Such a mood is not by any means a sign of degeneracy. Byron was as far from being a degenerate as he was far from being a saint. It is a sign of st.u.r.dy sanity and vigorous strength.
Not to relish the gay brutality of Byron is an indication of something degenerate in ourselves. There is a certain type of person--perhaps the most prurient and disagreeable of all human animals--who is accustomed to indulge in a kind of holy leer of disgust when "brought up sharp" by the Aristophanic lapses of gay and graceless youth. Such a person"s mind would be a fruitful study for Herr Freud; but the thought of its simmering cauldron of furtive naughtiness is not a pleasant thing to dwell on, for any but pathological philosophers.
After reading Don Juan one is compelled to recognise that Byron"s mind must have been abnormally sane and sound. No one who jests quite at this rate could possibly be a bad man. The bad men--a word to the wise--are those from whose mouth the gay wantonness of the youth of the world is condemned as evil. Such persons ought to be sent for a rest-cure to Cairo or Morocco or Pekin.
The innocence of youth should be protected from a morality which is far more morbid than the maddest Dionysian revel.
It is, to confess it freely, not the satyrishness of Byron at all, but his hard brutality, which, for myself, I find difficult to enjoy.
I seem to require something more mellow, more ironical, more subtle, more humane, in my literature of irreverence. But no doubt this is a racial prejudice. Some obstinate drop of Latin--or, for all I know,--Carthaginian blood in me, makes me reluctant to give myself up to the tough, sane, st.u.r.dy brutality of your Anglo-Scot.
I can relish every word of Rabelais and I am not in the least dismayed by Heine"s impishness, but I have always found Fielding"s and Smollett"s grosser scenes difficult mouthfuls to swallow.
They tell me there is a magnanimous generosity and a large earthy sanity about these humorists. But to me there is too much horse-play, too much ruffianism and "bully-ragging." And something of the same quality offends me in Byron. I lack the steadiness of nerves to deal with a coa.r.s.eness which hits you across the head, much as the old English clowns. .h.i.t one another with strings of sausages.
But because I suffer from this psychological limitation; because I prefer Sterne to Fielding, and Lamb to d.i.c.kens; I should condemn myself as an un-catholic fanatic if I presumed to turn my personal lack of youthful aplomb and gallant insouciance into a grave artistic principle.
Live and let live! That must be our motto in literary criticism as it is our motto in other things. I am not going to let myself call Byron a blackguard because of something a little hard and insensitive in him which happens to get upon my own nerves. He was a fine genius. He wrote n.o.ble verses. He has a beautiful face.
Women are, as a rule, less sensitive than men in these matters of s.e.xual brutality. It may be that they have learned by bitter experience that the Byrons of this world are not their worst enemies.
Or perhaps they feel towards them a certain maternal tenderness; condoning, as mothers will do, with an understanding beyond the comprehension of any neurotic critic, these roughnesses and insensitivenesses in their darlings.
Yes--let us leave the reputation of this great man, as far as his s.e.xual lapses are concerned, to the commonsense and tact of women.
He was the kind of man that women naturally love. Perhaps we who criticise him are not altogether forgetful of that fact when we put our finger upon his aristocratic selfishness and his garish brilliance.
And perhaps the women are right.
It is pleasant at any rate to think so; pleasant to think that one"s refined and gentle aunts, living n.o.ble lives in cathedral close and country vicarage, still regard this great wayward poet as a dear spoilt child and feel nothing of that instinctive suspicion of him which they feel toward so many "Byrons de nos jours."
When I recall the peculiarly tender look that came into the face of one beautiful old lady--a true "grande dame" of the old-fashioned generation--to whom I mentioned his name, and a.s.sociate it with the look of weary distaste with which she listened to my discourses upon more modern and more subtle rebels, I am tempted to conclude that what womanly women really admire in a man is a certain energy of action, a certain drastic force, brilliance and hardness, which is the very opposite of the nervous sensitiveness and receptive weakness which is the characteristic of most of us men of letters. I am tempted to go so far as to maintain that a profound atavistic instinct in normal women makes them really contemptuous in their hearts of any purely aesthetic or intellectual type. They prefer poets who are also men of action and men of the world. They prefer poets who "when they think are children." It is not hardness or selfishness or brutality which really alarms them. It is intellect, it is subtlety, it is, above all, _irony._ Byron"s unique achievement as a poet is to have flung into poetry the essential brutality and the essential sentiment of the typical male animal, and, in so far as he has done this, all his large carelessness, all his cheap and superficial rhetoric, all his scornful cynicism, cannot hide from us something primitive and appealing about him which harmonises well enough with his beautiful face and his dramatic career.
