Dame Nature had the last word; but was Byron, foreseeing her crushing repartee, so absolutely unjustified in his criticisms and questionings of a Power that held him as lightly as the parasite on the hind leg of any of the fifty thousand species of beetles? For if Fate treads with equal foot on a Byron and a beetle, the bard may be forgiven if he takes it less christianly than the coleopteron.
Byron is “cheap” to-day in England, and while Greece celebrates the centenary of his arrival and Crete calls on his name, while Italy is full of his glory, his hotels and his piazzas, while Genoa is proud that he lived in Il Paradiso and the Armenian Monastery at Venice still cherishes the memory of his sojourn there to learn Armenian, and every spot he trod is similarly sacred, the Puritan critic reminds us that
“The gods approve
The depth and not the tumult of the soul.”
Yes, we know, but when a poet is disapproving of the gods their standards matter less. And we are men, not gods, that their standards should be ours. Humani sumus, and nothing of Byron’s passion and pain can be alien from us. This tumult of the soul, who has escaped it? Not Wordsworth, assuredly, who wrote those lines. Only the fool hath not said in his heart, “There is no God.” Even Cardinal Manning said it on his death-bed. Not that death-bed conversions are worth anything. Matthew Arnold was apt to give us Wordsworth as the reposeful contrast to the bold, bad Byron. But the calmness of Wordsworth is only in his style, and if his questionings are cast in bronze, they were often forged in the same furnace as Byron’s, and fused through and through with the pain
“Of all this unintelligible world.”
Poets, even the austere, have to learn in suffering what they teach in song. Only the suffering is always so much clearer than what it teaches them. And then, as Heine says, comes Death, and with a clod of earth gags the mouth that sings and cries and questions.
“Aber ist Das eine Antwort?”
VARIATIONS ON A THEME
Among these multitudinous Madonnas, and countless Crucifixions, and Entombments innumerable, who shall dare award the palm for nobility of conception? But there is a minor theme of Renaissance Art as to which I do not hesitate. It is the Pietà theme, but with angels replacing or supplementing the Madonna who cherishes the dead Christ, and it is significant that the finest treatment of it I have seen comes from the greatest craftsman who treated it—to wit, Giovanni Bellini. His Cristo Sorretto da Angioli you will find painted on wood—a tavola—in the Palazzo Communale of Rimini. The Christ lies limp but tranquil, in the peace, not the rigidity, of death, and four little angels stand by, one of them half hidden by the dead figure. The exquisite appeal of this picture, the uniqueness of the conception, lies in the sweet sorrow of the little angels—a sorrow as of a dog or a child that cannot fathom the greatness of the tragedy, only knows dumbly that here is matter for sadness. The little angels regard the wounds with grave infantile concern. Sacred tragedy is here fused with idyllic poetry in a manner to which I know no parallel in any other painter. The sweet perfection of Giovanni Bellini, too suave for the grim central theme of Christianity, here finds triumphant and enchanting justification.