Every one of Byron"s most magnificent love-lyrics has its actual circ.u.mstantial cause and impulse in the adventures of his life. He does not spin out vague wordy platonic rhapsodies upon love-in-general.
He addresses a particular person, just as Burns did--just as Shakespeare did--and his poems are, so to speak, thrilled with the excitement of the great moment"s tumultuous pulses, scalded with the heat of its pa.s.sionate tears.
These moments pa.s.s, of course. One need not be derisively cynical over that. Infatuation succeeds infatuation. Dream succeeds dream.
The loyalty of a life-long love was not his. His life ended indeed before youth"s desperate experiments were over, before the reaction set in. But the sterner mood had begun.
"Tread these reviving pa.s.sions down, Unworthy manhood. Unto thee Indifferent should the smile or frown Of Beauty be."
And the lines end--his last--with that stoical resignation in the presence of a soldier"s fate which gives to the close of his adventurous enterprise on behalf of an oppressed h.e.l.lenic world such a gallant dignity.
"Then look around and choose thy ground, And take thy rest."
If these proud personal touches, of which there are so many scattered through his work, offend our artistic modern sense we must remember that the same tone, the same individual confession of quite personal emotion, is to be found in Dante and Milton and Goethe.
The itching mock-modesty of the intellectual altruist, ashamed to commit himself to the personal note, is not an indication of a great nature. It is rather a sign of a fussy self-consciousness under the eyes of impertinent criticism.
What drives the modern philosopher to jeer at Byron is really a sort of envy of his splendid and irresponsible personality, that personality whose demonic energy is so radiant with the beautiful glamour of youth.
And what superb strength and high romance there are in certain of his verses when the magnificent anger of the moment has its way with him!
Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!
On Suli"s rock and Parga"s sh.o.r.e Exists the remnant of a line Such as our Doric mothers bore--
No one can help confessing that poetry of this kind, "simple, sensuous and pa.s.sionate"--to use the great Miltonic definition--possesses, for all its undeniable _rhetoric,_ a large and high poetic value.
And at its best, the poetry of Byron is not mere rhetoric. Rhetoric undoubtedly is there. His mind was constantly, like most simple minds when touched to large issues, betrayed by the sweet treachery of rhetoric; but I feel confident that any really subtle critic of the delicate differences between one poetic vein and another, must feel, though he might not be able to express the fineness of the distinction, that there is something here--some breath, some tone, some air, some atmosphere, some royal and golden gesture--which is altogether beyond the reach of all mere eloquence, and sealed with the indescribable seal of poetry.
This real poetic element in Byron--I refer to something over and above his plangent rhetoric--arrests us with all the greater shock of sudden possession, for the very reason that it is so carelessly, so inartistically, so recklessly flung out.
He differs in this, more than in anything else, from our own poetic contemporaries. Our clever young poets know their business so appallingly well. They know all about the theories of poetry: they know what is to be said for Free Verse, for Imagism, for Post-Impressionism: they know how the unrhymed Greek chorus lends itself to the lyrical exigencies of certain moods: they know how wonderful the j.a.panese are, and how interesting certain Indian cadences may be: they know the importance of expressing the Ideal of Democracy, of Femininity, of Evolution, of Internationalism.
There really is nothing in the whole field of poetic criticism which they do not know--except the way to persuade the G.o.ds to give us genius, when genius has been refused!
Byron, on the contrary, knows absolutely nothing of any of these things. "When he thinks he is a child"; when he criticises he is a child; when he philosophises, theorises, _mysticizes,_ he is a hopeless child. A vast amount of his poetry, for all its swing and dash and rush, might have been written by a lamentably inferior hand.
We come across such stuff to-day; not among the literary circles, but in the poets" corners of provincial magazines. What is called "Byronic sentiment," so derided now by the clever young psychologists who terrorise our literature, has become the refuge of timid old-fashioned people, quite bewildered and staggered by new developments.
I sympathise with such old-fashioned people. The pathetic earnestness of an elderly commercial traveller I once met on the Pere Marquette Railway who a.s.sured me that Byron was "some poet" remains in my mind as a much more touching tribute to the lordly roue than all the praise of your Arnolds and Swinburnes.
He is indeed "some poet." He is the poet for people who feel the magic of music and the grandeur of imagination, without being able to lay their finger on the more recondite nuances of "creative work,"
without so much as ever having heard of "imagism."
