THE BYRON MEMORIAL.
I T is not at first sight quite clear why any one should want to put up a Memorial of Byron in London. Byron's claim to fame, and to the homage of the world as well as of his countrymen, is that he was a great poet, whose work widened the intelligence if it did not add greatly to the happiness of all mankind, and especially of all English-speaking men. Whatever the defects of his character or the melancholy of his career—a career which ended, as Mr. Disraeli reminded his audience, at thirty-six, before he had ceased to be young—Byron had in him genius in no stinted measure, the power which neither age, nor experience, nor culture can give,—the power of uttering a cry to which all men must listen ; and he so used it that his songs, whatever their motive or their moral effect, are possessions to his countrymen for ever- more. We cannot, it is true, admit for one moment what Mr. Disraeli tried to hint, that Byron's sensualism was boyish, or his irreligion a scepticism of a kind to which the world has come since his death partly round. On the contrary, his sensualism is that of the worn voluptuary ; his irreligion that of the man who seeks in fatalism or defiance a refuge from the possibility of despair. Byron was in some moods a mere Necessitarian of the old Greek type,—that is, a Necessitarian who believed or felt Necessity to be in some mysterious way hostile to the human race, more hostile than a Creator could be ; and in others, he was what Proudhon was in social politics, the poet of the philosophy of Revolt. Neither as sensualist nor as theologian is he deserving of much honour, and it is not as either that he will live for ever, whether honoured or not. It is as Poet, as one of the minute number of men who have pos- sessed and used „the power of expressing living thoughts in fiery numbers, or of pouring out,—as he could do, rarely as he employed his sweeter gifts,—" a rain of melody," that he is to be remem- bered, and in that capacity he can have but one true memorial, —his work. He loved Italy, and he died for Greece, and to Greece and Italy those circumstances make him dear ; but to Englishmen his personalitY in its evil and good is little, and his poetry all. Englishmen will no more remember him the longer because he has a statue in London than they will forget Shake- speare the sooner because he has none. While Childe Harold de- scribes and Hamlet meditates, neither poet--though we suggest no equality between them—will be overlooked, nor can any building, or any monument, or any statue make the glory of either wider or more bright. To hope to recall the memory of Byron to men's minds by an edifice in his honour is as vain as to hope to recall the memory of melody by a wreath of laurel granted to its composer's bust. It is true, Byron had while alive the advantage, or the misfortune, that his face suggested truly the character of his genius—its incisiveness, its harmony, and its cynicism—and could we preserve that face in marble in all its scornful beauty, the statue might be so separate among statues that the ignorant, gazing on it, would wonder and inquire. But it is not for the ignorant that statues exist, nor, if it were, is there much hope that in the present condition of the sculptor's art in England, and in our line-effacing climate, a statue paid for by subscription will long suggest to the observer thoughts which only Byron could raise. And it is by the separativeness and applicability of the thought it suggests to the spectator that a memorial in marble should first of all be judged. A building, again, whatever its merit, will lack the specialty of the statue, and we may rely on it that neither will add one iota either to the fame or the appreciation of Byron. He will live without marble.
