Chapter VII: Part 7

In the welling up, out of the world's depths, of happiness like this, there is a sense of calm, of serenity, of immortal repose and full-brimmed ecstasy. It is the "energy without disturbance" which Aristotle indicates as the secret of the life of the eternal Being himself. It is beyond the ordinary pleasures of sex, as it is beyond the ordinary difference between good and evil. It is human and yet inhuman. It is the happiness of da Vinci, of Spinoza, of Goethe. It is the happiness towards which Nietzsche all his life long struggled desperately, and struggled in vain.

One touches the fringe of the very mystery of human symbols--of the uttermost secret of _words_ in their power to express the soul of a writer--when one attempts to analyse the child-like simplicity of William Blake's style. How is it that he manages with so small, so limited a vocabulary, to capture the very "music of the spheres"? We all have the same words at our command; we all have the same rhymes; where then lies this strange power that can give the simplest syllables so original, so personal, a shape?

"What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?"

Just because his materials are so simple and so few--and this applies to his plastic art as well as to his poetry--we are brought to pause more sharply and startlingly in his case than that of almost any other, before the primordial mystery of human expression and its malleableness under the impact of personality. Probably no poet ever lived who expressed his meaning by the use of such a limited number of words, or of words so simple and childish. It is as though William Blake had actually transformed himself into some living incarnation of his own Virgilian child-saviour, and were stammering his oracles to mankind through divine baby-lips.

What matter? It is the one and the same Urbs Beata, Calliopolis, Utopia, New Rome, New Atlantis, which these child-like syllables announce, trumpet heralded by the angels of the Revelation, chanted by the high-souled Mantuan, sung by David the King, or shouted "over the roofs of the world" by Walt Whitman.

It is the same mystery, the same hope for the human race.

"I will not cease from mental strife
Nor shall my sword sink from my hand
Till I have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant Land!"

One of the most curious and interesting things in Blake's work is the value he places upon tears. All his noble mythological figures, gathering in verse after verse, for the great battle against brutality and materialism, come "weeping" to the help of their outraged little ones. Gods and beasts, lions and lambs, Christ and Lucifer, fairies and angels, all come "weeping" into the struggle with the forces of stupidity and tyranny.

He seems to imply that to have lost the power of shedding tears is to have dehumanized oneself and put oneself outside the pale. "A tear is an intellectual thing," and those who still have the power of "weeping" have not quite lost the key to the wisdom of the eternal gods. It is not only the mysterious and foreordained congruity of rhyme that leads him to associate in poem after poem--until for the vulgar mind, the repetition becomes almost ludicrous--this symbolic "weeping" with the sweet sleep which it guards and which it brings.

The poet of the veiled child at the heart of the world is naturally a poet of the mystery of tears and the mystery of sleep. And William Blake becomes all this without the least tincture of sentimentality. That is where his genius is most characteristic and admirable. He can come chanting his strange gnomic tunes upon tears and upon sleep, upon the loveliness of children, upon life and death, upon the wonder of dews and clouds and rain and the soft petals of flowers which these nourish, without--even for one moment--falling into sentiment or pathos.

All through his strange and turbulent life he was possessed of the power of splendid and terrible anger. His invectives and vituperations bite and flay like steel whips. The "buyers and sellers" in the temple of his Lord are made to skip and dance. He was afraid of no man living--nor of any man's god.

Working with his own hands, composing his poems, illustrating them, engraving them, printing them, and binding them in his own workshop, he was in a position to make Gargantuan sport of the "great" and the "little" vulgar.

He went his own way and lived as he pleased; having something about him of that shrewd, humorous, imperturbable "insouciance" which served Walt Whitman so well, and which is so much wiser, kindlier and more human a shield for an artist's freedom, than the sarcasms of a Whistler or the insolence of a Wilde.

Careless and nonchalant, he "travelled the open road," and gave all obscurantists and oppressors to ten million cart-loads of horned devils!

It is my privilege to live, on the South Coast, not so many miles from that village of Felpham where he once saw in his child-like fantasies, a fairy's funeral. That funeral must have been followed after Blake's death by many others; for there are no fairies in Felpham now. But Blake's cottage is there still--to be seen by any who care to see it--and the sands by the sea's edge are the "yellow sands," flecked with white foam and bright green sea-weed of Ariel's song; and on the sea-banks above grow tufts of Homeric Tamarisk.

It is astonishing to think that while the laconic George Crabbe, "Nature's sternest painter," was writing his rough couplets in the metre of Alexander Pope, and while Doctor Johnson was still tapping the posts of his London streets, as he went his way to buy oysters for his cat, William Blake--in mind and imagination a contemporary of Nietzsche and Whitman--should have been asserting the artist's right (why should we not say the individual's right, artist or no artist?) to live as he pleases, according to the morals, manners, tastes, inclination and caprices, of his own absolute humour and fancy.

This was more than one hundred years ago. What would William Blake think of our new world,--would it seem to him to resemble his New Jerusalem of child-like happiness and liberty?--our world where young ladies are fined five dollars if they go into the sea without their stockings? Well! at Felpham they do not tease them with stockings.

What makes the genius of William Blake so salutary a revolutionary influence is the fact that while contending so savagely against puritanical stupidity, he himself preserves to the end, his guilelessness and purity of heart.

