dim. The victors arrive--he does not deign to answer them; the priest

brings near the absolving cross, "but he look'd upon it with an eye profane." What remains to him of life is for his poor page, the only being who loved him, who has followed him to the end, and who now tries to stanch the blood from his wound:

"He scarce can speak, but motions him 'tis vain, He clasps the hand that pang which would assuage, And sadly smiles his thanks to that dark page.... His dying tones are in that other tongue, To which some strange remembrance wildly clung.... And once, as Kaled's answering accents ceased, Rose Lara's hand, and pointed to the East: Whether (as then the breaking sun from high Roll'd back the clouds) the morrow caught his eye, Or that 'twas chance, or some remember'd scene, That raised his arm to point where such had been, Scarce Kaled seem'd to know, but turn'd away, As if his heart abhorr'd that coming day, And shrunk his glance before that morning light, To look on Lara's brow--where all grew night.... But from his visage little could we guess, So unrepentant, dark, and passionless.... But gasping heaved the breath that Lara drew, And dull the film along his dim eye grew; His limbs stretch'd fluttering, and his head droop'd o'er."[188]

All is over, and of this haughty spirit there remains but a poor piece of clay. After all, it is the desirable lot of such hearts; they have spent life amiss, and only rest well in the tomb.

A strange and altogether northern poetry, with its root in the Edda and its flower in Shakespeare, born long ago under an inclement sky, on the shores of a stormy ocean--the work of a too wilful, too strong, too sombre race--and which, after lavishing its images of desolation and heroism, ends by stretching like a black veil over the whole of living nature the dream of universal destruction: this dream is here, as in the Edda, almost equally grand:

"I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day.... Forests were set on fire--but hour by hour They fell and faded--and the crackling trunks Extinguish'd with a crash--and all was black.... And they did live by watchfires--and the thrones, The palaces of crowned kings--the huts, The habitations of all things which dwell, Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed, And men were gathered round their blazing homes To look once more into each other's face.... The brows of men by the despairing light Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits The flashes fell upon them; some lay down And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled; And others hurried to and fro, and fed Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up With mad disquietude on the dull sky, The pall of a past world; and then again With curses cast them down upon the dust, And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd, And, terrified, did flutter on the ground, And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd And twined themselves among the multitude, Hissing, but stingless--they were slain for food: And War, which for a moment was no more, Did glut himself again; a meal was bought With blood, and each sate sullenly apart Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left; All earth was but one thought--and that was death, Immediate and inglorious; and the pang Of famine fed upon all entrails--men Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh; The meagre by the meagre were devour'd, Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one. And he was faithful to a corse, and kept The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay, Till hunger clung them, or the drooping dead Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food, But with a piteous and perpetual moan, And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand Which answer'd not with a caress--he died. The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two Of an enormous city did survive, And they were enemies: they met beside The dying embers of an altar-place Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things For an unholy usage; they raked up, And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath Blew for a little life, and made a flame Which was a mockery; then they lifted up Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld Each other's aspects--saw, and shriek'd, and died-- Even of their mutual hideousness they died."[189]

Section IV.--Manfred

Amongst these unrestrained and gloomy poems, which incessantly return and dwell on the same subject, there is one more imposing and lofty than the rest, "Manfred," twin-brother of the greatest poem of the age, Goethe's "Faust." Goethe says of Byron: "This singular intellectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself, and extracted from it the strongest nourishment for his hypochondriac humour. He has made use of the impelling principles in his own way, for his own purposes, so that no one of them remains the same; and it is particularly on this account that I cannot enough admire his genius." The play is indeed original. Byron writes: "His (Goethe's) 'Faust' I never read, for I don't know German, but Matthew Monk Lewis, in 1816, at Coligny, translated most of it to me _vivâ voce_, and I was naturally much struck with it; but it was the 'Steinbach' and the 'Jungfrau' and something else, much more than Faustus, that made me write 'Manfred.'"[190] Goethe adds: "The whole is so completely formed anew, that it would be an interesting task for the critic to point out not only the alterations he (Byron) has made, but their degree of resemblance or dissimilarity to the original." Let us speak of it, then, quite freely: the subject of "Manfred" is the dominant idea of the age, expressed so as to display the contrast of two masters, and of two nations.

What constitutes Goethe's glory is, that in the nineteenth century he did produce an epic poem--I mean a poem in which genuine gods act and speak. This appeared impossible in the nineteenth century, since the special work of our age is the refined consideration of creative ideas, and the suppression of the poetic characters by which other ages have never failed to represent them. Of the two divine families, the Greek and the Christian, neither seemed capable of re-entering the epic world. Classic literature dragged down in its fall the mythological puppets, and the ancient gods slept on their old Olympus, whither history and archaeology alone might go to arouse them. The angels and saints of the Middle Ages, as strange and almost as far from our thoughts, slept on the vellum of their missals and in the niches of their cathedrals; and if a poet, like Chateaubriand, tried to make them enter the modern world,[191] he succeeded only in degrading them, and in making of them vestry decorations and operatic machinery. The mythic credulity disappeared amid the growth of experience, the mystic amid the growth of prosperity. Paganism, at the contact of science, was reduced to the recognition of natural forces; Christianity, at the contact of morality, was reduced to the adoration of the ideal. In order again to deify physical powers, man should have become once more a healthy child, as in Homer's time. In order again to deify spiritual powers, man should have become once more a sickly child as in Dante's time. But he was an adult, and could not ascend again to civilizations or epics, from which the current of his thought and of his life had withdrawn him forever. How was he to be shown his gods, the modern gods? how could he reclothe them in a personal and visible form, since he had toiled to strip them precisely of all personal and sensible form, and had succeeded in this? Instead of rejecting legend, Goethe took it up again. He chose a mediaeval story for his theme. Carefully, scrupulously, he tracked old manners and old beliefs; an alchemist's laboratory, a sorcerer's conjuring-book, coarse villagers, students' or drunkards' gayety, a witches' meeting on the Brocken, a mass in church; we might fancy we saw an engraving of Luther's time, conscientious and minute: nothing is omitted. Heavenly characters appear in consecrated attitudes after the text of Scripture, like the old mysteries: the Lord with his angels, then with the devil, who comes to ask permission to tempt Faust, as formerly he tempted Job; heaven, as St. Francis imagined it and Van Eyck painted it, with anchorites, holy women and doctors--some in a landscape with bluish rocks, others above in the sublime air, hovering in choirs about the Virgin in glory, one tier above another. Goethe affects even to be so orthodox as to write under each her Latin name, and her due niche in the Vulgate.[192] And this very fidelity proclaims him a sceptic. We see that if he resuscitates the ancient world, it is as a historian, not as a believer. He is only a Christian through remembrance and poetic feeling. In him the modern spirit overflows designedly the narrow vessel in which he designedly seems to enclose it. The thinker percolates through the narrator. Every instant a calculated word, which seems involuntary, opens up glimpses of philosophy, beyond the veils of tradition. Who are they, these supernatural personages--this god, this Mephistopheles, these angels? Their substance incessantly dissolves and re-forms, to show or hide alternately the idea which fills it. Are they abstractions or characters? Mephistopheles, a revolutionary and a philosopher, who has read "Candide," and cynically jeers at the Powers--is he anything but "the spirit of negation"?

