘His first and last worldly ambition was himself to be the founder of a
distinct branch,' of the clan Scott; he desired to plant a lasting root, and
dreamt not of lasting fame, but of long distant generations rejoicing in the
name of “Scott of Abbotsford. ” By this idea all his reveries, all his aspira-
tions, all his plans and efforts were overshadowed and controlled. '
This ambition was the product of the same romantic sentiment
which was the original inspiration of his literary efforts. It was
not a mere vulgar striving for opulence and rank; it was associated
with peculiar border partialities and enthusiasms; to be other
than a border laird and chief and the founder of a new border
house had no charms for him. Still, excusable as his ambition
may have been, it was to have for him very woeful consequences.
.
Though, without this special incentive, he might not have exerted
himself so strenuously in literature as he did, he would have
escaped the pecuniary disasters in a herculean effort to remedy
which he overtaxed his brain and abruptly shortened his life; and,
if the absence of ulterior motives might have lessened his literary
production, its fruits might, in quality, have been considerably
bettered. True, rapidity of production was one of his special gifts.
It was rendered possible by his previous mastery of his materials
and the possession of a nervous system which it was almost im-
possible to tire; and, in his case, the emotional excitement of
creation almost demanded celerity of composition ; but it was not
incumbent on him to omit careful revision of his first drafts. Had
he not disdained this, many somewhat wearisome passages might
have been condensed, various errors or defects of style might
have been corrected, redundances might have been removed, incon-
sistencies weeded out and the plots more effectively adjusted.
How immensely he might have bettered the literary quality of
his novels by careful revision there is sufficient proof in that


## p. 29 (#53) ##############################################

1] Defects and Merits of of his
his Style 29
splendid masterpiece Wandering Willie's Tale, the manuscript
of which shows many important amendments.
While the carelessness of Scott is manifest in defects of con-
struction and in curious contradictions in small details, it is
more particularly apparent in the style of portions of merely
narrative or descriptive passages. Yet, with all its frequent
clumsiness, its occasional lapses into mere rodomontade, its
often loosely interwoven paragraphs, and its occasionally halting
grammar, his style is that of a great writer. Except when he
overburdens it with lore, legal or antiquarian, it sparkles with
interest, its phrases and epithets are often exceptionally happy,
and, in his more emotional or more strikingly imaginative passages,
he attains to an exceptional felicity of diction. This is the case
throughout Wandering Willie's Tale ; and the description of the
ghastly revellers in Redgauntlet castle beginning : There was
the fierce Middleton,' is unsurpassable in apt and graphic
phraseology. The farewell of Meg Merrilies to Ellangowan has,
also, been singled out by critics for special praise ; but many
of his purely descriptive passages are, likewise, wholly admirable.
Take, for example, the account of the gathering storm in The
Antiquary :
The disk of the sun became almost totally obscured ere he had altogether
sunk below the horizon, and an early and lurid shade of darkness blotted the
serene twilight of a summer evening, eto.
or the picture in The Abbot of the various personages and groups
that traversed the vestibule of Holyrood palace : ‘Here the
hoary statesman,' etc. ; or the description of the Glasgow mid-
night in Rob Roy:
Evening had now closed and the growing darkness gave to the broad, still
and deep expanse of the brimful river, first a hue sombre and uniform-then
a dismal and turbid appearance, partially lighted by a waning and pallid
moon, etc.
or the woodland scene in The Legend of Montrose, where
Dalgetty is pursued by the bloodhounds of the marquis of
Argyll :
The moon gleamed on the broken pathway and on the projecting cliffs of
rock round which it winded, its light intercepted here and there by the
branches of bushes and dwarf trees, which finding nourishment in the
crevices of the rocks, in places overshadowed the brow and ledge of the
precipice. Below a thick copsewood lay in deep and dark shadow, etc.
Passages such as these are common with Scott; and, as for his
dialogues, though, in the English, he occasionally lapses into curious


## p. 30 (#54) ##############################################

30
[CH. I
Sir Walter Scott
stiltednesses, the Scottish or semi-Scottish are invariably beyond
praise, both for their apt expressiveness, and their revelation of
character.
Necessarily, Scott's influence was felt more drastically in
Scotland than elsewhere. The enormous interest aroused there
by the publication of his poetic romances and then of his novels
we can now hardly realise. It quite outvied that immediately
caused by the poetry of Burns, who, to use Burns's own expression,
was less ‘respected' during his life than he gradually came to be
after his death. While some aspects of Scott's presentations of the
past called forth, at first, some protests from the stricter sectarians,
the general attitude towards them was that of enthusiastic appre-
ciation; and it is hardly possible to exaggerate their effect in
liberating Scotland from the trammels of social and religious
tradition. He did not, however, found a poetic school in Scot-
land. In England, he had various poetic imitators that are now
forgotten; and he had, further, a good deal to do with the
predominance of narrative in subsequent English verse. Byron,
also, was directly indebted to him in the case of his narrative
verse, and echoes of his method and manner are even to be found
in Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. In fiction, he may almost
be reckoned the founder of the historical romance, in which he has
had many successors, both in this country and abroad; and, if
Smollett was his predecessor in the Scottish novel, and is more
responsible than he for the earlier novels of Galt, Scott may
be deemed the originator of a pretty voluminous Scottish
romantic school, of which the most distinguished representative
is R. L. Stevenson ; while, with Smollett and Galt, he has been
the forerunner of a vernacular school of fiction which, within
late years, developed into a variety to which the term “kailyard'
has, with more or less appositeness, been applied. On the con-
tinent, Scott shared with Byron a vogue denied to all other
English writers except Shakespeare, and his influence was closely
interwoven with the romantic movement there, and, more especially,
with its progress in France.


## p. 31 (#55) ##############################################

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,


## p. 32 (#56) ##############################################

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


## p. 33 (#57) ##############################################

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.


## p. 34 (#58) ##############################################

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


## p. 35 (#59) ##############################################

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


## p. 36 (#60) ##############################################

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


## p. 37 (#61) ##############################################

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,


## p. 38 (#62) ##############################################

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


## p. 39 (#63) ##############################################

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


## p. 40 (#64) ##############################################

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
>


## p. 41 (#65) ##############################################

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


## p. 42 (#66) ##############################################

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


## p. 43 (#67) ##############################################

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
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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


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46
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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.


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48
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impenetrable.