Jane Eyre

"Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë is a classic novel that follows the

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 And flowerets which drooping as day drooped too,
Fell into pavilions, white, purple, and blue,
To roof the glow-worm from the evening dew."[142]
Everything lives here, everything breathes and yearns for something.
This poem, the story of a plant, is also the story of a soul—Shelley's
soul, the sensitive. Is it not natural to confound them? Is there not a
community of nature amongst all the dwellers in this world? Verily
there is a soul in everything; in the universe is a soul; be the
existence what it will, uncultured or rational, defined or vague, ever
beyond its sensible form shines a secret essence and something
divine, which we catch sight of by sublime illuminations, never
reaching or penetrating it. It is this presentiment and yearning which
sustains all modern poetry—now in Christian meditations, as with
Campbell and Wordsworth, now in pagan visions, as with Keats and
Shelley. They hear the great heart of nature beat; they wish to reach
it; they try all spiritual and sensible approaches, through Judea and
through Greece, by consecrated doctrines and by proscribed
dogmas. In this splendid and fruitless effort the greatest become
exhausted and die. Their poetry, which they drag with them over
these sublime tracks, is torn to pieces. One alone, Byron, attains the
summit; and of all these grand poetic draperies, which float like
banners, and seem to summon men to the conquest of supreme
truth, we see now but tatters scattered by the wayside.
Yet these men did their work. Under their multiplied efforts, and by
their unconscious working together, the idea of the beautiful is
changed, and other ideas change by contagion. Conservatives
contribute to it as well as revolutionaries, and the new spirit
breathes through the poems which bless and those which curse
Church and State. We learn from Wordsworth and Byron, by
profound Protestantism[143] and confirmed scepticism, that in this
sacred cant-defended establishment there is matter for reform or for
revolt; that we may discover moral merits other than those which
the law tickets and opinion accepts; that beyond conventional
confessions there are truths; that beyond respected social conditions
there are grandeurs; that beyond regular positions there are virtues;
that greatness is in the heart and the genius; and all the rest,
actions and beliefs, are subaltern. We have just seen that beyond
literary conventionalities there is a poetry, and consequently we are
disposed to feel that beyond religious dogmas there may be a faith,
and beyond social institutions a justice. The old edifice totters, and
the Revolution enters, not by a sudden inundation, as in France, but
by slow infiltration. The wall built up against it by public intolerance
cracks and opens: the war waged against Jacobinism, republican
and imperial, ends in victory; and henceforth we may regard
opposing ideas, not as opposing enemies, but as ideas. We regard
them, and, accommodating them to the different countries, we
import them. Roman Catholics are enfranchised, rotten boroughs
abolished, the electoral franchise lowered; unjust taxes, which kept
up the price of corn, are repealed; ecclesiastical tithes changed into
rent-charges; the terrible laws protecting property are modified, the
assessment of taxes brought more and more on the rich classes; old
institutions, formerly established for the advantage of a race, and in
this race of a class, are only maintained when for the advantage of
all classes; privileges become functions; and in this triumph of the
middle class, which shapes opinion and assumes the ascendancy,
the aristocracy, passing from sinecures to services, seems now
legitimate only as a national nursery, kept up to furnish public men.
At the same time narrow orthodoxy is enlarged. Zoology, astronomy,
geology, botany, anthropology, all the sciences of observation, so
much cultivated and so popular, forcibly introduce their dissolvent
discoveries. Criticism comes in from Germany, rehandles the Bible,
rewrites the history of dogma, attacks dogma itself. Meanwhile, poor
Scottish philosophy is dried up. Amidst the agitations of sects,
endeavoring to transform each other, and rising Unitarianism, we
hear at the gates of the sacred ark the continental philosophy
roaring like a tide. Now already it has reached literature: for fifty
years all great writers have plunged into it—Sydney Smith, by his
sarcasms against the numbness of the clergy, and the oppression of
the Catholics; Arnold, by his protests against the religious monopoly
of the clergy, and the ecclesiastical monopoly of the Anglicans;
Macaulay, by his history and panegyric of the liberal revolution;
Thackeray, by attacking the nobles, in the interests of the middle
class; Dickens, by attacking dignitaries and wealthy men, in the
interests of the lowly and poor; Currer Bell and Mrs. Browning, by
defending the initiative and independence of women; Stanley and
Jowett, by introducing the German exegesis, and by giving precision
to biblical criticism; Carlyle, by importing German metaphysics in an
English form; Stuart Mill, by importing French positivism in an
English form; Tennyson himself, by extending over the beauties of all
lands and all ages the protection of his amiable dilettantism and his
poetical sympathies—each according to his power and his difference
of position; all retained within reach of the shore by their practical
prejudices, all strengthened against falling by their moral prejudices;
all bent, some with more of eagerness, others with more of distrust,
in welcoming or giving entrance to the growing tide of modern
democracy and philosophy in State and Church, without doing
damage, and gradually, so as to destroy nothing, and to make
everything bear fruit.
[60]See Alison, "History of Europe"; Porter, "Progress of the Nation."
[61]In the "Fourth Estate," by F. Knight Hunt, 2 vols. 1840, it is said (I.
175) that the first daily and morning paper, "The Daily Courant,"
appeared in 1709.—Tr.
[62]To realize the contrast, compare Gil Blas and Ruy Blas, Marivaux's
Paysan Parvenu and Stendhal's Julien Sorel (in "Rouge et Noir").
[63]The disciple of Faust.
[64]Goethe's "Faust," sc. 1.
[65]Most of these details are taken from the "Life and Works of Burns,"
by R. Chambers, 1851, 4 vols.
[66]Ibid. I. 14.
[67]My great constituent elements are pride and passion.
[68]Extract from Burns's commonplace-book; Chambers's "Life," I. 79.
[69]Ibid. I. 231. Burns had a right to think so; when he arrived at night
in an inn, the very servants woke their fellow-laborers to come and hear
him talk.
[70]Ibid. II. 68.
[71]"Man was made to Mourn," a dirge.
[72]"First Epistle to Davie, a brother poet."
[73]"Earnest Cry and Prayer to the Scotch Representatives."
[74]"The Creed of Poverty;" Chambers's "Life," IV. 86.
[75]"The Tree of Liberty."
[76]1780.
[77]"The Holy Fair."
[78]"The Holy Fair."
[79]"Holy Willie's Prayer."
[80]"Epistle to the Rev. John M'math."
[81]"A Dedication to Gavin Hamilton."
[82]"Address to the Deil."
[83]He himself says: "I have been all along a miserable dupe to Love."
His brother Gilbert said: "He was constantly the victim of some fair
enslaver."
[84]Chambers's "Life of Burns," I. 12.
[85]Byron's Works, ed. Moore, 17 vols, II. 302, "Journal," Dec. 13, 1813.
[86]See a passage from Burns's commonplace-book in Chambers's "Life
of Burns," I. 93.
[87]Chambers's "Life," I. 38.
[88]See "Tam o' Shanter. Address to the Deil, The Jolly Beggars, A Man's
a Man for a' that, Green Grow the Rashes," etc.
[89]"O Clarinda, shall we not meet in a state, some yet unknown state
of being, where the lavish hand of plenty shall minister to the highest
wish of benevolence, and where the chill north-wind of prudence shall
never blow over the flowery fields of enjoyment?"
[90]"Epistle to James Smith:"
"O Life, how pleasant is thy morning,
Young Fancy's rays the hills
adorning,
Cold-pausing Caution's lesson
spurning!"
[91]Chambers's "Life"; Letter to Mr. Js. Burnes, IV. 205.
[92]"The Speeches of William Pitt," 2d ed. 3 vols. 1808, II. 17, Jan. 21,
1794.
[93]"The Speeches of William Pitt," III. 152, Feb. 17, 1800.
[94]Macaulay's Works, VII.; "Life of William Pitt," 396.
[95]"The Works of W. Cowper," ed. Southey, 8 vols. 1843.
[96]Ibid. I. 18.
[97]Ibid. 79.
[98]Ibid. 81.
[99]"The Works of W. Cowper," I. 97.
[100]"The Works of W. Cowper," ed. Southey; Letter to the Rev. John
Newton, July 12, 1780.
[101]Ibid. Letter to Rev. J. Newton, August 5, 1786.
[102]"The Task," IV; The Winter Evening.
[103]Ibid.
[104]Ibid.
[105]"The Task," IV; The Winter Evening.
[106]Crabbe may also be considered one of the masters and renovators
of poetry, but his style is too classical, and he has been rightly
nicknamed "a Pope in worsted stockings."
[107]"The Task," I; The Sofa.
[108]1793-1794.
[109]Wordsworth's Works, new edition, 1870, 6 vols.; "Descriptive
Sketches during a Pedestrian Tour," I. 42.
[110]In English poetry as since modified, no one dreams of limiting the
number of syllables, even in blank verse.—Tr.
[111]See "The Fudge Family."
[112]"The Epicurean."
[113]"Lalla Rookh."
[114]See also "The History of the Caliph Vathek," a fantastic but
powerfully written tale, by W. Beckford, published first in French in 1784.
[115]See the notes of Southey, worse than those of Chateaubriand in
the "Martyrs."
[116]"Edinburgh Review."
[117]Lockhart, "Life of Sir Walter Scott," 10 vols. 2d ed. 1839, II. ch.
XXXVII. p. 170.
[118]Lockhart's "Life of Sir Walter Scott;" Autobiography, I. 62.
[119]Lockhart's "Life of Sir Walter Scott," Autobiography, I. 72.
[120]Ibid, VII; Abbotsford in 1825.
[121]If Constable's "Memorials" (3 vols. 1873) had been published when
M. Taine wrote this portion of his work he perhaps would have seen
reason to alter this opinion, because it is clear that, so far from Sir
Walter's printer and publisher ruining him, they, if not ruined by Sir
Walter, were only equal sharers with him in the imprudences that led to
the disaster.—Tr.
[122]Lockhart's "Life," I. ch. VII. 269.
[123]Ibid. VI. ch. XLIX. 252.
[124]See the opening of "Ivanhoe": "Such being our chief scene, the
date of our story refers to a period towards the end of the reign of
Richard I., when his return from his long captivity had become an event
rather wished than hoped for by his despairing subjects, who were in the
meantime subjected to every species of subordinate oppression." It is
impossible to write in a heavier style.
[125]Sir Walter Scott's Works, 48 vols., 1829; "The Antiquary," ch. VIII.
[126]Lockhart's "Life," X. 217.
[127]The Jansenists, the Puritans, and the Methodists are the extremes
of this class.
[128]See the preface of his second edition of "Lyrical Ballads."
[129]"Feter Bell, The White Doe, The Kitten and Falling Leaves," etc.
[130] "This dull product of a scoffer's pen
Impure conceits discharging from a
heart
Hardened by impious pride!"
 —Wordsworth's Works, 7 vols. 1849; "The Excursion," book 2; "The
Solitary."
[131]Wordsworth's Works, 7 vols. 1849, VII; "The Excursion," Preface,
11.
[132]Wordsworth's Works, 7 vols. 1849, VII. book 9; "Discourse of the
Wanderer," opening verses, 315.
[133]Ibid. VII; "The Excursion," book 4; "Despondency Corrected," 137.
[134]Ibid, VII; "The Excursion," book 4; "Despondency Corrected," 149.
[135]Ibid, last lines of book 5, "The Pastor," 20.
[136]See also the novels of Godwin, "Caleb Williams" and others.
[137]"Queen Mab," and notes. At Oxford Shelley issued a kind of thesis,
calling it "On the Necessity of Atheism."
[138]Some time before his death, when he was twenty-nine, he said, "If
I die now, I shall have lived as long as my father."
[139]See in Shelley's Works, 1853, "The Witch of Atlas, The Cloud, To a
Sky-lark," the end of "The Revolt of Islam, Alastor," and the whole of
"Prometheus."
[140]"The Cloud," c. III. 502.
[141]Ibid. c. IV. 503.
[142]Shelley's Works, 1853, "The Sensitive Plant," 490.
[143]"Our life is turned out of her course, whenever man is made an
offering, a sacrifice, a tool, or implement, a passive thing employed as a
brute mean."—Wordsworth, "The Excursion."

