CHAPTER II

THE AGE OF BYRON

1815-1840

IT is noticeable that the early manifestations of the reforming spirit in English literature had been accompanied by nothing revolutionary in morals or conduct. It is true that, at the very outset, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge had been in

clined to a "pantisocratic" sympathy with the principles of the French Revolution, and had leaned to the radical side in politics. But the spirit of revolt was very mildly awakened in them, and when the Reign of Terror came, their aspirations after democratic freedom were nipped in the bud. Early in the century Wordsworth had become, what he remained, a Church and State Tory of the extreme type; Southey, who in 1794 had, "shocking to say, wavered between deism and atheism," promptly developed a horror for every species of liberal speculation, and contributed with gusto to the Quarterly Review. Temperament and circumstance combined to make Scott a conservative in

Lord Byron

(Circa 1804-1806)

politics and manners. Meanwhile, it was in the hands of these peaceful men that the literary revolution was proceeding, and we look back from 1815 with a sense of the extraordinary modesty and wholesome law-abiding morality of the generation which introduced romanticism in this country.

107

No section of English literature is, we will not say more innocent merely, but more void of the appearance of offence than that which was produced by the romantic reformers of our poetry. The audacity of Wordsworth and Coleridge was purely artistic; it was bounded by the determination to destroy certain conventions of style, and to introduce new elements and new aspects into the treatment of poetry. But these novelties included nothing that could unsettle, or even excite, the conscience of the least mature of readers. Both these great writers spoke much of passion, and insisted on its resumption by an art which had permitted it to escape too long. But by passion Wordsworth understood no unruly turbulence of the senses, no revolt against conventional manners, no disturbance of social custom. He conceived the term, and illustrated his conception in his poetry, as intense emotion concentrated upon some object of physical or pathetic beauty -such as a mountain, a child, a flower-and led directly by it into. the channel of imaginative expression. He saw that there were aspects of beauty which might lead to danger, but from these he and Scott, and even Coleridge, resolutely turned away their eyes.

Mrs. Byron

To all the principal writers of this first generation, not merely vice, but coarseness and licence were abhorrent, as they had been to no earlier race of Englishmen. The rudeness of the eighteenth century gave way to a cold refinement, exquisitely crystal in its highest expressions, a little empty and inhuman in its lower ones. What the Continental nations unite to call our "hypocrisy," our determination not to face the ugly side of nature at all, to deny the very existence of the unseemly instincts, now came to the front. In contrast to the European riot, England held her garments high out of the mire, with a somewhat mincing air of excessive virtue. The image was created of Britannia, with her long teeth, prudishly averting her elderly eyes from the cancan of the nations. So far as this refinement was genuine it was a good thing-the spotless purity of Wordsworth and Scott is matter for national pride-but so far as it was indeed hypocritical, so far as it was an exhibition of empty spiritual arrogance, it was hateful. In any case, the cord was drawn so tight that it was bound to snap, and to the generation of intensely proper, conservative poets and novelists there succeeded a race

of bards who rejoiced to be thought profligates, socialists, and atheists. Our literature was to become "revolutionary" at last.

In the sixth Lord BYRON the pent-up animal spirits of the new era found the first channel for their violence, and England positively revelled in the poetry of crime and chaos. The representative of a race of lawless and turbulent men, proud as Lucifer, beautiful as Apollo, sinister as Loki, Byron appeared on the scenes arrayed in every quality which could dazzle the youthful and alarm the mature. His lovely curly head moved all the women to adore him; his melancholy attitudes were mysteriously connected with stories of his appalling wicked

ness; his rank and ostentation of life, his wild exotic tastes, his defiance of restraint, the pathos of his physical infirmity, his histrionic gifts as of one, half mountebank, half archangel, all these combined to give his figure, his whole legend, a matchless fascination. Nor, though now so much of the gold is turned to tinsel, though now the lights are out upon the stage where Byron strutted, can we cease to be fascinated. Even those who most strenuously deny him imagination, style, the durable parts of literature, cannot pretend to be unmoved by the unparalleled romance of his career. Goethe declared that a man so pre-eminent for character had never existed in literature before, and would probably never appear again. This should give us the note for a comparative estimate of Byron: in quality of style he is most unequal, and is never, perhaps, absolutely first-rate; but as an example of the literary temperament at its boiling-point, history records no more brilliant

name.

