Page:The Review of English Studies Vol 1.djvu/39

Rh it to the fugitive Charles XII, after the battle of Pultowa, under an oak tree:

In form, Mazeppa is still a lay; but meanwhile, as we know, Byron had hit on quite a different method of story-telling. It was the old, discursive, ironical Italian method. Beppo is his gay little first adventure of this kind. It is another anecdote: the husband, long thought to be lost, comes home in the guise of a Turk; introduces himself, with politeness and tact, to his wife and to his successor, and all goes smoothly. That is the whole; all the virtue is in the embroidery, in the arabesque; and these are perfect. Such, too, is the method of Don Juan, with its flow of wit, vulgarity—even flat boorishness—confession, observation, colour, and poetry. The poem is a great and permanent landmark in the progress of a particular form; what with its old forerunners, from Pulci to Casti, and what with the successors to whom it gave an impulse, in France, in Spain, and in Russia. For De Musset, for Espronceda, for Pushkin, that form comes through Byron, with the stamp that Byron set upon it, and does not come directly from the Italian originals. Some of them, like the author of Evgeniy Onegin, restored a certain plastic delicacy of which Byron was incapable. The main features of his bequest to these authors are two. First of all, he aims, far more violently than do his models (amongst whom we must reckon Frere with his pleasant Whistlecraft) at producing a continual sense of shock and discord, as much by his sudden soarings into poetry as by his more frequent and sudden drops into anticlimax. And secondly, Byron’s way is to let this mind and story drift—drift back to himself, and then swiftly away again to the subject. And these two traits distinguish him also from Chaucer; who embroiders indeed and digresses, but who leaves a sense of harmony and not of discord; and who, when he speaks of himself from time to time, speaks gently, and not for long. There is, of course, the other old Italian way of narrative, which is seen in the prose of the Decameron and its successors. Here the teller keeps out of sight, and the story is stripped down to its naked perfection. There is something of this quality in Byron’s letters, when he briefly portrays a scene, or recites a scandal.

Byron rises to his full power as a narrator when the tale itself