I have spent whole evenings in pa.s.sionate readings of "Childe Harold" and the "Poems to Thyrza" with gentle Quaker ladies and demure old maids descended from the Pilgrim Fathers, and I have always left such Apollonian prayer-meetings with a mind purged from the cant of cleverness; washed and refreshed in the authentic springs of the Muses.
So few lords--when you come to think of it--write poetry at all, that it is interesting to note the effect of aristocratic blood upon the style of a writer.
Personally I think its chief effect is to produce a certain magnanimous indifference to the meticulous niceties of the art. We say "drunk as a lord"; well--it is something to see what a person will do, who is descended from Robert Bruce"s Douglas, when it is a question of this more heavenly intoxication. Aristocratic blood shows itself in poetry by a kind of unscrupulous contempt for gravity. It refuses to take seriously the art which it practises.
It plays the part of the grand amateur. It is free from bourgeois earnestness. It is this, I suppose, which is so irritating to the professional critic. If you can write poetry, so to speak, with your left hand, in intervals of war and love and adventure, between rescuing girls from sacks destined for the waters of the Bosphorus and swimming the length of the Venetian Grand Ca.n.a.l and recruiting people to fight for h.e.l.lenic freedom, you are doing something that ought not to be allowed. If other men of action, if other sportsmen and pleasure-seekers and travellers and wandering free-lances were able to sit down in any cosmopolitan cafe in Cairo or Stamboul and knock off immortal verses in the style of Byron --verses with no "philosophy" for us to expound, no technique for us to a.n.a.lyse, no "message" for us to interpret, no aesthetic subtleties for us to unravel, no mystical orientation for us to track out, what is there left for a poor sedentary critic to do? Our occupation is gone.
We must either enjoy romance for its own sake in a frank, honest, simple manner; confessing that Byron was "some poet" and letting it go at that; or we must explain to the world, as many of us do, that Byron was a thoroughly bad writer. A third way of dealing with this unconscionable boy, who scoffed at Wordsworth and Southey and insisted that Pope was a great genius, is the way some poor camp-followers of the Moral Ideal have been driven to follow; the way, namely, of making him out to be a great leader in the war of the liberation of humanity, and a great interpreter of the wild magic of nature.
I must confess I cannot see Byron in either of these lights. He scoffs at kings and priests, certainly; he scoffs at Napoleon; he scoffs at the pompous self-righteousness of his own race; he scoffs at religion and s.e.x and morality in that humorous, careless, indifferent "public-school" way which is so salutary and refreshing; but when you ask for any serious devotion to the cause of Liberty, for any definite Utopian outlines of what is to be built up in the world"s future, you get little or nothing, except resounding generalities and conventional rhetoric.
Nor are those critics very wise who insist on laying stress upon Byron"s contributions to the interpretation of Nature.
He could write "How the big rain comes dancing to the earth!" and his flashing, fitful, sun-smouldering pictures of European rivers and plains and hills and historic cities have their large and generous charm.
But beyond this essentially human and romantic, att.i.tude to Nature there is just nothing at all.
"Roll on, thou deep and dark-blue Ocean, roll!"
I confess I caught a keener thrill of pleasure from that all-too-famous line when I suddenly heard it uttered by one of those garrulous ghosts in Mr. Masters"s Spoon River cemetery, than I ever did when in childhood they made me learn it.
But, for all that, though it is not an easy thing to put into words, there is a certain grandiose and sonorous beauty, fresh and free and utterly unaffected, about these verses, and many others in "Childe Harold."
As for those long plays of Byron"s, and those still longer narrative poems, nothing will induce me to read a line of them again. They have a singularly dusty smell to me; and when I think of them even, I suffer just such a withering sensation of ineffable boredom as I used to experience waiting in a certain ante-room in Tunbridge Wells where lived an aged retired general. I a.s.sociate them with ill.u.s.trated travels in Palestine.
How Goethe could read "Manfred" with any pleasure pa.s.ses my comprehension. "Cain" has a certain charm, I admit; but of all forms of all literature the thing which is called Poetic Drama seems to me the most dreary. If poets cannot write for the stage they had better confine themselves to honest straightforward odes and lyrics.