Lady Caroline Lamb in her Page's Costume From a Miniature in the possession of John Murray, Esq.

Byron was in haste to be famous, and wrote before he had learned his art. His intention was to resist the incursion of the romantic movement, and at the age of twenty-one he produced a satire, the aim of which, so far as it was not merely splenetic, was the dethronement of Wordsworth and Coleridge in favour of Dryden and Pope. In taste and conviction he was reactionary to the very last; but when he came to write, the verse poured forth like lava, and took romantic forms in spite of him. His character was formed during the two wild years of exile (June 1809 till July 1811), when, a prey to a frenzied restlessness, he scoured the Mediterranean, rescued Turkish

women, visited Lady Hester Stanhope, swam across the Hellespont, rattled at the windows of seraglios, and even-so Goethe and the world believed -murdered a man with a yataghan and captured an island of the Cyclades. Before he began to sing of Lara and the Giaour he was himself a Giaour, himself Lara and Conrad; he had travelled with a disguised Gulnare, he had been beloved by Medora, he had stabbed Hassan to the heart, and fought by the side of Alp the renegade; or, if he had not done quite all this, people insisted that he had, and he was too melancholy to deny the impeachment.

Languid as Byron affected to be, and haughtily indolent, he wrote with extraordinary persistence and rapidity. Few poets have composed so much in so short a time. The first two cantos of Childe Harold in 1812 lead off the giddy masque of his productions, which for the next few years were far too numerous to be mentioned here in detail. Byron's verse romances, somewhat closely modelled in form on those of Scott, began with the Giaour, and each had a beautiful, fatal hero "of one virtue and a thousand crimes," in whom tens of thousands of awestruck readers believed they recognised the poet himself in masquerade. All other poetry instantly paled before the astounding success of Byron, and Scott, who had reigned unquestioned as the popular minstrel of the age, "gave over writing verse-romances" and took to prose. Scott's courtesy to his young rival was hardly more exquisite than the personal respect which Byron showed to one whom he insisted in addressing as "the Monarch of Parnassus"; but Scott's gentle chieftains were completely driven out of the field by the Turkish bandits and pirates. All this time Byron was writing exceedingly little that has stood the test of time; nor, indeed, up to the date of his marriage in 1815, can it be said that he had produced much of any real poetical importance. He was now, however, to be genuinely unhappy and candidly inspired.

Lord Byron

After a Portrait by W. Westall in the possession of
Coningsby D'Israeli, Esq.

Adversity drove him in upon himself, and gave him something of creative

sincerity. Perhaps, if he had lived, and had found peace with advancing years, he might have become a great artist. But that he never contrived to be. In 1816 he left England, shaking its dust from his feet, no longer a pinchbeck pirate, but a genuine outlaw, in open enmity with society. This enfranchisement acted upon his genius like a tonic, and in the last eight years of his tempestuous and lawless life he wrote many things of extraordinary power and even splendour. Two sections of his work approach, nearer than any others, perfection in their kind. In a species of magnificent invective, of which the Vision of Judgment is the finest example, Byron rose to the level of Dryden and Swift; in the picturesque satire of social life-where he boldly imitated the popular poets of Italy, and in particular Casti and Pulci-his extreme ease and versatility, his masterly blending of humour and pathos, ecstasy and misanthropy, his variegated knowledge of men and manners, gave him, as Scott observed, something of the universality of Shakespeare. Here he is to be studied in Beppo and in the unmatched Don Juan of his last six years. It is in these and the related works that we detect the only perdurable Byron, the only poetry that remains entirely worthy of the stupendous fame of the author.

Lord Byron

It is the fatal defect of Byron. that his verse is rarely exquisite. That indescribable combination of harmony in form with inevitable propriety in language which thrills the reader of Milton, of Wordsworth, of Shelley, of Tennyson-this is scarcely to be discerned in Byron. We are, in exchange, presented with a rapid volume of rough melody, burning words which are torches rather than stars, a fine impetuosity, a display of personal temperament which it has nowadays become more interesting to study in the poet than in the poetry, a great noise of trumpets and kettledrums in which the more delicate melodies of verse are drowned. These refinements, however, are imperceptible to all but native ears, and the lack of them has not prevented Byron from seeming to foreign critics to be by far the greatest and the most powerful of our poets. There was no difficulty in comprehending his splendid,