Nevertheless, the reasons for a Memorial outweigh the reasons or the doubts which press in the other scale. A memorial, if but adequate and national, is the concrete criticism of a nation, stamping with its recognition the greatness, be it in poetry, or in art, or in deed, by which its children have been illustrated. The world, whether better or not, is at least the larger for any great poet, and the English world is specially the larger for this very one. Its intellectual temptation is to be Philistine, to see in external law the only rule of action, to elevate respect for the Usual into a cult, to refuse not only to admire—which may occasionally be right—but to recognise the existence of originality, of a mind, or a philosophy, or a career not bound by the code of the accus- tomed. Byron passed his life and mostly used his powers in outraging that English code, now in rising above it, now in sink- ing below it, but always in proclaiming that he held it naught,—a mere fetter forged by man for himself, which ought to be con- temned by any one with the strength to rend it asunder. Too often he contemned the code, while still believing it righteous, merely because it was law ; but whether his impulse was evil or good, its effect has always been to compel Englishmen to recon- sider the grounds of a faith which, when held as if it were divine, intensifies their bad tendency to intellectual content. For them to recognise genius amid lawlessness, to perceive that there may be greatness amid rebellion, to understand that there are souls with impulses other than their own, must be beneficial, and all the more so because their recognition is expressed after half a century of reflection. No momentary enthusiasm for a personality has entered into it. Byron was reviled while he lived, and has been traduced since he died ; his character, whatever the inner truth of it may have been, was in no sense English ; and if, after fifty years, Englishmen pay him a special homage, their impulse springs from admiration of nothing accidental. He is to-day to them Byron, and neither the voluptuary noble nor the martyr of Missolonghi. The day when imitation of Byron's career could be encouraged by acknowledgment of his genius has long since passed away, passed away like the enthusiasm for Greece, and it is well, by recognising it as nationally and completely as it can, that this generation should do its little possible to tempt genius to display itself. There is not too much of the divine fire among us, and the in- creased belief which ought to arise from a tribute to Byron that genius, in spite of all prepossessions, even now, and even among Englishmen, does lead to immortality, does tend, in the strange medley called human nature, to encourage its possessors to exer- tion. Byron will live without marble, as we said ; but marble, though it cannot make, will help to develop, not, let us hope, new Byrons, but men who will use to less doubtful ends the glorious gift he owned. They will not, we fear, possess it in the same measure, will not be able by the divine sweetness of song to add mew charm to memories like those of Greece and Italy, to pour fresh glow upon the brilliance of nature, or to make of a harsh philosophy a music; but they may use what they have, be it little or much, in greater freedom, because their countrymen after fifty years have proclaimed that this man, for all his lawlessness, was great. What Byron said of himself, and Lord Rosalyn so aptly quoted, is true, and men are the better always for recognising any truth :—
“But I.have lived, and have not lived in vain : My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire, And my frame perish even in conquering pain; But there is that within me which shall tire Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire ; Something unearthly, which they deem not of, Like the remember'd tone of a mute lyre, Shall on their soften'd spirits sink, and move In hearts all rocky now the late remorse of love."
As to the form of the Memorial, we incline to a monument, rather than to the statue. A statue in the air in our climate perishes or grows black, and a Byron blackened will be too Mephistophelean a figure. A statue to him will always, it is true, seem to his devotees the most fitting tribute, because, as we have said already, face and figure—down even, as Macaulay remarked, to his clubfoot—bore so distinctively the impress of Lila distinctive genius ; but the statue can be enshrined within the monument, and there retain its whiteness. Scott is fortunate in Edinburgh in his canopy of stone. One use at least of memorials to the memorable is to increase the wsthetic beauty of the cities which erect them, and in London there is no possibility of a statue which shall be an added beauty to the spaces round it. Our climate, such as we make it—for the London atmosphere cleansed of smoke would be as clear as northern atmosphere may be—is fatal to statues, and our national genius is not for the art which was born in the climate Byron celebrated and loved. Even if the commis- sion were not jobbed—quite an unlikely supposition—and were finished in the life-time of the generation which had given it—an equally sanguine hope—the statue within five years would be one more added to the long list of London disappointments. Black with smoke and roughened with rain, the figure would soon represent one more of the heroes whom Englishmen have commemorated, but
whom the sky has forbidden to be distinguishable. Let the work be done, if done at all, so that Byron might have borne to see it, and not be inspired to scorn, as he would have scorned, the cultured mob which, even when gifted with power to admire him, could, in that momentary flash of insight, produce in his honour only that. If he must be statuefied, let him stand, the modern Pan, among the trees of Hyde Park ; but there ought to be the power somewhere to do better than this; to raise, say in the middle of Park Crescent, among the trees that end the broad upward sweep of Portland Place—in some ways, perhaps, the best site in London—a fane a hundred feet high, under which the poet may sit enshrined,—a fane which all the world may see as they should see Byron's fane, when, with much labour and disgust, they have rounded the impeding, lumbering brutality of the Langharn Hotel. An American hotel, barring with its cloddish weight the sight of Byron, glorified in a place he might himself have chosen, a place where, standing among trees, he can look down on a capital,—there will be sug- gestiveness, at least, in that selection of a place, which, neverthe- less, lacks no quality essential to the work.
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