Chapter III: Part 3

“In this idea originated the plan of the LYRICAL BALLADS; in which it
was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and
characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer
from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth
sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing
suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic
faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself
as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday and
to excite a feeling _analogous to the supernatural_, {103} by
awakening the mind’s attention to the lethargy of custom, and
directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before
us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the
film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not,
ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.

“With this view I wrote THE ANCIENT MARINER, and was preparing, among
other poems, THE DARK LADIE and the CHRISTABEL, in which I should
have more nearly have realised my ideal, than I had done in my first
attempt.”

Coleridge, when he wrote to Cottle offering him the _Lyrical Ballads_, affirms that “the volumes offered to you are, to a certain degree, _one work in kind_” {104a} (_Reminiscences_, p. 179); and Wordsworth declares, “I should not, however, have requested this assistance, had I not believed that the poems of my Friend would in a great measure _have the same tendency as my own_, {104b} and that though there would be found a difference, there would be found no discordance in the colours of our style; as our opinions on the subject of poetry do almost entirely coincide” (Preface to _Lyrical Ballads_, 1800).

It is a point carefully to be borne in mind that we have the explicit and contemporary authority of both poets that their aim was the same.

There are difficulties in the way of believing that _The Ancient Mariner_ was written for the _Lyrical Ballads_. It was planned in 1797 and was originally intended for a magazine. Nevertheless, it may be asserted that the purpose of _The Ancient Mariner_ and of _Christabel_ (which was originally intended for the _Ballads_) was, as their author said, _truth_, living truth. He was the last man in the world to care for a story simply as a chain of events with no significance, and in these poems the supernatural, by interpenetration with human emotions, comes closer to us than an event of daily life. In return the emotions themselves, by means of the supernatural expression, gain intensity. The texture is so subtly interwoven that it is difficult to illustrate the point by example, but take the following lines:—

“Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.

The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.

* * * *

The self-same moment I could pray:
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

* * * *

And the hay was white with silent light
Till rising from the same,
Full many shapes, that shadows were,
In crimson colours came.

A little distance from the prow
Those crimson shadows were:
I turned my eyes upon the deck—
Oh, Christ! what saw I there!

Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat,
And, by the holy rood!
A man all light, a seraph-man,
On every corse there stood.”

Coleridge’s marginal gloss to these last stanzas is “The angelic spirits leave the dead bodies, and appear in their own forms of light.”

Once more from _Christabel_:—

“The maid, alas! her thoughts are gone,
She nothing sees—no sight but one!
The maid, devoid of guile and sin,
I know not how, in fearful wise,
So deeply had she drunken in
That look, those shrunken serpent eyes,
That all her features were resigned
To this sole image in her mind:
And passively did imitate
That look of dull and treacherous hate.”

What Wordsworth intended we have already heard from Coleridge, and Wordsworth confirms him. It was, says the Preface of 1802, “to present ordinary things to the mind in an unusual way.” In Wordsworth the miraculous inherent in the commonplace, but obscured by “the film of familiarity,” is restored to it. This translation is effected by the imagination, which is not fancy nor dreaming, as Wordsworth is careful to warn us, but that power by which we see things as they are. The authors of _The Ancient Mariner_ and _Simon Lee_ are justified in claiming a common object. It is to prove that the metaphysical in Shakespeare’s sense of the word interpenetrates the physical, and serves to make us see and feel it.

Poetry, if it is to be good for anything, must help us to live. It is to this we come at last in our criticism, and if it does not help us to live it may as well disappear, no matter what its fine qualities may be. The help to live, however, that is most wanted is not remedies against great sorrows. The chief obstacle to the enjoyment of life is its dulness and the weariness which invades us because there is nothing to be seen or done of any particular value. If the supernatural becomes natural and the natural becomes supernatural, the world regains its splendour and charm. Lines may be drawn from their predecessors to Coleridge and the Wordsworths, but the work they did was distinctly original, and renewed proof was given of the folly of despair even when fertility seems to be exhausted. There is always a hidden conduit open into an unknown region whence at any moment streams may rush and renew the desert with foliage and flowers.

The reviews which followed the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_ were nearly all unfavourable. Even Southey discovered nothing in _The Ancient Mariner_ but “a Dutch attempt at German sublimity.” A certain learned pig thought it “the strangest story of a cock and bull that he ever saw on paper,” and not a single critic, not even the one or two who had any praise to offer, discerned the secret of the book. The publisher was so alarmed that he hastily sold his stock. Nevertheless Coleridge, Wordsworth, and his sister quietly went off to Germany without the least disturbance of their faith, and the _Ballads_ are alive to this day.

