None Arose Among The Moderns More Potent
To Accompany Poetry With Action,
None More Piously Inclined
To Sing The Glories and Adventures
Of our People.”
An epigraph, I fear, involving some poetic licence. True, of course, that no modern poet’s life or work, save Browning’s, is so interpenetrated with Italy. But Byron’s amateur relation with the futile Italian conspirators of the generation before Garibaldi was a somewhat shadowy contact with action, however generous his impatient ardour for Italy’s resurrection. Vaporous, too, was the conspiracy of “The Liberal” to pour new wine into the old British beer-bottle. But even his membership of the Greek committee or the equipment of a bellicose brig against Turkey, or his abortive appointment as Commander-in-Chief in an expedition against Lepanto, scarcely brings Byron into the category of men of action. He had never the chance of sloughing Hamlet for Cæsar or even for the Corsair. It was not even given him to die in battle, as he so ardently desired in the last verse of his last poem. And though his Hellenic fervour redeemed his closing days from despair and degradation, still the fever which slew him at Missolonghi hardly warrants the claim that he gave his life for Greece. Had his microbe met him in marshy Ravenna instead of marshy Missolonghi, would it have been said that he died for Italy? For aught we know his sea voyage from Genoa to Greece may have lengthened his life.
Moreover it was as an ideologue that Byron plunged into affairs. For the Greeks whom he set out to deliver figured in his mind as direct, if degenerate, descendants of the great free spirits of old, the creators of Hellenic culture: the reality was a priest-ridden population debased by Slav stocks.
Byron had indeed an opulence of temperament which naturally spilt over into action. Like Sir Walter Scott, he was larger than a writing man, and he brought the Scott sanity rather than the Byronic ebullience into his three months’ work at Missolonghi, holding himself aloof from factions and thus reconciling them in him, throwing his weight on the side of humanity, and even rising beyond his disappointment in the Greeks to perceive that their very failings made their regeneration only the more necessary. There was certainly in him the making of a leader of men. Nevertheless cerebral ferment and not conspiring for liberty was his essential form of activity. That cerebral ferment was never more ebullient and continuous than in those years of Italy and the Countess Guiccioli. Ravenna was his favourite town, and action is not precisely the note of Ravenna at whose town-gate I read with my own eyes a fabulous prohibition against vehicular traffic in the streets.
But did we concede Carducci’s claim to the full, and even supplement it by Byron’s passing eagerness to mould British politics, the Italian poet’s characterisation of him as the most striking modern instance of the union of poetry and action, is a startling reminder of the poverty and vacuousness of the chronicle of singing men of affairs. If Byron be indeed Eclipse, truly the rest are nowhere. And the question arises, why the modern man should be so artificially bifurcated. Æschylus was both soldier and poet. Cæsar not only made history but wrote it. Dante was Prior of Florence.
“In rebus publicis administrans,” says the inscription on the absurd tomb of Ariosto, and we know that Duke Alfonso sent him to suppress bands of robbers in lawless Garfagnana as well as on that even more formidable expedition to the Terrible Pontiff who had excommunicated the ruler of Ferrara. Chaucer was a diplomatist and Government Official. The ethereal singer of “The Faerie Queene” shared in the bloody attempt at the Pacification of Ireland. Milton, that virulent pamphleteer, barely escaped the block. Goethe administered Weimar. Victor Hugo, like Dante, achieved exile. Björnson contributed to the independence of Norway. The notion of a poet as aloof from life seems to be largely modern and peculiarly British. Shelley is probably responsible for this conception of the “beautiful and ineffectual angel,” and in our own day Swinburne has helped to carry on the legend. But Swinburne’s fellow-poet, the self-styled “Singer of an empty day,” was precisely the poet who had the largest relations with life, and whose wall-papers have spread to circles where his poetry is unknown or unread.