Perhaps, as a matter of fact, our literary point of view in these later days has been at once over-subtilized and underfed. Perhaps we have grown morbidly fastidious in the matter of delicacies of style, and shrinkingly averse to the slashing energy of hard-hitting, action-loving, self-a.s.sertive worldliness.
It may be so; and yet, I am not sure. I can find it in me to dally with the morbid and very modern fancy that, after all, Byron has been a good deal overrated; that, after all, when we forget his personality and think only of his actual work, he cannot be compared for a moment, as an original genius, with such persons--so much less appealing to the world-obsessed feminine mind--as William Blake or Paul Verlaine!
Yes; let the truth be blurted out--even though it be a confession causing suffering to one"s pride--and the truth is that I, for one, though I can sit down and read Matthew Arnold and Remy de Gourmont and Paul Verlaine, for hours and hours, and though it is only because I have them all so thoroughly by heart that I don"t read the great Odes of Keats any more, shall _never again,_ not even for the s.p.a.ce of a quarter of an hour, not even as a psychological experiment, turn over the pages of a volume of Byron"s Poetical Works!
I think I discern what this reluctance means. It means that primarily and intrinsically what Byron did for the world was to bring into prominence and render beautiful and appealing a certain fierce rebellion against unctuous domesticity and solemn puritanism. His political propagandism of Liberty amounts to nothing now. What amounts to a great deal is that he magnificently and in an engaging, though somewhat brutal manner, broke the rules of a bourgeois social code.
As a meteoric rebel against the degrading servility of what we have come to call the "Nonconformist Conscience" Byron must always have his place in the tragically slow emanc.i.p.ation of the human spirit. The reluctance of an ordinary sensitive modern person, genuinely devoted to poetry, to spend any more time with Byron"s verses than what those great familiar lyrics printed in all the anthologies exact, is merely a proof that he is not the poet that Sh.e.l.ley, for instance, is.
It is a melancholy commentary upon the "immortality of genius" and that "perishing only with the English language" of which conventional orators make so much, that the case should be so; but it is more important to be honest in the admission of our real feelings than to flatter the pride of the human race.
The world moves on. Manners, customs, habits, moralities, ideals, all change with changing of the times.
_Style alone,_ the imaginative rendering in monumental words of the most personal secrets of our individuality, gives undying interest to what men write. Sappho and Catullus, Villon and Marlowe, are as vivid and fresh to-day as are Walter de la Mare or Edgar Lee Masters.
If Byron can only thrill us with half-a-dozen little songs his glory-loving ghost ought to be quite content.
To last in any form at all, as the generations pa.s.s and the face of the planet alters, is a great and lucky accident. To last so that men not only read you but love you when a century"s dust covers your ashes is a high and royal privilege.
To leave a name which, whether men read your work or not, whether men love your memory or not, still conjures up an image of strength and joy and courage and beauty, is a great reward.
To leave a name which must be a.s.sociated for all time with the human struggle to free itself from false idealism and false morality is something beyond any reward. It is to have entered into the creative forces of Nature herself. It is to have become a fatality. It is to have merged your human, individual, personal voice with the voices of _the elements which are beyond the elements._ It is to have become an eternally living portion of that unutterable central flame which, though the smoke of its burning may roll back upon us and darken our path, is forever recreating the world.
Much of Byron"s work, while he lived, was of necessity destructive.
Such destruction is part of the secret of life. In the world of moral ideals destroyers have their place side by side with creators. The destroyers of human thoughts are the winged ministers of the thoughts of Nature. Out of the graves of ideals something rises which is beyond any ideal. We are tossed to and fro, poets and men of action alike, by powers whose intentions are dark, by unknown forces whose faces no man may ever see. From darkness to darkness we stagger across a twilight-stage.
With no beginning that we can imagine, with no end that we can conceive, the mad procession moves forward. Only sometimes, at moments far, far apart, and in strange places, do we seem to catch the emergence, out of the storm in which we struggle, of something that no poet nor artist nor any other human voice has ever uttered, something that is as far beyond our virtue as it is beyond our evil, something terrible, beautiful, irrational, _mad_--which is the secret of the universe!
EMILY BRONTe
The name of Emily Bronte--why does it produce in one"s mind so strange and startling a feeling, unlike that produced by any other famous writer?
It is not easy to answer such a question. Certain great souls seem to gather to themselves, as their work acc.u.mulates its destined momentum in its voyage down the years, a power of arousing our imagination to issues that seem larger than those which can naturally be explained as proceeding inevitably from their tangible work.
Our imagination is roused and our deepest soul stirred by the mention of such names without any palpable accompaniment of logical a.n.a.lysis, without any well-weighed or rational justification.
Such names touch some response in us which goes deeper than our critical faculties, however desperately they may struggle. Instinct takes the place of reason; and our soul, as if answering the appeal of some translunar chord of subliminal music, vibrates in response to a mood that baffles all a.n.a.lysis.
We all know the work of Emily"s sister Charlotte; we know it and can return to it at will, fathoming easily and at leisure the fine qualities of it and its impa.s.sioned and romantic effect upon us.
But though we may have read over and over again that one amazing story--"Wuthering Heights"--and that handful of unforgettable poems which are all that Emily Bronte has bequeathed to the world, which of us can say that the full significance of these things has been ransacked and combed out by our conscious reason; which of us can say that we understand to the full all the mysterious stir and ferment, all the far-reaching and magical reactions, which such things have produced within us?
Who can put into words the secret of this extraordinary girl? Who can define, in the suave and plausible language of academic culture, the flitting shadows thrown from deep to deep in the unfathomable genius of her vision?
Perhaps not since Sappho has there been such a person. Certainly she makes the ghosts of de Stael and Georges Sand, of Eliot and Mrs.
Browning, look singularly homely and sentimental.
I am inclined to think that the huge mystery of Emily Bronte"s power lies in the fact that she expresses in her work--just as the Lesbian, did--the very soul of womanhood. It is not an easy thing to achieve, this. Women writers, clever and lively and subtle, abound in our time, as they have abounded in times past; but for some inscrutable reason they lack the demonic energy, the occult spiritual force, the instinctive fire, wherewith to give expression to the ultimate mystery of their own s.e.x.
I am inclined to think that, of all poets, Walt Whitman is the only one who has drawn his reckless and chaotic inspiration straight from the uttermost spiritual depths of the s.e.x-instincts of the male animal; and Emily Bronte has done for her s.e.x what Walt Whitman did for his.
It is a strange and startling commentary upon the real significance of our s.e.xual impulses that, when it comes to the final issue, it is not the beautiful ruffianism of a Byron, full of normal s.e.x-instinct though that may be, or the eloquent sentiment of a Georges Sand, penetrated with pa.s.sionate sensuality as that is, which really touch the indefinable secret. Emily Bronte, like Walt Whitman, sweeps us, by sheer force of inspired genius, into a realm where the mere _animalism_ of s.e.xuality, its voluptuousness, its l.u.s.t, its lechery, are absolutely merged, lost, forgotten; fused by that burning flame of spiritual pa.s.sion into something which is beyond all earthly desire.
Emily Bronte--and this is indicative of the difference between woman and man--goes even further than Walt Whitman in the spiritualising of this flame. In Whitman there is, as we all know, a vast ma.s.s of work, wherein, true and magical though it is, the earthly and bodily elements of the great pa.s.sion are given enormous emphasis. It is only at rare moments--as happens with ordinary men in the normal experience of the world--that he is swept away beyond the reach of l.u.s.t and voluptuousness. But Emily Bronte seems to dwell by natural predilection upon these high summits and in these unsounded depths. The flame of the pa.s.sion in her burns at such quivering vibrant pressure that the fuel of it--the debris and rubble of our earth-instincts--is entirely absorbed and devoured. In her work the fire of life licks up, with its consuming tongue, every vestige of materiality in the thing upon which it feeds, and the lofty tremulous spires of its radiant burning ascend into the illimitable void.
It is of extraordinary interest, as a mere psychological phenomenon, to note the fact that when the pa.s.sion of s.e.x is driven forward by the flame of its conquering impulse beyond a certain point it becomes itself trans.m.u.ted and loses the earthy texture of its original character.
s.e.x-pa.s.sion when carried to a certain pitch of intensity loses its s.e.xuality. It becomes pure flame; immaterial, unearthly, and with no sensual dross left in it.
It may even be said, by an enormous paradox, to become s.e.xless.
And this is precisely what one feels about the work of Emily Bronte.
s.e.x-pa.s.sion in her has been driven so far that it has come round "full circle" and has become s.e.xless pa.s.sion. It has become pa.s.sion disembodied, pa.s.sion absolute, pa.s.sion divested of all human weakness. The "muddy vesture of decay" which "grossly closes in"
our diviner principle has been burnt up and absorbed. It has been reduced to nothing; and in its place quivers up to heaven the clear white flame of the secret fountain of life.