SOME NOTES ON MILTON

MUCH of the criticism on Milton, if not hostile, is apologetic, and it is considered quite correct to say we “do not care” for him. Partly this indifference is due to his Nonconformity. The “superior” Englishman who makes a jest of the doctrines and ministers of the Established Church always pays homage to it because it is _respectable_, and sneers at Dissent. Another reason why Milton does not take his proper place is that his theme is a theology which for most people is no longer vital. A religious poem if it is to be deeply felt must embody a living faith. The great poems of antiquity are precious to us in proportion to our acceptance, now, as fact, of what they tell us about heaven and earth. There are only a few persons at present who perceive that in substance the account which was given in the seventeenth century of the relation between man and God is immortal and worthy of epic treatment. A thousand years hence a much better estimate of Milton will be possible than that which can be formed to-day. We attribute to him mechanic construction in dead material because it is dead to ourselves. Even Mr. Ruskin who was far too great not to recognise in part at least Milton’s claims, says that “Milton’s account of the most important event in his whole system of the universe, the fall of the angels, is evidently unbelievable to himself; and the more so, that it is wholly founded on, and in a great part spoiled and degraded from, Hesiod’s account of the decisive war of the younger gods with the Titans. The rest of his poem is a picturesque drama, in which every artifice of invention is visibly and consciously employed; not a single fact being for an instant conceived as tenable by any living faith” (_Sesame and Lilies_, section iii.).

Mr. Mark Pattison, quoting part of this passage, remarks with justice, “on the contrary, we shall not rightly apprehend either the poetry or the character of the poet until we feel that throughout _Paradise Lost_, as in _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson_, Milton felt himself to be standing on the sure ground of fact and reality” (_English Men of Letters_—Milton, p. 186, ed. 1879).

St. Jude for ages had been sufficient authority for the angelic revolt, and in a sense it was a reasonable dogma, for although it did not explain the mystery of the origin of evil it pushed it a step further backwards, and without such a revolt the Christian scheme does not well hold together. So also with the entrance of the devil into the serpent. It is not expressly taught in any passage of the canonical Scriptures, but to the Church and to Milton it was as indisputable as the presence of sin in the world. Milton, I repeat, _believed_ in the framework of his poem, and unless we can concede this to him we ought not to attempt to criticise him. He was impelled to turn his religion into poetry in order to bring it closer to him. The religion of every Christian if it is real is a poem. He pictures a background of Holy Land scenery, and he creates a Jesus who continually converses with him and reveals to him much more than is found in the fragmentary details of the Gospels. When Milton goes beyond his documents he does not imagine for the purpose of filling up: the additions are expression.

Milton belonged to that order of poets whom the finite does not satisfy. Like Wordsworth, but more eminently, he was “powerfully affected” only by that “which is conversant with or turns upon infinity,” and man is to him a being with such a relationship to infinity that Heaven and Hell contend over him. Every touch which sets forth the eternal glory of Heaven and the scarcely subordinate power of Hell magnifies him. Johnson, whose judgment on Milton is unsatisfactory because he will not deliver himself sufficiently to beauty which he must have recognised, nevertheless says of the _Paradise Lost_, that “its end is to raise the thoughts above sublunary cares,” and this is true. The other great epic poems worthy to be compared with Milton’s, the Iliad, Odyssey, Æneid, and Divine Comedy, all agree in representing man as an object of the deepest solicitude to the gods or God. Milton’s conception of God is higher than Homer’s, Virgil’s, or Dante’s, but the care of the Miltonic God for his offspring is greater, and the profound truth unaffected by Copernican discoveries and common to all these poets is therefore more impressive in Milton than in the others.

There is nothing which the most gifted of men can create that is not mixed up with earth, and Milton, too, works it up with his gold. The weakness of the _Paradise Lost_ is not, as Johnson affirms, its lack of human interest, for the _Prometheus Bound_ has just as little, nor is Johnson’s objection worth anything that the angels are sometimes corporeal and at other times independent of material laws. Spirits could not be represented to a human mind unless they were in a measure subject to the conditions of time and space. The principal defect in _Paradise Lost_ is the justification which the Almighty gives of the creation of man with a liability to fall. It would have been better if Milton had contented himself with telling the story of the Satanic insurrection, of its suppression, of its author’s revenge, of the expulsion from Paradise, and the promise of a Redeemer. But he wanted to “justify the ways of God to man,” and in order to do this he thought it was necessary to show that man must be endowed with freedom of will, and consequently could not be directly preserved from yielding to the assaults of Satan.

_Paradise Regained_ comes, perhaps, closer to us than _Paradise Lost_ because its temptations are more nearly our own, and every amplification which Milton introduces is designed to make them more completely ours than they seem to be in the New Testament. It has often been urged against _Paradise Regained_ that Jesus recovered Paradise for man by the Atonement and not merely by resistance to the devil’s wiles, but inasmuch as Paradise was lost by the devil’s triumph through human weakness it is natural that _Paradise Regained_ should present the triumph of the Redeemer’s strength. It is this victory which proves Jesus to be the Son of God and consequently able to save us.

He who has now become incarnated for our redemption is that same Messiah who, when He rode forth against the angelic rebels,

“into terror chang’d
His count’nance too severe to be beheld,
And full of wrath bent on his enemies.”

It is He who

“on his impious foes right onward drove,
Gloomy as night:”

whose right hand grasped

“ten thousand thunders, which he sent
Before him, such as in their souls infix’d
Plagues.”

(_P. L._ vi. 824–38.)

Now as Son of Man he is confronted with that same Archangel, and he conquers by “strong sufferance.” He comes with no fourfold visage of a charioteer flashing thick flames, no eye which glares lightning, no victory eagle-winged and quiver near her with three-bolted thunder stored, but in “weakness,” and with this he is to “overcome satanic strength.”