CHAPTER SECOND

Lord Byron

Section I.—His Life and Character

I have reserved for the last the greatest and most English of these literary
men; he is so great and so English that from him alone we shall learn more
truths of his country and of his age than from all the rest put together. His
ideas were proscribed during his life; it has been attempted to depreciate
his genius since his death. Even at the present day English critics are hardly
just to him. He fought all his life against the society from which he was
descended; and during his life, as after his death, he suffered the penalty of
the resentment which he provoked, and the dislike to which he gave rise. A
foreign critic may be more impartial, and freely praise the powerful hand
whose blows he has not felt.
If ever there was a violent and madly sensitive soul, but incapable of
shaking off its bonds; ever agitated, but yet shut in; predisposed to poetry
by its innate fire, but limited by its natural barriers to a single kind of poetry
—it was Byron's.
This promptitude to extreme emotions was with him a family legacy, and
the result of education. His great-uncle, a sort of raving and misanthropical
maniac, had slain in a tavern brawl, by candle-light, Mr. Chaworth, his
relative, and had been tried before the House of Lords. His father, a brutal
roisterer, had eloped with the wife of Lord Carmarthen, ruined and ill-
treated Miss Gordon, his second wife; and, after living like a madman and a
scoundrel, had gone with the remains of his wife's family property, to die
abroad. His mother, in her moments of fury, would tear her dresses and her
bonnets to pieces. When her wretched husband died she almost lost her
reason, and her cries were heard in the street. It would take a long story to
tell what a childhood Byron passed under the care of "this lioness"; in what
torrents of insults, interspersed with softer moods, he himself lived, just as
passionate and more bitter. His mother ran after him, called him a "lame
brat," shouted at him, and threw fire-shovel and tongs at his head. He held
his tongue, bowed, and none the less felt the outrage. One day, when he
was "in one of his silent rages," they had to take out of his hand a knife
which he had taken from the table, and which he was already raising to his
throat. Another time the quarrel was so terrible that son and mother, each
privately, went to "the apothecary's, inquiring anxiously whether the other
had been to purchase poison, and cautioning the vendor of drugs not to
attend to such an application, if made."[144] When he went to school, "his
friendships were passions." Many years after he left Harrow, he never heard
the name of Lord Clare, one of his old schoolfellows, pronounced, without
"a beating of the heart."[145] A score of times he got himself into trouble
for his friends, offering them his time, his pen, his purse. One day, at
Harrow, a big boy claimed the right to fag his friend, little Peel, and finding
him refractory, gave him a beating on the inner fleshy side of his arm,
which he had twisted round to render the pain more acute. Byron, too small
to fight the rascal, came up to him, "blushing with rage," tears in his eyes,
and asked with a trembling voice how many stripes he meant to inflict.
"Why," returned the executioner, "you little rascal, what is that to you?
Because, if you please," said Byron, holding out his arm, "I would take
half."[146] He never met with objects of distress without affording them
succor.[147] In his latter days, in Italy, he gave away a thousand pounds out
of every four thousand he spent. The upwellings of this heart were too
copious, and flooded forth good and evil impetuously, and at the least
collision. Like Dante, in his early youth, Byron, at the age of eight, fell in
love with a child named Mary Duff.

"How very odd that I should have been so utterly, devotedly fond of
that girl, at an age when I could neither feel passion, nor know the
meaning of the word!... I recollect all our caresses,... my restlessness,
my sleeplessness. My misery, my love for that girl were so violent, that
I sometimes doubt if I have ever been really attached since. When I
heard of her being married,... it nearly threw me into convulsions."[148]

At twelve years he fell in love with his cousin, Margaret Parker:

"My passion had its usual effects upon me. I could not sleep—I could
not eat—I could not rest; and although I had reason to know that she
loved me, it was the texture of my life to think of the time which must
elapse before we could meet again, being usually about twelve hours
of separation. But I was a fool then, and am not much wiser now."[149]

He never was wiser, read hard at school; took too much exercise; later on,
at Cambridge, Newstead, and London, he changed night into day, rushed
into debauchery, kept long fasts, led an unwholesome way of living, and
engaged in the extreme of every taste and every excess. As he was a
dandy, and one of the most brilliant, he nearly let himself die of hunger for
fear of becoming fat, then drank and ate greedily during his nights of
recklessness. Moore said:

"Lord Byron, for the last two days, had done nothing towards
sustenance beyond eating a few biscuits and (to appease appetite)
chewing mastic.... He confined himself to lobsters, and of these
finished two or three to his own share,—interposing, sometimes, a
small liqueur-glass of strong white brandy, sometimes a tumbler of
very hot water, and then pure brandy again, to the amount of near half
 a dozen small glasses of the latter.... After this we had claret, of which
having despatched two bottles between us, at about four o'clock in the
morning we parted."[150]

Another day we find in Byron's journal the following words:

"Yesterday, dined tête-à-tête at the 'Cocoa' with Scrope Davies—sat

from six till midnight—drank between us one bottle of champagne and
six of claret, neither of which wines ever affect me."[151]

Later, at Venice:

"I have hardly had a wink of sleep this week past. I have had some
curious masking adventures this carnival.... I will work the mine of my
youth to the last vein of the ore, and then—good night. I have lived,
and am content."[152]

At this rate the organs wear out, and intervals of temperance are not
sufficient to repair them. The stomach does not continue to act, the nerves
get out of order, and the soul undermines the body, and the body the soul.

"I always wake in actual despair and despondency, in all respects, even
of that which pleased me over-night. In England, five years ago, I had
the same kind of hypochondria, but accompanied with so violent a
thirst that I have drank as many as fifteen bottles of soda-water in one
night after going to bed, and been still thirsty,... striking off the necks
of bottles from mere thirsty impatience."[153]

Much less is necessary to ruin mind and body wholly. Thus these vehement
minds live, ever driven and broken by their own energy, like a cannon ball,
which, when fired, turns and spins round quickly, but at the smallest
obstacle leaps up, rebounds, destroys everything, and ends by burying itself
in the earth. Beyle, a most shrewd observer, who lived with Byron for
several weeks, says that on certain days he was mad; at other times, in
presence of beautiful things, he became sublime. Though reserved and
proud, music made him weep. The rest of his time, petty English passions,
pride of rank, for instance, a vain dandyism, unhinged him: he spoke of
Brummel with a shudder of jealousy and admiration. But small or great, the
passion of the hour swept down upon his mind like a tempest, roused him,
transported him either into imprudence or genius. Byron's own journal, his
familiar letters, all his unstudied prose, is, as it were, trembling with wit,
anger, enthusiasm; the smallest words breathe sensitiveness; since Saint
Simon we have not seen more lifelike confidences. All styles appear dull,
and all souls sluggish by the side of his.
In this splendid rush of unbridled and disbanded faculties, which leaped up
at random, and seemed to drive him without option to the four quarters of
the globe, one took the reins, and cast him on the wall against which he
was broken.

"Sir Walter Scott describes Lord Byron as being a man of real goodness
of heart, and the kindest and best feelings, miserably thrown away by
his foolish contempt of public opinion. Instead of being warned or
checked by public opposition, it roused him to go on in a worse strain,
as if he said, 'Ay, you don't like it; well, you shall have something worse
for your pains.'"[154]

