Chapter 6

Experience and alliances are plausibly urged as indispensable for success. But Jesus knew that the sum total of a man’s power for good is precisely what of good there is in him and that if it be expressed even in the simplest form, all its strength is put forth and its office is fulfilled. To suppose that it can be augmented by machinery is a foolish delusion. The

“projects deep Of enemies, of aids, battles and leagues, Plausible to the world”

(_P. R._ iii. 395–3.)

are to the Founder of the kingdom not of this world “worth naught.” Another side of the mountain is tried. Rome is presented with Tiberius at Capreæ. Could it possibly be anything but a noble deed to

“expel this monster from his throne Now made a sty, and in his place ascending, A victor people free from servile yoke!”

(_P. R._ iv. 100–102.)

“_And with my help thou may’st_.” With the devil’s help and not without can this glorious revolution be achieved! “For him,” is the Divine reply, “I was not sent.” The attack is then directly pressed.

“The kingdoms of the world, to thee I give; For, giv’n to me, I give to whom I please, No trifle; yet with this reserve, not else, On this condition, if thou wilt fall down And worship me as thy superior lord.”

(_P. R._ iv. 163–7.)

This, then, is the drift and meaning of it all. The answer is taken verbally from the gospel.

“‘Thou shalt worship The Lord thy God, and only Him shalt serve.’”

(_P. R._ iv. 176–7.)

That is to say, Thou shalt submit thyself to God’s commands and God’s methods and thou shalt submit thyself to _no other_.

Omitting the Athenian and philosophic episode, which is unnecessary and a little unworthy even of the Christian poet, we encounter not an amplification of the Gospel story but an interpolation which is entirely Milton’s own. Night gathers and a new assault is delivered in darkness. Jesus wakes in the storm which rages round Him. The diabolic hostility is open and avowed and He hears the howls and shrieks of the infernals. He cannot banish them though He is so far master of Himself that He is able to sit “unappall’d in calm and sinless peace.” He has to endure the hellish threats and tumult through the long black hours

“till morning fair Came forth with pilgrim steps in amice gray, Who with her radiant finger still’d the roar Of thunder, chas’d the clouds, and laid the winds, And grisly spectres, which the Fiend had rais’d To tempt the Son of God with terrors dire. But now the sun with more effectual beams Had cheer’d the face of earth, and dri’d the wet From drooping plant, or dropping tree; the birds, Who all things now beheld more fresh and green, After a night of storm so ruinous, Clear’d up their choicest notes in bush and spray To gratulate the sweet return of morn.”

(_P. R._ iv. 426–38.)

There is nothing perhaps in _Paradise Lost_ which possesses the peculiar quality of this passage, nothing which like these verses brings into the eyes the tears which cannot be repressed when a profound experience is set to music.

The temptation on the pinnacle occupies but a few lines only of the poem. Hitherto Satan admits that Jesus had conquered, but he had done no more than any wise and good man could do.

“Now show thy progeny; if not to stand, Cast thyself down; safely, if Son of God; For it is written, ‘He will give command Concerning thee to His angels; in their hands They shall uplift thee, lest at any time Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone.’”

(_P. R._ iv. 554–9.)

The promise of Divine aid is made in mockery.

“To whom thus Jesus: ‘Also it is written, Tempt not the Lord thy God.’ He said, and stood: But Satan, smitten with amazement, fell.”

(_P. R._ iv. 560–2.)

It is not meant, “thou shalt not tempt _me_,” but rather, “it is not permitted me to tempt God.” In this extreme case Jesus depends on God’s protection. This is the devil’s final defeat and the seraphic company for which our great Example had refused to ask instantly surrounds and receives him. Angelic quires

“the Son of God, our Saviour meek, Sung victor, and from heavenly feast refresh’t, Brought on His way with joy; He unobserv’d, Home to His mother’s house private return’d.”

(_P. R._ iv. 636–9.)

Warton wished to expunge this passage, considering it an unworthy conclusion. It is to be hoped that there are many readers of Milton who are able to see what is the value of these four lines, particularly of the last.

It is hardly necessary to say more in order to show how peculiarly Milton is endowed with that quality which is possessed by all great poets—the power to keep in contact with the soul of man.

THE MORALITY OF BYRON’S POETRY. “THE CORSAIR.”

[This is an abstract of an essay four times as long written many years ago. Although so much has been struck out, the substance is unaltered, and the conclusion is valid for the author now as then.]

BYRON above almost all other poets, at least in our day, has been set down as immoral. In reality he is moral, using the word in its proper sense, and he is so, not only in detached passages, but in the general drift of most of his poetry. We will take as an example “The Corsair.”

Conrad is not a debauched buccaneer. He was not—

“by Nature sent To lead the guilty—guilt’s worst instrument.”

He had been betrayed by misplaced confidence.

“Doom’d by his very virtues for a dupe, He cursed those virtues as the cause of ill, And not the traitors who betray’d him still; Nor deem’d that gifts bestow’d on better men Had left him joy, and means to give again, Fear’d—shunn’d—belied—ere youth had lost her force, He hated man too much to feel remorse, And thought the voice of wrath a sacred call, To pay the injuries of some on all.”

Conrad was not, and could not be, mean and selfish. A selfish Conrad would be an absurdity. His motives are not gross—

“he shuns the grosser joys of sense, His mind seems nourished by that abstinence.”

