(Reprinted, with corrections, by permission from the “Contemporary Review,” August, 1881.)

Mr. Matthew Arnold has lately published a remarkable essay [133] upon Lord Byron. Mr. Arnold’s theory about Byron is, that he is neither artist nor thinker—that “he has no light, cannot lead us from the past to the future;” “the moment he reflects, he is a child;” “as a poet he has no fine and exact sense for word and structure and rhythm; he has not the artist’s nature and gifts.” The excellence of Byron mainly consists in his “sincerity and strength;” in his rhetorical power; in his “irreconcilable revolt and battle” against the political and social order of things in which he lived. “Byron threw himself upon poetry as his organ; and in poetry his topics were not Queen Mab, and the Witch of the Atlas, and the Sensitive Plant, they were the upholders of the old order, George the Third and Lord Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington and Southey, and they were the canters and tramplers of the great world, and they were his enemies and himself.”

Mr. Arnold appeals to Goethe as an authority in his favour. In order, therefore, that English people may know what Goethe thought about Byron I have collected some of the principal criticisms upon him which I can find in Goethe’s works. The text upon which Mr. Arnold enlarges is the remark just quoted which Goethe made about Byron to Eckermann: “so bald er reflectirt ist er ein Kind”—as soon as he reflects he is a child.

Goethe, it is true, did say this; but the interpretation of the saying depends upon the context, which Mr. Arnold omits. I give the whole passage, quoting from Oxenford’s translation of the Eckermann Conversations, vol. i. p. 198 (edition 1850):—

“‘Lord Byron,’ said Eckermann, ‘is no wiser when he takes ‘Faust’ to pieces and thinks you found one thing here, the other there.’ ‘The greater part of those fine things cited by Lord Byron,’ Goethe replied, ‘I have never even read; much less did I think of them when I was writing “Faust.” But Lord Byron is only great as a poet; as soon as he reflects he is a child. He knows not how to help himself against the stupid attacks of the same kind made upon him by his own countrymen. He ought to have expressed himself more strongly against them. ‘What is there is mine,’ he should have said, ‘and whether I got it from a book or from life is of no consequence; the only point is, whether I have made a right use of it.’ Walter Scott used a scene from my ‘Egmont,’ and he had a right to do so; and because he did it well, he deserves praise.’”

Goethe certainly does not mean that Byron was unable to reflect in the sense in which Mr. Arnold interprets the word. What was really meant we shall see in a moment.

We will, however, continue the quotations from the Eckermann:—

“We see how the inadequate dogmas of the Church work upon a free mind like Byron’s and how by such a piece (‘Cain’) he struggles to get rid of a doctrine which has been forced upon him” (vol. i. p. 129).

“The world to him was transparent, and he could paint by way of anticipation” (vol. i. p. 140).

“That which I call invention I never saw in any one in the world to a greater degree than in him” (vol. i. p. 205).

“Lord Byron is to be regarded as a man, as an Englishman, and as a great talent. His good qualities belong chiefly to the man, his bad to the Englishman and the peer, his talent is incommensurable. All Englishmen are, as such, without reflection properly so-called; distractions and party-spirit will not permit them to perfect themselves in quiet. But they are great as practical men. Thus, Lord Byron could never attain reflection on himself, and on this account his maxims in general are not successful. . . . But where he will create, he always succeeds; and we may truly say that, with him, inspiration supplies the place of reflection. He was always obliged to go on poetizing, and then everything that came from the man, especially from his heart, was excellent. He produced his best things, as women do pretty children, without thinking about it, or knowing how it was done. He is a great talent, a born talent, and I never saw the true poetical power greater in any man than in him. In the apprehension of external objects, and a clear penetration into past situations, he is quite as great as Shakespeare. But as a pure individuality, Shakespeare is his superior” (vol. i. p. 209).

We see now what Goethe means by “reflection.” It is the faculty of self-separation, or conscious consideration, a faculty which would have enabled Byron, as it enabled Goethe, to reply successfully to a charge of plagiarism. It is not thought in its widest sense, nor creation, and it has not much to do with the production of poems of the highest order—the poems that is to say, which are written by the impersonal thought.

But again—

“The English may think of Byron as they please; but this is certain, that they can show no poet who is to be compared to him. He is different from all the others, and for the most part, greater” (vol. i. p. 290).

This passage is one which Mr. Arnold quotes, and he strives to diminish its importance by translating der ihm zu vergleichen wÄre, by “who is his parallel,” and maintains that Goethe “was not so much thinking of the strict rank, as poetry, of Byron’s production; he was thinking of that wonderful personality of Byron which so enters into his poetry.” It is just possible; but if Goethe did think this, he used words which are misleading, and if the phrase der ihm zu vergleichen wÄre simply indicates parallelism, it has no point, for in that sense it might have been applied to Scott or to Southey.