Milton sees in the temptation to turn the stones into bread a devilish incitement to use miraculous powers and not to trust the Heavenly Father.

“Why dost thou then suggest to me distrust,
Knowing who I am, as I know who thou art?”

(_P. R._ i. 355–6.)

Finding his enemy steadfast, Satan disappears,

“bowing low
His gray dissimulation,”

(_P. R._ i. 497–8.)

and calls to council his peers. He disregards the proposal of Belial to attempt the seduction of Jesus with women. If he is vulnerable it will be to objects

“such as have more shew
Of worth, of honour, glory, and popular praise,
Rocks whereon greatest men have oftest wreck’d;
Or that which only seems to satisfy
Lawful desires of Nature, not beyond.”

(_P. R._ ii. 226–30.)

The former appeal is first of all renewed. “Tell me,” says Satan,

“‘if food were now before thee set
Would’st thou not eat?’ ‘Thereafter as I like
The giver,’ answered Jesus.”

(_P. R._ ii. 320–22.)

A banquet is laid, and Satan invites Jesus to partake of it.

“What doubts the Son of God to sit and eat?
These are not fruits forbidd’n.”

(_P. R._ ii. 368–9.)

But Jesus refuses to touch the devil’s meat—

“Thy pompous delicacies I contemn,
And count thy specious gifts no gifts, but guiles.”

(_P. R._ ii. 390–1.)

So they were, for at a word

“Both table and provision vanish’d quite,
With sound of harpies’ wings and talons heard.”

(_P. R._ ii. 402–3.)

If but one grain of that enchanted food had been eaten, or one drop of that enchanted liquor had been drunk, there would have been no Cross, no Resurrection, no salvation for humanity.

The temptation on the mountain is expanded by Milton through the close of the second book, the whole of the third and part of the fourth. It is a temptation of peculiar strength because it is addressed to an aspiration which Jesus has acknowledged.

“Yet this not all
To which my spirit aspir’d: victorious deeds
Flam’d in my heart, heroic acts.”

(_P. R._ i. 214–16.)

But he denies that the glory of mob-applause is worth anything.

“What is glory but the blaze of fame,
The people’s praise, if always praise unmixt?
And what the people but a herd confus’d,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol
Things vulgar, and, well weigh’d, scarce worth the praise?”

(_P. R._ iii. 47–51.)

To the Jesus of the New Testament this answer is, in a measure, inappropriate. He would not have called the people “a herd confus’d, a miscellaneous rabble.” But although inappropriate it is Miltonic. The devil then tries the Saviour with a more subtle lure, an appeal to duty.

“If kingdom move thee not, let move thee zeal
And duty; zeal and duty are not slow;
But on occasion’s forelock watchful wait.
They themselves rather are occasion best,
Zeal of thy father’s house, duty to free
Thy country from her heathen servitude.”

(_P. R._ iii. 171–6.)

But zeal and duty, the endeavour to hurry that which cannot and must not be hurried may be a suggestion from hell.

“If of my reign prophetic writ hath told
That it shall never end, so when begin
The Father in His purpose hath decreed.”

(_P. R._ iii. 184–6.)

Acquiescence, a conviction of the uselessness of individual or organised effort to anticipate what only slow evolution can bring, is characteristic of increasing years, and was likely enough to be the temper of Milton when he had seen the failure of the effort to make actual on earth the kingdom of Heaven. The temptation is developed in such a way that every point supposed to be weak is attacked. “You may be what you claim to be,” insinuates the devil, “but are rustic.”

“Thy life hath yet been private, most part spent
At home, scarce view’d the Galilean towns,
And once a year Jerusalem.”

(_P. R._ iii. 232–4.)

Experience and alliances are plausibly urged as indispensable for success. But Jesus knew that the sum total of a man’s power for good is precisely what of good there is in him and that if it be expressed even in the simplest form, all its strength is put forth and its office is fulfilled. To suppose that it can be augmented by machinery is a foolish delusion. The

“projects deep
Of enemies, of aids, battles and leagues,
Plausible to the world”

(_P. R._ iii. 395–3.)

are to the Founder of the kingdom not of this world “worth naught.” Another side of the mountain is tried. Rome is presented with Tiberius at Capreæ. Could it possibly be anything but a noble deed to

“expel this monster from his throne
Now made a sty, and in his place ascending,
A victor people free from servile yoke!”

(_P. R._ iv. 100–102.)

“_And with my help thou may’st_.” With the devil’s help and not without can this glorious revolution be achieved! “For him,” is the Divine reply, “I was not sent.” The attack is then directly pressed.

“The kingdoms of the world, to thee I give;
For, giv’n to me, I give to whom I please,
No trifle; yet with this reserve, not else,
On this condition, if thou wilt fall down
And worship me as thy superior lord.”

(_P. R._ iv. 163–7.)

This, then, is the drift and meaning of it all. The answer is taken verbally from the gospel.

“‘Thou shalt worship
The Lord thy God, and only Him shalt serve.’”

(_P. R._ iv. 176–7.)

That is to say, Thou shalt submit thyself to God’s commands and God’s methods and thou shalt submit thyself to _no other_.

