Page:The Review of English Studies Vol 1.djvu/46

34 that in diction they are Wordsworthian; whether consciously or not, is another matter:

The last line, as poetry, is audacious; but I think it stands, and clinches the whole. Byron’s blank verse has been so much and so justly raked and scarified that we welcome this level musical strain, caught in a happy moment when his ear and his heart were honest.

5. But if we enlarge our question regarding beauty, and ask whether Byron can also give us grandeur of language, or what in his age was still called the Sublime, we must go carefully. This quality we should expect to find, if anywhere, in the Cain which Goethe admired so highly. And a certain grandeur of conception in that poem it would be hard to deny. Byron himself, in the person of Cain, is reasoning passionately, with unfettered brain, on life and death and divine responsibility. If they are not original reasonings, but old familiar eighteenth-century ones, the poet, with a freedom and fierceness as of the sea-eagle, makes them his own. Still, there is very little realised grandeur of expression. It is just in Cain that his sins of diction and metre swarm most abundantly. Continually, the eagle comes to earth, and walks, or hops, and is absurd. After Milton, you can hardly read Cain. Not that Byron is lacking in the sublime of a certain order. It comes in unexpected places, no doubt. Once again Goethe may be quoted. Talking to Crabb Robinson, as they read over the Vision of Judgment together, Goethe picked out certain stanzas for especial praise, and one, he said, was “sublime.” At any rate it shows Byron’s nearest to that quality, and it wins its effect and relief by being set between two purely satiric stanzas. The first of these, preceding the “sublime” one, introduces George the Third arriving at Heaven-Gate: While thus they spake, the angelic caravan,
 * Arriving like a rush of mighty wind,

Cleaving the fields of space, as doth the swan
 * Some silver stream (say Ganges, Nile, or Inde,