This rebellious instinct is inherent in the race; there was a whole cluster of
wild passions, born of the climate,[155] which nourished him: a gloomy
humor, violent imagination, indomitable pride, a relish for danger, a craving
for strife, that inner exaltation, only satiated by destruction, and that
sombre madness which urged forward the Scandinavian Berserkirs, when,
in an open bark, beneath a sky cloven with lightning, they abandoned
themselves to the tempest, whose fury they had breathed. This instinct is in
the blood: people are born so, as they are born lions or bull-dogs.[156]
Byron was still a little boy in petticoats when his nurse scolded him roughly
for having soiled or torn a new frock which he had just put on. He got into
one of his silent rages, seized the garment with his hands, rent it from top
to bottom, and stood erect, motionless, and gloomy before the storming
nurse, so as to set more effectually her wrath at defiance. His pride
mastered him. When at ten he inherited the title of lord, and his name was
first called at school, preceded by the title dominas, he could not answer
the customary adsum, stood silent amidst the general stare of his school-
fellows, and at last burst into tears. Another time, at Harrow, in a dispute
which was dividing the school, a boy said, "Byron won't join us, for he
never likes to be second anywhere." He was offered the command, and
then only would he condescend to take part with them. Never to submit to
a master; to rise with his whole soul against every semblance of
encroachment or rule; to keep his person intact and inviolate at all cost,
and to the end against all; to dare everything rather than give any sign of
submission,—such was his character. This is why he was disposed to
undergo anything rather than give signs of weakness. At ten he was a stoic
from pride. His foot was painfully stretched in a wooden contrivance whilst
he was taking his Latin lesson, and his master pitied him, saying "he must
be suffering. Never mind, Mr. Rogers," he said, "you shall not see any signs
of it in me."[157] Such as he was as a child, he continued as a man. In mind
and body he strove, or prepared himself for strife. Every day, for hours at a
time, he boxed, fired pistols, practised sword-exercise, ran and leaped,
rode, overcame obstacles. These were the exploits of his hands and
muscles; but he needed others. For lack of enemies he found fault with
society, and made war upon it. We know to what excesses the dominant
opinions then ran. England was at the height of the war with France, and
thought it was fighting for morality and liberty. In English eyes, at this time,
Church and State were holy things: anyone who touched them became a
public enemy. In this fit of natural passion and Protestant severity,
whosoever publicly avowed liberal ideas and manners seemed an
incendiary, and stirred up against himself the instincts of property, the
doctrines of moralists, the interests of politicians, and the prejudices of the
people. Byron chose this moment to praise Voltaire and Rousseau, to
admire Napoleon, to avow himself a sceptic, to plead for nature and
pleasure against cant and regularity, to say that high English society,
debauched and hypocritical, made phrases and killed men, to preserve its
sinecures and rotten boroughs. As though political hatred was not enough,
he contracted, in addition, literary animosities, attacked the whole body of
critics,[158] ran down the new poetry, declared that the most celebrated
were "Claudians," men of the later empire, raged against the Lake school,
and in consequence had in Southey a bitter and unwearied enemy. Thus
provided with enemies, he laid himself open to attack on all sides. He
decried himself through his hatred of cant, his bravado, his boasting about
his vices. He depicted himself in his heroes, but for the worse; in such a
way that no man could fail to recognize him, and think him much worse
than he was. Walter Scott wrote, immediately after seeing "Childe Harold":

"'Childe Harold' is, I think, a very clever poem, but gives no good
symptom of the writer's heart or morals... Vice ought to be a little more
modest, and it must require impudence almost equal to the noble
Lord's other powers, to claim sympathy gravely for the ennui arising
 from his being tired of his wassailers and his paramours. There is a
monstrous deal of conceit in it, too, for it is informing the inferior part
of the world that their little old-fashioned scruples of limitation are not
worthy of his regard."[159]
"My noble friend is something like my old peacock, who chooses to
bivouac apart from his lady, and sit below my bedroom window, to
keep me awake with his screeching lamentation. Only, I own he is not
equal in melody to Lord Byron."[160]

Such were the sentiments which he called forth in all respectable classes.
He was pleased thereat, and did worse—giving out that in his adventures in
the East he had dared a good many things; and he was not indignant when
identified with his heroes. He said he should like to feel for once the
sensations of a man who had committed a murder. Another time he wrote
in his diary:

"Hobhouse told me an odd report—that I am the actual Conrad, the

veritable Corsair, and that part of my travels are supposed to have
passed in privacy. Um! people sometimes hit near the truth, but never
the whole truth. He don't know what I was about the year after he left
the Levant; nor does anyone—nor—nor—nor—however, it is a lie—'but
I doubt the equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth.'"[161]

These dangerous words were turned against him like a dagger; but he
loved danger, mortal danger, and was only at ease when he saw the points
of all angers bristling against him. Alone against all, against an armed
society; erect, invincible, even against common-sense, even against
conscience—it was then he felt in all his strained nerves the great and
terrible sensation, to which his whole being involuntarily inclined.
A last imprudence brought down the attack. As long as he was an
unmarried man, his excesses might be excused by the overstrong passions
of a temperament which often causes youth in England to revolt against
good taste and rule; but marriage settles them, and it was marriage which
in him completed his unsettling. He found that his wife was a kind of
paragon of virtue, known as such, "a creature of rule," correct and without
feelings, incapable of committing a fault herself, and of forgiving. His
servant Fletcher observed, "It is very odd, but I never yet knew a lady that
could not manage my Lord except my Lady."[162] Lady Byron thought her
husband mad, and had him examined by physicians. Having learned that he
was in his right mind, she left him, returned to her father, and refused ever
to see him again. Thereupon he passed for a monster. The papers covered
him with obloquy; his friends induced him not to go to a theatre or to
Parliament, fearing that he would be hooted or insulted. The rage and
pangs which so violent a soul, precociously accustomed to brilliant glory felt
in this universal storm of outrage, can only be learned from his verses. He
grew stubborn, went to Venice, and steeped himself in the voluptuous
Italian life, even in low debauchery, the better to insult the Puritan prudery
which had condemned him, and left it only through an offence still more
blamed, his public intimacy with the young Countess Guiccioli. Meanwhile
he showed himself as bitterly republican in politics as in morality. He wrote
in 1813: "I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all
existing governments." This time, at Ravenna, his house was the centre and
storehouse of conspirators, and he generously and imprudently prepared to
take arms with them, to strike for the deliverance of Italy:

"They meant to insurrect here, and are to honour me with a call

thereupon. I shall not fall back; though I don't think them in force and
heart sufficient to make much of it. But, onward.... What signifies
self?... It is not one man nor a million, but the spirit of liberty which
must be spread.... The mere selfish calculation ought never to be made
on such occasions; and, at present, it shall not be computed by me.... I
should almost regret that my own affairs went well, when those of
nations are in peril."[163]

In the meantime he had quarrels with the police: his house was watched,
he was threatened with assassination, and yet he rode out daily, and went
into the neighboring pine-forest to practise pistol-shooting. These are the
sentiments of a man standing at the muzzle of a loaded cannon, waiting for
it to go off. The emotion is great, nay, heroic, but it is not agreeable; and
certainly, even at this season of great emotion, he was unhappy. Nothing is
more likely to poison happiness than a combative spirit. He writes:

"What is the reason that I have been, all my lifetime, more or less
ennuyé?... I do not know how to answer this, but presume that it is
constitutional,—as well as the waking in low spirits, which I have
invariably done for many years. Temperance and exercise, which I have
practised at times, and for a long time together vigorously and
 violently, made little or no difference. Violent passions did: when under
their immediate influence—it is odd, but—I was in agitated, but not in
depressed spirits.... Wine and spirits make me sullen and savage to
ferocity—silent, however, and retiring, and not quarrelsome, if not
spoken to. Swimming also raises my spirits; but in general they are
low, and get daily lower. That is hopeless; for I do not think I am so
much ennuyé as I was at nineteen. The proof is, that then I must
game, or drink, or be in motion of some kind, or I was miserable."[164]
"What I feel most growing upon me are laziness, and a disrelish more
powerful than indifference. If I rouse, it is into fury. I presume that I
shall end (if not earlier by accident, or some such termination) like
Swift, 'dying at top.'[165] Lega (his servant) came in with a letter about
a bill unpaid at Venice which I thought paid months ago. I flew into a
paroxysm of rage, which almost made me faint. I have always had une
âme, which not only tormented itself, but everybody else in contact
with it, and an esprit violent, which has almost left me without any
esprit at all."[166]