He is protected by a charm against undistinguishing lust—

“Though fairest captives daily met his eye, He shunn’d, nor sought, but coldly pass’d them by;”

and even Gulnare, his deliverer, fails to seduce him.

Mr. Ruskin observes that Byron makes much of courage. It is Conrad, the leader, who undertakes the dangerous errand of surprising Seyd; it is he who determines to save the harem. His courage is not the mere excitement of battle. When he is captured—

“A conqueror’s more than captive’s air is seen,”

and he is not insensible to all fear.

“Each has some fear, and he who least betrays, The only hypocrite deserving praise.

* * * * *

One thought alone he could not—dared not meet— ‘Oh, how these tidings will Medora greet?’”

Gulnare announces his doom to him, but he is calm. He cannot stoop even to pray. He has deserted his Maker, and it would be baseness now to prostrate himself before Him.

“I have no thought to mock his throne with prayer Wrung from the coward crouching of despair; It is enough—I breathe—and I can bear.”

He has no martyr-hope with which to console himself; his endurance is of the finest order—simple, sheer resolution, a resolve that with no reward, he will never disgrace himself. He knows what it is

“To count the hours that struggle to thine end, With not a friend to animate, and tell To other ears that death became thee well,”

but he does not break down.

Gulnare tries to persuade him that the only way by which he can save himself from tortures and impalement is by the assassination of Seyd, but he refuses to accept the terms—

“Who spares a woman’s seeks not slumber’s life”—

and dismisses her. When she has done the deed and he sees the single spot of blood upon her, he, the Corsair, is unmanned as he had never been in battle, prison, or by consciousness of guilt.

“But ne’er from strife—captivity—remorse— From all his feelings in their inmost force— So thrill’d—so shudder’d every creeping vein, As now they froze before that purple stain. That spot of blood, that light but guilty streak, Had banish’d all the beauty from her cheek!”

The Corsair’s misanthropy had not destroyed him. Small creatures alone are wholly converted into spite and scepticism by disappointment and repulse. Those who are larger avenge themselves by devotion. Conrad’s love for Medora was intensified and exalted by his hatred of the world.

“Yes, it was Love—unchangeable—unchanged, Felt but for one from whom he never ranged;”

and she was worthy of him, the woman who could sing—

“Deep in my soul that tender secret dwells, Lonely and lost to light for evermore, Save when to thine my heart responsive swells, Then trembles into silence as before.

There, in its centre, a sepulchral lamp Burns the slow flame, eternal—but unseen; Which not the darkness of despair can damp, Though vain its ray as it had never been.”

He finds Medora dead, and—

“his mother’s softness crept To those wild eyes, which like an infant’s wept.”

If his crimes and love could be weighed in a celestial balance, weight being apportioned to the rarity and value of the love, which would descend?

The points indicated in Conrad’s character are not many, but they are sufficient for its delineation, and it is a moral character. We must, of course, get rid of the notion that the relative magnitude of the virtues and vices according to the priest or society is authentic. A reversion to the natural or divine scale has been almost the sole duty preached to us by every prophet. If we could incorporate Conrad with ourselves we should find that the greater part of what is worst in us would be neutralised. The sins of which we are ashamed, the dirty, despicable sins, Conrad could not have committed; and in these latter days they are perhaps the most injurious.

We do not understand how moral it is to yield unreservedly to enthusiasm, to the impression which great objects would fain make upon us, and to embody that impression in worthy language. It is rare to meet now even with young people who will abandon themselves to a heroic emotion, or who, if they really feel it, do not try to belittle it in expression. Byron’s poetry, above most, tempts and almost compels surrender to that which is beyond the commonplace self.

It is not true that “The Corsair” is insincere. He who hears a note of insincerity in Conrad and Medora may have ears, but they must be those of the translated Bottom who was proud of having “a reasonable good ear in music.” Byron’s romance has been such a power exactly because men felt that it was not fiction and that his was one of the strongest minds of his day. He was incapable of toying with the creatures of the fancy which had no relationship with himself and through himself with humanity.

A word as to Byron’s hold upon the people. He was able to obtain a hearing from ordinary men and women, who knew nothing even of Shakespeare, save what they had seen at the theatre. Modern poetry is the luxury of a small cultivated class. We may say what we like of popularity, and if it be purchased by condescension to popular silliness it is nothing. But Byron secured access to thousands of readers in England and on the Continent by strength and loveliness, a feat seldom equalled and never perhaps surpassed. The present writer’s father, a compositor in a dingy printing office, repeated verses from “Childe Harold” at the case. Still more remarkable, Byron reached one of this writer’s friends, an officer in the Navy, of the ancient stamp; and the attraction, both to printer and lieutenant, lay in nothing lower than that which was best in him. It is surely a service sufficient to compensate for many more faults than can be charged against him that wherever there was any latent poetic dissatisfaction with the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life he gave it expression, and that he has awakened in the _people_ lofty emotions which, without him, would have slept. The cultivated critics, and the refined persons who have _schrecklich viel gelesen_, are not competent to estimate the debt we owe to Byron.

BYRON, GOETHE, AND MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD

(_Reprinted_, _with corrections_, _by permission from the_ “_Contemporary Review_,” _August_, 1881.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But again—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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