The angels

"Rejoice to share The wealth exuberant of all that's fair, Which lives, and has its being everywhere! And the creative essence which surrounds, And lives in all, and worketh evermore. Encompass... within love's gracious bounds; And all the world of things, which flit before The gaze in seeming fitful and obscure. Do... in lasting thoughts embody and secure."[193]

Are these angels, for an instant at least, anything else than the ideal intelligence which comes, through sympathy, to love all, and through ideas, to comprehend all? What shall we say of this Deity, at first biblical and individual, who little by little is unshaped, vanishes and, sinking to the depths, behind the splendors of living nature and mystic reverie, is confused with the inaccessible absolute? Thus is the whole poem unfolded, action and characters, men and gods, antiquity and Middle Ages, aggregate and details, always on the confines of two worlds--one visible and figurative, the other intelligible and formless; one comprehending the moving externals of history or of life, and all that hued and perfumed bloom which nature lavishes on the surface of existence, the other containing the profound generative powers and invisible fixed laws by which all these living beings come to the light of day.[194] At last we see our gods: we no longer parody them, like our ancestors, by idols or persons; we perceive them as they are in themselves, and we have no need, in order to see them, to renounce poetry, nor break with the past We remain on our knees before the shrines where men have, prayed for three thousand years; we do not tear a single rose from the chaplets with which they have crowned their divine Madonnas; we do not extinguish a single candle which they have crowded on the altar steps; we behold with an artist's pleasure the precious shrines where, amidst the wrought candlesticks, the suns of diamonds, the gorgeous copes, they have scattered the purest treasures of their genius and their heart. But our thoughts pierce further than our eyes. For us, at certain moments, these draperies, this marble, all this pomp vacillates; it is no longer aught but beautiful phantoms; it vanishes in the smoke, and we discover through it and behind it the impalpable ideal which has set up these pillars, lighted these roofs, and hovered for centuries over the kneeling multitude.

To understand the legend and also to understand life, is the object of this work, and of the whole work of Goethe. Everything, brutish or rational, vile or sublime, fantastic or tangible, is a group of powers, of which our mind, through study and sympathy, may reproduce in itself the elements and the disposition. Let us reproduce it, and give it in our thought a new existence. Is a gossip like Martha, babbling and foolish--a drunkard like Frosch, brawling and dirty, and the other Dutch boors--unworthy to enter a picture? Even the female apes, and the apes who sit beside the caldron, watching that it does not boil over, with their hoarse cries and disordered fancies, may repay the trouble of art in restoring them. Wherever there is life, even bestial or maniacal, there is beauty. The more we look upon nature, the more we find it divine--divine even in rocks and plants. Consider these forests, they seem motionless; but the leaves breathe, and the sap mounts insensibly through the massive trunks and branches, to the slender shoots, stretched like fingers at the end of the twigs; it fills the swollen ducts, leaks out in living forms, loads the frail aments with fecundating dust, spreads profusely through the fermenting air the vapors and odors: this luminous air, this dome of verdure, this long colonnade of trees, this silent soil, labor and are transformed; they accomplish a work, and the poet's heart has but to listen to them to find a voice for their obscure instincts. They speak in his heart; still better, they sing, and other beings do the same; each, by its distinct melody, short or long, strange or simple, solely adapted to its nature, capable of manifesting it fully, in the same manner as a sound, by its pitch, its height, its force, manifests the inner structure of the body which has produced it. This melody the poet respects; he avoids altering it by confusing its ideas or accent; his whole care is to keep it intact and pure. Thus is his work produced, an echo of universal nature, a vast chorus in which gods, men, past, present, all periods of history, all conditions of life, all orders of existence agree without confusion, and in which the flexible genius of the musician, who is alternately transformed into each one of them in order to interpret and comprehend them, only bears witness to his own thought in giving an insight, beyond this immense harmony, into the group of ideal laws whence it is derived, and the inner reason which sustains it.

Beside this lofty conception, what is the supernatural part of Manfred? Doubtless Byron is moved by the great things of nature; he had just left the Alps; he has seen those glaciers which are like "a frozen hurricane"--those "torrents which roll the sheeted silver's waving column o'er the crag's headlong perpendicular, like the pale courser's tail, as told in the Apocalypse"--but he has brought nothing from them but images. His witch, his spirits, his Arimanes, are but stage gods. He believes in them no more than we do. Genuine gods are created with much greater difficulty; we must believe in them; we must, like Goethe, have assisted long at their birth, like philosophers and scholars; we must have seen of them more than their externals. He who, whilst continuing a poet, becomes a naturalist and geologist, who has followed in the fissures of the rocks the tortuous waters slowly distilled, and driven at length by their own weight to the light, may ask himself, as the Greeks did formerly, when they saw them roll and sparkle in their emerald tints, what these waters might be thinking, whether they thought. What a strange life is theirs, alternately at rest and in violent motion. How far removed from ours! With what effort must we tear ourselves from our worn and complicated passions, to comprehend the youth and divine simplicity of a being without reflection and form! How difficult is such a work for a modern man! How impossible for an Englishman! Shelley, Keats approached it--thanks to the nervous delicacy of their sickly or overflowing imagination; but how partial still was this approach! And how we feel, on reading them, that they would have needed the aid of public culture, and the aptitude of national genius, which Goethe possessed! That which the whole of civilization has alone developed in the Englishman, is energetic will and practical faculties. Here man has braced himself up in his efforts, become concentrated in resistance, fond of action, and hence shut out from pure speculation, from wavering sympathy, and from disinterested art. In him metaphysical liberty has perished under utilitarian preoccupation, and pantheistic reverie under moral prejudices. How would he frame and bend his imagination so as to follow the numberless and fugitive outlines of existences, especially of vague existences? How would he leave his religion so a£ to reproduce indifferently the powers of indifferent nature? And who is further from flexibility and indifference than he? The flowing water, which in Goethe takes the mould of all the contours of the soil, and which we perceive in the sinuous and luminous distance beneath the golden mist which it exhales, was in Byron suddenly frozen into a mass of ice, and makes but a rigid block of crystal. Here, as elsewhere, there is but one character, the same as before. Men, gods, nature, all the changing and multiplex world of Goethe, has vanished. The poet alone subsists, as expressed in his character. Inevitably imprisoned within himself, he could see nothing but himself; if he must come to other existences, it is that they may reply to him; and through this pretended epic he persisted in his eternal monologue.