Omitting the Athenian and philosophic episode, which is unnecessary and a little unworthy even of the Christian poet, we encounter not an amplification of the Gospel story but an interpolation which is entirely Milton’s own. Night gathers and a new assault is delivered in darkness. Jesus wakes in the storm which rages round Him. The diabolic hostility is open and avowed and He hears the howls and shrieks of the infernals. He cannot banish them though He is so far master of Himself that He is able to sit “unappall’d in calm and sinless peace.” He has to endure the hellish threats and tumult through the long black hours

“till morning fair
Came forth with pilgrim steps in amice gray,
Who with her radiant finger still’d the roar
Of thunder, chas’d the clouds, and laid the winds,
And grisly spectres, which the Fiend had rais’d
To tempt the Son of God with terrors dire.
But now the sun with more effectual beams
Had cheer’d the face of earth, and dri’d the wet
From drooping plant, or dropping tree; the birds,
Who all things now beheld more fresh and green,
After a night of storm so ruinous,
Clear’d up their choicest notes in bush and spray
To gratulate the sweet return of morn.”

(_P. R._ iv. 426–38.)

There is nothing perhaps in _Paradise Lost_ which possesses the peculiar quality of this passage, nothing which like these verses brings into the eyes the tears which cannot be repressed when a profound experience is set to music.

The temptation on the pinnacle occupies but a few lines only of the poem. Hitherto Satan admits that Jesus had conquered, but he had done no more than any wise and good man could do.

“Now show thy progeny; if not to stand,
Cast thyself down; safely, if Son of God;
For it is written, ‘He will give command
Concerning thee to His angels; in their hands
They shall uplift thee, lest at any time
Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone.’”

(_P. R._ iv. 554–9.)

The promise of Divine aid is made in mockery.

“To whom thus Jesus: ‘Also it is written,
Tempt not the Lord thy God.’ He said, and stood:
But Satan, smitten with amazement, fell.”

(_P. R._ iv. 560–2.)

It is not meant, “thou shalt not tempt _me_,” but rather, “it is not permitted me to tempt God.” In this extreme case Jesus depends on God’s protection. This is the devil’s final defeat and the seraphic company for which our great Example had refused to ask instantly surrounds and receives him. Angelic quires

“the Son of God, our Saviour meek,
Sung victor, and from heavenly feast refresh’t,
Brought on His way with joy; He unobserv’d,
Home to His mother’s house private return’d.”

(_P. R._ iv. 636–9.)

Warton wished to expunge this passage, considering it an unworthy conclusion. It is to be hoped that there are many readers of Milton who are able to see what is the value of these four lines, particularly of the last.

It is hardly necessary to say more in order to show how peculiarly Milton is endowed with that quality which is possessed by all great poets—the power to keep in contact with the soul of man.

THE MORALITY OF BYRON’S POETRY. “THE CORSAIR.”

[This is an abstract of an essay four times as long written many years ago. Although so much has been struck out, the substance is unaltered, and the conclusion is valid for the author now as then.]

BYRON above almost all other poets, at least in our day, has been set down as immoral. In reality he is moral, using the word in its proper sense, and he is so, not only in detached passages, but in the general drift of most of his poetry. We will take as an example “The Corsair.”

Conrad is not a debauched buccaneer. He was not—

“by Nature sent
To lead the guilty—guilt’s worst instrument.”

He had been betrayed by misplaced confidence.

“Doom’d by his very virtues for a dupe,
He cursed those virtues as the cause of ill,
And not the traitors who betray’d him still;
Nor deem’d that gifts bestow’d on better men
Had left him joy, and means to give again,
Fear’d—shunn’d—belied—ere youth had lost her force,
He hated man too much to feel remorse,
And thought the voice of wrath a sacred call,
To pay the injuries of some on all.”

Conrad was not, and could not be, mean and selfish. A selfish Conrad would be an absurdity. His motives are not gross—

“he shuns the grosser joys of sense,
His mind seems nourished by that abstinence.”

He is protected by a charm against undistinguishing lust—

“Though fairest captives daily met his eye,
He shunn’d, nor sought, but coldly pass’d them by;”

and even Gulnare, his deliverer, fails to seduce him.

Mr. Ruskin observes that Byron makes much of courage. It is Conrad, the leader, who undertakes the dangerous errand of surprising Seyd; it is he who determines to save the harem. His courage is not the mere excitement of battle. When he is captured—

“A conqueror’s more than captive’s air is seen,”

and he is not insensible to all fear.

“Each has some fear, and he who least betrays,
The only hypocrite deserving praise.

* * * * *

One thought alone he could not—dared not meet—
‘Oh, how these tidings will Medora greet?’”

Gulnare announces his doom to him, but he is calm. He cannot stoop even to pray. He has deserted his Maker, and it would be baseness now to prostrate himself before Him.

“I have no thought to mock his throne with prayer
Wrung from the coward crouching of despair;
It is enough—I breathe—and I can bear.”

He has no martyr-hope with which to console himself; his endurance is of the finest order—simple, sheer resolution, a resolve that with no reward, he will never disgrace himself. He knows what it is

“To count the hours that struggle to thine end,
With not a friend to animate, and tell
To other ears that death became thee well,”

but he does not break down.

Gulnare tries to persuade him that the only way by which he can save himself from tortures and impalement is by the assassination of Seyd, but he refuses to accept the terms—

“Who spares a woman’s seeks not slumber’s life”—

and dismisses her. When she has done the deed and he sees the single spot of blood upon her, he, the Corsair, is unmanned as he had never been in battle, prison, or by consciousness of guilt.

“But ne’er from strife—captivity—remorse—
From all his feelings in their inmost force—
So thrill’d—so shudder’d every creeping vein,
As now they froze before that purple stain.
That spot of blood, that light but guilty streak,
Had banish’d all the beauty from her cheek!”

The Corsair’s misanthropy had not destroyed him. Small creatures alone are wholly converted into spite and scepticism by disappointment and repulse. Those who are larger avenge themselves by devotion. Conrad’s love for Medora was intensified and exalted by his hatred of the world.

“Yes, it was Love—unchangeable—unchanged,
Felt but for one from whom he never ranged;”

and she was worthy of him, the woman who could sing—

“Deep in my soul that tender secret dwells,
Lonely and lost to light for evermore,
Save when to thine my heart responsive swells,
Then trembles into silence as before.

There, in its centre, a sepulchral lamp
Burns the slow flame, eternal—but unseen;
Which not the darkness of despair can damp,
Though vain its ray as it had never been.”

He finds Medora dead, and—

“his mother’s softness crept
To those wild eyes, which like an infant’s wept.”

If his crimes and love could be weighed in a celestial balance, weight being apportioned to the rarity and value of the love, which would descend?

The points indicated in Conrad’s character are not many, but they are sufficient for its delineation, and it is a moral character. We must, of course, get rid of the notion that the relative magnitude of the virtues and vices according to the priest or society is authentic. A reversion to the natural or divine scale has been almost the sole duty preached to us by every prophet. If we could incorporate Conrad with ourselves we should find that the greater part of what is worst in us would be neutralised. The sins of which we are ashamed, the dirty, despicable sins, Conrad could not have committed; and in these latter days they are perhaps the most injurious.

We do not understand how moral it is to yield unreservedly to enthusiasm, to the impression which great objects would fain make upon us, and to embody that impression in worthy language. It is rare to meet now even with young people who will abandon themselves to a heroic emotion, or who, if they really feel it, do not try to belittle it in expression. Byron’s poetry, above most, tempts and almost compels surrender to that which is beyond the commonplace self.

It is not true that “The Corsair” is insincere. He who hears a note of insincerity in Conrad and Medora may have ears, but they must be those of the translated Bottom who was proud of having “a reasonable good ear in music.” Byron’s romance has been such a power exactly because men felt that it was not fiction and that his was one of the strongest minds of his day. He was incapable of toying with the creatures of the fancy which had no relationship with himself and through himself with humanity.

A word as to Byron’s hold upon the people. He was able to obtain a hearing from ordinary men and women, who knew nothing even of Shakespeare, save what they had seen at the theatre. Modern poetry is the luxury of a small cultivated class. We may say what we like of popularity, and if it be purchased by condescension to popular silliness it is nothing. But Byron secured access to thousands of readers in England and on the Continent by strength and loveliness, a feat seldom equalled and never perhaps surpassed. The present writer’s father, a compositor in a dingy printing office, repeated verses from “Childe Harold” at the case. Still more remarkable, Byron reached one of this writer’s friends, an officer in the Navy, of the ancient stamp; and the attraction, both to printer and lieutenant, lay in nothing lower than that which was best in him. It is surely a service sufficient to compensate for many more faults than can be charged against him that wherever there was any latent poetic dissatisfaction with the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life he gave it expression, and that he has awakened in the _people_ lofty emotions which, without him, would have slept. The cultivated critics, and the refined persons who have _schrecklich viel gelesen_, are not competent to estimate the debt we owe to Byron.

BYRON, GOETHE, AND MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD

(_Reprinted_, _with corrections_, _by permission from the_ “_Contemporary Review_,” _August_, 1881.)

MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD has lately published a remarkable essay {133} upon Lord Byron. Mr. Arnold’s theory about Byron is, that he is neither artist nor thinker—that “he has no light, cannot lead us from the past to the future;” “the moment he reflects, he is a child;” “as a poet he has no fine and exact sense for word and structure and rhythm; he has not the artist’s nature and gifts.” The excellence of Byron mainly consists in his “sincerity and strength;” in his rhetorical power; in his “irreconcilable revolt and battle” against the political and social order of things in which he lived. “Byron threw himself upon poetry as his organ; and in poetry his topics were not Queen Mab, and the Witch of the Atlas, and the Sensitive Plant, they were the upholders of the old order, George the Third and Lord Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington and Southey, and they were the canters and tramplers of the great world, and they were his enemies and himself.”

Mr. Arnold appeals to Goethe as an authority in his favour. In order, therefore, that English people may know what Goethe thought about Byron I have collected some of the principal criticisms upon him which I can find in Goethe’s works. The text upon which Mr. Arnold enlarges is the remark just quoted which Goethe made about Byron to Eckermann: “_so bald er reflectirt ist er ein Kind_”—_as soon as he reflects he is a child_.

