every year becoming more feeble and more manliness of taste which approached to roughmechanical, while the monotonous versifica- ness. They did not deal in mechanical versition which Pope had introduced, no longer re-fication and conventional phrases. They wrote deemed by his brilliant wit and his compact- concerning things, the thought of which set ness of expression, palled on the ear of the their hearts on fire; and thus what they wrote, public, the great works of the dead were every even when it wanted every other grace, had that day attracting more and more of the admiration inimitable grace which sincerity and strong which they deserved. The plays of Shakspeare passion impart to the rudest and most homely were better acted, better edited, and better compositions. Each of them sought for inspiknown than they had ever been. Our noble ration in a noble and affecting subject, fertile old ballads were again read with pleasure, and of images, which had not yet been hackneyed. it became a fashion to imitate them. Many Liberty was the muse of Alfieri; religion was of the imitations were altogether contemptible. the muse of Cowper. The same truth is found But they showed that men had at least begun in their lighter pieces. They were not among to admire the excellence which they could not those who deprecated the severity, or deplored rival. A literary revolution was evidently at the absence of an unreal mistress in melodious hand. There was a ferment in the minds of commonplaces. Instead of raving about imamen, a vague craving for something new, a ginary Chloes and Sylvias, Cowper wrote of disposition to hail with delight any thing which Mrs. Unwin's knitting-needles. The only love might at first sight wear the appearance of verses of Alfieri were addressed to one whom originality. A reforming age is always fertile he truly and passionately loved. "Tutte le of impostors. The same excited state of pub-rime amorose che seguono," says he, tutte lic feeling which produced the great separation sono per essa, e ben sue, e di lei solamente from the see of Rome, produced also the ex- poiché mai d'altra donna per certo non canterò." cesses of the Anabaptists. The same stir in the public mind of Europe which overthrew the abuses of the old French government, produced the Jacobins and Theophilanthropists. Macpherson and the Della Cruscans were to the true reformers of English poetry what Cnipperdoling was to Luther, or what Clootz was to Turgot. The public was never more disposed to believe stories without evidence, and to admire books without merit. Any thing which could break the dull monotony of the correct school was acceptable. 66 These great men were not free from affectation. But their affectation was directly opposed to the affectation which generally prevailed. Each of them has expressed, in strong and bitter language, the contempt which he felt for the effeminate poetasters who were in fashion both in England and Italy. Cowper complains that He had "Manner is all in all, whate'er is writ, The substitute for genius, taste, and wit." praised Pope; yet he regretted that Pope "Made poetry a mere mechanic art, The forerunner of the great restoration of our literature was Cowper. His literary caAnd every warbler had his tune by heart." reer began and ended at nearly the same time Alfieri speaks with similar scorn of the trage with that of Alfieri. A parallel between Alfieri dies of his predecessors. "Mi cadevano dalle and Cowper may, at first sight, seem as un-mani per la languidezza, trivialtà e prolissità promising as that which a loyal Presbyterian dei modi e del verso, senza parlare poi della minister is said to have drawn, in 1745, be- snervatezza dei pensieri. Or perchè mai questa tween George the Second and Enoch. It may nostra divina lingua, si maschia anco, ed enerseem that the gentle, shy, melancholy Calvin-gica, e feroce, in bocca di Dante, dovra elle ist, whose spirit had been broken by fagging at farci così sbiadata ed eunuca nel dialogo traschool, who had not courage to earn a liveli-gico." hood by reading the titles of bills in the House of Lords, and whose favourite associates were a blind old lady and an evangelical divine, could have nothing in common with the haughty, ardent, and voluptuous nobleman, the horse-jockey, the libertine, who fought Lord Ligonier in Hyde Park, and robbed the Pretender of his queen. But though the private lives of these remarkable men present scarcely any points of resemblance, their literary lives bear a close analogy to each other. They both found poetry in its lowest state of degradation, feeble, artificial, and altogether nerveless. They both possessed precisely the talents which fitted them for the task of raising it from that deep abasement. They cannot, in strictness, be called great poets. They had not in any very high degree the creative power, "The vision and the faculty divine;" but they had great vigour of thought, great warmth of feeling, and what, in their circumstances, was above all things important, a To men thus sick of the languid manner of their contemporaries, ruggedness seemed a venial fault, or rather a positive merit. In their hatred of meretricious ornament, and of what Cowper calls "creamy smoothness," they erred on the opposite side. Their style was too austere, their versification too harsh. It is not easy, however, to overrate the service which they rendered to literature. Their merit 13 rather that of demolition than that of construc tion. The intrinsic value of their poems is considerable. But the example which they set of mutiny against an absurd system was invaluable. The part which they performed was rather that of Moses than that of Joshua. They opened the house of bondage; but they did not enter the promised land. During the twenty years