LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Byron.
By John Nichol.
(English-Men-of-Letters Series.)
New York: Harper &Brothers.
"The quiet, uneventful life of a man of letters" is a phrase not infrequently used, generally by way of excuse for some dull biography. It is doubtful, however, whether the life of the poet, the novelist, or even the scholar, is not apt to be quite as varied and full of incident as those of men whose callings are considered more active and adventurous, while the interest that attaches to the relation of it is almost certain to be more personal and concentrated. The career of the statesman or the warrior is commonly merged in the events of his time; that of the discoverer or the inventor furnishes matter for a chapter in the history of scientific progress; the mere "man of the world" is one of the least important figures in the shifting scenes and disconnected pictures of which his recollections may supply the only memorial. But the man of genius whose writings we have studied with a constant sense of the influence of mind upon mind—his mind upon ours, stirring our emotions, quickening our thoughts, enlarging our conceptions—becomes in his biography a subject for close investigation and analysis, in which every fact is significant, actions and impressions have equal importance, efforts and achievements, success and failure, are viewed as the direct outcome of character and intellect, all events have a common centre, and the world's affairs are noted only in reference to the individual, whether, like Rousseau, he has given them a strong impulse, or, like Dante, has been the victim of their turbulence, or, like Goethe, has stood apart in the attitude of contemplation. The office of such men is to reveal the needs and aspirations of humanity; their voices rise above the general din in musical plaint or exultation; their utterances lead us to examine and understand ourselves; and hence their lives, even when outwardly tranquil, cannot fail, if fully and rightly portrayed, to enchain our sympathies. But it is the exception, rather than the rule, when genius is linked with an apparently serene or commonplace existence. It is the fashion now-a-days to deride the notion that a man of genius is almost necessarily deficient in prudence, and consequently little fitted to steer his way securely amid the ordinary perils of life. Nevertheless, the fact remains that in the great majority of cases the most highly-gifted natures appeal as strongly to our pity or tolerance as to our admiration, that under similar circumstances their errors and misfortunes have been greater or more frequent than those of commoner natures, that with them the "inward storm and outward strife" in which the great lesson of life—"das schwer-verstandene Wort"—is learned—
Von der Gewalt die alle Wesen bindet
Befreit der Mensch sich der sich überwindet—
are not lighter, but more severe and destructive, than with others. And in cases where there has been a conjunction of high intellect and a fiery temperament with outward conditions equally remote from those of ordinary life, the biographer is provided with materials which the novelist would not dare to grapple with, and which the tragic writer would scarcely need to mix with any stronger element of his art.
That Byron's was one of these rare cases no one will be inclined to deny. His genius, if not of the highest order, was marvellously brilliant and fertile, and almost unparalleled in the potency of its charm. His nature was chaotic, his position full of incongruities, his fame an eruption, his career meteoric. "No one ever lived," remarks Mr. Nichol, "who in the same space more thoroughly ran the gauntlet of existence." And all the experiences of his life, all the contrasts in his character and his intellect—his nobleness and his baseness, his sincerity and his affectations, his giant power and his puerile weakness—are reflected and exhibited in his works with a directness and completeness that do not belong to the self-mirrorings of any other writer, not excepting Rousseau. Never has there been a great poet who was less of an artist; never one who could so little transmute an experience or embody a thought as to give it a universal significance; never one whose productions, however diversified in form, have an equal sameness in theme and tone, or present themselves so palpably as fragments of an autobiography. We follow him in his travels, we are witnesses of his thinly veiled adventures, we find his cravings and caprices, his piercing mockeries and fantastic imaginings, in the Selims and Conrads, the Manfreds and Cains, the Harolds and Juans, whose forms he assumes as the disguises of a masquerade, we receive the outpourings of his confidence in every mood and on every topic—we gaze, in short, incessantly into the inmost recesses and watch all the wild and wayward movements of a heart that is never at rest and that never shrinks from exposure—and, if strongly impressionable, we yield to the spell, accept the magic, echo the cry, undergo the same sensations, and identify ourselves with the being that has taken possession of us by this strange and violent egotism. One thing more must be remembered in accounting for the intensity of Byron's influence on his contemporaries, the wideness of its diffusion and the suddenness of its decline: this personality, which seems at once so peculiar and so self-engrossed, is nevertheless the child of an epoch, itself full of agitations and contradictions, feverish and tumultuous yet wearied and disgusted with its past excesses, ardent and aspiring yet scornful of its ideals, lavish of its energies yet unable to concentrate them, in revolt against conventional and outworn forms, but powerless to create fit ones for the inrushing life that seems, for lack of them, to spend its force in vain. Had Byron's been a loftier, clearer, calmer spirit, it would not have so well represented the age or impressed it so strongly: its sway would have been less transitory, but not so absolute.