A horrible foreboding, which haunted him to the end! On his death-bed, in

Greece, he refused, I know not why, to be bled, and preferred to die at
once. They threatened that the uncontrolled disease might end in madness.
He sprang up: "There! you are, I see, a d—d set of butchers! Take away as
much blood as you like, but have done with it,"[167] and stretched out his
arm. Amidst such wild outbursts and anxieties he passed his life. Anguish
endured, danger braved, resistance overcome, grief relished, all the
greatness and sadness of the black warlike madness—such are the images
which he needs must let pass before him. In default of action he had
dreams, and he only betook himself to dreams for want of action. He said,
when embarking for Greece, that he had taken poetry for lack of better, and
that it was not his fit work. "What is a poet? what is he worth? what does
he do? He is a babbler." He augured ill of the poetry of his age, even of his
own; saying that, if he lived ten years more, they should see something
else from him than verses. In reality, he would have been more at home as
a sea-king, or a captain of a band of troopers during the Middle Ages.
Except two or three gleams of Italian sunshine, his poetry and life, are
those of a Scald transplanted into modern life, who in this over-well-
regulated world did not find his vocation.
 Section II.—The Style of Byron's Poetry

Byron was a poet, but in his own way—a strange way, like that in which he
lived. There were internal tempests within him, avalanches of ideas, which
found issue only in writing. He wrote: "I have written from the fulness of
my mind, from passion, from impulse, from many motives, but not 'for their
sweet voices.' To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my
entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all—and publishing also the
continuance of the same object, by the action it affords to the mind, which
else recoils upon itself." He wrote almost always with astonishing rapidity,
"The Corsair" in ten days, "The Bride of Abydos" in four days. While it was
printing he added and corrected, but without recasting: "I told you before
that I can never recast anything. I am like the tiger. If I miss the first
spring, I go grumbling back to my jungle again; but if I do it, it is crushing."
[168] Doubtless he sprang, but he had a chain: never, in the freest flight of
his thoughts, did he liberate himself from himself. He dreams of himself,
and sees himself throughout. It is a boiling torrent, but hedged in with
rocks. No such great poet has had so narrow an imagination; he could not
metamorphose himself into another. They are his own sorrows, his own
revolts, his own travels, which, hardly transformed and modified, he
introduces into his verses. He does not invent, he observes; he does not
create, he transcribes. His copy is darkly exaggerated, but it is a copy. "I
could not write upon anything," says he, "without some personal
experience and foundation." We will find in his letters and note-books,
almost feature for feature, the most striking of his descriptions. The capture
of Ismail, the shipwreck of Don Juan, are, almost word for word, like two
accounts of it in prose. If none but cockneys could attribute to him the
crimes of his heroes, none but blind men could fail to see in him the
sentiments of his characters. This is so true that he has not created more
than one. Childe Harold, Lara, the Giaour, the Corsair, Manfred,
Sardanapalus, Cain, Tasso, Dante, and the rest, are always the same—one
man represented under various costumes, in several lands, with different
expressions; but just as painters do, when, by change of garments,
decorations, and attitudes, they draw fifty portraits from the same model.
He meditated too much upon himself to be enamored of anything else. The
habitual sternness of his will prevented his mind from being flexible; his
force, always concentrated for effort and bent upon strife, shut him up in
self-contemplation, and reduced him never to make a poem, save of his
own heart.
What style would he adopt? With these concentrated and tragic sentiments
he had a classical mind. By the strangest mixture, the books which he
preferred were at once the most violent or the most proper, the Bible above
all: "I am a great reader and admirer of those books (the Bible), and had
read them through and through before I was eight years old; that is to say,
the Old Testament, for the New struck me as a task, but the other as a
pleasure."[169] Observe this word: he did not relish the tender, and self-
denying mysticism of the gospel, but the cruel sternness and lyrical outcries
of the old Hebrews. Next to the Bible he loved Pope, the most correct and
formal of men:

"As to Pope, I have always regarded him as the greatest name in our
poetry. Depend upon it, the rest are barbarians. He is a Greek Temple,
with a Gothic Cathedral on one hand, and a Turkish Mosque and all
sorts of fantastic pagodas and conventicles about him. You may call
Shakspeare and Milton pyramids, but I prefer the Temple of Theseus or
the Parthenon to a mountain of burnt brickwork.... The grand
distinction of the under-forms of the new school of poets is their
vulgarity. By this I do not mean they are coarse, but shabby-genteel."
[170]

And he presently wrote two letters with incomparable vivacity and spirit to
defend Pope against the scorn of modern writers. These writers, according
to him, have spoiled the public taste. The only ones who were worth
anything—Crabbe, Campbell, Rogers—imitate the style of Pope. A few
others had talent; but, take them all together, those who had come last had
perverted literature: they did not know their own language; their
expressions are only approximate, above or below the true tone, forced or
dull. He ranges himself amongst the corrupters,[171] and we soon see that
this theory is not an invention, springing from bad temper and polemics; he
returns to it. In his two first attempts—"Hours of Idleness, English Bards
and Scotch Reviewers"—he tried to follow it up. Later, and in almost all his
works, we find its effect. He recommends and practises the rule of unity in
tragedy. He loves oratorical form, symmetrical phrase, condensed style. He
likes to plead his passions. Sheridan tried to induce Byron to devote himself
to eloquence; and the vigor, piercing logic, wonderful vivacity, close
argument of his prose, prove that he would have taken the first rank
amongst pamphleteers.[172] If he attains to it amongst the poets, it is
partly due to his classical system. This oratorical form, in which Pope
compresses his thought like La Bruyère, magnifies the force and swing of
vehement ideas; like a narrow and straight canal, it collects and dashes
them in their right direction; there is then nothing which their impetus does
not carry away; and it is thus Lord Byron from the first, in the face of
hostile criticisms, and over jealous reputations, has made his way to the
public.[173]
Thus "Childe Harold" made its way. At the first onset every man who read it
was agitated. It was more than an author who spoke; it was a man. In
spite of his denial, the author was identified with his hero: he calumniated
himself, but still it was himself whom he portrayed. He was recognized in
that young voluptuous and disgusted man, ready to weep amidst his orgies,
who
"Sore sick at heart,
And from his fellow bacchanals would flee;
'Tis said, at times the sullen tear would start,
But pride congeal'd the drop within his ee:
Apart he stalk'd in joyless reverie,
And from his native land resolved to go,
And visit scorching climes beyond the sea;
With pleasure drugg'd, he almost long'd for woe."[174]
Fleeing from his native land, he carried, amongst the splendors and
cheerfulness of the south, his unwearying persecutor, "demon thought,"
implacable behind him. The scenery was recognized: it had been copied on
the spot. And what was the whole book but a diary of travel? He said in it
what he had seen and thought. What poetic fiction is so valuable as
genuine sensation? What is more penetrating than confidence, voluntary or
involuntary? Truly, every word here expressed an emotion of eye or heart:
"The tender azure of the unruffled deep....
The mountain-moss by scorching skies imbrown'd...
The orange tints that gild the greenest bough."...[175]
All these beauties, calm or imposing, he had enjoyed, and sometimes
suffered through them: and hence we see them through his verse.
Whatever he touched, he made palpitate and live, because when he saw it,
his heart had beaten and he had lived. He himself, a little later, quitting the
mask of Harold, took up the parable in his own name; and who is not
touched by an avowal so passionate and complete?
 "Yet must I think less wildly:—I have thought
Too long and darkly, till my brain became,
In its own eddy boiling and o'erwrought,
A whirling gulf of phantasy and flame:
And thus, untaught in youth my heart to tame,
My springs of life were poison'd. 'Tis too late!
Yet am I changed: though still enough the same
In strength to bear what time can not abate,
And feed on bitter fruits without accusing Fate....