But how all these powers, assembled in a single being, make him great! Into what mediocrity and platitude sinks the Faust of Goethe, compared to Manfred! As soon as we cease to see humanity in this Faust, what does he become? Is he a hero? A sad hero, who has no other task but to speak, is afraid, studies the shades of his sensations, and walks about! His worst action is to seduce a grisette, and to go and dance by night in bad company--two exploits which many a German student has accomplished. His wilfulness is whim, his ideas are longings and dreams. A poet's soul in a scholar's head, both unfit for action, and not harmonizing well together; discord within, and weakness without; in short, character is wanting: it is German all over. By his side, what a man is Manfred! He is a man; there is no fitter word, or one which could depict him better. He will not, at the sight of a spirit, "quake like a crawling, cowering, timorous worm." He will not regret that "he has neither land, nor pence, nor worldly honours, nor influence." He will not let himself be duped by the devil like a schoolboy, or go and amuse himself like a cockney with the phantasmagoria of the Brocken. He has lived like a feudal chief, not like a scholar who has taken his degree; he has fought, mastered others; he knows how to master himself. If he has studied magic arts, it is not from an alchemist's curiosity, but from a spirit of revolt:

"From my youth upwards My spirit walk'd not with the souls of men, Nor look'd upon the earth with human eyes; The thirst of their ambition was not mine, The aim of their existence was not mine; My joys, my griefs, my passions, and my powers Made me a stranger; though I wore the form, I had no sympathy with breathing flesh.... My joy was in the Wilderness, to breathe The difficult air of the iced mountain's top, Where the birds dare not build, nor insect's wing Flit o'er the herbless granite, or to plunge Into the torrent, and to roll along On the swift whirl of the new breaking wave.... To follow through the night the moving moon, The stars and their development; or catch The dazzling lightnings till my eyes grew dim; Or to look, list'ning, on the scatter'd leaves, While Autumn winds were at their evening song. These were my pastimes, and to be alone; For if the beings, of whom I was one-- Hating to be so--cross'd me in my path, I felt myself degraded back to them, And was all clay again....[195] I could not tame my nature down; for he Must serve who fain would sway--and soothe--and sue-- And watch all time--and pry into all place-- And be a living lie--who would become A mighty thing amongst the mean, and such The mass are; I disdain'd to mingle with A herd, though to be leader--and of wolves..."[196]

He lives alone, and he cannot live alone. The deep source of love, cut off from its natural issues, then overflows and lays waste the heart which refused to expand. He has loved, too well, one too near to him, his sister it may be; she has died of it, and impotent remorse fills the soul which no human occupation could satisfy:

"... My solitude is solitude no more, But peopled with the Furies;--I have gnash'd My teeth in darkness till returning morn, Then cursed myself till sunset;--I have pray'd For madness as a blessing--'tis denied me. I have affronted death--but in the war Of elements the waters shrunk from me, And fatal things pass'd harmless--the cold hand Of an all-pitiless demon held me back, Back by a single hair, which would not break. In fantasy, imagination, all The affluence of my soul.... I plunged deep, But, like an ebbing wave, it dashed me back Into the gulf of my unfathom'd thought.... I dwell in my despair, And live, and live for ever."[197]

He only wishes to see her once more: to this sole and all-powerful desire flow all the energies of his soul. He calls her up in the midst of spirits; she appears, but answers not. He prays to her--with what cries, what doleful cries of deep anguish! How he loves! With what yearning and effort all his downtrodden and outcrushed tenderness gushes out and escapes at the sight of those well-beloved eyes, which he sees for the last time! With what enthusiasm his convulsive arms are stretched towards that frail form which, shuddering, has quitted the tomb!--towards those cheeks in which the blood, forcibly recalled, plants "a strange hectic--like the unnatural red which Autumn plants upon the perished leaf."

"... Hear me, hear me-- Astarte! my beloved! speak to me: I have so much endured--so much endure-- Look on me! the grave hath not changed thee more Than I am changed for thee. Thou lovedst me Too much as I loved thee: we were not made To torture thus each other, though it were The deadliest sin to love as we have loved. Say that thou loath'st me not--that I do bear This punishment for both--that thou wilt be One of the blessed--and that I shall die; For hitherto all hateful things conspire To bind me in existence--in a life Which makes me shrink from immortality-- A future like the past. I cannot rest. I know not what I ask, nor what I seek: I feel but what thou art--and what I am; And I would hear yet once before I perish The voice which was my music--Speak to me! For I have call'd on thee in the still night, Startled the slumbering birds from the hush'd boughs, And woke the mountain wolves, and made the caves Acquainted with thy vainly echoed name, Which answer'd me--many things answer'd me-- Spirits and men--but thou wert silent all.... Speak to me! I have wander'd o'er the earth, And never found thy likeness--Speak to me! Look on the fiends around--they feel for me: I fear them not, and feel for thee alone-- Speak to me! though it be in wrath;--but say-- I reck not what--but let me hear thee once-- This once--once more!"[198]

She speaks. What a sad and doubtful reply! Manfred's limbs are convulsed when she disappears. But an instant after the spirits see that:

"... He mastereth himself, and makes His torture tributary to his will. Had he been one of us, he would have made An awful spirit."[199]

Will is the unshaken basis of this soul. He did not bend before the chief of the spirits; he stood firm and calm before the infernal throne, whilst all the demons were raging who would tear him to pieces: now he dies, and they assail him, but he still strives and conquers:

"... Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel; Thou never shalt possess me, that I know: What I have done is done; I bear within A torture which could nothing gain from thine: The mind which is immortal makes itself Requital for its good or evil thoughts-- Is its own origin of ill and end-- And its own place and time--its innate sense, When stripp'd of this mortality, derives No colour from the fleeting things without; But is absorb'd in sufferance or in joy, Born from the knowledge of its own desert. Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me; I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey-- But was my own destroyer, and will be My own hereafter.--Back, ye baffled fiends! The hand of death is on me--but not yours!"[200]

This "I," the invincible I, who suffices to himself, on whom nothing has a hold, demons nor men, the sole author of his own good and ill, a sort of suffering or fallen god, but god always, even in its quivering flesh, amidst his soiled and blighted destiny--such is the hero and the work of this mind, and of the men of his race. If Goethe was the poet of the universe, Byron was the poet of the individual; and if in one the German genius found its interpreter, the English genius found its interpreter in the other.

Section V.--What Byron's Contemporaries Thought of Him.--His Morals

We can well imagine that Englishmen clamored at and repudiated the monster. Southey, the poet-laureate, said of him, in good biblical style, that he savored of Moloch and Belial--most of all of Satan; and, with the generosity of a brother poet, called the attention of government to him. We should fill many pages if we were to copy the reproaches of the respectable reviews against these "men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society, and, hating that revealed religion which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to disbelieve, labour to make others as miserable as themselves, by infecting them with a moral virus that eats into the soul."[201] This sounds like the emphasis of an episcopal charge and scholastic pedantry: in England the press does the duty of the police, and it never did it more violently than at that time. Opinion backed the press. Several times, in Italy, Lord Byron saw gentlemen leave a drawing-room with their wives, when he was announced. Owing to his title and celebrity, the scandal which he caused was more conspicuous than any other: he was a public sinner. One day an obscure parson sent him a prayer which he had found amongst the papers of his wife--a charming and pious lady, recently dead, and who had secretly prayed to God for the conversion of the great sinner. Conservative and Protestant England, after a quarter of a century of moral wars, and two centuries of moral education, carried its severity and rigor to extremes; and Puritan intolerance, like Catholic intolerance previously in Spain, put recusants out of the pale of the law. The proscription of voluptuous or abandoned life, the narrow observation of order and decency, the respect of all police, human and divine; the necessary bows at the mere name of Pitt, of the king, the church, the God of the Bible; the attitude of a gentleman in a white tie, conventional, inflexible, implacable--such were the customs then met with across the Channel, a hundred times more tyrannical than nowadays: at that time, as Stendhal says, a peer at his fireside dared not cross his legs, for fear of its being improper. England held herself stiff, uncomfortably laced in her stays of decorum. Hence arose two sources of misery: a man suffers, and is tempted to throw down the ugly choking apparatus, when he is sure that it can be done secretly. On the one side constraint, on the other hypocrisy--these are the two vices of English civilization; and it was these which Byron, with his poet's discernment and his combative instincts, attacked.

