Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 4. Naturalism in England

by Georg Brandes

And he makes the great poet, who was, like himself, unjustly exiled, exclaim;

'Tis the doom
Of spirits of my order to be rack'd
In life, to wear their hearts out, and consume
Their days in endless strife, and die alone."

Of Tasso Byron had already written. Even a superficial comparison of Goethe's Tasso with Byron's Lament of Tasso is sufficient to show us what a resistless attraction hopeless suffering had for Byron's imagination. Goethe takes Tasso the youth, the lover, the poet, and places him in the society of the beautiful women of the court of Ferrara, where, happy and unhappy, he is admired and humiliated. Byron takes Tasso alone, ruined, shut out from society, shut into the cell of a madhouse though he is quite sane, a prey to the cruelty of his former protectors:—

"I loved all solitude—but little thought
To spend I know not what of life, remote
From all communion with existence, save
The maniac and his tyrant;—had I been
Their fellow, many years ere this had seen
My mind like theirs corrupted to its grave.
But who hath seen me writhe, or heard me rave?
Perchance in such a cell we suffer more
Than the wreck'd sailor on his desert shore;
The world is all before him—mine is here,
Scarce twice the space they must accord my bier.
What though he perish, he may lift his eye,
And with a dying glance upbraid the sky;
I will not raise my own in such reproof,
Although 'tis clouded by my dungeon roof."

Of the court of Ferrara, a court where Lucrezia Borgia has her residence, a court where the passions and the cruelty of the Renaissance period flourish, Goethe makes a little German Weimar, where everything is ruled by the most refined humanitarianism of the eighteenth century; Byron is magnetically attracted by what he considers the revolting barbarity of the Duke of Ferrara, and his poem turns into a declamation against the injustice and tyranny of princes.

We have another description of tragic suffering, along with still more violent accusation—both, however, decidedly overdone—in The Two Foscari, a tragedy in which a father is compelled to sentence the son he loves to the agonies of the torture-chamber, and in which the son, who is the hero of the tragedy, is stretched on the rack during almost the whole duration of the play, and only rises from it to die of grief because he is banished. In The Two Foscari, as in his other tragedies, Byron, as if in defiance, follows the French fashion of strict adherence to the Aristotelian rules. In his conviction that this is the one right style, he risks the comical paradox, that England has hitherto possessed no drama.

It has created much surprise that Byron, who, like all the other English poets of the day, was a pronounced Naturalist—which means that he preferred the forest to the garden, the unsophisticated to the civilised human being, the original to the acquired language of passion—that this same Byron should have been such an enthusiastic admirer of Pope and of the small group of poets (including Samuel Rogers and Crabbe) who still paid homage to classical tradition, even to the extent of imitating the antique dramatic style.

The first reason for the admiration of Pope is to be sought in Byron's spirit of contradiction. The fact that the poets of that Lake School which he despised were continually reviling Pope, was in itself a sufficient reason for his exalting him to the skies, calling him the greatest of all English poets, and declaring that he would willingly himself defray the expense of erecting a monument to him in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey, from which, as a Catholic, he was excluded. Secondly, we have to remember that the traditions of Harrow never lost their influence over Byron; and at Harrow Pope had always been held up as the model poet. A third thing to be remembered is Byron's own great deficiency in critical acumen, as an instance of which we may take his remark to Lady Blessington that Shakespeare owed half his fame to his low birth. There still remain the predisposing circumstances—that Pope was deformed, and in spite of his deformity had a beautiful head; that he did not belong to the Established Church; that he was the poet of good society; and that his deformity begot in him a certain satirical gloom—all things in which Byron sympathised with him. And, lastly, we have Byron's personal bias (possibly attributable to his Norman descent) towards rhetoric of the style peculiar to the Latin races.

The circumstance that Byron championed the art theories of a past age, whilst he in everything else belonged to the party of progress, produces a certain likeness between him and Armand Carrel, who also remained faithful to antiquated classicism in literature, though he held the most emancipated views in politics and religion. As both of them adopted the standpoint of eighteenth century France in most matters intellectual and spiritual, it was not unnatural that they should also conform to it in the only domain in which it was a conventional standpoint, namely, that of belles-lettres. Certain it is that his theoretical caprices had a baneful influence on Byron's Italian dramas. These consist of monologues and declamation. Byron's genius and Countess Guiccioli's patriotism combined did not suffice to communicate to them more than a very meagre quantum of poetic inspiration.

But during the production of Cain and Sardanapalus the young Countess was what it was her desire to be, Byron's Muse.