There are admirable writers and philosophers, whose work on behalf of the liberation of humanity is rendered less disinterested by the fact that they are fighting for their personal inclinations rather than for the happiness of the world at large. This could never be said of William Blake. A more unselfish devotion to the spiritual interests of the race than that which inspired him from beginning to end could hardly be imagined. But he held it as axiomatic that the spiritual interests of the race can only be genuinely served by means of the intellectual and moral freedom of the individual. And certainly in his own work we have a beautiful and anarchical freedom.

No writer or artist ever succeeded in expressing more completely the texture and colour of his thoughts. Those strange flowing-haired old men who reappear so often in his engravings, like the "splendid and savage old men" of Walt Whitman's fancy, seem to incorporate the very swing and sweep of his elemental earth-wrestling; while those long-limbed youths and maidens, almost suggestive of El Greco in the way their bodies are made, yearn and leap upwards towards the clear air and the cloudless blue sky, in a passion of tumultuous escape, in an ecstasy of resurrection.

It is extraordinary how Blake's peculiar use of very simple rhymes, with the same words repeated over and over again, enhances the power of his poetry--it does more than enhance it--it is the body of its soul. One approaches here the very mystery of style, in the poetic medium, and some of its deepest secrets. Just as that "metaphysic in sensuality" which is the dominant impulse in the genius of Remy de Gourmont expresses itself in constant echoes and reiterated liturgical repetitions--such as his famous "fleur hypocrite, fleur du silence"--until one feels that the "refrain" in poetry has become, in an especial sense, his predominant note, so these constantly recurring rhymes in the work of Blake, coming at the end of very short lines, convey, as nothing else could do, the child-like quality of the spirit transfused through them. They are childlike; and yet they could not have been written by any one but a grown man, and a man of formidable strength and character.

The psychology of the situation is doubtless the same as that which we remark in certain very modern artists--the ones whose work is most of all bewildering to those who, in their utter inability to become as "little children," are as completely shut out from the kingdom of art as they are from the kingdom of heaven.

The curious spell which these simple and in some cases infantile rhymes cast over us, ought to compel the more fanatical adherents of "free verse" to rearrange their ideas. Those who, without any prejudice one way or the other, are only anxious to enjoy to the full every subtle pleasure which the technique of art is able to give, cannot help finding in the unexpected thrill produced by these sweet, soft vibrations of verbal melody--like the sound of a golden bell rung far down under the humming waters--a direct revelation of the tender, strong soul behind them, for whose hidden passion they find a voice.

After all, it is in the final impression produced upon our senses and intellect by a great artist, and not in any particular quality of a particular work of art, that--unless we are pedantic virtuosos--we weigh and judge what we have gained. And what we have gained by William Blake cannot be over-estimated.

His poems seem to associate themselves with a thousand evanescent memories of days when we have been happy beyond the power of calamity or disappointment. They associate themselves with those half-physical, half-spiritual trances--when, suddenly in the outskirts of a great city perhaps, or on the banks of some inland river, we have remembered the long line of breaking surf, and the murmurs and the scents of the sea. They associate themselves with the dreamy indescribable moments when crossing the wet grass of secluded misty meadows, passing the drowsy cattle and the large cool early morning shadows thrown by the trees, we have suddenly come upon cuckoo flowers or marigolds, every petal of which seems burdened with a mystery almost intolerably sweet.

Like the delicate pictures of early Italian art, the poems of Blake indicate and suggest rather than exhaust or satiate. One is never oppressed by too heavy a weight of natural beauty. A single tree against the sky--a single shadow upon the pathway--a single petal fallen on the grass; these are enough to transport us to those fields of light and "chambers of the sun" where the mystic dance of creation still goes on; these are enough to lead us to the hushed dew-drenched lawns where the Lord God walks in the garden "in the cool of the day."

One associates the poetry of William Blake, not with the mountain peaks and gorgeous foliage and rushing torrents of a landscape that clamours to be admired and would fain overpower us with its picturesque appeal, but with the quietest, gentlest, softest, least assuming background to that "going forth" to our work, "and our labour until the evening," which is the normal destiny of man.

The pleasant fields of Felpham with their hawthorne hedges, the little woods of Hertfordshire or Surrey with their patches of bluebells, were all that he needed to set him among the company of the eternal gods.

For this is the prerogative of imagination, that it can reconcile us to life where life is simplest and least adorned; and this is the reluctance and timidity of imagination that it shrinks away into twilight and folds its wings, when the pressure of reality is too heavy, and the materials of beauty too oppressive and tyrannous.

BYRON

It is in a certain sense a lamentable indictment upon the sheepishness and inertness of the average crowd that a figure like that of Byron should have been so exceptional in his own day and should be so exceptional still. For, godlike rascal as he was, he was made of quite normal stuff.

There was nothing about him of that rare magical quality which separates such poets as Shelley or Edgar Allan Poe or Paul Verlaine from the mass of ordinary people. The Byronic type, as it is called, has acquired a certain legendary glamour; but it is nothing, when we come really to analyse it, but the universal type of vain, impetuous, passionate youth, asserting itself with royal and resplendent insolence in defiance of the cautious discretion of middle-aged conventions.

