Part 11

This, I repeat, is a strange fact, for it appears that these poets, prophets who spoke in the language of beauty and who have held the world's reverence so long--it appears now that these interpreters of the fates were all misled. Possibly, as Aristotle intimated, genius is allied to some vice of the secretions which produces a melancholia of the brain; something like this, indeed, only expressed in more recondite terms, may be found in the most modern theory of science. But more probably they wrote merely from insufficient experience, not having perceived how the human race with increase of knowledge grows in happiness. Thus, at least, it seems to one who observes the tides of thought. Next year, or the next, some divine invention shall come which will prove this melancholy of the poets to have been only a childish ignorance of man's sublimer destiny; some discovery of a new element more wonderful than radium will render the ancient brooding over human feebleness a matter of laughter and astonishment; some acceptance of the larger brotherhood of the race will wipe away all tears and bring down upon earth the fair dream of heaven, a reality and a possession for ever; some new philosophy of the soul will convert the old poems of conflict into meaningless fables, stale and unprofitable. Already we see the change at hand. To how many persons to-day does Browning appeal--though they would not always confess it--more powerfully than Homer or Milton or any other of the great names of antiquity? And the reason of this closer appeal of Browning is chiefly the unflagging optimism of his philosophy, his full-blooded knowledge and sympathy which make the wailings of the past somewhat silly in our ears, if truth must be told. I never read Browning but those extraordinary lines of Euripides recur to my mind: "Not now for the first time do I regard mortal things as a shadow, nor would I fear to charge with supreme folly those artificers of words who are reckoned the sages of mankind, for no man among mortals is happy." [Greek: Thnêtôn gar oudeis estin eudaimôn], indeed!--would any one be shameless enough to utter such words under the new dispensation of official optimism?

It is necessary to think of these things before we attempt to criticise Byron, for _Don Juan_, too, despite its marvellous vivacity, looks upon life from the old point of view. Already, for this reason in part, it seems a little antiquated to us, and in a few years it may be read only as a curiosity. Meanwhile for the few who lag behind in the urgent march of progress the poem will possess a special interest just because it presents the ancient thesis of the poets and prophets in a novel form. Of course, in many lesser matters it makes a wider and more lasting appeal. Part of the Haidée episode, for instance, is so exquisitely lovely, so radiant with the golden haze of youth, that even in the wiser happiness of our maturity we may still turn to it with a kind of complacent delight. Briefer passages scattered here and there, such as the "'T is sweet to hear," and the "Ave Maria," need only a little abridgment at the close to fit them perfectly for any future anthology devoted to the satisfaction and the ultimate significance of human emotions. But, strangely enough, these disturbing climaxes, which will demand to be forgotten, or to be rearranged as we restore old mutilated statues, do, indeed, point to those very qualities which render the poem so extraordinary a complement to the great and accepted epics of the past. For the present it may yet be sufficient to consider _Don Juan_ as it is--with all its enormities upon it.

And, first of all, we shall make a sad mistake if we regard the poem as a mere work of satire. Occasionally Byron pretends to lash himself into a righteous fury over the vices of the age, but we know that this is all put on, and that the real savageness of his nature comes out only when he thinks of his own personal wrongs. Now this is a very different thing from the deliberate and sustained denunciation of a vicious age such as we find in Juvenal, a different thing utterly from the _sæva indignatio_ that devoured the heart and brain of poor Swift. There is in _Don Juan_ something of the personal satire of Pope, and something of the whimsical mockery of Lucilius and his imitators. But it needs but a little discernment to see that Byron's poem has vastly greater scope and significance than the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_, or the spasmodic gaiety of the Menippean satire. It does in its own way present a view of life as a whole, with the good and the evil, and so passes beyond the category of the merely satirical. The very scope of its subject, if nothing more, classes it with the more universal epics of literature rather than with the poems that portray only a single aspect of life.

Byron himself was conscious of this, and more than once alludes to the larger aspect of his work. "If you must have an epic," he once said to Medwin, "there's _Don Juan_ for you; it is an epic as much in the spirit of our day as the _Iliad_ was in that of Homer." And in one of the asides in the poem itself he avows the same design:

A panoramic view of Hell's in training, After the style of Virgil and of Homer, So that my name of Epic's no misnomer.

Hardly the style of those stately writers, to be sure, but an epic after its own fashion the poem certainly is. That Byron's way is not the way of the older poets requires no emphasis; they

reveled in the fancies of the time, True Knights, chaste Dames, huge Giants, Kings despotic; But all these, save the last, being obsolete, I chose a modern subject as more meet.

