Lord Jeffrey at the close of a once-famous review quaintly laments: "The tuneful quartos of Southey are already little better than lumber, and the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley, and the fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth, and the plebeian pathos of Crabbe, are melting fast from the field of our vision. The novels of Scott have put out his poetry, and the blazing star of Byron himself is receding from its place of pride." Of the poets of the early part of this century, Lord John Russell thought Byron the greatest, then Scott, then Moore. "Such an opinion," wrote a National reviewer, in 1860, "is not worth a refutation; we only smile at it." Nothing in the history of literature is more curious than the shifting of the standard of excellence, which so perplexes criticism. But the most remarkable feature of the matter is the frequent return to power of the once discarded potentates. Byron is resuming his place: his spirit has come again to our atmosphere; and every budding critic, as in 1820, is impelled to pronounce a verdict on his genius and character. The present times are, in many respects, an aftermath of the first quarter of the century, which was an era of revolt, of doubt, of storm. There succeeded an era of exhaustion, of quiescence, of reflection. The first years of the third quarter saw a revival of turbulence and agitation; and, more than our fathers, we are inclined to sympathize with our grandfathers. Macaulay has popularized the story of the change of literary dynasty which in our island marked the close of the last, and the first two decades of the present, hundred years.

The corresponding artistic revolt on the continent was closely connected with changes in the political world. The originators of the romantic literature in Italy, for the most part, died in Spielberg or in exile. The same revolution which levelled the Bastille, and converted Versailles and the Trianon—the classic school in stone and terrace—into a moral Herculaneum and Pompeii, drove the models of the so-called Augustan ages into a museum of antiquarians. In our own country, the movement initiated by Chatterton, Cowper, and Burns, was carried out by two classes of great writers. They agreed in opposing freedom to formality; in substituting for the old, new aims and methods; in preferring a grain of mother wit to a peck of clerisy. They broke with the old school, as Protestantism broke with the old Church; but, like the sects, they separated again. Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, while refusing to acknowledge the literary precedents of the past, submitted themselves to a self-imposed law. The partialities of their maturity were towards things settled and regulated; their favourite virtues, endurance and humility; their conformity to established institutions was the basis of a new Conservatism. The others were the Radicals of the movement: they practically acknowledged no law but their own inspiration. Dissatisfied with the existing order, their sympathies were with strong will and passion and defiant independence. These found their master-types in Shelley and in Byron.

A reaction is always an extreme. Lollards, Puritans, Covenanters, were in some respects nauseous antidotes to ecclesiastical corruption. The ruins of the Scotch cathedrals and of the French nobility are warnings at once against the excess that provokes and the excess that avenges. The revolt against the ancien rÉgime in letters made possible the Ode that is the high-tide mark of modern English inspiration, but it was parodied in page on page of maundering rusticity. Byron saw the danger, but was borne headlong by the rapids. Hence the anomalous contrast between his theories and his performance. Both Wordsworth and Byron were bitten by Rousseau; but the former is, at furthest, a Girondin. The latter, acting like Danton on the motto "L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace," sighs after Henri Quatre et GabriÈlle. There is more of the spirit of the French Revolution in Don Juan than in all the works of the author's contemporaries; but his criticism is that of Boileau, and when deliberate is generally absurd. He never recognized the meaning of the artistic movement of his age, and overvalued those of his works which the Unities helped to destroy. He hailed Gifford as his Magnus Apollo, and put Rogers next to Scott in his comical pyramid. "Chaucer," he writes, "I think obscene and contemptible." He could see no merit in Spenser, preferred Tasso to Milton, and called the old English dramatists "mad and turbid mountebanks." In the same spirit he writes: "In the time of Pope it was all Horace, now it is all Claudian." He saw—what fanatics had begun to deny—that Pope was a great writer, and the "angel of reasonableness," the strong common sense of both was a link between them; but the expressions he uses during his controversy with Bowles look like jests, till we are convinced of his earnestness by his anger. "Neither time, nor distance, nor grief, nor age can ever diminish my veneration for him who is the great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all stages of existence…. Your whole generation are not worth a canto of the Dunciad, or anything that is his." All the while he was himself writing prose and verse, in grasp if not in vigour as far beyond the stretch of Pope, as Pope is in "worth and wit and sense" removed above his mimics. The point of the paradox is not merely that he deserted, but that he sometimes imitated his model, and when he did so, failed. Macaulay's judgment, that "personal taste led him to the eighteenth century, thirst for praise to the nineteenth," is quite at fault. There can be no doubt that Byron loved praise as much as he affected to despise it. His note, on reading the Quarterly on his dramas, "I am the most unpopular man in England," is like the cry of a child under chastisement; but he had little affinity, moral or artistic, with the spirit of our so-called Augustans, and his determination to admire them was itself rebellious. Again we are reminded of his phrase, "I am of the opposition." His vanity and pride were perpetually struggling for the mastery, and though he thirsted for popularity he was bent on compelling it; so he warred with the literary impulse of which he was the child.