Youth is essentially Byronic when it is natural and fearless and strong; and it is a melancholy admission of something timid and sluggish in us all that we should speak "with bated breath and whispering humbleness" of this brilliant figure. A little more courage, a little less false modesty, a little more sincerity, and the lambs of our democratic age would all show something of that leonine splendour.

There is nothing in Byron so far above the commonplace that he is out of the reach of average humanity. He is made of the same clay as we all are made of. His vanity is our vanity, his pride our pride, his vices our vices.

We are on the common earth with him; on the natural ground of our normal human infirmities; and if he puts us to shame it is only because he has the physical force and the moral courage to be himself more audaciously and frankly than we dare to be.

His genius is no rare hot-house flower. It is no wild and delicate plant growing in a remote and inhuman soil. It is simply the intensification, to a point of fine poetic fury, of emotions and attitudes and gestures which we all share under the pressure of the spirit of youth.

It is for this reason--for the reason that he expressed so completely in his wayward and imperious manner the natural feelings of normal youthfulness--that he became in his own day so legendary and symbolic a personage, and that he has become in ours a sort of flaming myth. He would never have become all this; he would never have stirred the fancy of the masses of people as he has; if there were not in his temperament something essentially simple, human, and within the comprehension of quite ordinary minds.

It might indeed be maintained that what Oscar Wilde is to the rarer and more perverse minority, Byron is to the solid majority of downright simple philistines.

The average British or American "plain blunt man" regards, and always will regard, such writers as Shelley and Poe and Verlaine and Wilde with a certain uneasy suspicion. These great poets must always seem to him a little weird and morbid and apart from common flesh and blood. He will be tempted to the end to use in reference to them the ambiguous word "degenerate." They strike him as alien and remote. They seem to have no part or lot in the world in which he lives. He suspects them of being ingrained immoralists and free-lovers. Their names convey to his mind something very sinister, something dangerous to the foundations of society.

But the idea of Byron brings with it quite different associations. The sins of Byron seem only a splendid and poetic apotheosis of such aperson's own sins. The rebelliousness of Byron seems a rebelliousness not so much deliberate and intellectual as instinctive and impulsive. It seems a normal revolt against normal restrictions. The ordinary man understands it and condones it, remembering the fires of his own youth.

Besides, Byron was a lord.

Goethe declared to Eckermann that what irritated many people against Byron was the power and pride of his personality--the fact that his personality stood out in so splendid and emphatic a way.

Goethe was right. The brilliance of Byron's personality is a thing which causes curious annoyance to certain types of mind. But these minds are not the normal ones of common intelligence. They are minds possessed of the sort of intellectual temper naturally antagonistic to reckless youth. They are the Carlyles and the Merediths of that spiritual and philosophical vision to which the impassioned normality of Byron with his school-boy ribaldry must always appear ridiculous.

I believe it will be found that those to whom the idea of Byron's brilliant and wayward personality brings exquisite pleasure are, in the first place, quite simple minds, and, in the second place, minds of a disillusioned and un-ethical order who have grown weary of "deep spiritual thinkers," and are ready to enjoy, as a refreshing return to the primitive emotions, this romantic swashbucklerism which proves so annoying to earnest modern thought.

How like a sudden reverberation of the old immortal spirit of romance, the breath of whose saddest melancholy seems sweeter than our happiness, is that clear-toned song of passion's exhaustion which begins

"We'll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon"

and which contains that magnificent verse,

"For the sword outwears the sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest."

It is extraordinary the effect which poetry of this kind has upon us when we come upon it suddenly, after a long interval, in the crowded pages, say, of some little anthology.

I think the pleasure which it gives us is due to the fact that it is so entirely sane and normal and natural; so solidly and massively within the circle of our average apprehension; so expressive of what the common flesh and blood of our elemental humanity have come to feel as permanent in their passions and reactions. It gives us a thrilling shock of surprise when we come upon it unexpectedly--this kind of thing; the more so because the poetry we have grown accustomed to, in our generation, is so different from this; so mystical and subjective, so remote from the crowd, so dim with the trailing mists of fanciful ambiguity.

It is very unfortunate that one "learned by heart," as a child, so much of Byron's finest poetry.

I cannot imagine a more exciting experience than a sudden discovery at this present hour, with a mind quite new and fresh to its resounding grandeur, of that poem, in the Hebrew Melodies, about Sennacherib.

"And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee."

Have not those lines the very wonder and terror and largeness of ancient wars?

"And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
And thro' it there rolled not the breath of his pride,
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf!"

Our modern poets dare not touch the sublime naïveté of poetry like that! Their impressionist, imagist, futurist theories make them too self-conscious. They say to themselves--"Is that word a 'cliché' word? Has that phrase been used several times before? Have I been carefully and precisely _original_ in this? Is that image clear-cut enough? Have I reverted to the 'magic' of Verlaine and Mallarmé and Mr. Yeats? Do I suggest the 'cosmic emotion' of Walt Whitman'?"

It is this terror of what they call "cliché words" which utterly prevents them from writing poetry which goes straight to our heart like Byron's; poetry which refreshes our jaded epicurean senses with a fine renaissance of youth.

Their art destroys them. Their art enslaves them. Their art lames and cripples them with a thousand meticulous scruples.