"But soon he knew himself the most unfit

Of men to herd with Man; with whom he held
Little in common; untaught to submit
His thoughts to others, though his soul was quell'd
In youth by his own thoughts; still uncompell'd,
He would not yield dominion of his mind
To spirits against whom his own rebell'd;
Proud though in desolation, which could find,
A life within itself, to breathe without mankind....

"Like the Chaldean, he could watch the stars,

Till he had peopled them with beings bright
As their own beams; and earth, and earth-born jars,
And human frailties, were forgotten quite:
Could he have kept his spirit to that flight
He had been happy; but this clay will sink
In spark immortal, envying it the light
To which it mounts, as if to break the link
That keeps us from yon heaven which woos us to its brink.

"But in Man's dwellings he became a thing

Restless and worn, and stern and wearisome,
Droop'd as a wild-born falcon with clipt wing,
To whom the boundless air alone were home:
Then came his fit again, which to o'ercome,
As eagerly the barr'd-up bird will beat
His breast and beak against his wiry dome
Till the blood tinge his plumage, so the heat
Of his impeded soul would through his bosom eat."[176]
Such are the sentiments wherewith he surveyed nature and history, not to
comprehend them and forget himself before them, but to seek in them and
impress upon them the image of his own passions. He does not leave
objects to speak of themselves, but forces them to answer him. Amidst
their peace, he is only occupied by his own emotion. He attunes them to his
soul, and compels them to repeat his own cries. All is inflated here, as in
himself; the vast strophe rolls along, carrying in its overflowing bed the
flood of vehement ideas; declamation unfolds itself, pompous, and at times
artificial (it was his first work), but potent, and so often sublime that the
rhetorical rubbish, which he yet preserved, disappeared under the afflux of
splendors, with which it is loaded. Wordsworth, Walter Scott, by the side of
this prodigality of accumulated splendors, seemed poor and dull: never
since Æschylus was seen such a tragic pomp; and men followed with a sort
of pang, the train of gigantic figures, whom he brought in mournful ranks
before their eyes, from the far past;
"I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
A palace and a prison on each hand:
I saw from out the wave her structures rise
As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand:
A thousand years, their cloudy wings expand
Around me, and a dying Glory smiles
O'er the far times, when many a subject land
Look'd to the winged Lion's marble piles,
Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred isles!

"She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean,

Rising with her tiara of proud towers
At airy distance, with majestic motion,
A ruler of the waters and their powers:
And such she was!—her daughters had their dowers
From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East
Pour'd in her lap all gems in sparkling showers.
In purple was she robed, and of her feast
Monarchs partook, and deem'd their dignity increased....[177]

"Lo! where the Giant on the mountain stands,

His blood-red tresses deep'ning in the sun,
With death-shot glowing in his fiery hands,
 And eye that scorcheth all it glares upon;
Restless it rolls, now fix'd and now anon
Flashing afar,—and at his iron feet
Destruction cowers, to mark what deeds are done;
For on this morn three potent nations meet,
To shed before his shrine the blood he deems most sweet.

"By Heaven! it is a splendid sight to see

(For one who hath no friend, no brother there)
Their rival scarfs of mix'd embroidery,
Their various arms that glitter in the air!
What gallant war-hounds rouse them from their lair,
And gnash their fangs, loud yelling for the prey!
All join the chase, but few the triumph share;
The Grave shall bear the chiefest prize away,
And Havoc scarce for joy can number their array....[178]

"What from this barren being do we reap?

Our senses narrow, and our reason frail,
Life short, and truth a gem which loves the deep,
And all things weigh'd in custom's falsest scale;
Opinion an omnipotence, whose veil
Mantles the earth with darkness, until right
And wrong are accidents, and men grow pale
Lest their own judgments should become too bright,
And their free thoughts be crimes, and earth have too much
light.

"And thus they plod in sluggish misery,

Rotting from sire to son, and age to age,
Proud of their trampled nature, and so die,
Bequeathing their hereditary rage
To the new race of inborn slaves, who wage
War for their chains, and rather than be free,
Bleed gladiator-like and still engage
Within the same arena where they see
Their fellows fall before, like leaves of the same tree."[179]
Has ever style better expressed a soul? It is seen here laboring and
expanding. Long and stormily the ideas boiled within this soul like bars of
metal heaped in the furnace. They melted there before the strain of the
intense heat; they mingled therein their heated mass amidst convulsions
and explosions, and then at last the door is opened; a slow stream of fire
descends into the trough prepared beforehand, heating the circumambient
air, and its glittering hues scorch the eyes which persist in looking upon it.