Byron has no relation to the master-minds whose works reflect a nation or an era, and who keep their own secrets. His verse and prose is alike biographical, and the inequalities of his style are those of his career. He lived in a glass case, and could not hide himself by his habit of burning blue lights. He was too great to do violence to his nature, which was not great enough to be really consistent. It was thus natural for him to pose as the spokesman of two ages—as a critic and as an author; and of two orders of society—as a peer, and as a poet of revolt. Sincere in both, he could never forget the one character in the other. To the last, he was an aristocrat in sentiment, a democrat in opinion. "Vulgarity," he writes with a pithy half-truth, "is far worse than downright black guardism; for the latter comprehends wit, humour, and strong sense at times, while the former is a sad abortive attempt at all things, signifying nothing." He could never reconcile himself to the English radicals; and it has been acutely remarked, that part of his final interest in Greece lay in the fact that he found it a country of classic memories, "where a man might be the champion of liberty without soiling himself in the arena." He owed much of his early influence to the fact of his moving in the circles of rank and fashion; but though himself steeped in the prejudices of caste, he struck at them at times with fatal force. Aristocracy is the individual asserting a vital distinction between itself and "the muck o' the world." Byron's heroes all rebel against the associative tendency of the nineteenth century; they are self-worshippers at war with society; but most of them come to bad ends. He maligned himself in those caricatures, and has given more of himself in describing one whom with special significance we call a brother poet. "Allen," he writes in 1813, "has lent me a quantity of Burns's unpublished letters…. What an antithetical mind!—tenderness, roughness—delicacy, coarseness— sentiment, sensuality—soaring and grovelling—dirt and deity—all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!" We have only to add to these antitheses, in applying them with slight modification to the writer. Byron had, on occasion, more self-control than Burns, who yielded to every thirst or gust, and could never have lived the life of the soldier at Mesolonghi; but partly owing to meanness, partly to a sound instinct, his memory has been more severely dealt with. The fact of his being a nobleman helped to make him famous, but it also helped to make him hated. No doubt it half spoiled him in making him a show; and the circumstance has suggested the remark of a humourist, that it is as hard for a lord to be a perfect gentleman as for a camel to pass through the needle's eye. But it also exposed to the rancours of jealousy a man who had nearly everything but domestic happiness to excite that most corroding of literary passions; and when he got out of gear he became the quarry of Spenser's "blatant beast." On the other hand, Burns was, beneath his disgust at Holy Fairs and Willies, sincerely reverential; much of Don Juan would have seemed to him "an atheist's laugh," and—a more certain superiority—he was absolutely frank.

Byron, like Pope, was given to playing monkey-like tricks, mostly harmless, but offensive to their victims. His peace of mind was dependent on what people would say of him, to a degree unusual even in the irritable race; and when they spoke ill he was, again like Pope, essentially vindictive. The Bards and Reviewers beats about, where the lines to Atticus transfix with Philoctetes' arrows; but they are due to a like impulse. Byron affected to contemn the world; but, say what he would, he cared too much for it. He had a genuine love of solitude as an alterative; but he could not subsist without society, and, Shelley tells us, wherever he went, became the nucleus of it. He sprang up again when flung to the earth, but he never attained to the disdain he desired.