Being cut off from the heroic subjects of the established school, he still sought to obtain something of the same large and liberating effect through the use of a frankly modern theme. The task was not less difficult than his success was singular and marked; and that is why it seemed in no way inappropriate, despite its occasional lapse of licentiousness, to read _Don Juan_ with the white reflection of Mont Blanc streaming through the window. Homer might have been so read, or Virgil, or any of those poets who presented life solemnly and magniloquently; I do not think I could have held my mind to Juvenal or Pope or even Horace beneath the calm radiance of that Alpine light.

I have said that the great poets all took a sombre view of the world. Man is but _the dream of a shadow_, said Pindar, speaking for the race of genius, and Byron is conscious of the same insight into the illusive spectacle. He has looked with like vision upon

this scene of all-confessed inanity, By Saint, by Sage, by Preacher, and by Poet,

and will not in his turn refrain "from holding up the nothingness of life." So in the introduction to the seventh canto he runs through the list of those who have preached and sung this solemn, but happily to us outworn, theme:

I say no more than hath been said in Dante's Verse, and by Solomon and by Cervantes.

It must not be supposed, however, because the heroic poems of old were touched with the pettiness and sadness of human destiny, that their influence on the reader was supposed to be narrowing or depressing; the name "heroic" implies the contrary of that. Indeed their very inspiration was derived from the fortitude of a spirit struggling to rise above the league of little things and foiling despairs. It may seem paradoxical to us, yet it is true that these morbid poets believed in the association of men with gods and in the grandeur of mortal passions. So Achilles and Hector, both with the knowledge of their brief destiny upon them, both filled with foreboding of frustrate hopes, strive nobly to the end of magnanimous defeat. There lay the greatness of the heroic epos for readers of old,--the sense of human littleness, the melancholy of broken aspirations, swallowed up in the transcending sublimity of man's endurance and daring. And men of lesser mould, who knew so well the limitations of their sphere, took courage and were taught to look down unmoved upon their harassed fate.

Now Byron came at a time of transition from the old to the new. The triumphs of material discovery, "_Le magnifiche sorti e progressive_," had not yet cast a reproach on the earlier sense of life's futility, while at the same time the faith in heroic passions had passed away. An attempt to create an epic in the old spirit would have been doomed, was indeed doomed in the hands of those who undertook it. The very language in which Byron presents the ancient universal belief of Plato and those others

Who knew this life was not worth a potato,--

shows how far he was from the loftier mode of imagination. In place of heroic passion he must seek another outlet of relief, another mode of purging away melancholy; and the spirit of the burlesque came lightly to his use as the only available _vis medica_. The feeling was common to his age, but he alone was able to adapt the motive to epic needs. How often the melancholy sentimentality of Heine corrects itself by a burlesque conclusion! Or, if we regard the novel, how often does Thackeray in like manner replace the old heroic relief of passion by a kindly smile at the brief and busy cares of men. But neither Heine nor Thackeray carries the principle of the burlesque to its artistic completion, or makes it the avowed motive of a complicated action, as Byron does in _Don Juan_. That poem is indeed "prolific of melancholy merriment." It is not necessary to point out at length the persistence of this mock-heroic spirit. Love, ambition, home-attachments, are all burlesqued; battle ardour, the special theme of epic sublimity, is subjected to the same quizzical mockery:

There was not now a luggage boy, but sought Danger and spoil with ardour much increased; And why? because a little--odd--old man, Stripped to his shirt, was come to lead the van.

In the gruesome shipwreck scene the tale of suffering which leads to cannibalism is interrupted thus:

At length they caught two Boobies, and a Noddy, And then they left off eating the dead body.

The description of London town as seen from Shooter's Hill ends with this absurd metaphor:

A huge, dun Cupola, like a foolscap crown On a fool's head--and there is London Town!

Even Death laughs,--death that "_hiatus maxime defiendus_," "the dunnest of all duns," etc. And, last of all, the poet turns the same weapon against his own art. Do the lines for a little while grow serious, he suddenly pulls himself up with a sneer:

Here I must leave him, for I grow pathetic, Moved by the Chinese nymph of tears, green tea!