Think what it would be, in this age, suddenly to come upon a poet who could write largely and carelessly, and with a flaming divine fire, about the huge transactions of life; about love and war and the great throbbing pulses of the world's historic events! They cannot do it--our poets--they cannot do it; and the reason of their inability is their over-intellectuality, their heavily burdened artistic conscience. They are sedentary people, too, most unhealthily sedentary, ourmoderns who write verse; sedentary young people, whose environment is the self-conscious Bohemia of artificial Latin Quarters. They are too clever, too artistic, too egotistic. They are too afraid of one another; too conscious of the derisive flapping of the goose-wings of the literary journal! They are not proud enough in their personal individuality to send the critics to the devil and go their way with a large contempt. They set themselves to propitiate the critics by the wit of technical novelty and to propitiate their fellow craftsmen by avoiding the inspiration of the past.

They do not write poetry for the pleasure of writing it. They write poetry in order that they may be called poets. They aim at originality instead of sweeping boldly ahead and being content to be themselves as God made them.

I am strongly of opinion that much of the admiration lavished on these versifiers is not due to our enjoyment of the poetry which they write--not, I mean, of the sheer poetic elements in it--but to our interest in the queer words they dig up out of the archives of philological bric-à-brac, to our astonishment at their erotic extravagances, to our satisfaction at being reminded of all the superior shibboleths of artistic slang, the use of which and the understanding of which prove us to be true initiates in the "creative world" and no poor forlorn snakes of outworn tradition.

Our modern poets cannot get our modern artists out of their heads. The insidious talk of these sly artists confuses the simplicity of their natural minds. They are dominated by art; whereas the real sister of the muse of poetry is not "art" at all, but music.

They do not see, these people, that the very carelessness of a great poet like Byron is the inevitable concomitant of his genius; I would go so far as to call his carelessness the mother of his genius and its guardian angel.

I cannot help thinking, too, that if the artistic self-consciousness of our generation spoils its free human pleasure in great poetry, the theories of the academic historians of literature do all they can to make us leave the poetry of the past in its deep grave. It seems to me that of all futile and uninteresting things what is called "the study of literature" is the very worst.

To meddle with such a preposterous matter at all damns a person, in my thinking, as a supreme fool. And yet this is, par excellence, the sort of tediousness in which devotees of culture complacently wallow. As if it mattered where Byron slips in "the great Renaissance of Wonder"; or where Rossetti drifts by, in the portentous "Pre-Raphaelite Movement"!

It is strange to me how boys and girls, brought up upon this "study of literature," can ever endure to see the look of a line of poetry again! Most of them, it seems, _can_ hardly bear that shock; and be it far from me to blame them. I should surmise that the mere names of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, etc., would fall upon their ears with a dreariness of memory like the tolling of chapel-bells.

They are queer birds, too, these writers of commentaries upon literature.

At one time in my life I myself absorbed such "critical literature" with a morbid avidity, as if it had been a drug; and a drug it is--a drug dulling one to all fine and fresh sensations--a drug from the effects of which I am only now, at this late hour, beginning slowly to recover. They set one upon a completely wrong track, bringing forward what is unessential and throwing what is essential into thebackground. Dear heavens! how well I recall those grey discriminations. Wordsworth was the fellow who hit upon the idea of the _anima mundi._ Shelley's "philosophy of life" differed from Wordsworth's in that _his_ universal spirit was a thing of pure Love, whereas the other's was a matter of pure Thought.

Pure Love! Pure Thought! Was there ever such petrifying of the evasive flame? "Words! Words! Words!" I suspect that the book the sweet Prince was reading when he met Polonius in the passage was a book of essays on the poets.

The worst of this historical-comical-philosophical way of going to work is that it leaves one with the feeling that poetry is a sort of intellectual game, entirely removed from the jostling pressure of actual life, and that poets when once dead are shoved into their academic pigeon-holes to be labelled like things under glass cases. The person who can rattle off such descriptive labels the quickest is the person of culture. Thus history swallows up poetry; thus the "comparative method" swallows up history; and the whole business is snatched away from the magical flow of real life and turned into the dreariness of a mausoleum. How refreshing, how salutary, to turn from all thoughts as to what Byron's "place in literature" was to such thrilling poetry as

"She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes--"

or to such sonorous lines full of the reverberating echoes of pent-up passion as those which begin

"There is none of Beauty's daughters."

One has only to recall the way these simple careless outbursts have burned themselves in upon one's lips, when one's feelings were stirred to the old tune, to realise how great a poet Byron was.

"Fare thee well and, if forever,
Still forever fare thee well!"

Can such things ever grow "stale and rung-upon," however much the chilly hand of a pedantic psychology seeks to brush the bloom away from the wings of the bird of paradise?

Those poems to the mysterious Thyrza, can any modern eroticism equal them, for large and troubled abandonment; natural as gasping human speech and musical as the murmur of deep waters?

Byron is frankly and outrageously the poet of _sentiment._ This is good. This is what one craves for in vain in modern verse. The infernal seriousness of our grave youngsters and their precious psychological irony make them terrified of any approach to sentiment. They leave such matters with supreme contempt to the poor little devils who write verses for the local newspapers. They are too clever to descend to sentiment. It is their affair to show us the absurdity of sentiment.

And yet the world is full of this thing. It has the rising sap of a thousand springs in its heart. It has the "big rain" of the suppressed tears of a hundred generations in its sobbing music.