We find him at once munificent and careful about money; calmly asleep amid a crowd of trembling sailors, yet never going to ride without a nervous caution; defying augury, yet seriously disturbed by a gipsy's prattle. He could be the most genial of comrades, the most considerate of masters, and he secured the devotion of his servants, as of his friends; but he was too overbearing to form many equal friendships, and apt to be ungenerous to his real rivals. His shifting attitude towards Lady Byron, his wavering purposes, his impulsive acts, are a part of the character we trace through all his life and work,—a strange mixture of magnanimity and brutality, of laughter and tears, consistent in nothing but his passion and his pride, yet redeeming all his defects by his graces, and wearing a greatness that his errors can only half obscure.

Alternately the idol and the horror of his contemporaries, Byron was, during his life, feared and respected as "the grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme." His works were the events of the literary world. The chief among them were translated into French, German, Italian, Danish, Polish, Russian, Spanish. On the publication of Moore's Life, Lord Macaulay had no hesitation in referring to Byron as "the most celebrated Englishman of the nineteenth century." Nor have we now; but in the interval between 1840-1870, it was the fashion to talk of him as a sentimentalist, a romancer, a shallow wit, a nine days' wonder, a poet for "green unknowing youth." It was a reaction, such as leads us to disestablish the heroes of our crude imaginations till we learn that to admire nothing is as sure a sign of immaturity as to admire everything.

The weariness, if not disgust, induced by a throng of more than usually absurd imitators, enabled Carlyle, the poet's successor in literary influence (followed with even greater unfairness by Thackeray), more effectively to lead the counter-revolt. "In my mind," writes the former, in 1839, "Byron has been sinking at an accelerated rate for the last ten years, and has now reached a very low level…. His fame has been very great, but I do not see how it is to endure; neither does that make him great. No genuine productive thought was ever revealed by him to mankind. He taught me nothing that I had not again to forgot." The refrain of Carlyle's advice during the most active years of his criticism was, "Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe." We do so, and find that the refrain of Goethe's advice in reference to Byron is—"nocturn versate manu, versate diurnÂ." He urged Eckermann to study English that he might read him; remarking, "A character of such eminence has never existed before, and probably will never come again. The beauty of Cain is such as we shall not see a second time in the world…. Byron issues from the sea-waves ever fresh. In Helena, I could not make use of any man as the representative of the modern poetic era except him, who is undoubtedly the greatest genius[1] of our century." Again: "Tasso's epic has maintained its fame, but Byron is the burning bush, which reduces the cedar of Lebanon to ashes…. The English may think of him as they please; this is certain, they can show no (living) poet who is comparable to him…. But he is too worldly. Contrast Macbeth, and Beppo, where you are in a nefarious empirical world." On Eckermann's doubting "whether there is a gain for pure culture in Byron's work," Goethe conclusively replies, "There I must contradict you. The audacity and grandeur of Byron must certainly tend towards culture. We should take care not to be always looking for it in the decidedly pure and moral. Everything that is great promotes cultivation, as soon as we are aware of it."

[Footnote 1: Mr. Arnold wrongly objects to this translation of the
German "talent."]

