Chapter 15

It is for this reason--for the reason that he expressed so completely in his wayward and imperious manner the natural feelings of normal youthfulness--that he became in his own day so legendary and symbolic a personage, and that he has become in ours a sort of flaming myth. He would never have become all this; he would never have stirred the fancy of the masses of people as he has; if there were not in his temperament something essentially simple, human, and within the comprehension of quite ordinary minds.

It might indeed be maintained that what Oscar Wilde is to the rarer and more perverse minority, Byron is to the solid majority of downright simple philistines.

The average British or American "plain blunt man" regards, and always will regard, such writers as Shelley and Poe and Verlaine and Wilde with a certain uneasy suspicion. These great poets must always seem to him a little weird and morbid and apart from common flesh and blood. He will be tempted to the end to use in reference to them the ambiguous word "degenerate." They strike him as alien and remote. They seem to have no part or lot in the world in which he lives. He suspects them of being ingrained immoralists and free-lovers. Their names convey to his mind something very sinister, something dangerous to the foundations of society.

But the idea of Byron brings with it quite different associations. The sins of Byron seem only a splendid and poetic apotheosis of such aperson's own sins. The rebelliousness of Byron seems a rebelliousness not so much deliberate and intellectual as instinctive and impulsive. It seems a normal revolt against normal restrictions. The ordinary man understands it and condones it, remembering the fires of his own youth.

Besides, Byron was a lord.

Goethe declared to Eckermann that what irritated many people against Byron was the power and pride of his personality--the fact that his personality stood out in so splendid and emphatic a way.

Goethe was right. The brilliance of Byron's personality is a thing which causes curious annoyance to certain types of mind. But these minds are not the normal ones of common intelligence. They are minds possessed of the sort of intellectual temper naturally antagonistic to reckless youth. They are the Carlyles and the Merediths of that spiritual and philosophical vision to which the impassioned normality of Byron with his school-boy ribaldry must always appear ridiculous.

I believe it will be found that those to whom the idea of Byron's brilliant and wayward personality brings exquisite pleasure are, in the first place, quite simple minds, and, in the second place, minds of a disillusioned and un-ethical order who have grown weary of "deep spiritual thinkers," and are ready to enjoy, as a refreshing return to the primitive emotions, this romantic swashbucklerism which proves so annoying to earnest modern thought.

How like a sudden reverberation of the old immortal spirit of romance, the breath of whose saddest melancholy seems sweeter than our happiness, is that clear-toned song of passion's exhaustion which begins

"We'll go no more a-roving By the light of the moon"

and which contains that magnificent verse,

"For the sword outwears the sheath, And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe, And love itself have rest."

It is extraordinary the effect which poetry of this kind has upon us when we come upon it suddenly, after a long interval, in the crowded pages, say, of some little anthology.

I think the pleasure which it gives us is due to the fact that it is so entirely sane and normal and natural; so solidly and massively within the circle of our average apprehension; so expressive of what the common flesh and blood of our elemental humanity have come to feel as permanent in their passions and reactions. It gives us a thrilling shock of surprise when we come upon it unexpectedly--this kind of thing; the more so because the poetry we have grown accustomed to, in our generation, is so different from this; so mystical and subjective, so remote from the crowd, so dim with the trailing mists of fanciful ambiguity.

It is very unfortunate that one "learned by heart," as a child, so much of Byron's finest poetry.

I cannot imagine a more exciting experience than a sudden discovery at this present hour, with a mind quite new and fresh to its resounding grandeur, of that poem, in the Hebrew Melodies, about Sennacherib.

"And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee."

Have not those lines the very wonder and terror and largeness of ancient wars?

"And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide, And thro' it there rolled not the breath of his pride, And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf!"

Our modern poets dare not touch the sublime naivete of poetry like that! Their impressionist, imagist, futurist theories make them too self-conscious. They say to themselves--"Is that word a 'cliche' word? Has that phrase been used several times before? Have I been carefully and precisely _original_ in this? Is that image clear-cut enough? Have I reverted to the 'magic' of Verlaine and Mallarme and Mr. Yeats? Do I suggest the 'cosmic emotion' of Walt Whitman'?"

It is this terror of what they call "cliche words" which utterly prevents them from writing poetry which goes straight to our heart like Byron's; poetry which refreshes our jaded epicurean senses with a fine renaissance of youth.

Their art destroys them. Their art enslaves them. Their art lames and cripples them with a thousand meticulous scruples.

