LORD BYRON'S POETRY.
[70 THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR."] SIR,—I rather wonder at the line you have taken about Byron in the Spectator. Surely he was a man made up of contradictions ; there certainly were in him malignity, a blinding sensuality, theatrical affectations and mystifications. But with all this there was sym- pathy with much that was noble and generous, and in spite of sel- fish perversity there must have been a very rare loveableness, as his most intimate personal friends agree. Lord Broughton, for instance, his most intimate friend, would hardly hear a word against him, so fond was he of him. Lord Broughton personally was all that was kind, and he could never have felt as he did, and believed as he did, with regard to the purely malignant fiend which your contributor has painted.
Nor can I see that an impartial study of his works justifies at all such a conclusion. But then, I suppose, we shall not agree about the works. Manfred, Chinon, and the Corsair, in spite of clap- trap, seem to me to have a unique flavour, a verve, and a movement in parts of them which we have not had since. And then, as to the claptrap, what was sheer and sickening humbug in imitators seems to me not to have been this mainly in Byron. There was a sense of guilt, a consciousness of secret, unrevealed wrong, of dark, overmastering destiny, a devouring misery, in that man, which casts a lurid glow as from the pit over all he writes. But had he been wholly malignant, there would have been little of this ghastliness, which comes of light striving with a smothering dark- ness. This seems to me only a little less true of Don Juan itself (of course, his greatest work, by far, as you say). If the mockery be diabolic, it is generally more Miltonic than Mephistophelic ; or even if this were not true, there are revulsions of feeling and aspira- tion which, at least in Don Juan, are utterly genuine and sincere, and which proceed from the "angel," e.g., the description of Aurora Raby. Even in the bitterest passages there breathes through it a wail of weary, unsatisfied despair, very different from the mere arid, withering blast of frigid, malignant disbelief.
One thing that draws me to him is the intensity of enjoyment
and love for nature which he often displays. It is too genuine to be mistaken. And yet he is far from always subtle and apprecia- tive in his intercourse with her. But of her broad effects, of her louder, more appealing, and demonstrative moods, there never was a finer painter. That is why I cannot sympathize with your con- tempt for Childe Harold. There seem to me to be unrivalled de- scriptions, and broodings mingled with a sense of natural glory, there. Surely those opening lines of the Corsair would alone be sufficient to embalm the poem, thin and tedious as much of it unquestionably is.
"O'er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,"
—upon those lines you bound along, breathing life as upon the very waves of the sea. The intense exhilaration and passionate enjoy- ment of them communicates itself electrically. And what do you say to the thunderstorm in Jura, to the ocean-apostrophe of Childe Harold?
That Byron's vision and emotion are often powerful enough to whirl him so irresistibly along as seriously to impede that dainty metrical picking of one's steps, now deemed the be-all and end-all of poetry, is likely enough. With him sight, feeling, imagination impel to rhythmical utterance from within according to the fashion of less enlightened ages ; he is not so enamoured with his own exquisite singing as to make it the end, instead of the medium where- into sight, feeling, and imagination may in disjointed kaleidoscope fragments be privileged occasionally to enter, or not at all, as the case may be.
He was not cunning to construct intricate word-altars into which the fire from heaven might fall afterwards if it pleased, word-altars into which too often (as was to be expected) it will not fall at all, though the priests of Ashtaroth dance and cry aloud, and cut themselves with knives.
But whatever his sins and his deficiencies (they are marked and many), tempest within and tempest without found in Byron a poetic organ of grand compass such as assuredly they have not found either in Wordsworth or in Mr. Tennyson.—I am, Sir, &c.,
A CONSTANT READER.
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