Section III.—Byron's Short Poems

Description and monologue did not suffice Byron; and he needed, to

express his ideal, events and actions. Only events try the force and
elasticity of the soul; only actions display and regulate this force and
elasticity. Amidst events he sought for the most powerful, amidst actions
the strongest; and we see appear successively "The Bride of Abydos, The
Giaour, The Corsair, Lara, Parisina, The Siege of Corinth, Mazeppa," and
"The Prisoner of Chillon."
I know that these sparkling poems have grown dull in forty years. In their
necklace of Oriental pearls have been discovered beads of glass; and Byron,
who only half loved them, judged better than his judges. Yet he judged
amiss; those which he preferred are the most false. His "Corsair" is marred
by classic elegancies: the pirates' song at the beginning is no truer than a
chorus at the Italian opera; his scamps propound philosophical antitheses
as balanced as those of Pope. A hundred times ambition, glory, envy,
despair, and the other abstract personages, whose images in the time of
the first Empire the French used to set upon their drawing-room clocks,
break in amidst living passions.[180] The noblest passages are disfigured by
pedantic apostrophes, and the pretentious poetic diction sets up its
threadbare frippery and conventional ornaments.[181] Far worse, he studies
effect and follows the fashion. Melodramatic strings pull his characters at
the right time, so as to obtain the grimace which shall make his public
shudder:
"Who thundering comes on blackest steed,
With slacken'd bit and hoof of speed!
... Approach, thou craven crouching slave,
Say, is not this Thermopylæ?"
Wretched mannerisms, emphatic and vulgar, imitated from Lucan and our
modern Lucans, but which produce their effect only on a first perusal, and
on the common herd of readers. There is an infallible means of attracting a
mob, which is, to shout out loud; with shipwrecks, sieges, murders, and
combats, we shall always interest them; show them pirates, desperate
adventurers—these distorted or raging faces will draw them out of their
regular and monotonous existence; they will go to see them as they go to
melodramas, and through the same instinct which induces them to read
novels in penny numbers. Add, by way of contrast, angelic women, tender
and submissive, beautiful as angels. Byron describes all this, and adds to
these seductions a bewitching scenery, oriental or picturesque adornments;
old Alpine castles, the Mediterranean waves, the setting suns of Greece, the
whole in high relief, with marked shadows and brilliant colors. We are all of
the people, as regards emotion; and the great lady, like the waiting-woman,
sheds tears, without cavilling with the author as to the means he uses.
And yet, after all, there is a great deal of truth in Byron's poems. No; this
man is not a mere arranger of effects or an inventor of phrases. He has
lived amidst the spectacles he describes; he has experienced the emotions
he relates. He has been in the tent of Ali Pacha, and relished the strong
savor of ocean adventure and savage manners. He has been a score of
times near death—in the Morea, in the anguish and the solitude of fever; at
Suli, in a shipwreck; at Malta, in England, and in Italy, in the dangers of a
duel, plots of insurrection, commencements of sudden attacks, at sea, in
arms, on horseback, having seen assassinations, wounds, agonies close to,
him, and that more than once. "I am living here exposed to it
(assassination) daily, for I have happened to make a powerful and
unprincipled man my enemy; and I never sleep the worse for it, or ride in
less solitary places, because precaution is useless, and one thinks of it as of
a disease which may or may not strike."[182] He spoke the truth; no one
ever held himself more erect and firm in danger. One day, near the Gulf of
San Fiorenzo, his yacht was thrown on the coast; the sea was terrific, and
the rocks in sight; the passengers kissed their rosaries, or fainted with
horror; and the two captains being consulted, declared shipwreck
inevitable. "Well," said Lord Byron, "we are all born to die; I shall go with
regret, but certainly not with fear." And he took off his clothes, begging the
others to do the same, not that they could save themselves amidst such
waves; but "it is every man's duty to endeavour to preserve the life God has
given him; so I advise you all to strip: swimming, indeed, can be of little
use in these billows; but as children, when tired with crying, sink placidly to
repose, we, when exhausted with struggling, shall die the easier..." He then
sat down, folding his arms, very calm; he even joked with the captain, who
was putting his dollars into his waistcoat pocket.... The ship approached the
rocks. All this time Byron was not seen to change countenance. A man thus
tried and moulded can paint extreme situations and sentiments. After all,
they are never painted otherwise than by experience. The most inventive—
Dante and Shakespeare—though quite different, yet do the same thing.
However high their genius rose, it always had its feet on observation; and
their most foolish, as well as their most splendid pictures, never offer to the
world more than an image of their age, or of their own heart. At most, they
deduce; that is, having derived from two or three features the inward
qualities of the man within themselves and of the men around them, they
draw thence, by a sudden ratiocination of which they have no
consciousness, the varied skein of actions and sentiments. They may be
artists, but they are observers. They may invent, but they describe. Their
glory does not consist in the display of a phantasmagoria, but in the
discovery of a truth. They are the first to enter some unexplored province
of humanity, which becomes their domain, and thenceforth supports their
name like an appanage. Byron found his domain, which is that of sad and
tender sentiments: it is a heath, and full of ruins; but he is at home there,
and he is alone.
What an abode! And it is on this desolation that he dwells. He muses on it.
See the brothers of Childe Harold pass—the characters who people it. One
in his prison, chained up with his two remaining brothers. Their father and
three others had perished fighting, or were burnt for their faith. One by
one, before the eyes of the eldest, the last two languish and fade: a silent
and slow agony amidst the damp darkness into which a beam of the sickly
sun pierces through a crevice. After the death of the first, the survivors
"begged as a boon" that he shall at least be buried on a spot "whereon the
day might shine." The jailers
"Coldly laugh'd—and laid him there:
The flat and turfless earth above
The being we so much did love;
His empty chain above it leant."[183]
Then the youngest "faded" daily
 "With all the while a cheek whose bloom
Was as a mockery of the tomb,
Whose tints as gently sunk away
As a departing rainbow's ray."[184]
But the pillars to which they are chained are too far apart—the elder cannot
approach his dying younger brother; he listens and hears the failing sighs;
he cries for succor, and none comes. He bursts his chain with one strong
bound: all is over. He takes that cold hand, and then, before the motionless
body, his senses are lost, his thoughts arrested; he is like a drowning man,
who, after passing through pangs of agony, lets himself sink down like a
stone, and no longer feels existence but by a complete petrifaction of
horror. Here is another brother of Childe Harold, Mazeppa, bound naked on
a wild horse, rushing over the steppes. He writhes, and his swollen limbs,
cut by the cords, are bleeding. A whole day the course continues, and
behind him the wolves are howling. The night through he hears their long
monotonous chase, and at the end his energy fails.
"... The earth gave way, the skies roll'd round,
I seem'd to sink upon the ground;
But err'd, for I was fastly bound.
My heart turn'd sick, my brain grew sore,
And throbb'd awhile, then beat no more;
The skies spun like a mighty wheel;
I saw the trees like drunkards reel,
And a slight flash sprang o'er my eyes,
Which saw no further: he who dies
Can die no more than then I died....
I felt the blackness come and go,