Think what it would be, in this age, suddenly to come upon a poet who could write largely and carelessly, and with a flaming divine fire, about the huge transactions of life; about love and war and the great throbbing pulses of the world's historic events! They cannot do it--our poets--they cannot do it; and the reason of their inability is their over-intellectuality, their heavily burdened artistic conscience. They are sedentary people, too, most unhealthily sedentary, ourmoderns who write verse; sedentary young people, whose environment is the self-conscious Bohemia of artificial Latin Quarters. They are too clever, too artistic, too egotistic. They are too afraid of one another; too conscious of the derisive flapping of the goose-wings of the literary journal! They are not proud enough in their personal individuality to send the critics to the devil and go their way with a large contempt. They set themselves to propitiate the critics by the wit of technical novelty and to propitiate their fellow craftsmen by avoiding the inspiration of the past.

They do not write poetry for the pleasure of writing it. They write poetry in order that they may be called poets. They aim at originality instead of sweeping boldly ahead and being content to be themselves as God made them.

I am strongly of opinion that much of the admiration lavished on these versifiers is not due to our enjoyment of the poetry which they write--not, I mean, of the sheer poetic elements in it--but to our interest in the queer words they dig up out of the archives of philological bric-a-brac, to our astonishment at their erotic extravagances, to our satisfaction at being reminded of all the superior shibboleths of artistic slang, the use of which and the understanding of which prove us to be true initiates in the "creative world" and no poor forlorn snakes of outworn tradition.

Our modern poets cannot get our modern artists out of their heads. The insidious talk of these sly artists confuses the simplicity of their natural minds. They are dominated by art; whereas the real sister of the muse of poetry is not "art" at all, but music.

They do not see, these people, that the very carelessness of a great poet like Byron is the inevitable concomitant of his genius; I would go so far as to call his carelessness the mother of his genius and its guardian angel.

I cannot help thinking, too, that if the artistic self-consciousness of our generation spoils its free human pleasure in great poetry, the theories of the academic historians of literature do all they can to make us leave the poetry of the past in its deep grave. It seems to me that of all futile and uninteresting things what is called "the study of literature" is the very worst.

To meddle with such a preposterous matter at all damns a person, in my thinking, as a supreme fool. And yet this is, par excellence, the sort of tediousness in which devotees of culture complacently wallow. As if it mattered where Byron slips in "the great Renaissance of Wonder"; or where Rossetti drifts by, in the portentous "Pre-Raphaelite Movement"!

It is strange to me how boys and girls, brought up upon this "study of literature," can ever endure to see the look of a line of poetry again! Most of them, it seems, _can_ hardly bear that shock; and be it far from me to blame them. I should surmise that the mere names of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, etc., would fall upon their ears with a dreariness of memory like the tolling of chapel-bells.

They are queer birds, too, these writers of commentaries upon literature.

At one time in my life I myself absorbed such "critical literature" with a morbid avidity, as if it had been a drug; and a drug it is--a drug dulling one to all fine and fresh sensations--a drug from the effects of which I am only now, at this late hour, beginning slowly to recover. They set one upon a completely wrong track, bringing forward what is unessential and throwing what is essential into thebackground. Dear heavens! how well I recall those grey discriminations. Wordsworth was the fellow who hit upon the idea of the _anima mundi._ Shelley's "philosophy of life" differed from Wordsworth's in that _his_ universal spirit was a thing of pure Love, whereas the other's was a matter of pure Thought.

Pure Love! Pure Thought! Was there ever such petrifying of the evasive flame? "Words! Words! Words!" I suspect that the book the sweet Prince was reading when he met Polonius in the passage was a book of essays on the poets.

The worst of this historical-comical-philosophical way of going to work is that it leaves one with the feeling that poetry is a sort of intellectual game, entirely removed from the jostling pressure of actual life, and that poets when once dead are shoved into their academic pigeon-holes to be labelled like things under glass cases. The person who can rattle off such descriptive labels the quickest is the person of culture. Thus history swallows up poetry; thus the "comparative method" swallows up history; and the whole business is snatched away from the magical flow of real life and turned into the dreariness of a mausoleum. How refreshing, how salutary, to turn from all thoughts as to what Byron's "place in literature" was to such thrilling poetry as

"She walks in beauty like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies, And all that's best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes--"

or to such sonorous lines full of the reverberating echoes of pent-up passion as those which begin

"There is none of Beauty's daughters."

One has only to recall the way these simple careless outbursts have burned themselves in upon one's lips, when one's feelings were stirred to the old tune, to realise how great a poet Byron was.

"Fare thee well and, if forever, Still forever fare thee well!"

Can such things ever grow "stale and rung-upon," however much the chilly hand of a pedantic psychology seeks to brush the bloom away from the wings of the bird of paradise?

Those poems to the mysterious Thyrza, can any modern eroticism equal them, for large and troubled abandonment; natural as gasping human speech and musical as the murmur of deep waters?

Byron is frankly and outrageously the poet of _sentiment._ This is good. This is what one craves for in vain in modern verse. The infernal seriousness of our grave youngsters and their precious psychological irony make them terrified of any approach to sentiment. They leave such matters with supreme contempt to the poor little devils who write verses for the local newspapers. They are too clever to descend to sentiment. It is their affair to show us the absurdity of sentiment.

