Like vaporous shapes half seen.”
And such mysteries and vaporous shapes run through all his poetic world. He wanders, with that rarely fine gift of rhythmic speech, as wide away from the compact sordid world—upon which Byron always sets foot with a ringing tread—as ever Spenser in his chase of rainbow creations. Yet there were penetrative sinuous influences about that young poet—defiant of law and wrapt in his pursuit of mysteries—which may well have given foreign touches of color to Byron’s Manfred or to his Prometheus. At any rate, these two souls lay quietly for a time, warped together—like two vessels windbound under mountain shelter.
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.
Shelley Again.
Shelley went back from Switzerland to a home for a year or more, beyond Windsor, near to Bisham—amid some of the loveliest country that borders upon the Thames. Here he wrote that strange poem of Laon and Cythna (or Revolt of Islam, as it was called on its re-issue), which, so far as one can gather meaning from its redundant and cumulated billows of rich, poetic language, tells how a nation was kindled to freedom by the strenuous outcry of some young poet-prophet—how he seems to win, and his enemies become like smoking flax—how the dreadful fates that beset us, and crowd all worldly courses from their best outcome, did at last trample him down; not him only, but the one dearest to him—who is a willing victim—and bears him off into the shades of night. Throughout, Laon the Victim is the poet’s very self; and the very self appears again—with what seems to the cautious, world-wise reader a curious indiscretion—in the pretty jumping metre of “Rosalind and Helen”:—