He had seen them from the first; true artists are perspicacious: it is in this that they outstrip us; we judge from hearsay and formulas, like cockneys; they, like eccentric beings, from accomplished facts, and things: at twenty-two he perceived the tedium born of constraint desolating all high life:

"There stands the noble hostess, nor shall sink With the three-thousandth curtsy;... Saloon, room, hall, o'erflow beyond their brink, And long the latest of arrivals halts, 'Midst royal dukes and dames condemn'd to climb, And gain an inch of staircase at a time."[202]

He wrote also:

"He (the Count) ought to have been in the country during the hunting season, with 'a select party of distinguished guests,' as the papers term it. He ought to have seen the gentlemen after dinner (on the hunting days), and the soirée ensuing thereupon--and the women looking as if they had hunted, or rather been hunted; and I could have wished that he had been at a dinner in town, which I recollect at Lord C----'s--small, but select, and composed of the most amusing people. The dessert was hardly on the table, when, out of twelve, I counted five asleep."[203]

As for the morals of the upper classes, this is what he says:

"Went to my box at Covent Garden to-night.... Casting my eyes round the house, in the next box to me, and the next, and the next, were the most distinguished old and young Babylonians of quality.... It was as if the house had been divided between your public and your understood courtesans;--but the intriguantes much outnumbered the regular mercenaries. Now, where lay the difference between Pauline and her mother,... and Lady---- and daughter? except that the two last may enter Carlton and any other house, and the two first are limited to the Opera and b-- house. How I do delight in observing life as it really is!--and myself, after all, the worst of any!"[204]

Decorum and debauchery; moral hypocrites, "_qui mettent leurs vertus en mettant leurs gants blancs_";[205] an oligarchy which, to preserve its places and its sinecures, ravages Europe, preys on Ireland, and excites the people by making use of the grand words, virtue, Christianity, and liberty: there was truth in all these invectives.[206] It is only thirty years since the ascendancy of the middle class diminished the privileges and corruptions of the great; but at that time hard words could with justice be thrown at their heads. Byron said, quoting from Voltaire:

"'_La Pudeur s'est enfuie des cœurs, et s'est réfugiée sur les lèvres.' ... 'Plus les mœurs sont dépravées, plus les expressions deviennent mesurées; on croit regagner en langage ce qu'on a perdu en vertu._' This is the real fact, as applicable to the degraded and hypocritical mass which leavens the present English generation; and it is the only answer they deserve.... Cant is the crying sin of this double-dealing and false-speaking time of selfish spoilers."[207]

And then he wrote his masterpiece, "Don Juan."[208]

All here was new, form as well as substance; for he had entered into a new world. The Englishman, the Northman, transplanted amongst southern manners and into Italian life, had become imbued with a new sap, which made him bear new fruit. He had been induced to read[209] the rather free satires of Buratti, and the more than voluptuous sonnets of Baffo. He lived in the happy Venetian society, still exempt from political animosities, where care seemed a folly, where life was looked upon as a carnival, pleasure displayed itself openly, not timid and hypocritical, but loosely arrayed and commended. He amused himself here, impetuously at first, more than sufficient, even more than too much, and almost killed himself by these amusements; but after vulgar gallantries, having felt a feeling of love, he became a _cavalier' servente_, after the fashion of the country where he dwelt, with the consent of the family of the lady, offering his arm, carrying her shawl, a little awkwardly at first, and wonderingly, but on the whole happier than he had ever been, and fanned by a warm breath of pleasure and abandon. He saw in Italy the overthrow of all English morality, conjugal infidelity established as a rule, amorous fidelity raised to a duty: "There is no convincing a woman here that she is in the smallest degree deviating from the rule of right or the fitness of things in having an _amorosa._[210]... Love (the sentiment of love) is not merely an excuse for it, but makes it an actual virtue, provided it is disinterested, and not a caprice, and is confined to one object."[211] A little later he translated the "Morgante Maggiore" of Pulci, to show "What was permitted in a Catholic country and a bigoted age to a churchman on the score of religion, and to silence those buffoons who accuse me of attacking the Liturgy."[212] He rejoiced in this liberty and this ease, and resolved never to fall again under the pedantic inquisition, which in his country had condemned and damned him past forgiveness. He wrote his "Beppo" like an improvisatore, with a charming freedom, a flowing and fantastic lightness of mood, and contrasted in it the recklessness and happiness of Italy with the prejudices and repulsiveness of England:

"I like... to see the Sun set, sure he'll rise to-morrow, Not through a misty morning twinkling weak as A drunken man's dead eye in maudlin sorrow, But with all Heaven t' himself; that day will break as Beauteous as cloudless, nor be forced to borrow That sort of farthing candlelight which glimmers Where reeking London's smoky caldron simmers.

"I love the language, that soft bastard Latin, Which melts like kisses from a female mouth, And sounds as if it should be writ on satin, With syllables which breathe of the sweet South, And gentle liquids gliding all so pat in, That not a single accent seems uncouth, Like our harsh northern whistling, grunting guttural, Which we're obliged to hiss, and spit, and sputter all.

"I like the women too (forgive my folly), From the rich peasant cheek of ruddy bronze, And large black eyes that flash on you a volley Of rays that say a thousand things at once, To the high dama's brow, more melancholy, But clear, and with a wild and liquid glance, Heart on her lips, and soul within her eyes, Soft as her clime, and sunny as her skies."[213]

With other manners there existed in Italy another morality; there is one for every age, race, and sky--I mean that the ideal model varies with the circumstances which fashion it. In England the severity of the climate, the warlike energy of the race, and the liberty of the institutions prescribe an active life, severe manners, Puritanic religion, the marriage tie strictly kept, a feeling of duty and self-command. In Italy the beauty of the climate, the innate sense of the beautiful, and the despotism of the government induced an idle life, loose manners, imaginative religion, the culture of the arts, and the search after happiness. Each model has its beauties and its plots--the epicurean artist like the political moralist;[214] each shows by its greatnesses the littlenesses of the other, and, to set in relief the disadvantages of the second, Lord Byron had only to set in relief the seductions of the first.

