Byron in Italy.
Byron next goes southward, to riotous life in Venice; where—whether in tradesmen’s houses or in palaces upon the Grand Canal, or in country villas upon the Euganean hills—he defies priests and traditions, and order, and law, and decency.
To this period belongs, probably, the conception, if not the execution, of many of those dramas[73]—as non-playable as ever those of Tennyson—unequal, too, but with passages scattered here and there of great beauty; masterly aggregation of words smoking with passion, and full of such bullet-like force of expression as only he could command; but there is no adequate blending of parts to make either stately or well-harmonized march of events toward large and definite issues.
Out of the Venetian welter came, too, the fourth canto of Childe Harold and the opening parts of Don Juan. The mocking, rollicking, marvellous Vision of Judgment, whose daring license staggered even Murray and Moore, and which scarified poor Southey, belongs to a later phase of his Italian career. It is angry and bitter—and has an impish laughter in it—of a sort which our friend Robert Ingersoll might write, if his genius ran to poetry. Cain had been of a bolder tone—perhaps loftier; with much of the argument that Milton puts into the mouth of Satan, amplified and rounded, and the whole illuminated by passages of wonderful poetic beauty.
His scepticism, if not so out-spoken and full of plump negatives as that of Shelley, is far more mocking and bitter. If Shelley was rich in negations—so far as relates to orthodox belief—he was also rich in dim, shadowy conceptions of a mysterious eternal region, with faith and love reigning in it—toward which in his highest range of poetic effusion he makes approaches with an awed and a tremulous step. But with Byron—even where his words carry full theistic beliefs—the awe and the tremulous approaches are wanting.