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These are excellent lines in a satire. But it is not the business of the
dramatist to exhibit characters in this sharp antithetical way. It is not thus
that Shakespeare makes Prince Hal rise from the rake of Eastcheap into the hero
of Shrewsbury, and sink again into the rake of Eastcheap. It is not thus that
Shakespeare has exhibited the union of effeminacy and valor in Antony. A
dramatist cannot commit a greater error than that of following those pointed
descriptions of character in which satirists and historians indulge so much. It
is by rejecting what is natural that satirists and historians produce these
striking characters. Their great object generally is to ascribe to every man as
many contradictory qualities as possible: and this is an object easily attained.
By judicious selection and judicious exaggeration, the intellect and the
disposition of any human being might be described as being made up of nothing
but startling contrasts. If the dramatist attempts to create a being answering
to one of these descriptions, he fails, because he reverses an imperfect
analytical process. He produces, not a man, but a personified epigram. Very
eminent writers have fallen into this snare. Ben Jonson has given us a
Hermogenes, taken from the lively lines of Horace; but the inconsistency which
is so amusing in the satire appears unnatural and disgusts us in the play. Sir
Walter Scott has committed a far more glaring error of the same kind in the
novel of Peveril. Admiring, as every judicious reader must admire, the keen and
vigorous lines in which Dryden satirized the Duke of Buckingham, Sir Walter
attempted to make a Duke of Buckingham to suit them, a real living Zimri; and he
made, not a man, but the most grotesque of all monsters. A writer who should
attempt to introduce into a play or a novel such a Wharton as the Wharton of
Pope, or a Lord Hervey answering to Sporus, would fail in the same manner.
But to return to Lord Byron; his women, like his men, are all of one breed.
Haidee is a half-savage and girlish Julia; Julia is a civilized and matronly
Haidee. Leila is a wedded Zuleika, Zuleika a virgin Leila. Gulnare and Medora
appear to have been intentionally opposed to each other. Yet the difference is a
difference of situation only. A slight change of circumstances would, it should
seem, have sent Gulnare to the lute of Medora, and armed Medora with the dagger
of Gulnare.
It is hardly too much to say, that Lord Byron could exhibit only one man and
only one woman, a man, proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and
misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable
of deep and strong affection: a woman all softness and gentleness, loving to
caress and to be caressed, but capable of being transformed by passion into a
tigress.
Even these two characters, his only two characters, he could not exhibit
dramatically. He exhibited them in the manner, not of Shakespeare, but of
Clarendon. He analyzed them; he made them analyze themselves; but he did not
make them show themselves. We are told, for example, in many lines of great
force and spirit, that the speech of Lara was bitterly sarcastic, that he talked
little of his travels, that if he was much questioned about them, his answers
became short, and his brow gloomy. But we have none of Lara's sarcastic speeches
or short answers. It is not thus that the great masters of human nature have
portrayed human beings. Homer never tells us that Nestor loved to relate long
stories about his youth. Shakespeare never tells us that in the mind of Iago
everything that is beautiful and endearing was associated with some filthy and
debasing idea.
It is curious to observe the tendency which the dialogue of Lord Byron always
has to lose its character of a dialogue, and to become soliloquy. The scenes
between Manfred and the Chamois-hunter, between Manfred and the Witch of the
Alps, between Manfred and the Abbot, are instances of this tendency. Manfred,
after a few unimportant speeches, has all the talk to himself. The other
interlocutors are nothing more than good listeners. They drop an occasional
question or ejaculation which sets Manfred off again on the inexhaustible topic
of his personal feelings. If we examine the fine passages in Lord Byron's
dramas, the description of Rome, for example, in Manfred, the description of a
Venetian revel in Marino Faliero, the concluding invective which the old doge
pronounces against Venice, we shall find that there is nothing dramatic in these
speeches, that they derive none of their effect from the character or situation
of the speaker, and that they would have been as fine, or finer, if they had
been published as fragments of blank verse by Lord Byron. There is scarcely a
speech in Shakespeare of which the same could be said. No skilful reader of the
plays of Shakespeare can endure to see what are called the fine things taken
out, under the name of "Beauties," or of "Elegant Extracts," or to hear any
single passage, "To be or not to be," for example, quoted as a sample of the
great poet. "To be or not to be" has merit undoubtedly as a composition. It
would have merit if put into the mouth of a chorus. But its merit as a
composition vanishes when compared with its merit as belonging to Hamlet. It is
not too much to say that the great plays of Shakespeare would lose less by being
deprived of all the passages which are commonly called the fine passages, than
those passages lose by being read separately from the play. This is perhaps the
highest praise which can be given to a dramatist.