Thereupon he went in search of a hero, and did not find one, which, in this age of heroes, is "an uncommon want." For lack of a better he chose "our ancient friend Don Juan"--a scandalous choice: what an outcry the English moralists will make! But, to cap the horror, this Don Juan is not wicked, selfish, odious, like his fellows; he does not seduce, he is no corrupter. When an opportunity arises, he lets himself drift; he has a heart and senses, and, under a beautiful sun, they are easily touched: at sixteen a youth cannot help himself, nor at twenty, nor perhaps at thirty. Lay it to the charge of human nature, my dear moralists; it is not I who made it as it is. If you will grumble, address yourselves higher: we are here as painters, not as makers of human puppets, and we do not answer for the inner structure of our dancing-dolls. Our Don Juan is now going about; he goes about in many places, and in all he is young; we will not launch thunderbolts on his head because he is young; that fashion is past: the green devils and their capers only came on the stage in the last act of Mozart's "Don Giovanni." And, moreover, Juan is so amiable! After all, what has he done that others don't do! He has been a lover of Catherine II, but he only followed the lead of the diplomatic corps and the whole Russian army. Let him sow his wild oats; the good grain will spring up in its time. Once in England, he will behave himself decently. I confess that he may even there, when provoked, go a-gleaning in the conjugal gardens of the aristocracy; but in the end he will settle, go and pronounce moral speeches in Parliament, become a member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. If you wish absolutely to have him punished, we will "make him end in hell, or in an unhappy marriage, not knowing which would be the severest: the Spanish tradition says hell; but it is probably only an allegory of the other state."[215] At all events, married or damned, the good folk at the end of the piece will have the pleasure of knowing that he is burning all alive.

Is not this a singular apology? Does it not aggravate the fault? Let us wait; we know not yet the whole venom of the book: together with Juan there are Donna Julia, Haidée, Gulbeyaz, Dudu, and many more. It is here the diabolical poet digs in his sharpest claw, and he takes care to dig it into our weakest side. What will the clergymen and white-chokered reviewers say? For, to speak the truth, there is no preventing it: we must read on, in spite of ourselves. Twice or three times following we meet here with happiness; and when I say happiness, I mean profound and complete happiness--not mere voluptuousness, not obscene gayety; we are far removed from the nicely-written ribaldry of Dorat, and the unbridled license of Rochester. Beauty is here, southern beauty, resplendent and harmonious, spread over everything, over the luminous sky, the calm scenery, corporal nudity, artlessness of heart. Is there a thing it does not deify? All sentiments are exalted under its hands. What was gross becomes noble; even in the nocturnal adventure in the seraglio, which seems worthy of Faublas, poetry embellishes licentiousness. The girls are lying in the large silent apartment, like precious flowers brought from all climates into a conservatory:

"One with her flush'd cheek laid on her white arm, And raven ringlets gather'd in dark crowd Above her brow, lay dreaming soft and warm; One with her auburn tresses lightly bound, And fair brows gently drooping, as the fruit Nods from the tree, was slumbering with soft breath, And lips apart, which show'd the pearls beneath.... A fourth as marble, statue-like and still, Lay in a breathless, hush'd, and stony sleep; White, cold, and pure... a carved lady on a monument."[216]

However, "the fading lamps waned dim and blue"; Dudu is asleep, the innocent girl; and if she has cast a glance on her glass,

"'Twas like the fawn, which, in the lake display'd, Beholds her own shy, shadowy image pass, When first she starts, and then returns to peep, Admiring this new native of the deep."[217]

What will become now of Puritanic prudery? Can the proprieties prevent beauty from being beautiful? Will you condemn a picture of Titian for its nudity? What gives value to human life, and nobility to human nature, if not the power of attaining delicious and sublime emotions? We have just had one--one worthy of a painter; is it not worth that of an alderman? Shall we refuse to acknowledge the divine because it appears in art and enjoyment, and not only in conscience and action? There is a world beside ours, and a civilization beside ours; our rules are narrow, and our pedantry tyrannic; the human plant can be otherwise developed than in our compartments and under our snows, and the fruits it will then bear will not be less precious. We must confess it, since we relish them when they are offered to us. Who has read the love of Haidée, and has had any other thought than to envy and pity her? She is a wild child who has picked up Juan--another child cast ashore senseless by the waves. She has preserved him, nursed him like a mother, and now she loves him: who can blame her for loving him? Who, in presence of the splendid nature which smiles on and protects them, can imagine for them anything else than the all-powerful feeling which unites them:

"It was a wild and breaker-beaten coast, With cliffs above, and a broad sandy shore, Guarded by shoals and rocks as by an host,... And rarely ceased the haughty billow's roar, Save on the dead long summer days, which make The outstretch'd ocean glitter like a lake.... And all was stillness, save the sea-bird's cry, And dolphin's leap, and little billow crost By some low rock or shelve, that made it fret Against the boundary it scarcely wet....

"And thus they wandered forth, and hand in hand, Over the shining pebbles and the shells, Glided along the smooth and harden'd sand, And in the worn and wild receptacles Work'd by the storms, yet work'd as it were plann'd, In hollow halls, with sparry roofs and cells, They turn'd to rest; and, each clasp'd by an arm, Yielded to the deep twilight's purple charm.

"They looked up to the sky whose floating glow Spread like a rosy ocean, vast and bright; They gazed upon the glittering sea below, Whence the broad moon rose circling into sight; They heard the wave's splash and the wind so low, And saw each other's dark eyes darting light Into each other--and, beholding this, Their lips drew near, and clung into a kiss....

"They were alone, but not alone as they Who shut in chambers think it loneliness; The silent ocean, and the starlight bay The twilight glow, which momently grew less, The voiceless sand, and dropping caves that lay Around them, made them to each other press, As if there were no life beneath the sky Save theirs, and that their life could never die."[218]

An excellent opportunity to introduce here your formularies and catechisms:

"Haidée spoke not of scruples, ask'd no vows, Nor offer'd any... She was all which pure, ignorance allows, And flew to her young mate like a young bird."[219]

Nature suddenly expands, for she is ripe, like a bud bursting into bloom, nature in her fulness, instinct, and heart:

"Alas! they were so young, so beautiful, So lonely, loving, helpless, and the hour Was that in which the heart is always full, And, having o'er itself no further power, Prompts deeds eternity cannot annul...."[220]

O admirable moralists, you stand before these two flowers like patented gardeners, holding in your hands a model of the bloom sanctioned by your society of horticulture, proving that the model has not been followed, and deciding that the two weeds must be cast into the fire, which you keep burning to consume irregular growths. You have judged well, and you know your art.