It is easy to say that Byron's sentiment was a pose.

The precise opposite of this is the truth. It is our poetic cleverness, our subjective imagery and cosmic irony, which is the pose; not his frank and boyish expression of direct emotion.

We write poetry for the sake of writing poetry. He wrote to give vent to the passions of his heart.

We compose a theme upon "love" and dedicate it to any suitable young woman the colour of whose eyes suits the turn of our metaphors. He loved first and wrote poetry afterwards--as the occasion demanded.

That is why his love-poetry is so full of vibrant sincerity, so rich in blood, so natural, so careless, so sentimental.

That is why there is a sort of conversational ease about his love-poetry, and here and there lapses into what, to an artistic sense, might seem bathos, absurdity, or rhetoric. Lovers are always a little absurd; and the fear of absurdity is not a sign of deep feeling but of the absence of all feeling.

Every one of Byron's most magnificent love-lyrics has its actual circumstantial cause and impulse in the adventures of his life. He does not spin out vague wordy platonic rhapsodies upon love-in-general. He addresses a particular person, just as Burns did--just as Shakespeare did--and his poems are, so to speak, thrilled with the excitement of the great moment's tumultuous pulses, scalded with the heat of its passionate tears.

These moments pass, of course. One need not be derisively cynical over that. Infatuation succeeds infatuation. Dream succeeds dream. The loyalty of a life-long love was not his. His life ended indeed before youth's desperate experiments were over, before the reaction set in. But the sterner mood had begun.

"Tread these reviving passions down,
Unworthy manhood. Unto thee
Indifferent should the smile or frown
Of Beauty be."

And the lines end--his last--with that stoical resignation in the presence of a soldier's fate which gives to the close of his adventurous enterprise on behalf of an oppressed Hellenic world such a gallant dignity.

"Then look around and choose thy ground,
And take thy rest."

If these proud personal touches, of which there are so many scattered through his work, offend our artistic modern sense we must remember that the same tone, the same individual confession of quite personal emotion, is to be found in Dante and Milton and Goethe.

The itching mock-modesty of the intellectual altruist, ashamed to commit himself to the personal note, is not an indication of a great nature. It is rather a sign of a fussy self-consciousness under the eyes of impertinent criticism.

What drives the modern philosopher to jeer at Byron is really a sort of envy of his splendid and irresponsible personality, that personality whose demonic energy is so radiant with the beautiful glamour of youth.

And what superb strength and high romance there are in certain of his verses when the magnificent anger of the moment has its way with him!

Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!
On Suli's rock and Parga's shore
Exists the remnant of a line
Such as our Doric mothers bore--

No one can help confessing that poetry of this kind, "simple, sensuous and passionate"--to use the great Miltonic definition--possesses, for all its undeniable _rhetoric,_ a large and high poetic value.

And at its best, the poetry of Byron is not mere rhetoric. Rhetoric undoubtedly is there. His mind was constantly, like most simple minds when touched to large issues, betrayed by the sweet treachery of rhetoric; but I feel confident that any really subtle critic of the delicate differences between one poetic vein and another, must feel, though he might not be able to express the fineness of the distinction, that there is something here--some breath, some tone, some air, some atmosphere, some royal and golden gesture--which is altogether beyond the reach of all mere eloquence, and sealed with the indescribable seal of poetry.

This real poetic element in Byron--I refer to something over and above his plangent rhetoric--arrests us with all the greater shock of sudden possession, for the very reason that it is so carelessly, so inartistically, so recklessly flung out.

He differs in this, more than in anything else, from our own poetic contemporaries. Our clever young poets know their business so appallingly well. They know all about the theories of poetry: they know what is to be said for Free Verse, for Imagism, for Post-Impressionism: they know how the unrhymed Greek chorus lends itself to the lyrical exigencies of certain moods: they know how wonderful the Japanese are, and how interesting certain Indian cadences may be: they know the importance of expressing the Ideal of Democracy, of Femininity, of Evolution, of Internationalism. There really is nothing in the whole field of poetic criticism which they do not know--except the way to persuade the gods to give us genius, when genius has been refused!

Byron, on the contrary, knows absolutely nothing of any of these things. "When he thinks he is a child"; when he criticises he is a child; when he philosophises, theorises, _mysticizes,_ he is a hopeless child. A vast amount of his poetry, for all its swing and dash and rush, might have been written by a lamentably inferior hand.

We come across such stuff to-day; not among the literary circles, but in the poets' corners of provincial magazines. What is called "Byronic sentiment," so derided now by the clever young psychologists who terrorise our literature, has become the refuge of timid old-fashioned people, quite bewildered and staggered by new developments.

I sympathise with such old-fashioned people. The pathetic earnestness of an elderly commercial traveller I once met on the Père Marquette Railway who assured me that Byron was "some poet" remains in my mind as a much more touching tribute to the lordly roué than all the praise of your Arnolds and Swinburnes.

He is indeed "some poet." He is the poet for people who feel the magic of music and the grandeur of imagination, without being able to lay their finger on the more recondite nuances of "creative work," without so much as ever having heard of "imagism."

I have spent whole evenings in passionate readings of "Childe Harold" and the "Poems to Thyrza" with gentle Quaker ladies and demure old maids descended from the Pilgrim Fathers, and I have always left such Apollonian prayer-meetings with a mind purged from the cant of cleverness; washed and refreshed in the authentic springs of the Muses.