“I have read once more Byron’s ‘Deformed Transformed,’ and must say that to me his talent appears greater than ever. His devil was suggested by my Mephistopheles; but it is no imitation—it is thoroughly new and original; close, genuine, and spirited. There are no weak passages—not a place where you could put the head of a pin, where you do not find invention and thought [italics mine]. Were it not for his hypochondriacal negative turn, he would be as great as Shakespeare and the ancients” (vol. i. p. 294).

Eckermann expressed his surprise. “Yes,” said Goethe, “you may believe me, I have studied him anew and am confirmed in this opinion.” The position which Byron occupies in the Second Part of “Faust” is well known. Eckermann talked to Goethe about it, and Goethe said, “I could not make use of any man as the representative of the modern poetical era except him, who undoubtedly is to be regarded as the greatest genius of our century” (vol. i. p. 425). Mr. Arnold translates this word “genius” by “talent.” The word in the original is talent, and I will not dispute with so accomplished a German scholar as Mr. Arnold as to what is the precise meaning of talent. In both the English translations of Eckermann the word is rendered “genius,” and after the comparison between Byron, Shakespeare, and the ancients just quoted, we can hardly admit that Goethe meant to distinguish scientifically between the two orders of intellect and to assign the lower to Byron.

But, last of all, I will translate Goethe’s criticism upon “Cain.” So far as I know, it has not yet appeared in English. It is to be found in the Stuttgart and TÜbingen edition of Goethe, 1840, vol. xxxiii. p. 157. Some portions which are immaterial I have omitted:—

“After I had listened to the strangest things about this work for almost a year, I at last took it myself in hand, and it excited in me astonishment and admiration; an effect which will produce in the mind which is simply susceptible, everything good, beautiful, and great. . . . The poet who, surpassing the limit of all our conceptions, has penetrated with burning spiritual vision the past and present, and consequently the future, has now subdued new regions under his limitless talent, but what he will accomplish therein can be predicted by no human being. His procedure, however, we can nevertheless in a measure more closely determine. He adheres to the letter of the Biblical tradition, for he allows the first pair of human beings to exchange their original purity and innocence for a guilt mysterious in its origin; the punishment which is its consequence descending upon all posterity. The monstrous burden of such an event he lays upon the shoulders of Cain as the representative of a wretched humanity, plunged for no fault of its own into the depths of misery.

“To this primitive son of man, bowed down and heavily burdened, death, which as yet he has not seen, is an especial trouble; and although he may desire the end of his present distress, it seems still more hateful to exchange it for a condition altogether unknown. Hence we already see that the full weight of a dogmatic system, explaining, mediating, yet always in conflict with itself, just as it still for ever occupies us, was imposed on the first miserable son of man. These contradictions, which are not strange to human nature, possessed his mind, and could not be brought to rest, either through the divinely-given gentleness of his father and brother, or the loving and alleviating co-operation of his sister-wife. In order to sharpen them to the point of impossibility of endurance, Satan comes upon the scene, a mighty and misleading spirit, who begins by unsettling him morally, and then conducts him miraculously through all worlds, causing him to see the past as overwhelmingly vast, the present as small and of no account, and the future as full of foreboding and void of consolation.

“So he turns back to his own family, more excited, but not worse than before; and finding in the family circle everything as he has left it, the urgency of Abel, who wishes to make him offer a sacrifice, becomes altogether insupportable. More say we not, excepting that the motivation of the scene in which Abel perishes is of the rarest excellence, and what follows is equally great and priceless. There now lies Abel! That now is Death—there was so much talk about it, and man knows about it as little as he did before.

“We must not forget, that through the whole piece there runs a kind of presentiment of a Saviour, so that the poet at this point, as well as in all others, has known how to bring himself near to the ideas by which we explain things, and to our modes of faith.

“Of the scene with the parents, in which Eve at last curses the speechless Cain, which our western neighbour lifts into such striking prominence, there remains nothing more for us to say: we have to approach the conclusion with astonishment and reverence.

“With regard to this conclusion, an intelligent and fair friend, related to us through esteem for Byron, has asserted that everything religious and moral in the world was put into the last three words of the piece.” [143]

We have now heard enough from Goethe to prove that Mr. Arnold’s interpretation of “so bald er reflectirt ist er ein Kind” is not Goethe’s interpretation of Byron. It is to be remembered that Goethe was not a youth overcome by Mr. Arnold’s “vogue” when he read Byron. He was a singularly self-possessed old man.