On the other hand, it may be doubted whether there is, in all Lord Byron's
plays, a single remarkable passage which owes any portion of its interest or
effect to its connection with the characters or the action. He has written only
one scene, as far as we can recollect, which is dramatic even in manner--the
scene between Lucifer and Cain. The conference is animated, and each of the
interlocutors has a fair share of it. But this scene, when examined, will be
found to be a confirmation of our remarks. It is a dialogue only in form. It is
a soliloquy in essence. It is in reality a debate carried on within one single
unquiet and skeptical mind. The questions and the answers, the objections and
the solutions, all belong to the same character.
A writer who showed so little dramatic skill in works professedly dramatic, was
not likely to write narrative with dramatic effect. Nothing could indeed be more
rude and careless than the structure of his narrative poems. He seems to have
thought, with the hero of the Rehearsal, that the plot was good for nothing but
to bring in fine things. His two longest works, Childe Harold and Don Juan, have
no plan whatever. Either of them might have been extended to any length, or cut
short at any point. The state in which the Giaour appears illustrates the manner
in which all Byron's poems were constructed. They are all, like the Giaour,
collections of fragments; and, though there may be no empty spaces marked by
asterisks, it is still easy to perceive, by the clumsiness of the joining, where
the parts for the sake of which the whole was composed end and begin.
It was in description and meditation that Byron excelled. "Description," as he
said in Don Juan, "was his forte." His manner is indeed peculiar, and is almost
unequalled; rapid, sketchy, full of vigor; the selection happy, the strokes few
and bold. In spite of the reverence which we feel for the genius of Mr.
Wordsworth we cannot but think that the minuteness of his descriptions often
diminishes their effect. He has accustomed himself to gaze on nature with the
eye of a lover, to dwell on every feature, and to mark every change of aspect.
Those beauties which strike the most negligent observer, and those which only a
close attention discovers, are equally familiar to him and are equally prominent
in his poetry. The proverb of old Hesiod, that half is often more than the
whole, is eminently applicable to description. The policy of the Dutch, who cut
down most of the precious trees in the Spice Islands, in order to raise the
value of what remained, was a policy which poets would do well to imitate. It
was a policy which no poet understood better than Lord Byron. Whatever his
faults might be, he was never, while his mind retained its vigor, accused of
prolixity.
His descriptions, great as was their intrinsic merit, derived. their principal
interest from the feeling which always mingled with them. He was himself the
beginning, the middle, and the end, of all his own poetry, the hero of every
tale, the chief object in every landscape. Harold, Lara, Manfred, and a crowd of
other characters, were universally considered merely as loose incognitos of
Byron; and there is every reason to believe that he meant them to be so
considered. The wonders of the outer world, the Tagus, with the mighty fleets of
England riding on its bosom, the towers of Cintra overhanging the shaggy forest
of cork-trees and willows, the glaring marble of Pentelicus, the banks of the
Rhine, the glaciers of Clarens, the sweet Lake of Leman, the dell of Egeria with
its summer-birds and rustling lizards, the shapeless ruins of Rome overgrown
with ivy and wall-flowers, the, stars, the sea, the mountains, all were mere
accessories, the background to one dark and melancholy figure.
Never had any writer so vast a command of the whole eloquence of scorn,
misanthropy, and despair. That Marah was never dry. No art could sweeten, no
draughts could exhaust, its perennial waters of bitterness. Never was there such
variety in monotony as that of Byron. From maniac laughter to piercing
lamentation, there was not a single note of human anguish of which he was not
master. Year after year, and month after month, he continued to repeat that to
be wretched is the destiny of all; that to be eminently wretched is the destiny
of the eminent; that all the desires by which we are cursed lead alike to
misery, if they are not gratified, to the misery of disappointment; if they are
gratified, to the misery of satiety. His heroes are men who have arrived by
different roads at the same goal of despair, who are sick of life, who are at
war with society, who are supported in their anguish only by an unconquerable
pride resembling that of Prometheus on the rock or of Satan in the burning marl,
who can master their agonies by the force of their will, and who to the last
defy the whole power of earth and heaven. He always described himself as a man
of the same kind with his favorite creations, as a man whose heart had been
withered, whose capacity for happiness was gone and could not be restored, but
whose invincible spirit dared the worst that could befall him here or hereafter.