Goethe, it is true, did say this; but the interpretation of the saying depends upon the context, which Mr. Arnold omits. I give the whole passage, quoting from Oxenford’s translation of the _Eckermann Conversations_, vol. i. p. 198 (edition 1850):—

“‘Lord Byron,’ said Eckermann, ‘is no wiser when he takes ‘Faust’ to
pieces and thinks you found one thing here, the other there.’ ‘The
greater part of those fine things cited by Lord Byron,’ Goethe
replied, ‘I have never even read; much less did I think of them when
I was writing “Faust.” But Lord Byron is only great as a poet; as
soon as he reflects he is a child. He knows not how to help himself
against the stupid attacks of the same kind made upon him by his own
countrymen. He ought to have expressed himself more strongly against
them. ‘What is there is mine,’ he should have said, ‘and whether I
got it from a book or from life is of no consequence; the only point
is, whether I have made a right use of it.’ Walter Scott used a
scene from my ‘Egmont,’ and he had a right to do so; and because he
did it well, he deserves praise.’”

Goethe certainly does not mean that Byron was unable to reflect in the sense in which Mr. Arnold interprets the word. What was really meant we shall see in a moment.

We will, however, continue the quotations from the _Eckermann_:—

“We see how the inadequate dogmas of the Church work upon a free mind
like Byron’s and how by such a piece (‘Cain’) he struggles to get rid
of a doctrine which has been forced upon him” (vol. i. p. 129).

“The world to him was transparent, and he could paint by way of
anticipation” (vol. i. p. 140).

“That which I call invention I never saw in any one in the world to a
greater degree than in him” (vol. i. p. 205).

“Lord Byron is to be regarded as a man, as an Englishman, and as a
great talent. His good qualities belong chiefly to the man, his bad
to the Englishman and the peer, his talent is incommensurable. All
Englishmen are, as such, without reflection properly so-called;
distractions and party-spirit will not permit them to perfect
themselves in quiet. But they are great as practical men. Thus,
Lord Byron could never attain reflection on himself, and on this
account his maxims in general are not successful. . . . But where he
will create, he always succeeds; and we may truly say that, with him,
inspiration supplies the place of reflection. He was always obliged
to go on poetizing, and then everything that came from the man,
especially from his heart, was excellent. He produced his best
things, as women do pretty children, without thinking about it, or
knowing how it was done. He is a great talent, a born talent, and I
never saw the true poetical power greater in any man than in him. In
the apprehension of external objects, and a clear penetration into
past situations, he is quite as great as Shakespeare. But as a pure
individuality, Shakespeare is his superior” (vol. i. p. 209).

We see now what Goethe means by “reflection.” It is the faculty of self-separation, or conscious _consideration_, a faculty which would have enabled Byron, as it enabled Goethe, to reply successfully to a charge of plagiarism. It is not thought in its widest sense, nor creation, and it has not much to do with the production of poems of the highest order—the poems that is to say, which are written by the impersonal thought.

But again—

“The English may think of Byron as they please; but this is certain,
that they can show no poet who is to be compared to him. He is
different from all the others, and for the most part, greater” (vol.
i. p. 290).

This passage is one which Mr. Arnold quotes, and he strives to diminish its importance by translating _der ihm zu vergleichen wäre_, by “who is his parallel,” and maintains that Goethe “was not so much thinking of the strict rank, as poetry, of Byron’s production; he was thinking of that wonderful personality of Byron which so enters into his poetry.” It is just possible; but if Goethe did think this, he used words which are misleading, and if the phrase _der ihm zu vergleichen wäre_ simply indicates parallelism, it has no point, for in that sense it might have been applied to Scott or to Southey.

“I have read once more Byron’s ‘Deformed Transformed,’ and must say
that to me his talent appears greater than ever. His devil was
suggested by my Mephistopheles; but it is no imitation—it is
thoroughly new and original; close, genuine, and spirited. There are
no weak passages—not a place where you could put the head of a pin,
where you do not find _invention and thought_ [italics mine]. Were
it not for his hypochondriacal negative turn, he would be as great as
Shakespeare and the ancients” (vol. i. p. 294).

Eckermann expressed his surprise. “Yes,” said Goethe, “you may believe me, I have studied him anew and am confirmed in this opinion.” The position which Byron occupies in the Second Part of “Faust” is well known. Eckermann talked to Goethe about it, and Goethe said, “I could not make use of any man as the representative of the modern poetical era except him, who undoubtedly is to be regarded as the greatest genius of our century” (vol. i. p. 425). Mr. Arnold translates this word “genius” by “talent.” The word in the original is _talent_, and I will not dispute with so accomplished a German scholar as Mr. Arnold as to what is the precise meaning of _talent_. In both the English translations of Eckermann the word is rendered “genius,” and after the comparison between Byron, Shakespeare, and the ancients just quoted, we can hardly admit that Goethe meant to distinguish scientifically between the two orders of intellect and to assign the lower to Byron.