Besides British cant, there is universal hypocrisy; besides English pedantry, Byron wars against human roguery. Here is the general aim of the poem, and to this his character and genius tended. His great and gloomy dreams of juvenile imagination have vanished; experience has come; he knows man now; and what is man once known? does the sublime abound in him? Do we think that the grand sentiments--those of Childe Harold, for instance--are the ordinary course of life?[221] The truth is, that man employs most of his time in sleeping, dining, yawning, working like a horse, amusing himself like an ape. According to Byron, he is an animal; except for a few minutes, his nerves, his blood, his instincts lead him. Routine works over it all, necessity whips him on, the animal advances. As the animal is proud, and moreover imaginative, it pretends to be marching for its own pleasure, that there is no whip, that at all events this whip rarely touches its flanks, that at least its stoic back can make-believe that it does not feel it. It thinks that it is decked with the most splendid trappings, and thus struts on with measured steps, fancying that it carries relics and treads on carpets and flowers, whilst in reality it tramples in the mud, and carries with it the stains and bad smells of every dunghill. What a pastime to touch its mangy back, to set before its eyes the sacks full of flour which it carries, and the goad which makes it go![222] What a pretty farce! It is the eternal farce; and not a sentiment thereof but provides him with an act: love in the first place. Certainly Donna Julia is very lovable, and Byron loves her; but she comes out of his hands, as rumpled as any other woman. She is virtuous, of course; and what is better still, she desires to be so. She plies herself, in connection with Don Juan, with the finest arguments; what a fine thing are arguments, and how suited they are to check passion! Nothing can be more solid than a firm purpose, propped up by logic, resting on the fear of the world, the thought of God, the recollection of duty; nothing can prevail against it except a _tête-à-tête_ in June, on a moonlight evening. At last the deed is done, and the poor timid lady is surprised by her outraged husband; in what a situation! Let us look again at the book. Of course she will be speechless, ashamed and full of tears, and the moral reader duly reckons on her remorse. My dear reader, you have not reckoned on impulse and nerves. To-morrow she will feel shame; the business is now to overwhelm the husband, to deafen him, to confound him, to save Juan, to save herself, to fight. The war once begun, is waged with all kinds of weapons, and chiefly with audacity and insults. The only idea is the present need, and this absorbs all others; it is in this that woman is a woman. This Julia cries lustily. It is a regular storm: hard words and recriminations, mockery and challenges, fainting and tears. In a quarter of an hour she has gained twenty years' experience. You did not know, nor she either, what an actress can emerge, all on a sudden, unforeseen, out of a simple woman. Do you know what can emerge from yourself? You think yourself rational, humane; I admit it for to-day; you have dined, and you are comfortable in a pleasant room. Your human mechanism works without getting into disorder, because the wheels are oiled and well regulated; but place it in a shipwreck, a battle, let the failing or the plethora of blood for an instant derange the chief pieces, and we shall see you howling or drivelling like a madman or an idiot. Civilization, education, reason, health, cloak us in their smooth and polished cases; let us tear them away one by one, or all together, and we laugh to see the brute, who is lying at the bottom. Here is our friend Juan reading Julia's last letter, and swearing in a transport never to forget the beautiful eyes which he caused to weep so much. Was ever feeling more tender or sincere? But unfortunately Juan is at sea, and sickness sets in. He cries out:

"Sooner shall earth resolve itself to sea, Than I resign thine image, oh, my fair!... (Here the ship gave a lurch, and he grew sea-sick.)... Sooner shall heaven kiss earth--(here he fell sicker.) Oh, Julia! what is every other woe? (For God's sake let me have a glass of liquor; Pedro, Battista, help me down below.) Julia, my love!--(You rascal, Pedro, quicker)-- Oh, Julia!--(this curst vessel pitches so) Beloved Julia, hear me still beseeching! (Here he grew inarticulate with retching.)... Love's a capricious power... Against all noble maladies he's bold, But vulgar illnesses don't like to meet;... Shrinks from the application of hot towels, And purgatives are dangerous to his reign, Sea-sickness death."[223]

Many other things cause the death of Love:

"'Tis melancholy, and a fearful sign Of human frailty, folly, also crime, That love and marriage rarely can combine. Although they both are born in the same clime; Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine-- A sad, sour, sober beverage.[224]... An honest gentleman, at his return, May not have the good fortune of Ulysses;... The odds are that he finds a handsome urn To his memory--and two or three young misses Born to some friend, who holds his wife and riches-- And that his Argus bites him by--the breeches."[225]

These are the words of a sceptic, even of a cynic. Sceptic and cynic, it is in this he ends. Sceptic through misanthropy, cynic through bravado, a sad and combative humor always impels him; southern voluptuousness has not conquered him; he is only an epicurean through contradiction and for a moment:

"Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, Sermons and soda-water the day after. Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; The best of life is but intoxication."[226]

We see clearly that he is always the same, going to extremes and unhappy, bent on destroying himself. His "Don Juan," also, is a debauchery; in it he diverts himself outrageously at the expense of all respectable things, as a bull in a china shop. He is always violent, and often ferocious; a sombre imagination intersperses his love stories with horrors leisurely enjoyed, the despair and famine of shipwrecked men, and the emaciation of the raging skeletons feeding on each other. He laughs at it horribly, like Swift; he jests over it like Voltaire:

"And next they thought upon the master's mate, As fattest; but he saved himself, because, Besides being much averse from such a fate, There were some other reasons: the first was, He had been rather indisposed of late; And that which chiefly proved his saving clause, Was a small present made to him at Cadiz, By general subscription of the ladies."[227]

With his specimens in hand,[228] Byron follows with a surgeon's exactness all the stages of death, gorging, rage, madness, howling, exhaustion, stupor; he wishes to touch and exhibit the naked and ascertained truth, the last grotesque and hideous element of humanity. Let us read again the assault on Ismail--the grape-shot and the bayonet, the street massacres, the corpses used as fascines, and the thirty-eight thousand slaughtered Turks. There is blood enough to satiate a tiger, and this blood flows amidst an accompaniment of jests; it is in order to rail at war, and the butcheries dignified with the name of exploits. In this pitiless and universal demolition of all human vanities, what remains? What do we know except that life is a "scene of all-confess'd inanity," and that men are,

"Dogs, or men!--for I flatter you in saying That ye are dogs--your betters far--ye may Read, or read not, what I am now essaying To show ye what ye are in every way?"[229]

What does he find in science but deficiencies, and in religion but mummeries?[230] Does he so much as preserve poetry? Of the divine mantle, the last garment which a poet respects, he makes a rag to trample upon, to wring, to make holes in, out of sheer wantonness. At the most touching moment of Haidée's love he vents a buffoonery. He concludes an ode with caricatures. He is Faust in the first verse, and Mephistopheles in the second. He employs, in the midst of tenderness or of murder, penny-print witticisms, trivialities, gossip, with a pamphleteer's vilification and a buffoon's whimsicalities. He lays bare the poetic method, asks himself where he has got to, counts the stanzas already done, jokes the Muse, Pegasus, and the whole epic stud, as though he wouldn't give twopence for them. Again, what remains? Himself, he alone, standing amidst all this ruin. It is he who speaks here; his characters are but screens; half the time even he pushes them aside, to occupy the stage. He lavishes upon us his opinions, recollections, anger, tastes; his poem is a conversation, a confidence, with the ups and downs, the rudeness and freedom of a conversation and a confidence, almost like the holographic journal, in which, by night, at his writing-table, he opened his heart and discharged his feelings. Never was seen in such a clear glass the birth of lively thought, the tumult of great genius, the inner life of a genuine poet, always impassioned, inexhaustibly fertile and creative, in whom suddenly, successively, finished and adorned, bloomed all human emotions and ideas--sad, gay, lofty, low, hustling one another, mutually impeding one another like swarms of insects who go humming and feeding on flowers and in the mud. He may say what he likes; willingly or unwillingly we listen to him; let him leap from sublime to burlesque, we leap with him. He has so much wit, so fresh a wit, so sudden, so biting, such a prodigality of knowledge, ideas, images picked up from the four corners of the horizon, in heaps and masses, that we are captivated, transported beyond all limits; we cannot dream of resisting. Too vigorous, and hence unbridled--that is the word which ever recurs when we speak of Byron; too vigorous against others and himself, and so unbridled, that after spending his life in setting the world at defiance, and his poetry in depicting revolt, he can only find the fulfilment of his talent and the satisfaction of his heart, in a poem waging war on all human and poetic conventions. When a man lives in such a manner he must be great, but he becomes also morbid. There is a malady of heart and mind in the style of "Don Juan," as in Swift. When a man jests amidst his tears, it is because he has a poisoned imagination. This kind of laughter is a spasm, and we see in one man a hardening of the heart, or madness; in another, excitement or disgust. Byron was exhausted, at least the poet was exhausted in him. The last cantos of "Don Juan" drag: the gayety became forced, the escapades became digressions; the reader began to be bored. A new kind of poetry, which he had attempted, had given way in his hands; in the drama he only attained to powerful declamation, his characters had no life; when he forsook poetry, poetry forsook him; he went to Greece in search of action, and only found death.

