Pages from a Journal with Other Papers

by William Hale White

“the intense
Reply of hers to our intelligence.”

His success is equally marked when he portrays men or women whose character attracts him. Take, for example, the girl in “The Island”:—

“The sunborn blood suffused her neck, and threw
O’er her clear nutbrown skin a lucid hue,
Like coral reddening through the darken’d wave,
Which draws the diver to the crimson cave.
Such was this daughter of the southern seas,
Herself a billow in her energies.

* * * * *

Her smiles and tears had pass’d, as light winds pass
O’er lakes to ruffle, not destroy, their glass,
Whose depths unsearch’d, and fountains from the hill,
Restore their surface, in itself so still.”

Passages like these might be quoted without end from Byron, and they explain why he is and must be amongst the immortals. He may have been careless in expression; he may have been a barbarian and not a εύφυής, as Mr. Matthew Arnold affirms, but he was great. This is the word which describes him. He was a mass of living energy, and therefore he is sanative. Energy, power, is the one thing after which we pine in this sickly age. We do not want carefully and consciously constructed poems of mosaic. Strength is what we need and what will heal us. Strength is true morality, and true beauty. It is the strength in Byron that falsifies the accusation of affectation and posing, which is brought against him. All that is meant by affectation and posing was a mere surface trick. The real man, Byron, and his poems are perfectly unconscious, as unconscious as the wind. The books which have lived and always will live have this unconsciousness in them, and what is manufactured, self-centred, and self-contemplative will perish. The world’s literature is the work of men, who, to use Byron’s own words—

“Strip off this fond and false identity;”

who are lost in their object, who write because they cannot help it, imperfectly or perfectly, as the case may be, and who do not sit down to fit in this thing and that thing from a commonplace book. Many novelists there are who know their art better than Charlotte Brontë, but she, like Byron—and there are more points of resemblance between them than might at first be supposed—is imperishable because she speaks under overwhelming pressure, self-annihilated, we may say, while the spirit breathes through her. The Byron “vogue” will never pass so long as men and women are men and women. Mr. Arnold and the critics may remind us of his imperfections of form, but Goethe is right after all, for not since Shakespeare have we had any one der ihm zu vergleichen wäre.

A SACRIFICE

A fatal plague devastated the city. The god had said that it would continue to rage until atonement for a crime had been offered by the sacrifice of a man. He was to be perfect in body; he must not desire to die because he no longer loved life, or because he wished for fame. A statue must not be erected to his memory; no poem must be composed for him; his name must not appear in the city’s records.

A few volunteers presented themselves, but none of them satisfied all the conditions. At last a young man came who had served as the model for the image of the god in his temple. There was no question, therefore, of soundness of limb, and when he underwent the form of examination no spot nor blemish was found on him. The priest asked him whether he was in trouble, and especially whether he was disappointed in love. He said he was in no trouble; that he was betrothed to a girl to whom he was devoted, and that they had intended to be married that month. “I am,” he declared, “the happiest man in the city.” The priest doubted and watched him that evening, but he saw him walking side by side with this girl, and the two were joyous as a youth and a maiden ought to be in the height of their passion. She sat down and sang to him he played to her, and they embraced one another tenderly at parting.

The next morning was the day on which he was to be slain. There was an altar in front of the temple, and a great crowd assembled, ranked round the open space. At the appointed hour the priest appeared, and with him was the youth, holding his beloved by the hand, but she was blindfolded. He let go her hand, knelt down, and in a moment the sacrificial knife was drawn across his throat. His body was placed upon the wood, and the priest was about to kindle it when a flash from heaven struck it into a blaze with such heat that when the fire dropped no trace of the victim remained. The girl, too, had disappeared, and was never seen again.