which followed the death of Cowper, the revolution in English poetry was fully consummated. None of the writers of this period, not even Sir Walter Scott, contributed so much to the consummation as Lord Byron. Yet he, Lord Byron, con tributed to it unwillingly, and with constant self-reproach and shame. All his tastes and inclinations led him to take part with the school of poetry which was going out, against the school which was coming in. Of Pope himself he spoke with extravagant admiration. He did not venture directly to say that the little man of Twickenham was a greater poet than Shakspeare or Milton. But he hinted pretty clearly that he thought so. Of his contemporaries, scarcely any had so much of his admiration as Mr. Gifford, who, considered as a poet, was merely Pope, without Pope's wit and fancy; and whose satires are decidedly inferior in vigour and poignancy to the very imperfect juvenile performance of Lord Byron himself. He now and then praised Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Coleridge; but ungraciously and without cordiality. When he attacked them, he brought his whole soul to the work. Of the most elaborate of Mr. Wordsworth's poems he could find nothing to say, but that it was "clumsy, and frowsy, and his aversion." Peter Bell excited his spleen to such a degree that he apostrophized the shades of Pope and Dryden, and demanded of them whether it were possible that such trash could evade contempt? In his heart, he thought his own Pilgrimage of Harold inferior to his Imitation of Horace's Art of Poetry-a feeble echo of Pope and Johnson. This insipid performance he repeatedly designed to publish, and was withheld only by the solicitations of his friends. He has distinctly declared his approbation of the unities; the most absurd laws by which genius was ever held in servitude. In one of his works, we think in his Letter to Mr. Bowles, he compares the poetry of the eighteenth century to the Parthenon, and that of the nineteenth to a Turkish mosque; and boasts that, though he had assisted his contemporaries in building their grotesque and barbarous edifice, he had never joined them in defacing the remains of a chaster and more graceful architecture. In another letter, he compares the change which had recently passed on English poetry, to the decay of Latin poetry after the Augustan age. In the time of Pope, he tells his friend, it was all Horace with us. It is all Claudian now. much of his contempt for men, and though he boasted that amidst all the inconstancy of fortune and of fame he was all-sufficient to himself, his literary career indicated nothing of that lonely and unsocial pride which he affected. We cannot conceive him, like Milton or Wordsworth, defying the criticisms of his contemporaries, retorting their scorn, and labouring on a poem in the full assurance that it would be unpopular, and in the full assurance that it would be immortal. He has said, 1 y the mouth of one of his heroes in speaking of political greatness, that "he must serve who gain would sway;" and this he assigns as a reason for not entering into political life. He did not consider that the sway which he exercised in literature had been purchased by servitudeby the sacrifice of his own taste to the taste of the public. He was the creature of his age; and wherever he had lived he would have been the creature of his age. Under Charles the First he would have been more quaint than Donne. Under Charles the Second the rants of his rhyming plays would have pitted it, boxed it, and galleried it, with those of any Bayes or Bilboa. Under George the First the monotonous smoothness of his versification and the terseness of his expression would have made Pope himself envious. As it was, he was the man of the last thirteen years of the eighteenth century and of the first twenty-three years of the nineteenth century. He belonged half to the old and half to the new school of poetry. His personal taste led him to the former, his thirst of fame to the latter; his talents were equally suited to both. His fame was a common ground on which the zealots of both sides-Gifford, for example, and Shelley-might meet. He was the representative, not of either literary party, but of both at once, and of their conflict, and of the victory by which that conflict was terminated. His poetry fills and measures the whole of the vast interval through which our literature has moved since the time of Johnson. It touches the Essay on Man at the one extremity and the Excursion at the other. For the great old masters of the art he had There are several parallel instances in lite no very enthusiastic veneration. In his Letter rary history. Voltaire, for example, was the to Mr. Bowles he uses expressions which connecting link between the France of Louis clearly indicate that he preferred Pope's Iliad the Fourteenth and the France of Louis the to the original. Mr. Moore confesses that his Sixteenth-between Racine and Boileau on the friend was no very fervent admirer of Shak- one side, and Condorcet and Beaumarchais on speare. Of all the poets of the first class, Lord the other. He, like Lord Byron, put himself at Byron seems to have admired Dante and Mil- the head of an intellectual revolution, dreadton most. Yet in the fourth canto of Childe ing it all the time, murmuring at it, sneering Harold he places Tasso, a writer not merely at it, yet choosing rather to move before his inferior to them, but of quite a different order age in any direction than to be left behind of mind, on at least a footing of equality with and forgotten. Dryden was the connectthem. Mr. Hunt is, we suspect, quite correcting link between the literature of the age of in saying, that Lord Byron could see little or no merit in Spenser. James the First and the literature of the