Section VI.--The Malady of the Age

So lived and so died this unhappy great man; the malady of the age had no more distinguished prey. Around him, like a hecatomb, lie the others, wounded also by the greatness of their faculties and their immoderate desires--some ending in stupor or drunkenness, others worn out by pleasure or work: these driven to madness or suicide; those beaten down by impotence, or lying on a sick-bed; all agitated by their too acute or aching nerves; the strongest carrying their bleeding wound to old age, the happiest, having suffered as much as the rest, and preserving their scars, though healed. The concert of their lamentations has filled their century, and we stood around them, hearing in our hearts the low echo of their cries. We were sad like them, and like them inclined to revolt. The reign of democracy excited our ambitions without satisfying them; the proclamation of philosophy kindled our curiosity without satisfying it. In this wide-open career, the plebeian suffered for his mediocrity, and the sceptic for his doubt. The plebeian, like the sceptic, attacked by a precocious melancholy, and withered by a premature experience, abandoned his sympathies and his conduct to the poets, who declared happiness impossible, truth unattainable, society ill-arranged, man abortive or marred. From this unison of voices an idea arose, the centre of the literature, the arts, the religion of the age, to-wit, that here is a monstrous disproportion between the different parts of our social structure, and that human destiny is vitiated by this disagreement.

What advice have they given us to cure this? They were great; were they wise? "Let deep and strong sensations rain upon you; if the human mechanism breaks, so much the worse! Cultivate your garden, bury yourself in a little circle, re-enter the flock, be a beast of burden. Turn believer again, take holy water, abandon your mind to dogmas, and your conduct to manuals of devotion. Make your way; aspire to power, honours, wealth." Such are the various replies of artists and citizens, Christians and men of the world. Are they replies? And what do they propose but to satiate one's self, to become stupid, to turn aside, to forget? There is another and a deeper answer which Goethe was the first to give, the truth of which we begin to conceive, in which issue all the labor and experience of the age, and which may perhaps be the subject-matter of future literature: "Try to understand yourself, and things in general." A strange reply, which seems hardly new, whose scope we shall only hereafter discover. For a long time yet men will feel their sympathies thrill at the sound of the sobs of their great poets. For a long time they will rage against a destiny which opens to their aspirations the career of limitless space, to shatter them, within two steps of the goal, against a wretched post which they had not seen. For a long time they will bear like fetters the necessities which they ought to have embraced as laws. Our generation, like the preceding, has been tainted by the malady of the age, and will never more than half get rid of it. We shall arrive at truth, not at tranquillity. All we can heal at present is our intellect; we have no hold upon our feelings. But we have a right to conceive for others the hopes which we no longer entertain for ourselves, and to prepare for our descendants the happiness which we shall never enjoy. Brought up in a more wholesome air, they will have, mayhap, a wholesomer heart. The reformation of ideas ends by reforming the rest, and the light of the mind produces serenity of heart. Hitherto, in our judgments on men, we have taken for our masters the oracles and poets, and like them we have received for undoubted truths the noble dreams of our imagination and the imperious suggestions of our heart. We have bound ourselves to the partiality of religious divinations, and the inexactness of literary divinations, and we have shaped our doctrines according to our instincts and our vexations. Science at last approaches, and approaches man; it has gone beyond the visible and palpable world of stars, stones, plants, amongst which man disdainfully confined her. It reaches the heart provided with exact and penetrating implements, whose justness has been proved, and their reach measured by three hundred years of experience. Thought, with its development and rank, its structure and relations, its deep material roots, its infinite growth through history, its lofty bloom at the summit of things, becomes the object of science--an object which, sixty years ago, it foresaw in Germany, and which, slowly and surely probed, by the same methods as the physical world, will be transformed before our eyes, as the physical world has been transformed. It is already being transformed, and we have left behind us the light in which Byron and the French poets had considered it. No, man is not an abortion or a monster; no, the business of poetry is not to disgust or defame him. He is in his place, and completes a chain. Let us watch him grow and increase, and we shall cease to rail at or curse him. He, like everything else, is a product, and as such it is right he should be what he is. His innate imperfection is in order, like the constant abortion of a stamen in a plant, like the fundamental irregularity of four facets in a crystal. What we took for a deformity, is a form; what seemed to us the subversion of a law, is the accomplishment of a law. Human reason and virtue have for their foundation instincts and animal images, as living forms have for their instruments physical laws, as organic matters have for their elements mineral substances. What wonder if virtue or human reason, like living form or organic matter, sometimes fails or decomposes, since like them, and like every superior and complex existence, they have for support and control inferior and simple forces, which, according to circumstances, now maintain it by their harmony, now mar it by their discord? What wonder if the elements of existence, like those of quantity, receive, from their very nature, the immutable laws which constrain and reduce them to a certain species and order of formation? Who will rise up against geometry? Who, especially, will rise up against a living geometry? Who will not, on the contrary, feel moved with admiration at the sight of those grand powers which, situated at the heart of things, incessantly urge the blood through the limbs of the old world, disperse it quickly in the infinite network of arteries, and spread over the whole surface the eternal flower of youth and beauty? Who, finally, will not feel himself ennobled, when he finds that this pile of laws results in a regular series of forms, that matter has thought for its goal, that nature ends in reason, and that this ideal to which, amidst so many errors, all the aspirations of men cling, is also the end to which aim, amidst so many obstacles, all the forces of the universe? In this employment of science, and in this conception of things, there is a new art, a new morality, a new polity, a new religion, and it is in the present time our task to try and discover them.

[Footnote 144: Byron's Works, ed. Moore, 17 vols. 1832; "Life," I. 102.]

[Footnote 145: Ibid. 63.]

[Footnote 146: Ibid. 69.]

[Footnote 147: Ibid. 137.]

[Footnote 148: Ibid. 26.]

[Footnote 149: Byron's Works, "Life," I. 53.]

[Footnote 150: Ibid. III. 83.]

[Footnote 151: Ibid. III. 20, March 28, 1814.]

[Footnote 152: Ibid. IV. 81; Letter to Moore, Feb. 12, 1818.]

[Footnote 153: Byron's Works, "Life," V. 96, Feb. 2, 1821.]

[Footnote 154: Lockhart's "Life of Sir Walter Scott," VII. 323.]

[Footnote 155: "If I was born, as the nurses say, with a 'silver spoon in my mouth,' it has stuck in my throat, and spoiled my palate, so that nothing put into it is swallowed with much relish--unless it be cayenne.... I see no such horror in a dreamless sleep, and I have no conception of any existence which duration would not make tiresome."]