But, last of all, I will translate Goethe’s criticism upon “Cain.” So far as I know, it has not yet appeared in English. It is to be found in the Stuttgart and Tübingen edition of Goethe, 1840, vol. xxxiii. p. 157. Some portions which are immaterial I have omitted:—

“After I had listened to the strangest things about this work for
almost a year, I at last took it myself in hand, and it excited in me
astonishment and admiration; an effect which will produce in the mind
which is simply susceptible, everything good, beautiful, and great. .
. . The poet who, surpassing the limit of all our conceptions, has
penetrated with burning spiritual vision the past and present, and
consequently the future, has now subdued new regions under his
limitless talent, but what he will accomplish therein can be
predicted by no human being. His procedure, however, we can
nevertheless in a measure more closely determine. He adheres to the
letter of the Biblical tradition, for he allows the first pair of
human beings to exchange their original purity and innocence for a
guilt mysterious in its origin; the punishment which is its
consequence descending upon all posterity. The monstrous burden of
such an event he lays upon the shoulders of Cain as the
representative of a wretched humanity, plunged for no fault of its
own into the depths of misery.

“To this primitive son of man, bowed down and heavily burdened,
death, which as yet he has not seen, is an especial trouble; and
although he may desire the end of his present distress, it seems
still more hateful to exchange it for a condition altogether unknown.
Hence we already see that the full weight of a dogmatic system,
explaining, mediating, yet always in conflict with itself, just as it
still for ever occupies us, was imposed on the first miserable son of
man. These contradictions, which are not strange to human nature,
possessed his mind, and could not be brought to rest, either through
the divinely-given gentleness of his father and brother, or the
loving and alleviating co-operation of his sister-wife. In order to
sharpen them to the point of impossibility of endurance, Satan comes
upon the scene, a mighty and misleading spirit, who begins by
unsettling him morally, and then conducts him miraculously through
all worlds, causing him to see the past as overwhelmingly vast, the
present as small and of no account, and the future as full of
foreboding and void of consolation.

“So he turns back to his own family, more excited, but not worse than
before; and finding in the family circle everything as he has left
it, the urgency of Abel, who wishes to make him offer a sacrifice,
becomes altogether insupportable. More say we not, excepting that
the motivation of the scene in which Abel perishes is of the rarest
excellence, and what follows is equally great and priceless. There
now lies Abel! That now is Death—there was so much talk about it,
and man knows about it as little as he did before.

“We must not forget, that through the whole piece there runs a kind
of presentiment of a Saviour, so that the poet at this point, as well
as in all others, has known how to bring himself near to the ideas by
which we explain things, and to our modes of faith.

“Of the scene with the parents, in which Eve at last curses the
speechless Cain, which our western neighbour lifts into such striking
prominence, there remains nothing more for us to say: we have to
approach the conclusion with astonishment and reverence.

“With regard to this conclusion, an intelligent and fair friend,
related to us through esteem for Byron, has asserted that everything
religious and moral in the world was put into the last three words of
the piece.” {143}

We have now heard enough from Goethe to prove that Mr. Arnold’s interpretation of “_so bald er reflectirt ist er ein Kind_” is not Goethe’s interpretation of Byron. It is to be remembered that Goethe was not a youth overcome by Mr. Arnold’s “vogue” when he read Byron. He was a singularly self-possessed old man.

Many persons will be inclined to think that Goethe, so far from putting Byron on a lower level than that usually assigned to him, has over-praised him, and will question the “burning spiritual vision” which the great German believed the great Englishman to possess. But if we consider what Goethe calls the “motivation” of Cain; if we reflect on what the poet has put into the legend; on the exploration of the universe with Lucifer as a guide; on its result, on the mode in which the death of Abel is reached; on the doom of the murderer—the limitless wilderness henceforth and no rest; on the fidelity of Adah, who, with the true instinct of love, separates between the man and the crime; on the majesty of the principal character, who stands before us as the representative of the insurgence of the human intellect, so that, if we know him, we know a whole literature; if we meditate hereon, we shall say that Goethe has not exaggerated. It is the same with the rest of Byron’s dramas. Over and above the beauty of detached passages, there is in each one of them a large and universal meaning, or rather meaning within meaning, precisely the same for no reader, but none the less certain, and as inexhaustible as the meanings of Nature. This is one reason why the wisdom of a selection from Byron is so doubtful. The worth of “Cain,” of “Sardanapalus,” of “Manfred,” of “Marino Faliero,” is the worth of an outlook over the sea; and we cannot take a sample of the scene from a cliff by putting a pint of water into a bottle. But Byron’s critics and the compilers tell us of failures, which ought not to survive, and that we are doing a kindness to him if we suppress these and exhibit him at his best. No man who seriously cares for Byron will assent to this doctrine. We want to know the whole of him, his weakness as well as his strength; for the one is not intelligible without the other. A human being is an indivisible unity, and his weakness _is_ his strength, and his strength _is_ his weakness.

It is not my object now, however, to justify what Mr. Arnold calls the Byronic “superstition.” I hope I could justify a good part of it, but this is not the opportunity. I cannot resist, however, saying a word by way of conclusion on the manner in which Byron has fulfilled what seems to me one of the chief offices of the poet. Mr. Arnold, although he is so dissatisfied with Byron because he “cannot reflect,” would probably in another mood admit that “reflections” are not what we demand of a poet. We do not ask of him a rhymed book of proverbs. He should rather be the articulation of what in Nature is great but inarticulate. In him the thunder, the sea, the peace of morning, the joy of youth, the rush of passion, the calm of old age, should find words, and men should through him become aware of the unrecognised wealth of existence. Byron had the power above most poets of acting as a kind of tongue to Nature. His descriptions are on everybody’s lips, and it is superfluous to quote them. He represented things not as if they were aloof from him, but as if they were the concrete embodiment of his soul. The woods, the wilds, the waters of Nature are to him—

“the intense
Reply of _hers_ to our intelligence.”