And strove to wake; but could not make
My senses climb up from below:
I felt as on a plank at sea,
When all the waves that dash o'er thee,
At the same time upheave and whelm,
And hurl thee towards a desert realm."[185]
 THE CASTLE OF CHILLON
Photogravure from an etching.
Shall I enumerate them all? Hugo, Parisina, the Foscari, the Giaour, the
Corsair. His hero is always a man striving with the worst anguish, face to
face with shipwreck, torture, death—his own painful and prolonged death,
the bitter death of his well-beloved, with remorse for his companion, amidst
the gloomy prospects of a threatening eternity, with no other support but
innate energy and hardened pride. These men have desired too much, too
impetuously, with a senseless swing, like a horse which does not feel the
bit, and thenceforth their inner doom drives them to the abyss which they
see, and cannot escape from. What a night was that of Alp before Corinth!
He is a renegade, and comes with the Mussulmans to besiege the
Christians, his old friends—Minotti, the father of the girl he loves. Next day
he is to lead the assault, and he thinks of his death, which he forebodes,
the carnage of his own soldiers, which he is preparing. There is no inner
support, but rooted resentment and a firm and stern will. The Mussulmans
despise him, the Christians execrate him, and his glory only publishes his
treason. Dejected and fevered, he passes through the sleeping camp, and
wanders on the shore:
 "'Tis midnight: on the mountains brown
The cold, round moon shines deeply down;
Blue roll the waters, blue the sky
Spreads like an ocean hung on high,
Bespangled with those isles of light....
The waves on either shore lay there
Calm, clear, and azure as the air;
And scarce their foam the pebbles shook,
But murmured meekly as the brook.
The winds were pillow'd on the waves;
The banners droop'd along their staves....
And that deep silence was unbroke,
Save where the watch his signal spoke,
Save where the steed neighed oft and shrill,...
And the wide hum of that wild host
Rustled like leaves from coast to coast...."[186]
How the heart sickens before such spectacles! What a contrast between his
agony and the peace of immortal nature! How man stretches then his arms
towards ideal beauty, and how impotently they fall back at the contact of
our clay and mortality! Alp advances over the sandy shore to the foot of the
bastion, exposed to the fire of the sentinels; and he hardly thinks of it:
"And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall
Hold o'er the dead their carnival,
Gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb;
They were too busy to bark at him!
From a Tartar's skull they had stripped the flesh,
As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;
And their white tusks crunched o'er the whiter skull,
As it slipped through their jaws, when their edge grew dull,
As they lazily mumbled the bones of the dead,
When they scarce could rise from the spot where they fed;
So well had they broken a lingering fast
With those who had fallen for that night's repast.
And Alp knew, by the turbans that roll'd on the sand,
The foremost of these were the best of his band:
Crimson and green were the shawls of their wear,
And each scalp had a single long tuft of hair,
All the rest was shaven and bare.
 The scalps were in the wild dog's maw,
The hair was tangled round his jaw.
But close by the shore on the edge of the gulf,
There sat a vulture flapping a wolf,
Who had stolen from the hills, but kept away,
Scared by the dogs, from the human prey;
But he seized on his share of a steed that lay,
Pick'd by the birds, on the sands of the bay."[187]
Such is the goal of man; the hot frenzy of life ends here; buried or not, it
matters little: vultures or jackals, one gravedigger is as good as another.
The storm of his rages and his efforts have but served to cast him to these
animals for their food, and to their beaks and jaws he comes only with the
sentiment of frustrated hopes and insatiable desires. Could any of us forget
the death of Lara after once reading it? Has anyone elsewhere seen, save in
Shakespeare, a sadder picture of the destiny of a man vainly rearing
against inevitable fate? Though generous, like Macbeth, he has, like
Macbeth, dared everything against law and conscience, even against pity
and the most ordinary feelings of honor. Crimes committed have forced him
into other crimes, and blood poured out has made him glide into a pool of
blood. As a corsair, he has slain; as a cut-throat, he assassinates; and his
former murders which haunt his dreams come with their bat's-wings
beating against the portals of his brain. He does not drive them away, these
black visitors; though the mouth remains silent, the pallid brow and strange
smile bear witness to their approach. And yet it is a noble spectacle to see
man standing with calm countenance even under their touch. The last day
comes, and six inches of iron suffice for all this energy and fury. Lara is
lying beneath a lime tree, and his wound "is bleeding fast from life away."
With each convulsion the stream gushes blacker, then stops; the blood
flows now only drop by drop, and his brow is already moist, his eyes dim.
The victors arrive—he does not deign to answer them; the priest brings
near the absolving cross, "but he look'd upon it with an eye profane." What
remains to him of life is for his poor page, the only being who loved him,
who has followed him to the end, and who now tries to stanch the blood
from his wound:
"He scarce can speak, but motions him 'tis vain,
He clasps the hand that pang which would assuage,
And sadly smiles his thanks to that dark page....
His dying tones are in that other tongue,
 To which some strange remembrance wildly clung....
And once, as Kaled's answering accents ceased,
Rose Lara's hand, and pointed to the East:
Whether (as then the breaking sun from high
Roll'd back the clouds) the morrow caught his eye,
Or that 'twas chance, or some remember'd scene,
That raised his arm to point where such had been,
Scarce Kaled seem'd to know, but turn'd away,
As if his heart abhorr'd that coming day,
And shrunk his glance before that morning light,
To look on Lara's brow—where all grew night....
But from his visage little could we guess,
So unrepentant, dark, and passionless....
But gasping heaved the breath that Lara drew,
And dull the film along his dim eye grew;
His limbs stretch'd fluttering, and his head droop'd o'er."[188]
All is over, and of this haughty spirit there remains but a poor piece of clay.
After all, it is the desirable lot of such hearts; they have spent life amiss,
and only rest well in the tomb.
A strange and altogether northern poetry, with its root in the Edda and its
flower in Shakespeare, born long ago under an inclement sky, on the shores
of a stormy ocean—the work of a too wilful, too strong, too sombre race—
and which, after lavishing its images of desolation and heroism, ends by
stretching like a black veil over the whole of living nature the dream of
universal destruction: this dream is here, as in the Edda, almost equally
grand:
"I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day....
Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour
They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks
Extinguish'd with a crash—and all was black....
And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face....
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd,
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food:
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again; a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought—and that was death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails—men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devour'd,
Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one.
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the drooping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answer'd not with a caress—he died.
The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
 The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they raked up,
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects—saw, and shriek'd, and died—
Even of their mutual hideousness they died."[189]