How much of this morbid feeling sprang from an original disease of the mind, how
much from real misfortune, how much from the nervousness of dissipation, how
much was fanciful, how much was merely affected, it is impossible for us, and
would probably have been impossible for the most intimate friends of Lord Byron,
to decide. Whether there ever existed, or can ever exist, a person answering to
the description which he gave of himself may be doubted; but that he was not
such a person is beyond all doubt. It is ridiculous to imagine that a man whose
mind was really imbued with scorn of his fellow-creatures would have published
three or four books every year in order to tell them so; or that a man who could
say with truth that he neither sought sympathy nor needed it would have admitted
all Europe to hear his farewell to his wife, and his blessings on his child. In
the second canto of Childe Harold, he tells us that he is insensible to fame and
obloquy:
"Ill may such contest now the spirit move, Which heeds nor keen reproof nor
partial praise."
Yet we know on the best evidence that, a day or two before he published these
lines, he was greatly, indeed childishly, elated by the compliments paid to his
maiden speech in the House of Lords.
We are far, however, from thinking that his sadness was altogether feigned. He
was naturally a man of great sensibility; he had been ill-educated; his feelings
had been early exposed to sharp trials; he had been crossed in his boyish love;
he had been mortified by the failure of his first literary efforts; he was
straitened in pecuniary circumstances; he was unfortunate in his domestic
relations; the public treated him with cruel injustice; his health and spirits
suffered from his dissipated habits of life; he was, on the whole, an unhappy
man. He early discovered that, by parading his unhappiness before the multitude,
he produced an immense sensation. The world gave him every encouragement to talk
about his mental sufferings. The interest which his first confessions excited
induced him to affect much that he did not feel; and the affectation probably
reacted on his feelings. How far the character in which he exhibited himself was
genuine, and how far theatrical, it would probably have puzzled himself to say.
There can be no doubt that this remarkable man owed the vast influence which he
exercised over his contemporaries at least as much to his gloomy egotism as to
the real power of his poetry. We never could very clearly understand how it is
that egotism, so unpopular in conversation, should be so popular in writing; or
how it is that men who affect in their compositions qualities and feelings which
they have not, impose so much more easily on their contemporaries than on
posterity. The interest which the loves of Petrarch excited in his own time, and
the pitying fondness with which half Europe looked upon Rousseau, are well
known. To readers of our age, the love of Petrarch seems to have been love of
that kind which breaks no hearts, and the sufferings of Rousseau to have
deserved laughter rather than pity, to have been partly counterfeited, and
partly the consequences of his own perverseness and vanity.
What our grandchildren may think of the character of Lord Byron, as exhibited in
his poetry, we will not pretend to guess. It is certain, that the interest which
he excited during his life is without a parallel in literary history. The
feeling with which young readers of poetry regarded him can be conceived only by
those who have experienced it. To people who are unacquainted with real
calamity, "nothing is so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy." This faint image of
sorrow has in all ages been considered by young gentlemen as an agreeable
excitement. Old gentlemen and middle-aged gentlemen have so many real causes of
sadness that they are rarely inclined "to be as sad as night only for
wantonness." Indeed they want the power almost as much as the inclination. We
know very few persons engaged in active life, who, even if they were to procure
stools to be melancholy upon, and were to sit down with all the premeditation of
Master Stephen, would be able to enjoy much of what somebody calls the "ecstasy
of woe."
Among that large class of young persons whose reading is almost entirely
confined to works of imagination, the popularity of Lord Byron was unbounded.
They bought pictures of him; they treasured up the smallest relics of him; they
learned his poems by heart, and did their best to write like him, and to look
like him. Many of them practiced at the glass in the hope of catching the curl
of the upper lip, and the scowl of the brow, which appear in some of his
portraits. A few discarded their neck-cloths in imitation of their great leader.
For some years the Minerva press sent forth no novel without a mysterious,
unhappy, Lara-like peer. The number of hopeful undergraduates and medical
students who became things of dark imaginings, on whom the freshness of the
heart ceased to fall like dew, whose passions had consumed themselves to dust,
and to whom the relief of tears was denied, passes all calculation. This was not
the worst. There was created in the minds of many of these enthusiasts a
pernicious and absurd association between intellectual power and moral
depravity. From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics,
compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness, a system in which the two great
commandments were, to hate your neighbor, and to love your neighbor's wife.
This affectation has passed away; and a few more years will destroy whatever yet
remains of that magical potency which once belonged to the name of Byron. To us
he is still a man, young, noble, and unhappy. To our children he will be merely
a writer; and their impartial judgment will appoint his place among writers;
without regard to his rank or to his private history. That his poetry will
undergo a severe sifting, that much of what has been admired by his
contemporaries will be rejected as worthless, we have little doubt. But we have
as little doubt that, after the closest scrutiny, there will still remain much
that can only perish with the English language.
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