This verdict of the Olympian as against the verdict of the Titan is interesting in itself, and as being the verdict of the whole continental world of letters. "What," exclaims Castelar, "does Spain not owe to Byron? From his mouth come our hopes and fears. He has baptized us with his blood. There is no one with whose being some song of his is not woven. His life is like a funeral torch over our graves." Mazzini takes up the same tune for Italy. Stendhal speaks of Byron's "Apollonic power;" and Sainte Beuve writes to the same intent, with some judicious caveats. M. Taine concludes his survey of the romantic movement with the remark: "In this splendid effort, the greatest are exhausted. One alone—Byron—attains the summit. He is so great and so English, that from him alone we shall learn more truths of his country and his age than from all the rest together." Dr. Elze, ranks the author of Harold and Juan among the four greatest English poets, and claims for him the intellectual parentage of Lamartine and Musset in France, of Espronceda in Spain, of Puschkin in Russia, with some modifications, of Heine in Germany, of Berchet and others in Italy. So many voices of so various countries cannot be simply set aside: unless we wrap ourselves in an insolent insularism, we are bound at least to ask what is the meaning of their concurrent testimony. Foreign judgments can manifestly have little weight on matters of form, and not one of the above-mentioned critics is sufficiently alive to the egregious shortcomings which Byron himself recognized. That he loses almost nothing by translation is a compliment to the man, a disparagement to tho artist. Very few pages of his verse even aspire to perfection; hardly a stanza will bear the minute word-by-word dissection which only brings into clearer view the delicate touches of Keats or Tennyson; his pictures with a big brush were never meant for the microscope. Here the contrast between his theoretic worship of his idol and his own practice reaches a climax. If, as he professed to believe, "the best poet is he who best executes his work," then he is hardly a poet at all. He is habitually rapid and slovenly; an improvisatore on the spot whore his fancy is kindled, writing currente calamo, and disdaining the "art to blot." "I can never recast anything. I am like the tiger; if I miss the first spring, I go grumbling back to my jungle." He said to Medwin, "Blank verse is the most difficult, because every line must be good." Consequently, his own blank verse is always defective—sometimes execrable. No one else—except, perhaps, Wordsworth—who could write so well, could also write so ill. This fact in Byron's case seems due not to mere carelessness, but to incapacity. Something seems to stand behind him, like the slave in the chariot, to check the current of his highest thought. The glow of his fancy fades with the suddenness of a southern sunset. His best inspirations are spoilt by the interruption of incongruous commonplace. He had none of the guardian delicacy of taste, or the thirst after completeness, which mark the consummate artist. He is more nearly a dwarf Shakespeare than a giant Popo. This defect was most mischievous where he was weakest, in his dramas and his lyrics, least so where he was strongest, in his mature satires. It is almost transmuted into an excellence in the greatest of these, which is by design and in detail a temple of incongruity.

If we turn from his manner to his matter, we cannot claim for Byron any absolute originality. His sources have been found in Rousseau, Voltaire, Chateaubriand, Beaumarchais, Lauzun, Gibbon, Bayle, St. Pierre, Alfieri, Casti, Cuvier, La Bruyore, Wieland, Swift, Sterne, Le Sage, Goethe, scraps of the classics, and the Book of Job. Absolute originality in a late age is only possible to the hermit, the lunatic, or the sensation novelist. Byron, like the rovers before Minos, was not ashamed of his piracy. He transferred the random prose of his own letters and journals to his dramas, and with the same complacency made use of the notes jotted down from other writers as he sailed on the Lake of Geneva. But he made them his own by smelting the rough ore into bell metal. He brewed a cauldron like that of Macbeth's witches, and from it arose the images of crowned kings. If he did not bring a new idea into the world, he quadrupled the force of existing ideas and scattered them far and wide. Southern critics have maintained that he had a southern nature and was in his true element on the Lido or under an Andalusian night. Others dwell on the English pride that went along with his Italian habits and Greek sympathies. The truth is, he had the power of making himself poetically everywhere at home; and this, along with the fact of all his writings being perfectly intelligible, is the secret of his European influence. He was a citizen of the world; because he not only painted the environs, but reflected the passions and aspirations of every scene amid which he dwelt.

A disparaging critic has said, "Byron is nothing without his descriptions." The remark only emphasizes the fact that his genius was not dramatic. All non-dramatic art is concerned with bringing before us pictures of the world, the value of which lies half in their truth, half in the amount of human interest with which they are invested. To scientific accuracy few poets can lay claim, and Byron less than most; but the general truth of his descriptions is acknowledged by all who have travelled in the same countries. The Greek verses of his first pilgrimage,—e.g. the night scene on the Gulf of Arta, many of the Albanian sketches, with much of the Siege of Corinth and the Giaour —have been invariably commended for their vivid realism. Attention has been especially directed to the lines in the Corsair beginning—

But, lo! from high Hymettus to the plain,

as being the veritable voice of one

Spell-bound, within the clustering Cyclades.

The opening lines of the same canto, transplanted from the Curse of
Minerva, are even more suggestive:—

Slow sinks, more lovely ere his race be run,
Along Morea's hill the setting sun,
Not, as in northern climes, obscurely bright,
But one unclouded blaze of living light, &c.