Many persons will be inclined to think that Goethe, so far from putting Byron on a lower level than that usually assigned to him, has over-praised him, and will question the “burning spiritual vision” which the great German believed the great Englishman to possess. But if we consider what Goethe calls the “motivation” of Cain; if we reflect on what the poet has put into the legend; on the exploration of the universe with Lucifer as a guide; on its result, on the mode in which the death of Abel is reached; on the doom of the murderer—the limitless wilderness henceforth and no rest; on the fidelity of Adah, who, with the true instinct of love, separates between the man and the crime; on the majesty of the principal character, who stands before us as the representative of the insurgence of the human intellect, so that, if we know him, we know a whole literature; if we meditate hereon, we shall say that Goethe has not exaggerated. It is the same with the rest of Byron’s dramas. Over and above the beauty of detached passages, there is in each one of them a large and universal meaning, or rather meaning within meaning, precisely the same for no reader, but none the less certain, and as inexhaustible as the meanings of Nature. This is one reason why the wisdom of a selection from Byron is so doubtful. The worth of “Cain,” of “Sardanapalus,” of “Manfred,” of “Marino Faliero,” is the worth of an outlook over the sea; and we cannot take a sample of the scene from a cliff by putting a pint of water into a bottle. But Byron’s critics and the compilers tell us of failures, which ought not to survive, and that we are doing a kindness to him if we suppress these and exhibit him at his best. No man who seriously cares for Byron will assent to this doctrine. We want to know the whole of him, his weakness as well as his strength; for the one is not intelligible without the other. A human being is an indivisible unity, and his weakness is his strength, and his strength is his weakness.

It is not my object now, however, to justify what Mr. Arnold calls the Byronic “superstition.” I hope I could justify a good part of it, but this is not the opportunity. I cannot resist, however, saying a word by way of conclusion on the manner in which Byron has fulfilled what seems to me one of the chief offices of the poet. Mr. Arnold, although he is so dissatisfied with Byron because he “cannot reflect,” would probably in another mood admit that “reflections” are not what we demand of a poet. We do not ask of him a rhymed book of proverbs. He should rather be the articulation of what in Nature is great but inarticulate. In him the thunder, the sea, the peace of morning, the joy of youth, the rush of passion, the calm of old age, should find words, and men should through him become aware of the unrecognised wealth of existence. Byron had the power above most poets of acting as a kind of tongue to Nature. His descriptions are on everybody’s lips, and it is superfluous to quote them. He represented things not as if they were aloof from him, but as if they were the concrete embodiment of his soul. The woods, the wilds, the waters of Nature are to him—

“the intense
Reply of hers to our intelligence.”

His success is equally marked when he portrays men or women whose character attracts him. Take, for example, the girl in “The Island”:—

“The sunborn blood suffused her neck, and threw
O’er her clear nutbrown skin a lucid hue,
Like coral reddening through the darken’d wave,
Which draws the diver to the crimson cave.
Such was this daughter of the southern seas,
Herself a billow in her energies.

* * * * *

Her smiles and tears had pass’d, as light winds pass
O’er lakes to ruffle, not destroy, their glass,
Whose depths unsearch’d, and fountains from the hill,
Restore their surface, in itself so still.”

Passages like these might be quoted without end from Byron, and they explain why he is and must be amongst the immortals. He may have been careless in expression; he may have been a barbarian and not a εύφυής, as Mr. Matthew Arnold affirms, but he was great. This is the word which describes him. He was a mass of living energy, and therefore he is sanative. Energy, power, is the one thing after which we pine in this sickly age. We do not want carefully and consciously constructed poems of mosaic. Strength is what we need and what will heal us. Strength is true morality, and true beauty. It is the strength in Byron that falsifies the accusation of affectation and posing, which is brought against him. All that is meant by affectation and posing was a mere surface trick. The real man, Byron, and his poems are perfectly unconscious, as unconscious as the wind. The books which have lived and always will live have this unconsciousness in them, and what is manufactured, self-centred, and self-contemplative will perish. The world’s literature is the work of men, who, to use Byron’s own words—

“Strip off this fond and false identity;”

who are lost in their object, who write because they cannot help it, imperfectly or perfectly, as the case may be, and who do not sit down to fit in this thing and that thing from a commonplace book. Many novelists there are who know their art better than Charlotte BrontË, but she, like Byron—and there are more points of resemblance between them than might at first be supposed—is imperishable because she speaks under overwhelming pressure, self-annihilated, we may say, while the spirit breathes through her. The Byron “vogue” will never pass so long as men and women are men and women. Mr. Arnold and the critics may remind us of his imperfections of form, but Goethe is right after all, for not since Shakespeare have we had any one der ihm zu vergleichen wÄre.