Happily, the period of fascination and that of the inevitable reaction are now both past, and we can examine the phenomenon that was once thought so transcendent and afterward so trivial and delusive with an unbiased judgment. To the question whether the magic that riveted the gaze and enthralled the minds of so many and diverse observers was real or false, we find the reply easy, that it was both. It seems to us difficult to dispute the dictum of Mr. Carlyle, that "no genuine productive thought was ever revealed by Byron to mankind." It is just as undeniable, as Mr. Nichol freely allows, that his gift of expression, with its almost matchless sweep and facility, never embraces that exquisite phraseology, that suggestive and untranslatable diction, that perfect marriage of words to thought, which is of the very essence of poetry. Furthermore, no writer not palpably imitative ever betrayed in such a degree the influence of his great contemporaries, or culled more unsparingly from books to enrich his own compositions. His total lack of the dramatic faculty is admitted on all hands. It would seem impossible, therefore, to assign him a place in the creative order of minds, or to rank him, as some continental critics still do, with the great masters of poetry. Judged by the strictest tests and soundest canons, one is in doubt whether he should be reckoned as a poet: with the Romans he would have been one, no doubt, but scarcely with the Greeks. But if not a son of heaven, he is a chief among the sons of earth. His intellect is of the keenest, his wit of the sharpest, his passion of the strongest. Every scene, every event, every thought, every feeling, strikes him with electric force and is reproduced with the vividness and intensity of the original impression. His imagery has the effect of physical sensations. His descriptions do not merely represent or suggest, but steep us in the emotions of "a living presence." The sea and the mountains, the night and the storm, the "dewy morn," the "hush of eve," the "light of setting suns," the battle-field and the shipwreck, the chamber of death, the desert and the ruin, the rage of fierce passions, the calmness of despair, stamp themselves upon the reader's brain, and linger like the haunting effigies of personal experiences. Scrutiny reveals innumerable flaws, reflection discloses a want that makes the whole fabric seem little better than phantasmal; but we never lose the sense of an abounding life, of a vigor that cannot be repressed and a splendor that cannot be dimmed, of a genius always ripening, though condemned by its very nature to perpetual immaturity.
We have left ourselves little space to speak of Mr. Nichol's execution of a not too easy task. With matter so abundant his restrictions in regard to treatment could not but press hardly upon him. Too often he is compelled to summarize baldly or to rely upon the reader's previous familiarity with details. But subject to the qualifications arising from the conditions imposed upon him, his performance may be pronounced satisfactory and successful. The arrangement is skilful, the story is well told, and the criticism, if somewhat deficient in definiteness and force, shows both sympathy and comprehension and steers with tolerable directness between the extremes of praise and censure. Opposing judgments are quoted or referred to with needless iteration, and sometimes, as in the case of Carlyle and Goethe, with an exaggerated emphasis and a misapprehension of the relative points of view. It would be easy to take exception also to particular judgments or the manner in which they are expressed. When we are told, in allusion to Cain, that "Lord Byron has elsewhere exhibited more versatility, fancy and richness of illustration, but nowhere else has he so nearly 'struck the stars,'" we cannot but demur to the substitution of a borrowed rhetorical phrase for the more literal statement which the preceding limitations lead us to expect. When we find it said of the Vision of Judgment that "every line that does not convulse with laughter stings or lashes," and of the Letter to the Editor of the British Review that "no more laughter-compelling composition exists," we can only infer that Mr. Nichol's risible muscles are much more flexible than those of most people. But whatever its faults or shortcomings, this volume, as well from the deep interest of the subject as the ability with which it is handled, is one of the most agreeable, and can hardly fail to be one of the most widely read, of the series to which it belongs.