So few lords--when you come to think of it--write poetry at all, that it is interesting to note the effect of aristocratic blood upon the style of a writer.

Personally I think its chief effect is to produce a certain magnanimous indifference to the meticulous niceties of the art. We say "drunk as a lord"; well--it is something to see what a person will do, who is descended from Robert Bruce's Douglas, when it is a question of this more heavenly intoxication. Aristocratic blood shows itself in poetry by a kind of unscrupulous contempt for gravity. It refuses to take seriously the art which it practises.

It plays the part of the grand amateur. It is free from bourgeois earnestness. It is this, I suppose, which is so irritating to the professional critic. If you can write poetry, so to speak, with your left hand, in intervals of war and love and adventure, between rescuing girls from sacks destined for the waters of the Bosphorus and swimming the length of the Venetian Grand Canal and recruiting people to fight for Hellenic freedom, you are doing something that ought not to be allowed. If other men of action, if other sportsmen and pleasure-seekers and travellers and wandering free-lances were able to sit down in any cosmopolitan cafe in Cairo or Stamboul and knock off immortal verses in the style of Byron --verses with no "philosophy" for us to expound, no technique for us to analyse, no "message" for us to interpret, no aesthetic subtleties for us to unravel, no mystical orientation for us to track out, what is there left for a poor sedentary critic to do? Our occupation is gone. We must either enjoy romance for its own sake in a frank, honest, simple manner; confessing that Byron was "some poet" and letting it go at that; or we must explain to the world, as many of us do, that Byron was a thoroughly bad writer. A third way of dealing with this unconscionable boy, who scoffed at Wordsworth and Southey and insisted that Pope was a great genius, is the way some poor camp-followers of the Moral Ideal have been driven to follow; the way, namely, of making him out to be a great leader in the war of the liberation of humanity, and a great interpreter of the wild magic of nature.

I must confess I cannot see Byron in either of these lights. He scoffs at kings and priests, certainly; he scoffs at Napoleon; he scoffs at the pompous self-righteousness of his own race; he scoffs at religion and sex and morality in that humorous, careless, indifferent "public-school" way which is so salutary and refreshing; but when you ask for any serious devotion to the cause of Liberty, for any definite Utopian outlines of what is to be built up in the world's future, you get little or nothing, except resounding generalities and conventional rhetoric.

Nor are those critics very wise who insist on laying stress upon Byron's contributions to the interpretation of Nature.

He could write "How the big rain comes dancing to the earth!" and his flashing, fitful, sun-smouldering pictures of European rivers and plains and hills and historic cities have their large and generous charm.

But beyond this essentially human and romantic, attitude to Nature there is just nothing at all.

"Roll on, thou deep and dark-blue Ocean, roll!"

I confess I caught a keener thrill of pleasure from that all-too-famous line when I suddenly heard it uttered by one of those garrulous ghosts in Mr. Masters's Spoon River cemetery, than I ever did when in childhood they made me learn it.

But, for all that, though it is not an easy thing to put into words, there is a certain grandiose and sonorous beauty, fresh and free and utterly unaffected, about these verses, and many others in "Childe Harold."

As for those long plays of Byron's, and those still longer narrative poems, nothing will induce me to read a line of them again. They have a singularly dusty smell to me; and when I think of them even, I suffer just such a withering sensation of ineffable boredom as I used to experience waiting in a certain ante-room in Tunbridge Wells where lived an aged retired general. I associate them with illustrated travels in Palestine.

How Goethe could read "Manfred" with any pleasure passes my comprehension. "Cain" has a certain charm, I admit; but of all forms of all literature the thing which is called Poetic Drama seems to me the most dreary. If poets cannot write for the stage they had better confine themselves to honest straightforward odes and lyrics.

But it is no use complaining. There is a sort of fate which drives people into this arid path. I sometimes feel as though both Imagination and Humour fled away from the earth when a modern poet takes pen to compose Poetic Drama!

The thing is a refuge for those to whom the gods have given a "talent for literature," and have stopped with that gift. The Poetic Drama flourishes in Anglo-Saxon Democracies. It lends itself to the babbling of extreme youth and to the pompous moralising of extreme middle-age.

The odious thing is an essentially modern creation; created, as it is, out of thin vapour, and moulded by melancholy rules of thumb. Drama was Religion to the Greeks, and in the old Elizabethan days great playwrights wrote great poetry.

I suppose if, by some fairy-miracle, _sheep_--the most modern of animals--were suddenly endowed with the privileges of culture, they would browse upon nothing else than Poetic Drama, from All Fools' Day to Candlemas.

But even Manfred cannot be blamed for this withering sterility, this dead-sea of ineptitude. There must be some form of literature found, loose and lax enough to express the Moral Idealism of the second-rate mind; and Poetic Drama lends itself beautifully to this.

Putting aside a few descriptive passages in "Childe Harold" and some score of superb lyrics sprinkled through the whole of the volume, what really is there in Byron at this hour--beyond the irresistible _idea_ of his slashing and crimson-blooded figure--to arrest us and hold us, who can read over and over again Christopher Marlowe and John Keats? Very little--singularly little--almost nothing.