[Footnote 156: "I like Junius: he was a good hater. I don't understand yielding sensitiveness. What I feel is an immense rage for forty-eight hours."]

[Footnote 157: Byron's Works, "Life," I. 41.]

[Footnote 158: In "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers."]

[Footnote 159: Lockhart's "Life of Sir Walter Scott," III. 389.]

[Footnote 160: Ibid. V. 141.]

[Footnote 161: Moore's "Life of Byron," III. 12, March 10, Thor's day. The last part of the sentence is a quotation from "Macbeth," V. 5.]

[Footnote 162: Ibid. IV. 169, note.]

[Footnote 163: Moore, Byron's Works; "Life," V. 67, Jan. 9, 1821.]

[Footnote 164: Ibid. V. 60, Jan. 6, 1821.]

[Footnote 165: Moore, Byron's Works; "Life," V. 97, February 2, 1821.]

[Footnote 166: Ibid. 95.]

[Footnote 167: Ibid. VI. 206.]

[Footnote 168: Moore, Byron's Works; "Life," V. 33, Ravenna, Nov. 18, 1820.]

[Footnote 169: Moore, Byron's Works; "Life," V. 265.]

[Footnote 170: Ibid. V. 150, Ravenna, May 3, 1821.]

[Footnote 171: "All the styles of the day are bombastic. I don't except my own; no one has done more through negligence to corrupt the language."]

[Footnote 172: See his "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers."]

[Footnote 173: Thirty thousand copies of "The Corsair" were sold in one day.]

[Footnote 174: Byron's Works, VIII; "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," c. I. 6.]

[Footnote 175: "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," c. I. 19.]

[Footnote 176: "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," c. III. 7-15.]

[Footnote 177: "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," c. IV. 1 and 2.]

[Footnote 178: "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," c. I. 39 and 40.]

[Footnote 179: Ibid. c. IV. 93 and 94.]

[Footnote 180: For example, "as weeping Beauty's cheek at Sorrow's tale."]

[Footnote 181: Here are verses like Pope, very beautiful and false: "And havock loath so much the waste of time, She scarce had left an uncommitted crime, One hour beheld him since the tide he stemm'd, Disguised, discover'd, conquering, ta'en condemn'd, A chief on land, an outlaw on the deep, Destroying, saving, prison'd, and asleep!"]

[Footnote 182: Moore's "Life," IV. 345.]

[Footnote 183: Byron's Works, X., "The Prisoner of Chillon," c. VII. 234.]

[Footnote 184: Byron's Works, X., "The Prisoner of Chillon," c. VIII. 236.]

[Footnote 185: Ibid, XI., "Mazeppa," c. XIII. 167.]

[Footnote 186: Byron's Works, X., "The Siege of Corinth," c. XI. 116.]

[Footnote 187: Byron's Works, X., "The Siege of Corinth," c. XVI. 123.]

[Footnote 188: Byron's Works, X; "Lara," c. 2, st. 17-20, 60.]

[Footnote 189: Byron's Works, X; "Darkness," 283.]

[Footnote 190: Byron's Works, IV. 320; Letter to Mr. Murray, Ravenna, June 7, 1820.]

[Footnote 191: The angel of holy loves, the angel of the ocean, the choirs of happy spirits. See this at length in the "Martyrs."]

[Footnote 192: "Magna peccatrix." S. Lucæ. VII. 36: "Mulier Samaritana." S. Johannis, IV; "Maria Ægyptiaca" (Acta Sanctorum), etc.]

[Footnote 193: Goethe's "Faust," translated by Theodore Martin. Prologue in Heaven.]

[Footnote 194: Goethe sings: "Wer ruft das Einzelne zur allgemeinen Weihe Wo es in herrlichen Accorden schlägt?"]

[Footnote 195: Byron's Works, XI; "Manfred," II. 2, 32.]

[Footnote 196: Ibid.; "Manfred," III. 1, 56.]

[Footnote 197: Ibid.; "Manfred," II. 2, 35.]

[Footnote 198: Byron's Works, XI; "Manfred," II. 4, 47.]

[Footnote 199: Byron's Works, XI; "Manfred," II. 4, 49.]

[Footnote 200: Ibid. III. 4. 70.]

[Footnote 201: Southey, Preface to "A Vision of Judgment."]

[Footnote 202: Byron's Works, XVII; "Don Juan," c. 11, st. LXVII.]

[Footnote 203: Ibid. VI. 18; Letter 512, April 5, 1823.]

[Footnote 204: Ibid. II. 303; Journal, December 17, 1813.]

[Footnote 205: Alfred de Musset.]

[Footnote 206: See his terrible satirical poem, "The Vision of Judgment," against Southey, George IV, and official pomp.]

[Footnote 207: Byron's Works, XVI. 131; Preface to "Don Juan," cantos VI., VII., and VIII.]

[Footnote 208: "Don Juan" is a satire on the abuses in the present state of society, and not a eulogy of vice.]

[Footnote 209: Stendhal, "Mémoires sur Lord Byron."]

[Footnote 210: Byron's Works, III. 333; Letter to Murray, Venice, January 2, 1817.]

[Footnote 211: Ibid. III. 363; Letter to Moore, Venice, March 25, 1817.]

[Footnote 212: Byron's Works, IV. 279; Letter to Murray. Ravenna, February 7, 1820.]

[Footnote 213: Ibid. XI; "Beppo," c. XLIII-XLV. 121.]

[Footnote 214: See Stendhal, "Vie de Giacomo Rossini," and Dean Stanley's "Life of Dr. Arnold." The contrast is complete. See also Mme. de Staël's "Corinne," where this opposition is very clearly grasped.]

[Footnote 215: Byron's Works, V. 127; Letter to Mr. Murray, Ravenna, February 16, 1821.]

[Footnote 216: Ibid. XVI; "Don Juan," c. VI. st. LXVI-LXVIII.]

[Footnote 217: Byron's Works, "Don Juan," c. VI. st. LX.]

[Footnote 218: Byron's Works, XV; "Don Juan," c. II. st. CLXXVII-CLXXXVIII.]

[Footnote 219: Ibid, XV; "Don Juan," c. II. st CXC.]

[Footnote 220: Ibid. c. II. st. CXCII.]

[Footnote 221: Byron says (V. October 12, 1820), "Don Juan is too true, and would. I suspect, live longer than Childe Harold. The women hate many things which strip off the tinsel of sentiment."]

[Footnote 222: "Don Juan," c. VII. st. 2. "I hope it is no crime to laugh at all things. For I wish to know what, after all, are all things--but a show?"]

[Footnote 223: Byron's Works, XV; "Don Juan," c. II. st. XIX-XXIII.]

[Footnote 224: Ibid. c. III. st. V.]

[Footnote 225: Ibid. c. III. st. XXIII.]

[Footnote 226: Ibid. c. II. st. CLXXVIII., CLXXIX.]

[Footnote 227: Byron's Works, XV; "Don Juan," c. II. st. LXXXI.]

[Footnote 228: Byron had before him a dozen authentic descriptions.]

[Footnote 229: Byron's Works, XVI; "Don Juan," c. VII. st. 7.]

[Footnote 230: See his "Vision of Judgment."]

CHAPTER THIRD

THE PAST AND THE PRESENT