I trust, however, it has been made sufficiently clear that _Don Juan_ is something quite different from the mere mock-heroic--from Pulci, for instance, "sire of the half-serious rhyme," whom Byron professed to imitate. The poem is in a sense not half but wholly serious, for the very reason that it takes so broad a view of human activity, and because of its persistent moral sense. (Which is nowise contradicted by the immoral scenes in several of the cantos.) It is not, for example, possible to think of finding in Pulci such a couplet as this:

But almost sanctify the sweet excess By the immortal wish and power to bless.

He who could write such lines as those was not merely indulging his humour. _Don Juan_ is something more than

A versified Aurora Borealis, Which flashes o'er a waste and icy clime.

Out of the bitterness of his soul, out of the wreck of his passions which, though heroic in intensity, had ended in quailing of the heart, he sought what the great makers of epic had sought,--a solace and a sense of uplifted freedom. The heroic ideal was gone, the refuge of religion was gone; but, passing to the opposite extreme, by showing the power of the human heart to mock at all things, he would still set forth the possibility of standing above and apart from all things. He, too, went beyond the limitations of destiny by laughter, as Homer and Virgil and Milton had risen by the imagination. And, in doing this, he wrote the modern epic.

We are learning a new significance of human life, as I said; and the sublime audacities of the elder poets in attempting to transcend the melancholia of their day are growing antiquated, just as Byron's heroic mockery is turning stale. In a few years we shall have come so much closer to the mysteries over which the poets bungled helplessly, that we can afford to forget their rhapsodies. Meanwhile it may not be amiss to make clear to ourselves the purpose and character of one of the few, the very few, great poems in our literature.

LAURENCE STERNE

A number of excellent editions of our standard authors have been put forth during the last two or three years, but none of them, perhaps, has been of such real service to letters as the new Sterne edited by Professor Wilbur L. Cross.[8]

Ordinarily the fresh material advertised in these editions is in large measure rubbish which had been deliberately discarded by the author and whose resuscitation is an impertinence to his memory. Certainly this is true of Murray's new Byron; it is in part true of the great editions of Hazlitt and Lamb recently published, to go no further afield. But with Sterne the case is different. The _Journal to Eliza_ and the letters now first printed in full from the "Gibbs manuscript" are a genuine aid in getting at the heart of Sterne's elusive character. Even more important is the readjustment of dates for the older correspondence, which the present editor has accomplished at the cost of considerable pains, for the setting back of a letter two years may make all the difference between a lying knave and an unstable sentimentalist. In the spring of 1767, just a year before his death, Sterne was inditing those rather sickly letters and the newly published _Journal_ to Eliza, a susceptible young woman who was about to sail for India. "The coward," says Thackeray, "was writing gay letters to his friends this while, with sneering allusions to his poor foolish _Brahmine_. Her ship was not out of the Downs, and the charming Sterne was at the 'Mount Coffee-House,' with a sheet of gilt-edged paper before him, offering that precious treasure, his heart, to Lady P----." It is an ugly charge, and indeed Thackeray's whole portrait of the humourist is harshly painted. But Sterne was not sneering in other letters at his "Brahmine," as he called the rather spoiled East India lady, and it turns out from some very pretty calculations of Professor Cross that the particular note to Lady P[ercy] must have been written at the Mount Coffee-House two years before he ever knew Eliza. "Coward," "wicked," "false," "wretched worn-out old scamp," "mountebank," "foul Satyr," "the last words the famous author wrote were bad and wicked, the last lines the poor stricken wretch penned were for pity and pardon"--for shame, Mr. Thackeray! Sterne was a weak man, one may admit; wretched and worn-out he was when the final blow struck him in his lonely hired room; but is there no pity and pardon on your pen for the wayward penitent? You had sympathy enough and facile tears enough for the genial Costigans and the others who followed their hearts too readily; have you no _Alas, poor Yorick!_ for the author who gave you these characters? You could smile at Pendennis when he used the old songs for a second love; was it a terrible thing that Yorick should have taken passages from his early letters (copies of which were thriftily preserved after the fashion of the day) and sent them as the bubblings of fresh emotion at the end of his life? "One solitary plate, one knife, one fork, one glass!--I gave a thousand pensive, penetrating looks at the chair thou hadst so often graced, in those quiet and sentimental repasts--then laid down my knife and fork, and took out my handkerchief, and clapped it across my face, and wept like a child"--he wrote to Miss Lumley who afterwards became Mrs. Sterne; and in the _Journal_ kept for Eliza when he was broken in spirit and near to death, you may read the same words, as Thackeray read them in manuscript, and you may call them false and lying; but I am inclined to believe they were quite as genuine as most of the pathos of that lachrymose age. The want of sympathy in Thackeray's case is the harder to understand for the reason that to Sterne more than to any other of the eighteenth-century wits he would seem to owe his style and his turn of thought. On many a page his peculiar sentiment reads like a direct imitation of _Tristram Shandy_; add but a touch of caprice to Colonel Newcome and you might almost imagine my Uncle Toby parading in the nineteenth century; and I think it is just the lack of this whimsical touch that makes the good colonel a little mawkish to many readers. And if one is to look for an antetype of Thackeray's exquisite English, whither shall one turn unless to the _Sermons_ of Mr. Yorick? There is a taint of ingratitude in his affectation of being shocked at the irregularities of one to whom he was so much indebted, and I fear Mr. Thackeray was too consciously appealing to the Philistine prejudices of the good folk who were listening to his lectures. Afterwards, when the mischief was done, he suffered what looks like a qualm of conscience. In one of the _Roundabout Papers_ he tells how he slept in Sterne's old hotel at Calais: "When I went to bed in the room, in _his_ room, when I think how I admire, dislike, and have abused him, a certain dim feeling of apprehension filled my mind at the midnight hour. What if I should see his lean figure in the black-satin breeches, his sinister smile, his long thin finger pointing to me in the moonlight!" Unfortunately the popular notion of Sterne is still based almost exclusively on the picture of him in the _English Humourists_.

