Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/683

Rh recognized the value of the instrument, and lost no time in making it his own.

It was not on the artistic side that Byron's strength lay. Words were far from niggardly in their supplies to him; they flowed in upon him with sufficient readiness for free and direct expression; his thoughts were not blunted, his conceptions were not turned awry by hopeless struggling with stubborn material, but language was not pliant in his hands for the finer achievements of art. The truth is, he felt too deeply to be a poet of the very highest rank; the feeling of the moment took too large and embarrassing a hold of him to leave his hand free for triumphs of execution. "This interfered both with the perfecting of details, and with the severe ordering of parts into an artistic whole. In Byron we are always struck more with the matter than with the form. It is his theme that absorbs attention, and the impetuous vehemence and stormy play of passion with which he hurries it on. This is, doubtless, an insecure foundation for lasting fame. The work of a man so keenly alive to the impressions of the hour, so closely bound up with his generation as Byron, runs a risk of perishing when the things that most deeply stir that generation have ceased to stir mankind. The secret of his tremendous power was his passionate sympathy with his own time. By the accidents of birth and circumstances, he was placed in opposition to the existing order of things, and his daring temper made him the exponent of the spirit of revolution. He is the greatest modern preacher of "liberty, equality, and fraternity." His little aristocratic assumptions were as superficial as his professions of antiquarian poetic loyalty. Nothing irritated him more than to deny him any of the privileges of his rank, but he never used the advantage of his social superiority in any of the contests in which he was involved, and in his loves and his friendships he showed regard only for the individual. He was a warm champion of the established fame of Pope against innovators, but he practised the innovations himself with such effect that he has been called a foolish enough phrase, certainly, but intelligible "the interpreter of Wordsworth to the multitude." Abroad, Byron's influence was, from the appearance of Childe Harold, no less conspicuous than at home. It has even been said that he was the first Englishman who made English literature known throughout Europe. Even such men as Lamartine, who deplored Byron as an incarnation of Satan, acknowledged his power; Lamartine says that Byron was "a second Ossian to him," and tells us that he was afraid to read him in his youth lest he should be perverted to his beliefs. Heine invited the compliment of being called "the German Byron." He is believed to have largely influenced the revolutionary movement in Germany, and he gave a direct stimulus to the liberators of Italy. Byron is the favourite poet of our English speaking fellow-subjects in India; the educated Bengalee knows him by heart. On the Continent his influence has rather increased than diminished. Only the other year a glowing eulogy of his genius was written by Castelar, the literary leader of republicanism in Spain. At home of late we have been accused of neglecting Byron, and the fact is significant. Such stormful and melancholy poetry as his must always be at the height of its popularity in times of conflict. The disturbed state of the Continent is more favourable to its spirit than the piping times of peace which have prevailed for a generation in England. Men who are content with the old things, and men who renounce old things with a light heart, can have little affinity with his deep-rooted sadness, his pride of defiant struggle, his flashes of defiant merriment; all this seems hysterical, affected, and unreal, and unreal it no doubt is, in the sense that the feelings of men under the tension of conflict must appear full of false notes to men who look on out of a normal condition of settled tranquillity.

The most hopeful circumstance for the permanence of Byron's name is that he stands at the opening of a new era as its largest literary figure. Sooner or later, as new phases of thought and sentiment supervene upon the old, his writings must pass out of the catalogue of popular literature, but his personality will always fascinate. He is like Hamlet in this respect. It may safely be predicted that Byron will not cease to be read till Hamlet has ceased to be studied. There is not a little in common between the characters, in spite of superficial difference. In the desolation of his youth, in his moodiness, in his distempered mobility between the extremes of laughter and tears, in his yearning for sympathy, his intensity of friendship, his dark fits of misanthropy, his habit of brooding over the mysteries of life, Byron unconsciously played the character of Hamlet with the world for his stage, and left a kindred problem for the wonder of mankind, a problem which no analysis can make clear, and which every one may pray that it be not given them to understand.

It has often been said that Byron could draw but one character, and that his own, This is not more than a half truth. It is true that Byron's genius was more lyrical than dramatic. "Many people," he said himself, "think my talent essentially undramatic, and I am not clear that they are not in the right." But he also said that while he, "like all imaginative men, embodied himself with the character while he drew it," he did so " not a moment after the pen was from off the paper." The difference between saying that Byron loved to picture himself in various circumstances, and that he could not set himself to the artistic portraiture of any character in which he was not interested, may not be great, but it is the difference between a true view and a false view of his artistic method. He was undramatic in this sense, that his imagination did not enter freely and self-delightedly into various forms of life. When Moore thought he had found a beautiful subject for Byron's genius, and wrote the details to him, Byron could not enter into the situation. His Monody on Sheridan is weak, because it was not spontaneous. But when he found a situation or a character which naturally attracted him, and which he was able to understand, his method was not, as is implied by the language in which his want of dramatis faculty is often expressed, to bring the situation or the character nearer to his own experience, but he tried to identify himself with the life of his subject, and laboured at details with almost pre-Raphaelitic minuteness. We do right to call him undramatic still, because a dramatic genius is doing constantly and by the law of his nature what Byron could only do rarely and with a limited range. But it is wrong to say that he was always drawing himself. There are considerable intervals between Sardanapalus, Marino Faliero, Alp, Lara, and Manfred, although in those and in all his leading characters we are more struck with what they have in common with their author, the affinity that led him to deal with their fortunes, than we are with their separate individualities. The Countess Guiccioli has given in the case of Marino Faliero a good example of the way in which he prepared himself for his work. He was struck with the tradition of Faliero's conspiracy in his old age against the state which he had served so well in youth and middle age, immediately after his arrival in Venice, but at first he was unable to satisfy himself as to the motive. The ordinary histories, which he searched through with care, ascribed it to an old man's jealousy of a young wife, but this Byron's instinct rejected. He passed hours in the hall of the great council, stared at the record of Faliero's decapitation, lingered about the tomb, and called up and realized every recorded circumstance of his life, keenly