And yet the world is full of this thing. It has the rising sap of a thousand springs in its heart. It has the "big rain" of the suppressed tears of a hundred generations in its sobbing music.

It is easy to say that Byron's sentiment was a pose.

The precise opposite of this is the truth. It is our poetic cleverness, our subjective imagery and cosmic irony, which is the pose; not his frank and boyish expression of direct emotion.

We write poetry for the sake of writing poetry. He wrote to give vent to the passions of his heart.

We compose a theme upon "love" and dedicate it to any suitable young woman the colour of whose eyes suits the turn of our metaphors. He loved first and wrote poetry afterwards--as the occasion demanded.

That is why his love-poetry is so full of vibrant sincerity, so rich in blood, so natural, so careless, so sentimental.

That is why there is a sort of conversational ease about his love-poetry, and here and there lapses into what, to an artistic sense, might seem bathos, absurdity, or rhetoric. Lovers are always a little absurd; and the fear of absurdity is not a sign of deep feeling but of the absence of all feeling.

Every one of Byron's most magnificent love-lyrics has its actual circumstantial cause and impulse in the adventures of his life. He does not spin out vague wordy platonic rhapsodies upon love-in-general. He addresses a particular person, just as Burns did--just as Shakespeare did--and his poems are, so to speak, thrilled with the excitement of the great moment's tumultuous pulses, scalded with the heat of its passionate tears.

These moments pass, of course. One need not be derisively cynical over that. Infatuation succeeds infatuation. Dream succeeds dream. The loyalty of a life-long love was not his. His life ended indeed before youth's desperate experiments were over, before the reaction set in. But the sterner mood had begun.

"Tread these reviving passions down, Unworthy manhood. Unto thee Indifferent should the smile or frown Of Beauty be."

And the lines end--his last--with that stoical resignation in the presence of a soldier's fate which gives to the close of his adventurous enterprise on behalf of an oppressed Hellenic world such a gallant dignity.

"Then look around and choose thy ground, And take thy rest."

If these proud personal touches, of which there are so many scattered through his work, offend our artistic modern sense we must remember that the same tone, the same individual confession of quite personal emotion, is to be found in Dante and Milton and Goethe.

The itching mock-modesty of the intellectual altruist, ashamed to commit himself to the personal note, is not an indication of a great nature. It is rather a sign of a fussy self-consciousness under the eyes of impertinent criticism.

What drives the modern philosopher to jeer at Byron is really a sort of envy of his splendid and irresponsible personality, that personality whose demonic energy is so radiant with the beautiful glamour of youth.

And what superb strength and high romance there are in certain of his verses when the magnificent anger of the moment has its way with him!

Fill high the bowl with Samian wine! On Suli's rock and Parga's shore Exists the remnant of a line Such as our Doric mothers bore--

No one can help confessing that poetry of this kind, "simple, sensuous and passionate"--to use the great Miltonic definition--possesses, for all its undeniable _rhetoric,_ a large and high poetic value.

And at its best, the poetry of Byron is not mere rhetoric. Rhetoric undoubtedly is there. His mind was constantly, like most simple minds when touched to large issues, betrayed by the sweet treachery of rhetoric; but I feel confident that any really subtle critic of the delicate differences between one poetic vein and another, must feel, though he might not be able to express the fineness of the distinction, that there is something here--some breath, some tone, some air, some atmosphere, some royal and golden gesture--which is altogether beyond the reach of all mere eloquence, and sealed with the indescribable seal of poetry.

This real poetic element in Byron--I refer to something over and above his plangent rhetoric--arrests us with all the greater shock of sudden possession, for the very reason that it is so carelessly, so inartistically, so recklessly flung out.

He differs in this, more than in anything else, from our own poetic contemporaries. Our clever young poets know their business so appallingly well. They know all about the theories of poetry: they know what is to be said for Free Verse, for Imagism, for Post-Impressionism: they know how the unrhymed Greek chorus lends itself to the lyrical exigencies of certain moods: they know how wonderful the Japanese are, and how interesting certain Indian cadences may be: they know the importance of expressing the Ideal of Democracy, of Femininity, of Evolution, of Internationalism. There really is nothing in the whole field of poetic criticism which they do not know--except the way to persuade the gods to give us genius, when genius has been refused!

Byron, on the contrary, knows absolutely nothing of any of these things. "When he thinks he is a child"; when he criticises he is a child; when he philosophises, theorises, _mysticizes,_ he is a hopeless child. A vast amount of his poetry, for all its swing and dash and rush, might have been written by a lamentably inferior hand.

