VI.
“Did I paint a fifth of what I feel,
Oh, how plaintive you would ween I was!
But I won’t, albeit I have a deal
More to wail about than Kerner has!
Kerner’s tears are wept for withered flowers;
Mine for withered hopes; my scroll of woe
Dates, alas! from youth’s deserted bowers,
Twenty golden years ago.
VII.
“Yet, may Deutschland’s bardlings flourish long!
Me, I tweak no beak among them;—hawks
Must not pounce on hawks: besides, in song
I could once beat all of them by chalks.
Though you find me, as I near my goal,
Sentimentalising like Rousseau,
Oh, I had a great Byronian soul
Twenty golden years ago!
VIII.
“Tick-tick, tick-tick!—not a sound save Time’s,
And the wind gust as it drives the rain—
Tortured torturer of reluctant rhymes,
Go to bed and rest thine aching brain!
Sleep!—no more the dupe of hopes or schemes;
Soon thou sleepest where the thistles blow;
Curious anti-climax to thy dreams
Twenty golden years ago!”
I find myself now in a great puzzle. I want, first of all, to say I think it most melancholy that Mangan, when of full age and judgment, should have thought Byron had “a great Byronian soul.” Observe, he does not mean that he had a soul greatly like Byron’s, but that he had a soul like the great soul of Byron. I do not believe Byron had a great soul at all. I believe he was simply a fine stage-manager of melodrama, the finest that ever lived, and that as a property-master he was unrivalled; but that to please no one, himself included, could he have written the play. I am not descending to so defiling a depth as to talk about plagiarism. What I wish to say is, that whether Byron stole or not made not the least difference in the world, for he never by the aid of his gifts or his thefts wrote a poem. I wanted further to say of Byron that there was nothing great about him except his vanity. Suddenly I remembered some words of the critic of whom I spoke a while back, in dealing with the question of poetical poetry and poems. I took down the printed page, where I found these lines:—
“Mr. Swinburne’s poetry is almost altogether poetical. Not all the poetry of even the Poets is so, and to one who loves this dear and intimate quality of which we speak, Coleridge, for instance, is a poet of some four poems, Wordsworth of some sixteen, Keats of five, Byron of none, though Byron is great and eloquent, but the thing we prize so much is far away from eloquence. Poetical poetry is the inner garden; there grows the ‘flower of the mind.’”
Now, my difficulty is plain. My critic, who is also a poet, says Byron is great, and I find fault with Mangan for saying Byron had a great Byronian soul. Here are two of my select authors against me. Plainly, the best thing I can do is say nothing at all about the matter!