In the same way, the later cantos of Harold are steeped in Switzerland and in Italy. Byron's genius, it is true, required a stimulus; it could not have revelled among the daisies of Chaucer, or pastured by the banks of the Doon or the Ouse, or thriven among the Lincolnshire fens. He had a sincere, if somewhat exclusive, delight in the storms and crags that seemed to respond to his nature and to his age. There is no affectation in the expression of the wish, "O that the desert were my dwelling-place!" though we know that the writer on the shores of the Mediterranean still craved for the gossip of the clubs. It only shows that—

Two desires toss about
The poet's feverish blood;
One drives him to the world without,
And one to solitude.

Of Byron's two contemporary rivals, Wordsworth had no feverish blood; nothing drove him to the world without; consequently his "eyes avert their ken from half of human fate," and his influence, though perennial, will always be limited. He conquered England from his hills and lakes; but his spirit has never crossed the Straits which he thought too narrow. The other, with a fever in his veins, calmed it in the sea and in the cloud, and, in some degree because of his very excellencies, has failed as yet to mark the world at large. The poets' poet, the cynosure of enthusiasts, he bore the banner of the forlorn hope; but Byron, with his feet of clay, led the ranks. Shelley, as pure a philanthropist as St. Francis or Howard, could forget mankind, and, like his AdonaÏs, become one with nature. Byron, who professed to hate his fellows, was of them even more than for them, and so appealed to them through a broader sympathy, and held them with a firmer hand. By virtue of his passion, as well as his power, he was enabled to represent the human tragedy in which he played so many parts, and to which his external universe of cloudless moons, and vales of evergreen, and lightning-riven peaks, are but the various background. He set the "anguish, doubt, desire," the whole chaos of his age, to a music whose thunder-roll seems to have inspired the opera of Lohengrin—a music not designed to teach or to satisfy "the budge doctors of the Stoic fur," but which will continue to arouse and delight the sons and daughters of men.

Madame de StaËl said to Byron, at Ouchy, "It does not do to war with the world: the world is too strong for the individual." Goethe only gives a more philosophic form to this counsel when he remarks of the poet, "He put himself into a false position by his assaults on Church and State. His discontent ends in negation…. If I call bad bad, what do I gain? But if I call good bad, I do mischief." The answer is obvious: as long as men call bad good, there is a call for iconoclasts: half the reforms of the world have begun in negation. Such comments also point to the common error of trying to make men other than they are by lecturing them. This scion of a long line of lawless bloods—a Scandinavian Berserker, if there ever was one—the literary heir of the Eddas—was specially created to wage that war—to smite the conventionality which is the tyrant of England with the hammer of Thor, and to sear with the sarcasm of Mephistopheles the hollow hypocrisy—sham taste, sham morals, sham religion—of the society by which he was surrounded and infected, and which all but succeeded in seducing him. But for the ethereal essence,—

The fount of fiery life
Which served for that Titanic strife,

Byron would have been merely a more melodious Moore and a more accomplished Brummell. But the caged lion was only half tamed, and his continual growls were his redemption. His restlessness was the sign of a yet unbroken will. He fell and rose, and fell again; but never gave up the struggle that keeps alive, if it does not save, the soul. His greatness as well as his weakness lay, in the fact that from boyhood battle was the breath of his being. To tell him not to fight, was like telling Wordsworth not to reflect, or Shelley not to sing. His instrument is a trumpet of challenge; and he lived, as he appropriately died, in the progress of an unaccomplished campaign. His work is neither perfect architecture nor fine mosaic; but, like that of his intellectual ancestors, the elder Elizabethans whom he perversely maligned, it is all animated by the spirit of action and of enterprise.

In good portraits his head has a lurid look, as if it had been at a higher temperature than that of other men. That high temperature was the source of his inspiration, and the secret of a spell which, during his life, commanded homage and drew forth love. Mere artists are often mannikins. Byron's brilliant though unequal genius was subordinate to the power of his personality; he

Had the elements
So mix'd in him, that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world—"This was a man."

We may learn much from him still, when we have ceased to disparage, as our fathers ceased to idolize, a name in which there is so much warning and so much example.