Page:The Review of English Studies Vol 1.djvu/41

Rh 2. My second question is this: Could Byron sing? The world for a long time thought so; he sang of himself, and the world thought the subject a good one; and Goethe thought so too, when he said that his Euphorion, who is Byron, had “a song his very own”—ein eigenster Gesang. But it is doubtful whether Goethe was thinking there of strictly lyrical power; he may have been referring to Byron’s general poetic gift. And besides, even a great poet may be fallible about the quality of a lyric gift in a language that is not his own. And then Europe, we remember, from Portugal to Sweden, from Athens to Moscow, mostly read Byron in translation; the library, the mere bibliography, of those translations and of the imitations they bred, can scarcely yet have been catalogued, still less reviewed, as a whole. In England, as we know, the next two generations of poets began to cast doubt on Byron’s purity of poetic gift, long before the rest of the world had done so. The discriminations of Matthew Arnold, and his contrast of Leopardi with Byron as a poetic artist, cut deep; and the still louder disgust of Swinburne, who was a sound judge, when he spoke of Byron’s dissonances, was founded in truth. I shall not waste time by going over that ground; we know pretty well by now what Byron, in the way of song, could not give; we know all about his lapses of ear, about the deadly commonness that intrudes so often even into his lyric; and to know this is no credit to us, who have heard these critics, and whose ears have been sharpened by familiarity with Shelley and other artists who are finer than Byron. But what is it in lyric that Byron can and does give us? This is not so easy to define, but I will try. We need only take him at his best. His best is what it is, and is not affected by the fact that he could be very bad at other times.

We all know the handful of good lyrics that Palgrave saved for his Golden Treasury; and Palgrave’s comment helps us to an answer, though I will put it in my own way. Creature of moods, and chameleon, as Byron was, he was not a child of the eighteenth century for nothing. And in the long run, I believe that what we get down to in him is an eighteenth-century characteristic: I mean, the ascendancy of reason. I shall press this point again; but meantime, he does one of the hardest of things: at his best, he reasons in song, and that without ceasing to sing. Song is winged, no doubt, by feeling; but he reasons about feeling. He keeps firmly to his thread; he is a master of the logic of feeling, which is