age of Anne. Oromazdes and Arimanes fought for But Lord Byron the critic, and Lord Byron him-Arimanes carried him off. But his heart the poet, were two very different men. The ef- was to the last with Oromazdes. Lord Byron fects of his theory may indeed often be traced was in the same manner the mediator between in his practice. But his disposition led him two generations, between two hostile poetical to accommodate himself to the literary taste of sects. Though always sneering at Mr. Wordsthe age in which he lived; and his talents worth, he was yet, though perhaps uncon would have enabled him to accommodate him-sciously, the interpreter between Mr. Words Self to the taste of any age. Though he said worth and the multitude. In the Lyrica Ballads and the Excursion, Mr. Wordsworth ap- it is not the business of the dramatist to expeared as the high priest of a worship of which hibit characters in this sharp, antithetical way. Nature was the idol. No poems have ever in- It is not in this way that 'Shakspeare makes dicated so exquisite a perception of the beauty Prince Hal rise from the rake of Eastcheap of the outer world, or so passionate a love and into the hero of Shrewsbury, and sink again reverence for that beauty. Yet they were not into the rake of Eastcheap. It is not thus that popular; and it is not likely that they ever will Shakspeare has exhibited the union of effemibe popular as the works of Sir Walter Scott nacy and valour in Antony. A dramatist canare popular. The feeling which pervaded not commit a great error than that of followthem was too deep for general sympathy. ing those pointed descriptions of character in Their style was often too mysterious for gene- which satirists and historians indulge so much. ral comprehension. They made a few esote- It is by rejecting what is natural that satirists ric disciples, and many scoffers. Lord Byron and historians produce these striking characfounded what may be called an exoteric Laketers. Their great object generally is to ascribe school of poetry; and all the readers of poetry to every man as many contradictory qualities in England, we might say in Europe, hastened as possible; and this is an object easily atto sit at his feet. What Mr. Wordsworth had tained. By judicious selections and judicious said like a recluse, Lord Byron said like a man exaggeration, the intellect and the disposition of the world; with less profound feeling, but of any human being might be described as with more perspicuity, energy, and concise- being made up of nothing but startling conness. We would refer our readers to the last trasts. If the dramatist attempts to create a two cantos of Childe Harold and to Manfred in being answering to one of these descriptions, proof of these observations. he fails; because he reverses an imperfect but a personified epigram. Very eminent writers have fallen into this snare. Ben Jonson has given us an 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. Adnriring, as every reader must admire, the keen and vigorous lines in which Dryden satirized the Duke of Buckingham, he attempted to make a Duke of Buckingham to suit theina real living Zimri; and he made, not a man, but the most grotesque of all monsters. writer who should attempt to introduce into a play or a novel such a Wharton as the Whar ton of Pope, or a Lord Hervey answering to Sporus, would fail in the same manner. A Lord Byron, like Mr. Wordsworth, had no-analytical process. He produces, not à man, thing dramatic in his genius. He was, indeed, the reverse of a great dramatist; the very antithesis to a great dramatist. All his charac. ters-Harold looking back on the western sky from which his country and the sun are receding together; the Giaour, standing apart in the gloom of the side-aisle, and casting a haggard scowl from under his long hood at the crucifix and the censer; Conrad, leaning on his sword by the watch-tower; Lara, smiling on the dancers; Alp, gazing steadily on the fatal cloud as it passes before the moon; Manfred, wandering among the precipices of Berne; Azo, on the judgment-seat; Ugo, at the bar; Lambro, frowning on the siesta of his daughter and Juan; Cain, presenting his unacceptable offering-all are essentially the same. The varieties are varieties merely of age, situation, and costume. If ever Lord Byron attempted But to return to Lord Byron: his women, to exhibit men of a different kind, he always like his men, are all of one breed. Haidee is made them either insipid or unnatural. Selim a half-savage and girlish Julia; Julia is a civilis nothing. Bonnivart is nothing. Don Juan ized and matronly Haidee. Leila is a wedded in the first and best cantos is a feeble copy of Zuleika-Zuleika a virgin Leila. Gulnare and the Page in the Marriage of Figaro. Johnson, Medora appear to have been intentionally opthe man whom Juan meets in the slave-mar-posed to each other. Yet the difference is a ket, is a most striking failure. How differently difference of situation only. A slight change would Sir Walter Scott have drawn a bluff, of circumstance would, it should seem, have fearless Englishman in such a situation! The sent Gulnare to the lute of Medora, and armed portrait would have seemed to walk out of the Medora with the dagger of Gulnare. canvass. Sardanapalus is more hardly drawn than any dramatic personage that we can remember. His heroism and his effeminacy, his contempt of death, and his dread of a weighty helmet, his kingly resolution to be seen in the foremost ranks, and the anxiety with which he calls for a looking-glass that he may be seen to advantage, are contrasted with all the point of Juvenal. Indeed, the hint of the character seems to have been taken from what Juvenal says of Otho, "Speculum civilis sarcina belli. But 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 