And the man who wrote this was worthy to play an even nobler part than the one he had thus nobly described; for it was not many years after, that Byron left all and laid down his life for the emancipation of a strange land, and 'Greece and Italy wept for his death, as it had been that of the noblest of their own sons.' Detractors have done their best to pare away the merit of this act of self-renunciation by attributing it to despair. That contemporaries of their own humour had done their best to make his life a load to him is true, yet to this talk of despair we may reply in the poet's own words:
When we knowAll that can come, and how to meet it, ourResolves, if firm, may merit a more nobleWord than this, to give it utterance.
There was an estimate of the value and purpose of a human life, which our Age of Comfort may fruitfully ponder.
To fix upon violent will and incessant craving for movement as the mark of a poet, whose contemporaries adored him for what they took to be the musing sweetness of his melancholy, may seem a critical perversity. There is, however, a momentous difference between that melancholy, which is as the mere shadow projected by a man's spiritual form, and that othermelancholy, which itself is the reality and substance of a character; between the soul to whom dejection brings graceful relief after labour and effort, and the soul which by irresistible habit and constitution dwells ever in Golgotha. This deep and penetrating subjective melancholy had no possession of Byron. His character was essentially objective, stimulated by outward circumstance, moving to outward harmonies, seeking colour and image and purpose from without. Hence there is inevitably a certain liveliness and animation, even when he is in the depths. We feel that we are watching clouds sweep majestically across the sky, and, even when they are darkest, blue interspaces are not far off. Contrast the moodiest parts ofChilde Haroldor ofCainwith Novalis'sNight Hymns. Byron's gloom is a mere elegance in comparison. The one pipes to us with a graceful despondency on the edge of the gulf, while the other carries us actually down into the black profound, with no rebellious cry, nor shriek of woe, but sombrely awaiting the deliverance of death, with soul absorbed and consumed by weariness. Let the reader mark the note of mourning struck in the opening stanzas, for instance, of Novalis'sLonging after Death, their simplicity, homeliness, transparent sincerity, and then turn to any of the familiar passages where Byron meditates on the good things which the end brings to men. How artificial he seems, and unseasonably ornate, and how conscious of his public. In the first, we sit sadly on the ground in someveritable Place of a Skull; in the second, we assist at tragical distress after the manner of the Italian opera. We should be disposed to call the first a peculiarly German quality, until we remember Pascal. With Novalis, or with Pascal, as with all those whom character, or the outer fates, or the two together, have drawn to dwell in the valley of the shadow, gloom and despondency are the very stuff of their thoughts. Material energy could have done nothing for them. Their nerves and sinews were too nearly cut asunder. To know the quality of Byron's melancholy, and to recognise how little it was of the essence of his character, we have only to consider how far removed he was from this condition. In other words, in spite of morbid manifestations of one sort and another, he always preserved a salutary and vivid sympathy for action, and a marked capacity for it.
It was the same impetuous and indomitable spirit of effort which moved Byron to his last heroic exploit, that made the poetry inspired by it so powerful in Europe, from the deadly days of the Holy Alliance onwards. Cynical and misanthropical as he has been called, as though that were his sum and substance, he yet never ceased to glorify human freedom, in tones that stirred the hearts of men and quickened their hope and upheld their daring, as with the voice of some heavenly trumpet. You may, if you choose, find the splendour of the stanzas in the Fourth Canto on the Bourbon restoration, on Cromwell, and Washington, a theatrical splendour. But for all that, they touched the noblest parts of men. They are alive with an exalted and magnanimous generosity, the one high virtue which can never fail to touch a multitude. Subtlety may miss them, graces may miss them, and reason may fly over their heads, but the words of a generous humanity on the lips of poet or chief have never failed to kindle divine music in their breasts. The critic may censure, and culture may wave a disdainful hand. As has been said, all such words 'are open to criticism, and they are all above it.' The magic still works. A mysterious and potent word from the gods has gone abroad over the face of the earth.