It is to be hoped that at last this carefully prepared edition will do something toward dispelling that false impression. Certainly, the various introductions furnished by Professor Cross are admirable for their fairness and insight. He does not attempt a panegyric of Sterne, as did Mr. Fitzgerald in the first edition of the _Life_, nor does he awkwardly overlay panegyric with censure, as these are found in the present revised form of that narrative; he recognises the errors of the sentimentalist, but he does not call them by exaggerated names. And he sees, too, the fundamental sincerity of the man, knowing that no great book was ever penned without that quality, whatever else might be missing. I think he will account it for service in a good cause if, as an essayist taking my material where it may be found, I try to draw a little closer still to the sly follower of Rabelais whom he has honoured by so elaborate a study.

Possibly Professor Cross does not recognise fully enough the influence of Sterne's early years on his character. It is indeed a vagrant and Shandean childhood to which the Rev. Mr. Laurence Sterne introduces us in the _Memoir_ written late in life for the benefit of his daughter Lydia. The father, a lieutenant in Handaside's regiment, passed from engagement to idleness, and from barrack to barrack, more than was the custom even in those unsettled days. At Clonmel, in the south of Ireland, November 24, 1713, Laurence was born, a few days after the arrival of his mother from Dunkirk. Other children had been given to the luckless couple, and were yet to be added, but here and there they were dropped on the wayside in pathetic graves, leaving in the end only two, the future novelist and his sister Catherine, who married a publican in London and became estranged from her brother by her "uncle's wickedness and her own folly"--says Laurence. Of the mother it is not necessary to say much. The difficulties of her life as a hanger-on in camps seem to have hardened her, and her temper ("clamorous and rapacious," he called it) was in all points unlike her son's. That Sterne neglected her brutally is a charge as old as Walpole's scandalous tongue, and Byron, taking his cue from thence, gave piquancy to the accusation by saying that "he preferred whining over a dead ass to relieving a living mother." Sterne's minute refutation of the slander may now be read at full length in a letter to the very uncle who set the tale agoing. The boy would seem to have taken the father's mercurial temperament, though not his physique:

The regiment [he writes] was sent to defend Gibraltar, at the siege, where my father was run through the body by Capt. Phillips, in a duel (the quarrel began about a goose!): with much difficulty he survived, though with an impaired constitution, which was not able to withstand the hardships it was put to; for he was sent to Jamaica, where he soon fell by the country fever, which took away his senses first, and made a child of him; and then, in a month or two, walking about continually without complaining, till the moment he sat down in an armchair, and breathed his last, which was at Port Antonio, on the north of the island. My father was a little smart man, active to the last degree in all exercises, most patient of fatigue and disappointments, of which it pleased God to give him full measure. He was, in his temper, somewhat rapid and hasty, but of a kindly, sweet disposition, void of all design; and so innocent in his own intentions, that he suspected no one; so that you might have cheated him ten times in a day, if nine had not been sufficient for your purpose.

Lieutenant Sterne died in 1731, and it would require but a few changes in the son's record to make it read like a page from _Henry Esmond_; the very texture of the language, the turn of the quizzical pathos, are Thackeray's.