Nothing--except "Don Juan"! This indeed is something of a poem. This indeed has the old authentic fire about it and the sweet devilry of reckless youth.

How does one account for the power and authority over certain minds exercised by this surprising production? I do not think it is exactly the wit in it. The wit is often entirely superficial--a mere tricky playing with light resemblances and wordy jingles. I do not feel as though it were the humour in it; for Byron is not really a humorist at all. I think it is something deeper than the mere juxtaposition of burlesque-show jests with Sunday-evening sentimentality. I think it is the downright lashing out, left and right, up and down, of a powerful reckless spirit able "to lash out" for the mere pleasure of doing so. I think it is the pleasure we get from the spectacle of mere splendid energy and devil-may-care animal spirits let loose to run amuck as they please; while genius, like a lovely camp-follower tossed to and fro from hand to hand, throws a redeeming enchantment over the most ribald proceedings.

The people--I speak now of intelligent people--who love Don Juan, are those who, while timid and shrinking themselves, love to contemplate emphatic gestures, scandalous advances, Rabelaisian foolings, clownish tricks; those who love to watch the mad hurly-burly of life and see the resplendent fire-works go bang; those who love all huge jests, vituperative cursings, moonlit philanderings, scoffing mockeries, honest scurrilities, great rolling barrels of vulgarity, tuns and vats of ribaldry, and lovely, tender, gondola-songs upon sleeping waters.

The pleasure which such persons derive from Byron is the pleasure which the civilised Greeks derived from Aristophanes, the pleasure of seeing everything which we are wont to treat reverently treated irreverently, the pleasure, most especially, of seeing the pompous great ones of the world made to dance and skip like drunk puppets. The literary temperament is so fatally inclined to fall into a sort of aesthetic gravity, taking its "philosophy" and its "art" with such portentous self-respect, that it is extremely pleasant when a reckless young Alcibiades of a Byron breaks into the enchanted circle and clears the air with a few resounding blasts from his profane bassoon.

What happens really in this pantomimic history of Don Juan, with its huge nonchalance and audacious cynicism, is the invasion of the literary field by the godless rabble, the rabble who take no stock of the preserves of art, and go picnicking and rollicking and scattering their beer-bottles and their orange-peel in the very glades of the immortals. It is in fact the invasion of Parnassus by a horde of most unmitigated proletarians. But these sweet scamps are led by a real lord, a lord who, like most lords, is ready to out-philistine the philistines and out-blaspheme the blasphemers.

Don Juan would be a hotch-potch of indecency and sentimentality, if it were not for the presence of genius there, of genius which, like a lovely flood of shining sunlight, irradiates the whole thing.

It is nonsense to talk of the "Byronic pose" either with regard to the outrageousness of his cynical wit or with regard to his sentimental Satanism.

Blasphemous wit and Satanic sentiment are the natural reactions of all healthy youthfulness in the presence of the sickening contrasts and diabolic ironies of life.

Such a mood is not by any means a sign of degeneracy. Byron was as far from being a degenerate as he was far from being a saint. It is a sign of sturdy sanity and vigorous strength.

Not to relish the gay brutality of Byron is an indication of something degenerate in ourselves. There is a certain type of person--perhaps the most prurient and disagreeable of all human animals--who is accustomed to indulge in a kind of holy leer of disgust when "brought up sharp" by the Aristophanic lapses of gay and graceless youth. Such a person's mind would be a fruitful study for Herr Freud; but the thought of its simmering cauldron of furtive naughtiness is not a pleasant thing to dwell on, for any but pathological philosophers.

After reading Don Juan one is compelled to recognise that Byron's mind must have been abnormally sane and sound. No one who jests quite at this rate could possibly be a bad man. The bad men--a word to the wise--are those from whose mouth the gay wantonness of the youth of the world is condemned as evil. Such persons ought to be sent for a rest-cure to Cairo or Morocco or Pekin.

The innocence of youth should be protected from a morality which is far more morbid than the maddest Dionysian revel.

It is, to confess it freely, not the satyrishness of Byron at all, but his hard brutality, which, for myself, I find difficult to enjoy.

I seem to require something more mellow, more ironical, more subtle, more humane, in my literature of irreverence. But no doubt this is a racial prejudice. Some obstinate drop of Latin--or, for all I know,--Carthaginian blood in me, makes me reluctant to give myself up to the tough, sane, sturdy brutality of your Anglo-Scot.

I can relish every word of Rabelais and I am not in the least dismayed by Heine's impishness, but I have always found Fielding's and Smollett's grosser scenes difficult mouthfuls to swallow.

They tell me there is a magnanimous generosity and a large earthy sanity about these humorists. But to me there is too much horse-play, too much ruffianism and "bully-ragging." And something of the same quality offends me in Byron. I lack the steadiness of nerves to deal with a coarseness which hits you across the head, much as the old English clowns hit one another with strings of sausages.

But because I suffer from this psychological limitation; because I prefer Sterne to Fielding, and Lamb to Dickens; I should condemn myself as an un-catholic fanatic if I presumed to turn my personal lack of youthful aplomb and gallant insouciance into a grave artistic principle.

Live and let live! That must be our motto in literary criticism as it is our motto in other things. I am not going to let myself call Byron a blackguard because of something a little hard and insensitive in him which happens to get upon my own nerves. He was a fine genius. He wrote noble verses. He has a beautiful face.

