“Yes, it was Love—unchangeable—unchanged,
Felt but for one from whom he never ranged;”
and she was worthy of him, the woman who could sing—
“Deep in my soul that tender secret dwells,
Lonely and lost to light for evermore,
Save when to thine my heart responsive swells,
Then trembles into silence as before.There, in its centre, a sepulchral lamp
Burns the slow flame, eternal—but unseen;
Which not the darkness of despair can damp,
Though vain its ray as it had never been.”
He finds Medora dead, and—
“his mother’s softness crept
To those wild eyes, which like an infant’s wept.”
If his crimes and love could be weighed in a celestial balance, weight being apportioned to the rarity and value of the love, which would descend?
The points indicated in Conrad’s character are not many, but they are sufficient for its delineation, and it is a moral character. We must, of course, get rid of the notion that the relative magnitude of the virtues and vices according to the priest or society is authentic. A reversion to the natural or divine scale has been almost the sole duty preached to us by every prophet. If we could incorporate Conrad with ourselves we should find that the greater part of what is worst in us would be neutralised. The sins of which we are ashamed, the dirty, despicable sins, Conrad could not have committed; and in these latter days they are perhaps the most injurious.
We do not understand how moral it is to yield unreservedly to enthusiasm, to the impression which great objects would fain make upon us, and to embody that impression in worthy language. It is rare to meet now even with young people who will abandon themselves to a heroic emotion, or who, if they really feel it, do not try to belittle it in expression. Byron’s poetry, above most, tempts and almost compels surrender to that which is beyond the commonplace self.
It is not true that “The Corsair” is insincere. He who hears a note of insincerity in Conrad and Medora may have ears, but they must be those of the translated Bottom who was proud of having “a reasonable good ear in music.” Byron’s romance has been such a power exactly because men felt that it was not fiction and that his was one of the strongest minds of his day. He was incapable of toying with the creatures of the fancy which had no relationship with himself and through himself with humanity.
A word as to Byron’s hold upon the people. He was able to obtain a hearing from ordinary men and women, who knew nothing even of Shakespeare, save what they had seen at the theatre. Modern poetry is the luxury of a small cultivated class. We may say what we like of popularity, and if it be purchased by condescension to popular silliness it is nothing. But Byron secured access to thousands of readers in England and on the Continent by strength and loveliness, a feat seldom equalled and never perhaps surpassed. The present writer’s father, a compositor in a dingy printing office, repeated verses from “Childe Harold” at the case. Still more remarkable, Byron reached one of this writer’s friends, an officer in the Navy, of the ancient stamp; and the attraction, both to printer and lieutenant, lay in nothing lower than that which was best in him. It is surely a service sufficient to compensate for many more faults than can be charged against him that wherever there was any latent poetic dissatisfaction with the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life he gave it expression, and that he has awakened in the people lofty emotions which, without him, would have slept. The cultivated critics, and the refined persons who have schrecklich viel gelesen, are not competent to estimate the debt we owe to Byron.