Goethe said of him, that he was inspired with the genius of Pain. The joyous, cheerful spirit that pervades the works of men who, like Scott and Southey, were educated under auspicious influences, and by a healthy process grew up to manhood with an habitual regard to the sacred sanctions annexed to their physical and moral being, contrasts strongly with the morbid, gloomy, and often bitter and sarcastic temper of that poetry, which seems to flow as if from some poisoned fountain of Helicon. Sometimes, indeed, he forgets his fancied wrongs and real woes, as when walking amid the ruins of imperial Rome, and kindred contiguities, he throws himself back into the very bosom of classic antiquity, and pours out the purest strains of eloquence, enriched with the glowing sunlight of poetry. For a time the shadow of the evil spirit appears to depart from him, and the true glory of his genius shines forth without a cloud, while the sentiments that rise in his soul ascend to a pitch of moral sublimity beyond which the ambition of the human imagination could not desire to go. In the fourth canto of Childe Harold his power of conception and expression culminated, and the publication of that poem called forth a judgment of the Lord Chief Justice of the Bench of Literature, Francis Jeffrey, which almost deserves a coequal immortality with the poem itself, and it is impossible to account for this splendid piece of criticism being left out of the recent collection of the elegant Critic and Essayist, except on the supposition that the most accomplished judges of other men’s works are some times incompetent to fix the right estimate of their own. Genius does not always accurately weigh its own productions, since Milton preferred his Paradise Regained to his Paradise Lost, and Byron himself was inveterately attached to a poem, or rather a translation, to restrain him from publishing which cost the strongest efforts of his most influential friends.
He was then a voluntary exile from his native land, that noble England, which should be dear to all great men, because the mother of so many; he was nursing many fictitious sorrows; affecting a scorn for his country he could not feel; defying the judgments of men to which he was painfully sensitive; mourning over the blasted blossoms of domestic happiness; seeking new sources of gratification, or old gratifications in new forms; in the midst of all he plunges into the arcana of classic lore; he dives into the crystal depths of classic antiquity, to draw forth beautiful gems, dripping with the sparkling element, untainted by its passage through centuries of time. He reconstructs the whole scene to our view, mingling his illustrations from those severer arts with the sweet and graceful touches of a pencil that seems capable of catching and delineating every form of beauty that can engage the fancy or awaken the imagination. We have been filled with admiration, we have been fired with enthusiasm, at some of these magnificent strains of poetry, noble ideas, burning thoughts, assuming precisely the dress, the costume, which best became them. Whether the poet takes us along the bank of some classic stream, places us before some romantic city, flies over the battle-field, luxuriates in a moonlight scene, lingers amid broken columns and bubbling fountains, gazes on the splendid remnants of statues that almost seem instinct with the breath of life, conducts us to the roaring of the cataract, across whose dread chasm, “the hell of waters,” is arched here and there the lovely Iris, with her seven-fold dyes, “like Hope upon a death-bed,” then upward passes and beholds the solemn mountains, the Alps or Appenines, scenes of heroic daring and suffering, contemplates the mighty ocean, “dark, heaving, boundless, endless and sublime, the image of eternity,” over whose bosom ten thousand fleets have swept, and left no marks; finally, if he leads us back to the Eternal City, not as in her pride of place and power, but as oppressed with the “double night of ages,” as the “Niobe of nations,” the “lone mother of dead empires,” sitting in solitude, “an empty urn within her withered hands,” and draws mighty lessons from all these objects, in all this we behold the splendor of true genius; we feel its power; we wonder at the gifts of God thus bestowed; we tremble at the responsibility of the man thus rarely endowed by his Creator. That regal imagination, disdaining at times the vulgarities to which a depraved heart would subject it, asserts its native dignity, and as it ranges among more quiet scenes utters, with the solemnity of a prophet, such a lesson as this:
“If from society we learn to live,
’Tis solitude should teach us how to die.
It hath no flatterers; vanity can give
No hollow aid; alone, man with his God must strive.”
Besides that ORIGINALITY, which is a distinguishing attribute of the genius of Byron, there is in his language a power of concentration, which adds greatly to its vigor; some condensing process of thought is going on, the result of which is much meaning in few words, and those words kept under the law of fitness with more than military precision, yet without constraint. Few feeble words or straggling lines disfigure his poetry. That infamous effusion of a putrid mind, Don Juan, has most of them, while it has also some exquisite gems of beauty. As the last offspring of a teeming mind, it evidences a progress in sensual depravity, and an effrontery in publishing it to the world, seldom adventured by the most reckless contemner of the opinion of his fellow men, or the most impious blasphemer of the majesty of God. Indeed, his moral sense must have reached that region said to be inhabited by demons, who “impair the strength of better thoughts,”
“Making the sun like blood, the earth a tomb,
The tomb a hell, and hell itself a murkier gloom.”
It was of this last, deeply characteristic work, that Blackwood’s Magazine said, at the time: “In its composition there is unquestionably a more thorough and intense infusion of genius and vice, power and profligacy, than in any poem which had ever been written in the English, or indeed in any other modern language.” No poem, perhaps, ever exhibited a more remarkable mixture of ease, strength, fluency, gayety, mock-seriousness, and even refined tenderness of sentiment along with coarse indecency. Love, honor, purity, patriotism, chastity, religion, are all set forth or set at naught, just as suits the present, vagrant fancy of the author. The Edinburgh Review justly said: “We are acquainted with no writings so well calculated to extinguish in young minds all generous enthusiasm and gentle affection, all respect for themselves, and all love for their kind; to make them practice and profess hardly what it teaches them to suspect in others, and actually to persuade them that it is wise and manly, and knowing, to laugh, not only at self-denial and restraint, but at all aspiring ambition, and all warm and constant affection.”