This will never do. It is more intolerable than even Mr. Wordsworth’s arbitrary egotism and pampered self-sufficiency. He creates a factitious interest out of nothing: Lord Byron would destroy our interest in all that is. Mr. Wordsworth, to salve his own self-love, makes the merest toy of his own mind,—the most insignificant object he can meet with,—of as much importance as the universe: Lord Byron would persuade us that the universe itself is not worth his or our notice; and yet he would expect us to be occupied with him.
——‘The man whose eye
Is ever on himself doth look on one,
The least of Nature’s works, one who might move
The wise man to that scorn which wisdom holds
Unlawful ever.’
These lines, written by one of these two poets, might be addressed to both of them with equal propriety.
Lord Byron, in this the fourth and last Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, seems to have worn out the glowing fervour of his genius to a calx, and to have exhausted the intense enthusiasm of his favourite topics of invective. There is little about himself, historically speaking—there is no plot, no story, no interest excited, no catastrophe. The general reflections are connected together merely by the accidental occurrence of different objects—the Venus of Medici, or the statue of Pompey,—the Capitol at Rome, or the Bridge of Sighs at Venice,—Shakespear, and Mrs. Radcliffe,—Bonaparte, and his Lordship in person,—are brought together as in a phantasmagoria, and with as little attention to keeping or perspective, as in Hogarth’s famous print for reversing the laws of vision. The judgements pronounced are often more dogmatical than profound, and with all their extravagance of expression, common-place. His Lordship does not understand the Apollo Belvidere or the Venus de Medicis, any more than Bonaparte. He cants about the one and against the other, and in doing the last, cuts his own throat. We are not without hopes that his friend Mr. Hobhouse will set this matter right in his ‘Historical Illustrations’; and shew that, however it may suit his Noble Friend’s poetical cross-purposes, politically and practically speaking, a house divided against itself cannot stand. He first, in his disdain of modern times, finds nothing to compare with the grandeur of antiquity but Bonaparte; and then ‘as ’twere in spite of scorn,’ goes on to disdain this idol, which he had himself gratuitously set up, in a strain of effeminate and rancorous abuse worthy of Mr. Wordsworth’s pastoral, place-hunting Muse. Suppose what is here said of ‘the child and champion of Jacobinism’ to be true, are there not venal tongues and venal pens enough to echo it, without his Lordship’s joining in the cry? Will ‘the High Legitimates, the Holy Band’ be displeased with these captious efforts to level the object of their hate to the groveling standard of royalty? Is there not a division of labour even on Mount Parnassus? The other writers of prose and verse, who enter the Temple of Fame by Mr. Murray’s door in Albemarle-street, have their cues. Mr. Southey, for instance, never sings or says, or dreams of singing or saying, that the Prince Regent is not so great a man as Julius Cæsar. Why then should Lord Byron force the comparison between the modern and the ancient hero? It is because the slaves of power mind the cause they have to serve, because their own interest is concerned; but the friends of liberty always sacrifice their cause, which is only the cause of humanity, to their own spleen, vanity, and self-opinion. The league between tyrants and slaves is a chain of adamant; the bond between poets and the people is a rope of sand. Is this a truth, or is it not? If it is not, let Lord Byron write no more on this subject, which is beyond his height and his depth. Let him not trample on the mighty or the fallen! Bonaparte is not Beppo.
The versification and style of this poem are as perverse and capricious as the method or the sentiments. One stanza perpetually runs on into the next, making the exception the rule, merely because it properly ends in itself; and there is a strange mixture of stately phraseology and far-fetched metaphor, with the most affected and bald simplicity of expression and uncouthness in the rhymes. It is well his Lordship is born so high, or all Grub street would set him down as a plebeian for such lines as the following:—
[‘I lov’d her[[46]] from my boyhood,’ &c. (stanza 18 and part of 19)].