Women are, as a rule, less sensitive than men in these matters of sexual brutality. It may be that they have learned by bitter experience that the Byrons of this world are not their worst enemies. Or perhaps they feel towards them a certain maternal tenderness; condoning, as mothers will do, with an understanding beyond the comprehension of any neurotic critic, these roughnesses and insensitivenesses in their darlings.

Yes--let us leave the reputation of this great man, as far as his sexual lapses are concerned, to the commonsense and tact of women.

He was the kind of man that women naturally love. Perhaps we who criticise him are not altogether forgetful of that fact when we put our finger upon his aristocratic selfishness and his garish brilliance.

And perhaps the women are right.

It is pleasant at any rate to think so; pleasant to think that one's refined and gentle aunts, living noble lives in cathedral close and country vicarage, still regard this great wayward poet as a dear spoilt child and feel nothing of that instinctive suspicion of him which they feel toward so many "Byrons de nos jours."

When I recall the peculiarly tender look that came into the face of one beautiful old lady--a true "grande dame" of the old-fashioned generation--to whom I mentioned his name, and associate it with the look of weary distaste with which she listened to my discourses upon more modern and more subtle rebels, I am tempted to conclude that what womanly women really admire in a man is a certain energy of action, a certain drastic force, brilliance and hardness, which is the very opposite of the nervous sensitiveness and receptive weakness which is the characteristic of most of us men of letters. I am tempted to go so far as to maintain that a profound atavistic instinct in normal women makes them really contemptuous in their hearts of any purely aesthetic or intellectual type. They prefer poets who are also men of action and men of the world. They prefer poets who "when they think are children." It is not hardness or selfishness or brutality which really alarms them. It is intellect, it is subtlety, it is, above all, _irony._ Byron's unique achievement as a poet is to have flung into poetry the essential brutality and the essential sentiment of the typical male animal, and, in so far as he has done this, all his large carelessness, all his cheap and superficial rhetoric, all his scornful cynicism, cannot hide from us something primitive and appealing about him which harmonises well enough with his beautiful face and his dramatic career.

Perhaps, as a matter of fact, our literary point of view in these later days has been at once over-subtilized and underfed. Perhaps we have grown morbidly fastidious in the matter of delicacies of style, and shrinkingly averse to the slashing energy of hard-hitting, action-loving, self-assertive worldliness.

It may be so; and yet, I am not sure. I can find it in me to dally with the morbid and very modern fancy that, after all, Byron has been a good deal overrated; that, after all, when we forget his personality and think only of his actual work, he cannot be compared for a moment, as an original genius, with such persons--so much less appealing to the world-obsessed feminine mind--as William Blake or Paul Verlaine!

Yes; let the truth be blurted out--even though it be a confession causing suffering to one's pride--and the truth is that I, for one, though I can sit down and read Matthew Arnold and Remy de Gourmont and Paul Verlaine, for hours and hours, and though it is only because I have them all so thoroughly by heart that I don't read the great Odes of Keats any more, shall _never again,_ not even for the space of a quarter of an hour, not even as a psychological experiment, turn over the pages of a volume of Byron's Poetical Works!

I think I discern what this reluctance means. It means that primarily and intrinsically what Byron did for the world was to bring into prominence and render beautiful and appealing a certain fierce rebellion against unctuous domesticity and solemn puritanism. His political propagandism of Liberty amounts to nothing now. What amounts to a great deal is that he magnificently and in an engaging, though somewhat brutal manner, broke the rules of a bourgeois social code.

As a meteoric rebel against the degrading servility of what we have come to call the "Nonconformist Conscience" Byron must always have his place in the tragically slow emancipation of the human spirit. The reluctance of an ordinary sensitive modern person, genuinely devoted to poetry, to spend any more time with Byron's verses than what those great familiar lyrics printed in all the anthologies exact, is merely a proof that he is not the poet that Shelley, for instance, is.

It is a melancholy commentary upon the "immortality of genius" and that "perishing only with the English language" of which conventional orators make so much, that the case should be so; but it is more important to be honest in the admission of our real feelings than to flatter the pride of the human race.

The world moves on. Manners, customs, habits, moralities, ideals, all change with changing of the times.

_Style alone,_ the imaginative rendering in monumental words of the most personal secrets of our individuality, gives undying interest to what men write. Sappho and Catullus, Villon and Marlowe, are as vivid and fresh to-day as are Walter de la Mare or Edgar Lee Masters.

If Byron can only thrill us with half-a-dozen little songs his glory-loving ghost ought to be quite content.

To last in any form at all, as the generations pass and the face of the planet alters, is a great and lucky accident. To last so that men not only read you but love you when a century's dust covers your ashes is a high and royal privilege.

To leave a name which, whether men read your work or not, whether men love your memory or not, still conjures up an image of strength and joy and courage and beauty, is a great reward.

To leave a name which must be associated for all time with the human struggle to free itself from false idealism and false morality is something beyond any reward. It is to have entered into the creative forces of Nature herself. It is to have become a fatality. It is to have merged your human, individual, personal voice with the voices of _the elements which are beyond the elements._ It is to have become an eternally living portion of that unutterable central flame which, though the smoke of its burning may roll back upon us and darken our path, is forever recreating the world.