Section IV.—Manfred

Amongst these unrestrained and gloomy poems, which incessantly return

and dwell on the same subject, there is one more imposing and lofty than
the rest, "Manfred," twin-brother of the greatest poem of the age, Goethe's
"Faust." Goethe says of Byron: "This singular intellectual poet has taken my
Faustus to himself, and extracted from it the strongest nourishment for his
hypochondriac humour. He has made use of the impelling principles in his
own way, for his own purposes, so that no one of them remains the same;
and it is particularly on this account that I cannot enough admire his
genius." The play is indeed original. Byron writes: "His (Goethe's) 'Faust' I
never read, for I don't know German, but Matthew Monk Lewis, in 1816, at
Coligny, translated most of it to mevivâ voce, and I was naturally much
struck with it; but it was the 'Steinbach' and the 'Jungfrau' and something
else, much more than Faustus, that made me write 'Manfred.'"[190] Goethe
adds: "The whole is so completely formed anew, that it would be an
interesting task for the critic to point out not only the alterations he (Byron)
has made, but their degree of resemblance or dissimilarity to the original."
Let us speak of it, then, quite freely: the subject of "Manfred" is the
dominant idea of the age, expressed so as to display the contrast of two
masters, and of two nations.
What constitutes Goethe's glory is, that in the nineteenth century he did
produce an epic poem—I mean a poem in which genuine gods act and
speak. This appeared impossible in the nineteenth century, since the special
work of our age is the refined consideration of creative ideas, and the
suppression of the poetic characters by which other ages have never failed