But it is no use complaining. There is a sort of fate which drives people into this arid path. I sometimes feel as though both Imagination and Humour fled away from the earth when a modern poet takes pen to compose Poetic Drama!
The thing is a refuge for those to whom the G.o.ds have given a "talent for literature," and have stopped with that gift. The Poetic Drama flourishes in Anglo-Saxon Democracies. It lends itself to the babbling of extreme youth and to the pompous moralising of extreme middle-age.
The odious thing is an essentially modern creation; created, as it is, out of thin vapour, and moulded by melancholy rules of thumb.
Drama was Religion to the Greeks, and in the old Elizabethan days great playwrights wrote great poetry.
I suppose if, by some fairy-miracle, _sheep_--the most modern of animals--were suddenly endowed with the privileges of culture, they would browse upon nothing else than Poetic Drama, from All Fools"
Day to Candlemas.
But even Manfred cannot be blamed for this withering sterility, this dead-sea of inept.i.tude. There must be some form of literature found, loose and lax enough to express the Moral Idealism of the second-rate mind; and Poetic Drama lends itself beautifully to this.
Putting aside a few descriptive pa.s.sages in "Childe Harold" and some score of superb lyrics sprinkled through the whole of the volume, what really is there in Byron at this hour--beyond the irresistible _idea_ of his slashing and crimson-blooded figure--to arrest us and hold us, who can read over and over again Christopher Marlowe and John Keats? Very little--singularly little--almost nothing.
Nothing--except "Don Juan"! This indeed is something of a poem.
This indeed has the old authentic fire about it and the sweet devilry of reckless youth.
How does one account for the power and authority over certain minds exercised by this surprising production? I do not think it is exactly the wit in it. The wit is often entirely superficial--a mere tricky playing with light resemblances and wordy jingles. I do not feel as though it were the humour in it; for Byron is not really a humorist at all. I think it is something deeper than the mere juxtaposition of burlesque-show jests with Sunday-evening sentimentality. I think it is the downright lashing out, left and right, up and down, of a powerful reckless spirit able "to lash out" for the mere pleasure of doing so. I think it is the pleasure we get from the spectacle of mere splendid energy and devil-may-care animal spirits let loose to run amuck as they please; while genius, like a lovely camp-follower tossed to and fro from hand to hand, throws a redeeming enchantment over the most ribald proceedings.
The people--I speak now of intelligent people--who love Don Juan, are those who, while timid and shrinking themselves, love to contemplate emphatic gestures, scandalous advances, Rabelaisian foolings, clownish tricks; those who love to watch the mad hurly-burly of life and see the resplendent fire-works go bang; those who love all huge jests, vituperative cursings, moonlit philanderings, scoffing mockeries, honest scurrilities, great rolling barrels of vulgarity, tuns and vats of ribaldry, and lovely, tender, gondola-songs upon sleeping waters.
The pleasure which such persons derive from Byron is the pleasure which the civilised Greeks derived from Aristophanes, the pleasure of seeing everything which we are wont to treat reverently treated irreverently, the pleasure, most especially, of seeing the pompous great ones of the world made to dance and skip like drunk puppets.
The literary temperament is so fatally inclined to fall into a sort of aesthetic gravity, taking its "philosophy" and its "art" with such portentous self-respect, that it is extremely pleasant when a reckless young Alcibiades of a Byron breaks into the enchanted circle and clears the air with a few resounding blasts from his profane ba.s.soon.
What happens really in this pantomimic history of Don Juan, with its huge nonchalance and audacious cynicism, is the invasion of the literary field by the G.o.dless rabble, the rabble who take no stock of the preserves of art, and go picnicking and rollicking and scattering their beer-bottles and their orange-peel in the very glades of the immortals. It is in fact the invasion of Parna.s.sus by a horde of most unmitigated proletarians. But these sweet scamps are led by a real lord, a lord who, like most lords, is ready to out-philistine the philistines and out-blaspheme the blasphemers.
Don Juan would be a hotch-potch of indecency and sentimentality, if it were not for the presence of genius there, of genius which, like a lovely flood of shining sunlight, irradiates the whole thing.
It is nonsense to talk of the "Byronic pose" either with regard to the outrageousness of his cynical wit or with regard to his sentimental Satanism.
Blasphemous wit and Satanic sentiment are the natural reactions of all healthy youthfulness in the presence of the sickening contrasts and diabolic ironies of life.