This larger influence was not impaired by Byron's ethical poverty. The latter was an inevitable consequence of his defective discipline. The triteness of his moral climax is occasionally startling. When Sardanapalus, for instance, sees Zarina torn from him, and is stricken with profound anguish at the pain with which he has filled her life, he winds up with such a platitude as this:
To what gulfsA single deviation from the trackOf human duties leaves even those who claimThe homage of mankind as their born due!
The baldest writer of hymns might work up passion enough for a consummation like this. Once more, Byron was insufficiently furnished with positive intellectual ideas, and for want of these his most exaltedwords were constantly left sterile of definite and pointed outcome.
Byron's passionate feeling for mankind included the long succession of generations, that stretch back into the past and lie far on in the misty distances of the future. No poet has had a more sublime sense of the infinite melancholy of history; indeed, we hardly feel how great a poet Byron was, until we have read him at Venice, at Florence, and above all in that overpowering scene where the 'lone mother of dead empires' broods like a mysterious haunting spirit among the columns and arches and wrecked fabrics of Rome. No one has expressed with such amplitude the sentiment that in a hundred sacred spots of the earth has
Fill'd upAs 'twere, anew, the gaps of centuries;Leaving that beautiful which still was so,And making that which was not; till the placeBecame religious, and the heart ran o'erWith silent worship of the great of old—The dead, but sceptred sovereigns, who still ruleOur spirits from their urns.
Only he stands aright, who from his little point of present possession ever meditates on the far-reaching lines, which pass through his point from one interminable star-light distance to another. Neither the stoic pagan, nor the disciple of the creed which has some of the peculiar weakness of stoicism and not all its peculiar strength, could find Manfred's latest word untrue to himself:
The mind, which is immortal, makes itselfRequital for its good or evil thoughts—Is its own origin of ill and end,And its own place and time: its innate sense,When stripped of this mortality, derivesNo colour from the fleeting things without:But is absorbed in sufferance of joy,Born from the knowledge of its own desert.
It is only when a man subordinates this absorption in individual sufferance and joy to the thought that his life is a trust for humanity, that he is sure of making it anything other than 'rain fallen on the sand.' In the last great episode of his own career Byron was as lofty as the noblest side of his creed. The historic feeling for the unseen benefactors of old time was matched by vehemence of sympathy with the struggles for liberation of his own day. And for this, history will not forget him. Though he may have no place in our own Minster, he assuredly belongs to the band of far-shining men, of whom Pericles declared the whole world to be the tomb.
FOOTNOTES[1]See also George Sand's Preface toObermann, p. 10.'En même temps que les institutions et les coutumes, la littérature anglaise passa le détroit, et vint regner chez nous. La poésie britannique nous révéla le doute incarné sous la figure de Byron; puis la littérature allemande, quoique plus mystique, nous conduisit au même résultat par un sentiment de rêverie plus profond.'The number of translations that have appeared in Germany since 1830 proves the coincidence of Byronic influence with revolutionary movement in that country.[2]Thoreau.[3]Morison'sLife of St. Bernard, p. 68 (2d edit.)
[1]See also George Sand's Preface toObermann, p. 10.'En même temps que les institutions et les coutumes, la littérature anglaise passa le détroit, et vint regner chez nous. La poésie britannique nous révéla le doute incarné sous la figure de Byron; puis la littérature allemande, quoique plus mystique, nous conduisit au même résultat par un sentiment de rêverie plus profond.'The number of translations that have appeared in Germany since 1830 proves the coincidence of Byronic influence with revolutionary movement in that country.
[1]See also George Sand's Preface toObermann, p. 10.'En même temps que les institutions et les coutumes, la littérature anglaise passa le détroit, et vint regner chez nous. La poésie britannique nous révéla le doute incarné sous la figure de Byron; puis la littérature allemande, quoique plus mystique, nous conduisit au même résultat par un sentiment de rêverie plus profond.'
The number of translations that have appeared in Germany since 1830 proves the coincidence of Byronic influence with revolutionary movement in that country.
[2]Thoreau.
[2]Thoreau.
[3]Morison'sLife of St. Bernard, p. 68 (2d edit.)
[3]Morison'sLife of St. Bernard, p. 68 (2d edit.)