His success is equally marked when he portrays men or women whose character attracts him. Take, for example, the girl in “The Island”:—

“The sunborn blood suffused her neck, and threw
O’er her clear nutbrown skin a lucid hue,
Like coral reddening through the darken’d wave,
Which draws the diver to the crimson cave.
Such was this daughter of the southern seas,
_Herself a billow in her energies_.

* * * * *

Her smiles and tears had pass’d, as light winds pass
O’er lakes to ruffle, not destroy, their glass,
_Whose depths unsearch’d_, _and fountains from the hill_,
_Restore their surface_, _in itself so still_.”

Passages like these might be quoted without end from Byron, and they explain why he is and must be amongst the immortals. He may have been careless in expression; he may have been a barbarian and not a εύφυής, as Mr. Matthew Arnold affirms, but he was _great_. This is the word which describes him. He was a mass of living energy, and therefore he is sanative. Energy, power, is the one thing after which we pine in this sickly age. We do not want carefully and consciously constructed poems of mosaic. Strength is what we need and what will heal us. Strength is true morality, and true beauty. It is the strength in Byron that falsifies the accusation of affectation and posing, which is brought against him. All that is meant by affectation and posing was a mere surface trick. The real man, Byron, and his poems are perfectly unconscious, as unconscious as the wind. The books which have lived and always will live have this unconsciousness in them, and what is manufactured, self-centred, and self-contemplative will perish. The world’s literature is the work of men, who, to use Byron’s own words—

“Strip off this fond and false identity;”

who are lost in their object, who write because they cannot help it, imperfectly or perfectly, as the case may be, and who do not sit down to fit in this thing and that thing from a commonplace book. Many novelists there are who know their art better than Charlotte Brontë, but she, like Byron—and there are more points of resemblance between them than might at first be supposed—is imperishable because she speaks under overwhelming pressure, self-annihilated, we may say, while the spirit breathes through her. The Byron “vogue” will never pass so long as men and women are men and women. Mr. Arnold and the critics may remind us of his imperfections of form, but Goethe is right after all, for not since Shakespeare have we had any one _der ihm zu vergleichen wäre_.

A SACRIFICE

A FATAL plague devastated the city. The god had said that it would continue to rage until atonement for a crime had been offered by the sacrifice of a man. He was to be perfect in body; he must not desire to die because he no longer loved life, or because he wished for fame. A statue must not be erected to his memory; no poem must be composed for him; his name must not appear in the city’s records.

A few volunteers presented themselves, but none of them satisfied all the conditions. At last a young man came who had served as the model for the image of the god in his temple. There was no question, therefore, of soundness of limb, and when he underwent the form of examination no spot nor blemish was found on him. The priest asked him whether he was in trouble, and especially whether he was disappointed in love. He said he was in no trouble; that he was betrothed to a girl to whom he was devoted, and that they had intended to be married that month. “I am,” he declared, “the happiest man in the city.” The priest doubted and watched him that evening, but he saw him walking side by side with this girl, and the two were joyous as a youth and a maiden ought to be in the height of their passion. She sat down and sang to him he played to her, and they embraced one another tenderly at parting.

The next morning was the day on which he was to be slain. There was an altar in front of the temple, and a great crowd assembled, ranked round the open space. At the appointed hour the priest appeared, and with him was the youth, holding his beloved by the hand, but she was blindfolded. He let go her hand, knelt down, and in a moment the sacrificial knife was drawn across his throat. His body was placed upon the wood, and the priest was about to kindle it when a flash from heaven struck it into a blaze with such heat that when the fire dropped no trace of the victim remained. The girl, too, had disappeared, and was never seen again.

In accordance with the god’s decree, no statue was erected, no poem was composed, and no entry was made in the city records. But tradition did not forget that the saviour of the city was he who survived in the great image on which the name of the god was inscribed.

THE AGED TREE

AN aged tree, whose companions had gone, having still a little sap in its bark and a few leaves which grew therefrom, prayed it might see yet another spring. Its prayer was granted: and spring came, but the old tree had no leaves save one or two near the ground, and a great fungus fixed itself on its trunk. It had a dull life in its roots, but not enough to know that its moss and fungus were not foliage. It stood there, an unlovely mass of decay, when the young trees were all bursting. “That rotten thing,” said the master, “ought to have been cut down long ago.”

CONSCIENCE

“CONSCIENCE,” said I, “her conscience would have told her.”

“Yes,” said my father. “The strongest amongst the many objections to the Roman Catholic doctrine of confession is that it weakens our dependence on the conscience. If we seek for an external command to do what ought to be done in obedience to that inward monitor, whose voice is always clear if we will but listen, its authority will gradually be lost, and in the end it will cease to speak.”