We come across such stuff to-day; not among the literary circles, but in the poets' corners of provincial magazines. What is called "Byronic sentiment," so derided now by the clever young psychologists who terrorise our literature, has become the refuge of timid old-fashioned people, quite bewildered and staggered by new developments.

I sympathise with such old-fashioned people. The pathetic earnestness of an elderly commercial traveller I once met on the Pere Marquette Railway who assured me that Byron was "some poet" remains in my mind as a much more touching tribute to the lordly roue than all the praise of your Arnolds and Swinburnes.

He is indeed "some poet." He is the poet for people who feel the magic of music and the grandeur of imagination, without being able to lay their finger on the more recondite nuances of "creative work," without so much as ever having heard of "imagism."

I have spent whole evenings in passionate readings of "Childe Harold" and the "Poems to Thyrza" with gentle Quaker ladies and demure old maids descended from the Pilgrim Fathers, and I have always left such Apollonian prayer-meetings with a mind purged from the cant of cleverness; washed and refreshed in the authentic springs of the Muses.

So few lords--when you come to think of it--write poetry at all, that it is interesting to note the effect of aristocratic blood upon the style of a writer.

Personally I think its chief effect is to produce a certain magnanimous indifference to the meticulous niceties of the art. We say "drunk as a lord"; well--it is something to see what a person will do, who is descended from Robert Bruce's Douglas, when it is a question of this more heavenly intoxication. Aristocratic blood shows itself in poetry by a kind of unscrupulous contempt for gravity. It refuses to take seriously the art which it practises.

It plays the part of the grand amateur. It is free from bourgeois earnestness. It is this, I suppose, which is so irritating to the professional critic. If you can write poetry, so to speak, with your left hand, in intervals of war and love and adventure, between rescuing girls from sacks destined for the waters of the Bosphorus and swimming the length of the Venetian Grand Canal and recruiting people to fight for Hellenic freedom, you are doing something that ought not to be allowed. If other men of action, if other sportsmen and pleasure-seekers and travellers and wandering free-lances were able to sit down in any cosmopolitan cafe in Cairo or Stamboul and knock off immortal verses in the style of Byron --verses with no "philosophy" for us to expound, no technique for us to analyse, no "message" for us to interpret, no aesthetic subtleties for us to unravel, no mystical orientation for us to track out, what is there left for a poor sedentary critic to do? Our occupation is gone. We must either enjoy romance for its own sake in a frank, honest, simple manner; confessing that Byron was "some poet" and letting it go at that; or we must explain to the world, as many of us do, that Byron was a thoroughly bad writer. A third way of dealing with this unconscionable boy, who scoffed at Wordsworth and Southey and insisted that Pope was a great genius, is the way some poor camp-followers of the Moral Ideal have been driven to follow; the way, namely, of making him out to be a great leader in the war of the liberation of humanity, and a great interpreter of the wild magic of nature.

I must confess I cannot see Byron in either of these lights. He scoffs at kings and priests, certainly; he scoffs at Napoleon; he scoffs at the pompous self-righteousness of his own race; he scoffs at religion and sex and morality in that humorous, careless, indifferent "public-school" way which is so salutary and refreshing; but when you ask for any serious devotion to the cause of Liberty, for any definite Utopian outlines of what is to be built up in the world's future, you get little or nothing, except resounding generalities and conventional rhetoric.

Nor are those critics very wise who insist on laying stress upon Byron's contributions to the interpretation of Nature.

He could write "How the big rain comes dancing to the earth!" and his flashing, fitful, sun-smouldering pictures of European rivers and plains and hills and historic cities have their large and generous charm.

But beyond this essentially human and romantic, attitude to Nature there is just nothing at all.

"Roll on, thou deep and dark-blue Ocean, roll!"

I confess I caught a keener thrill of pleasure from that all-too-famous line when I suddenly heard it uttered by one of those garrulous ghosts in Mr. Masters's Spoon River cemetery, than I ever did when in childhood they made me learn it.

But, for all that, though it is not an easy thing to put into words, there is a certain grandiose and sonorous beauty, fresh and free and utterly unaffected, about these verses, and many others in "Childe Harold."

As for those long plays of Byron's, and those still longer narrative poems, nothing will induce me to read a line of them again. They have a singularly dusty smell to me; and when I think of them even, I suffer just such a withering sensation of ineffable boredom as I used to experience waiting in a certain ante-room in Tunbridge Wells where lived an aged retired general. I associate them with illustrated travels in Palestine.

How Goethe could read "Manfred" with any pleasure passes my comprehension. "Cain" has a certain charm, I admit; but of all forms of all literature the thing which is called Poetic Drama seems to me the most dreary. If poets cannot write for the stage they had better confine themselves to honest straightforward odes and lyrics.

But it is no use complaining. There is a sort of fate which drives people into this arid path. I sometimes feel as though both Imagination and Humour fled away from the earth when a modern poet takes pen to compose Poetic Drama!