BYRON, GOETHE, AND MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD
(Reprinted, with corrections, by permission from the “Contemporary Review,” August, 1881.)
Mr. Matthew Arnold has lately published a remarkable essay [133] upon Lord Byron. Mr. Arnold’s theory about Byron is, that he is neither artist nor thinker—that “he has no light, cannot lead us from the past to the future;” “the moment he reflects, he is a child;” “as a poet he has no fine and exact sense for word and structure and rhythm; he has not the artist’s nature and gifts.” The excellence of Byron mainly consists in his “sincerity and strength;” in his rhetorical power; in his “irreconcilable revolt and battle” against the political and social order of things in which he lived. “Byron threw himself upon poetry as his organ; and in poetry his topics were not Queen Mab, and the Witch of the Atlas, and the Sensitive Plant, they were the upholders of the old order, George the Third and Lord Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington and Southey, and they were the canters and tramplers of the great world, and they were his enemies and himself.”
Mr. Arnold appeals to Goethe as an authority in his favour. In order, therefore, that English people may know what Goethe thought about Byron I have collected some of the principal criticisms upon him which I can find in Goethe’s works. The text upon which Mr. Arnold enlarges is the remark just quoted which Goethe made about Byron to Eckermann: “so bald er reflectirt ist er ein Kind”—as soon as he reflects he is a child.
Goethe, it is true, did say this; but the interpretation of the saying depends upon the context, which Mr. Arnold omits. I give the whole passage, quoting from Oxenford’s translation of the Eckermann Conversations, vol. i. p. 198 (edition 1850):—
“‘Lord Byron,’ said Eckermann, ‘is no wiser when he takes ‘Faust’ to pieces and thinks you found one thing here, the other there.’ ‘The greater part of those fine things cited by Lord Byron,’ Goethe replied, ‘I have never even read; much less did I think of them when I was writing “Faust.” But Lord Byron is only great as a poet; as soon as he reflects he is a child. He knows not how to help himself against the stupid attacks of the same kind made upon him by his own countrymen. He ought to have expressed himself more strongly against them. ‘What is there is mine,’ he should have said, ‘and whether I got it from a book or from life is of no consequence; the only point is, whether I have made a right use of it.’ Walter Scott used a scene from my ‘Egmont,’ and he had a right to do so; and because he did it well, he deserves praise.’”
Goethe certainly does not mean that Byron was unable to reflect in the sense in which Mr. Arnold interprets the word. What was really meant we shall see in a moment.
We will, however, continue the quotations from the Eckermann:—
“We see how the inadequate dogmas of the Church work upon a free mind like Byron’s and how by such a piece (‘Cain’) he struggles to get rid of a doctrine which has been forced upon him” (vol. i. p. 129).
“The world to him was transparent, and he could paint by way of anticipation” (vol. i. p. 140).
“That which I call invention I never saw in any one in the world to a greater degree than in him” (vol. i. p. 205).
“Lord Byron is to be regarded as a man, as an Englishman, and as a great talent. His good qualities belong chiefly to the man, his bad to the Englishman and the peer, his talent is incommensurable. All Englishmen are, as such, without reflection properly so-called; distractions and party-spirit will not permit them to perfect themselves in quiet. But they are great as practical men. Thus, Lord Byron could never attain reflection on himself, and on this account his maxims in general are not successful. . . . But where he will create, he always succeeds; and we may truly say that, with him, inspiration supplies the place of reflection. He was always obliged to go on poetizing, and then everything that came from the man, especially from his heart, was excellent. He produced his best things, as women do pretty children, without thinking about it, or knowing how it was done. He is a great talent, a born talent, and I never saw the true poetical power greater in any man than in him. In the apprehension of external objects, and a clear penetration into past situations, he is quite as great as Shakespeare. But as a pure individuality, Shakespeare is his superior” (vol. i. p. 209).
We see now what Goethe means by “reflection.” It is the faculty of self-separation, or conscious consideration, a faculty which would have enabled Byron, as it enabled Goethe, to reply successfully to a charge of plagiarism. It is not thought in its widest sense, nor creation, and it has not much to do with the production of poems of the highest order—the poems that is to say, which are written by the impersonal thought.