love into a tigress. Even these two characters, his only two characters, he could not exhibit dramatically. He exhibited them in the manner, not of Shak speare, but of Clarendon. He analyzed them. He made them analyze themselves, but he did not make them show themselves. He tells us, for example, in many lines of great force and spirit, that the speech of Lara was bitterly sar castic, that he talked little of his travels, that if 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 tell long stories about his youth; Shakspeare never tells us that in the mind of Iago, every thing 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 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 dying invective which the old Doge pronounces against Venice, we shall find there is nothing dramatic in them; 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 Shakspeare of which the same could be said. No skilful reader of the plays of Shakspeare 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 Shakspeare 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. and the solutions, all belong to the same character. A writer who showed so little of 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 his 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 he excelled.-" Description," as he said in Don Juan, "was his forte." His manner is indeed peculiar, and is almost unequalled — rapid, sketchy, full of vigour; 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 vigour, 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 On the other hand, it may be doubted whe- tale, the chief object in every landscape. Hather there is, in all Lord Byron's plays, a sin- rold, Lara, Manfred, and a crowd of other gle remarkable passage which owes any por- characters, were universally considered meretion of its interest or effect to its connection ly as loose incognitos of Byron; and there is with the characters or the action. He has every reason to believe that he meant them to written only one scene, as far as we can re- be so considered. The wonders of the outer collect, which is dramatic even in manner-world, the Tagus, with the mighty fleets of the scene between Lucifer and Cain. The conference in that scene 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 England riding on its bosom, the towers of Cintra overhanging the shaggy forest of corktrees 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 accessaries -the background to one dark and melancholy fortunate in his domestic relations; the public figure. 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 excited an unrivalled interest. The world gave him every encouragement to talk about his mental sufferings. The effect which his first confessions produced, 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, would probably have puzzled himself to say. 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 There can be no doubt that this remarkable misery; if they are not gratified, to the misery man owed the vast influence which he exerof disappointment; if they are gratified, to the cised over his contemporaries, at least as misery of satiety. His principal heroes are much to his gloomy egotism as to the real men who have arrived by different roads at power of his poetry. We never could very the same goal of despair, who are sick of life, clearly understand how it is that egotism, so who are at war with society, who are support- unpopular in conversation, should be so popued in their anguish only by an unconquerable lar in writing; or how it is that men who afpride, resembling that of Prometheus on the fect in their compositions qualities and feelrock, or of Satan in the burning marl; who canings which they have not, impose so much 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 favourite 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. 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 time, 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. How much of this morbid feeling sprung from an original disease of mind, how much from real misfortune, how much from the What our grandchildren may think of the nervousness of dissipation, how much of it was character of Lord Byron, as exhibited in his fanciful, how much of it was merely affected, poetry, we will not pretend to guess. It is It is impossible for us, and would probably certain, that the interest which he excited durhave been impossible for the most intimate ing his life is without a parallel in literary friends of Lord Byron, to decide. Whether history. The feeling with which young readthere ever existed, or can ever exist, a personers of poetry regarded him, can be conceived 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 fellowcreatures, 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. only by those who have experienced it. To people who are unacquainted with the 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 wo." Among that large class of young persons whose reading is almost entirely confined to works of imagination, the popularity of Lord We are far, however, from thinking that his Byron was unbounded. They bought pictures sadness was altogether feigned. He was na- of him, they treasured up the smallest relics turally a man of great sensibility; he had been of him; they learned his poems by heart, and ill-educated; his feelings had been early ex-did their best to write like him, and to look posed to sharp trials; he had been crossed in like him. Many of them practised at the glass, his boyish love; he had been mortified by the in the hope of catching the curl of the upper failure of his first literary efforts; he was strait-lip, and the scowl of the brow, which appear ened in pecuniary circumstances; he was un-in some of his portraits. A few discarded. |