Are all thy playthings snatched away?
Byron is one of the few poets whose life it was ever necessary to write. His acts were representative; from his Harrow meditations on a tomb to his death on the superb pedestal of Missolonghi, they are symbolic. His life explains nearly everything in his poetry. The life and the poetry together make an incomparable whole. Most lives of poets stand to their work as a block of unhewn marble stands to the statue finished and unveiled; if the marble is not as much forgotten as was Pygmalion’s when Galatea breathed and sighed. Byron’s poetry without his life is not finished; but with it, it is like a statue by Michael Angelo or Rodin that is actually seen to grow out of the material. He was a man before he was a poet. Other poets may once have been men; they are not so now. We read their lives after their poetry and we forget them. It is by their poetry that they survive—blithe or pathetic or glorious, but dim, ghosts who are become a part of the silence of libraries and lovers’ hearts. They are dead but for the mind that enjoys and the voice that utters their verse. I had not the smallest curiosity about Mr. Swinburne when he was alive and visible. When I think of him, I think of Rosamund speaking to Eleanor or Tristram to Isoud; he has given up his life to them. But with Byron it is different. If all record of him could be destroyed, more than half of him would be lost. For I think that it is upon the life and the portraits and the echoes that are still reverberating in Europe, that we found our belief that he is a great man. Without them he would be an interesting rhetorician, perhaps little more. There are finer poems than his “Mazeppa,” but the poet is the equal of that wild lover and of the great King who slept while the tale was told.
And Shelley, too, is an immortal sentiment. Men may forget to repeat his verses; they can never be as if Shelley had never been. He is present wherever love and rapture are. He is a part of all high-spirited and pure audacity of the intellect and imagination, of all clean-handed rebellion, of all infinite endeavour and hope. The remembered splendour of his face is more to us than Parliaments; one strophe of his odes is more nourishing than a rich man’s gold....
Under those oaks in May I could wish to see these men walking together, to see their gestures and brave ways. It is the poet there who all but creates them for me. But only one can I fairly see because I have seen him alive and speaking. Others have sent up their branches higher among the stars and plunged their roots deeper among the rocks and waters. But he and Chaucer and Jonson and Byron have obviously much plain humanity in their composition. They have a brawn and friendliness not necessarily connected with poetry. We use no ceremony—as we do with some other poets—with Morris when we read—
The days have slain the days, and the seasons have gone by,
And brought me the summer again; and here on the grass I lie,
As erst I lay and was glad ere I meddled with right and with wrong.
Or the end of “Thunder in the Garden”—
Then we turned from the blossoms, and cold were they grown: