One cannot but recall, by way of contrast, the words of Mrs. Shelley in regard to her exalted companion. In all Shelley did,' she says, 'he, at the time of doing it, believed himself justified to his own conscience.' This, surely, is the inner falsehood, more deadly, as Plato affirmed, than the spoken lie; and one needs but a little of the Platonic doctrine to believe that in this glozing of evil lies the veritable danger to morals. There is no such insidious disease in Byron's mind. The errors of Byron, both in conduct and in art, were in fact largely due to the revolutionary spirit which so easily passes into licentiousness. Classical art should result in self-restraint and harmony of form, but to this Byron never attained except spasmodically, almost by accident it should seem. So far he is classical that he almost universally displays predominance of intellect, breadth of treatment, and human interest; but side by side with this principle of limitation runs the other spirit of revolt, producing at times that extraordinary incongruity of effect which has so baffled his later audience. The world, after manifold struggles, had begun to throw off the medieval ideals. Faith in the infinite and eternal value of the human person, with all its earthly desires and ambitions, with its responsibility to a jealous God, had been rudely shaken; nor had that deeper faith taken hold of the mind wherein this laboring, grasping earthly self is seen to be but a shadow, an obscuration, of something vastly greater hidden in the secret places of the heart. Belief in the divine right of rulers had been burst as an insubstantial bubble, but in the late-born ideal of a humanity bound in brotherhood and striving upward together the individual was very slow to feel the drawing of the new ties; he had revolted from the past, and still felt himself homeless and unattached in the shadowy ideals of the future. In such an age Byron was born, a man of superabundant physical vigor which at any time would have ill brooked restraint, and of mental impetuosity which had by nature something of the tiger in it. He was led at first by the very spirit of the age to glory in physical and mental license and to exaggerate his impatience of restraint; and only by the hard experience of life did he learn, or partly learn, the lesson of moderation. Inevitably his poetry too often reflected his temperament in its lack of discipline. No one can be more conscious of these deficiencies than the present writer, whose task it has been to read through Byron's works with an editor's questioning eye. His language is often - very often slipshod, made obscure by interminable anacoluthons, disfigured by frequent lapses into bad grammar. The thought and style of certain poems The Prophecy of Dante, for instance are so cheap as to render the reading of them a labor of necessity. Yet all this hardly affects his importance for us. We are not likely to learn bad grammar from him, and his dull poems are easily passed over. He wrote, to use his own words, as the tiger leaps; and if he missed his aim, there was no retrieving the failure. We call this lack of artistic conscience, and so it is; but in this at least he followed only too well the guidance of his age. And then, if he often failed, he sometimes hit the mark. There are passages - more than that, there are whole poems wherein his classical method has dominated the license of revolt sufficiently to achieve almost perfect harmony of form, while retaining the full vigor of his imperious inspiration. - But the inner character of his work was affected even more than his art by the new leaven, and this free expression of the revolutionary spirit lends to some of his poems a psychological interest even beyond their intrinsic value. It is curious, for instance, to compare the effect on the mature mind of Manfred's eloquence and sombre misanthropy with the impression left from a first reading of that drama many years ago. What carred away the young enthusiast with passionate sympathy now leaves the reader cold or even provokes a smile. Such platitudes as this: 'They who know the most Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth, The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life; such profundities as the gulf of my unfathomed thought,' do not now seem quite the utterances of apocalyptic wisdom. A more critical taste, too, while feeling the superb rush and abandon of the lyrical stanzas, cannot pass lightly over a tame conclusion like 'now wither!' But, however cold Manfred's rhetoric may leave us, we are compelled to admit another and perhaps more enduring value in the poem. Its psychological interest is not easily exaggerated and becomes clear only as we pass out of immediate sympathy with the writer. Much has been said concerning the relation between Manfred and Faust, and Byron has more than once been accused of plagiarizing the idea of his poem from the great German. As a matter of fact certain ideas of a philosophical cast were probably inspired directly by a recollection of Faust. This talk of the 'tree of Knowledge and the tree of Life,' this pretension to profundities of ineffable science, have about them all the insincerity of borrowed inspiration. But the true theme of Manfred is not a philosophical question; the real poem, as Byron himself asserted, came not from reading, but was the immediate outcome of his own life, and Byron's life was the very impersonation of the revolutionary idea, the idea of reckless individual revolt which we have hardly yet outgrown. It is because Manfred more than almost any other English poem expresses the longings and ambitions, the revolt and the tragic failure of this idea, that its interest is still so great and must always remain great in any historical survey of literature. Where better can we read the desire of detachment, the longing of the individual to throw off the bonds of social law and make for himself a life apart from the world's life, than in Manfred's boastful words: 'My pang shall find a voice. From my youth upwards My spirit walk'd not with the souls of men'? Equally strong is the expression of self-centred pride. When Manfred rebukes the Spirit who claims dominion over his soul, he cries out scornfully: Back to thy hell! Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel; It is in such words as these that we recognize the vast difference between Manfred and Faust, not to mention Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. Of similar nature and growing directly from the revolutionary ideal of personal unrestraint is the longing for union with one kindred soul, a longing which seems at once impossible and impious, yet inevitable. This is Manfred's love for Astarte, the love of a soul that has violated common human attachments in its loneliness and throws itself with guilty passionateness into one sacrilegious desire of union. And the same loneliness, self-created and still intolerable, speaks in the yearning cry after a more intimate absorption into nature: 'I said, with men, and with the thoughts of men, I held but slight communion; but instead, My joy was in the Wilderness, to breathe The difficult air of the iced mountain's top,' etc. And at the last comes the inevitable despair, the necessary failure, expressed in Manfred by the vain prayer of oblivion from self. In the end this solitary pride and isolation, this morbid exaltation of our personal existence, become a creation of Frankenstein, from whose oppression we long for deliverance. To the Spirits who offer him dominion and all the joys of the senses the smitten and defiant soul can only cry out for forgetfulness: It is the perfect and ever memorable tragedy of the spirit of revolution, of individual isolation, of unrestraint, of limitless desires, which found in Byron side by side with his classic intelligence its most authentic utterance. Every one recognizes at a But to do anything like justice to the psychology of Byron would require a separate study in itself; and if the subject is here passed lightly over, this is because it seems, on the whole, less important to-day than the analysis of his art. glance the tormented personality and the revolutionary leaven in Byron's spirit; not every one, perhaps, would comprehend immediately the extraordinary result produced by the union of these with his classical method, a result so peculiar as alone to lend permanent interest to his work. And this interest is heightened by the rapid change and development in his character. There are, in fact, four pretty clearly defined periods in his life, although as always these overlap one another to a certain extent. First we see the youthful satirist lashing friend and foe with savage bitterness, as if his egregious egotism could find relief only in baying at the world. Then follows a second phase of revolt, taking pleasure in melodramatic isolation from society, exulting in moody revenge and unutterable mysteries, stalking before the world in gorgeous Oriental disguise. Out of this extravagance grows the Byron of the later Childe Harold, who would unburden his soul of its self-engendered torture in solitary communion with nature, and would find relief from the vulgar cant of the present in pensive reflection on the grandeurs of the older days. And last of all, when even these fail him, the self-mocking Don Juan, with his strange mingling of sweet and bitter, infinitely heavy-hearted at bottom, who cries out in the end: 'Now . . . Imagination droops her pinion, And the sad truth that hovers o'er my desk Turns what was once romantic to burlesque. And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'Tis that I may not weep; and if I weep, 'Tis that our nature cannot always bring Itself to apathy.' He was saved, indeed, from the final silence of apathy by an early death. Yet it may at least be said that for one brief moment, when, after escaping the vexations of his ruined domestic life, he wrote his Epistle to Augusta from the solitudes of Switzerland, - Byron caught, dim and distorted it may be, a glimpse of divine wisdom, which, if pursued, might have rendered him great among the wisest. But some Nemesis of fate, some error of will, swept him back into the bondage from which he never entirely escaped. As it was he wrung from the tragedy of his own life the irony and pathos of Don Juan, a poem which in its own sphere is so easily supreme that this achievement alone would rank him great among the strongest, if not among the wisest. P. E. M. CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE A ROMAUNT [In reading Childe Harold one should remember that it is really two, or even three, poems written at quite different periods in Byron's poetical development. The first and second cantos represent the time of his early travels, when he was comparatively unskilled as a poet and unversed in the world. The stanzas begin with an awkward attempt to imitate the archaic language of Spenser, and there is an equally awkward confusion of the poet himself and his hero, who are neither wholly merged together nor yet fully distinguished. Nevertheless it is of these two cantos that Byron uttered the famous remark: I awoke one morning and found myself famous. Canto I. was begun at Joannina in Albania, October 31, 1809, and Canto II. was finished at Smyrna, March 28, 1810. They were published in March, 1812. Between that date and the writing of the third canto came Byron's life in London, and the composition of the Oriental Tales; there came also his marriage and the fatal rupture. It was, indeed, during the first months of his melancholy exile that he returned to Childe Harold. Canto III. was completed at Diodati, on Lake Geneva, in July, 1816, and was published the same year. To compare these stanzas with those of the earlier cantos is to see how much Byron had grown in depth of feeling and in technical skill. The poem gains in force by the frankness with which the poet now speaks in his own person. With the first line, 'Is thy face like thy mother's, my fair child, we feel that we have come to the true Byron. The fourth canto, though published separately, is in the same tone as the third. It was written at Venice between June of 1817 and January of 1818, and was published immediately. As with most of his works the poem suffered manifold changes while going through the press, and later editions brought other alterations. The stanzas to Ianthe' (Lady Charlotte Harley) had been written in 1812, but were first printed in 1814 as a dedication to the seventh edition of Cantos I. and II.] L'univers est une espèce de livre, dont on n'a lu que la première page quand on n'a vu que son pays. J'en ai feuilleté un assez grand nombre, que j'ai trouvé également mauvaises. Cet examen ne m'a point été infructueux. Je haissais ma patrie. Toutes les impertinences des peuples divers, parmi lesquels j'ai vécu, m'ont réconcilié avec elle. Quand je n'aurais tiré d'autre bénéfice de mes voyages que celuilà, je n'en regretterais ni les frais ni les fatigues. Le Cosmopolite. PREFACE [TO THE FIRST AND SECOND CANTOS] The following poem was written, for the most part, amidst the scenes which it attempts to describe. It was begun in Albania; and the parts relative to Spain and Portugal were composed from the author's observations in those countries. Thus much it may be necessary to state for the correctness of the descriptions. The scenes attempted to be sketched are in Spain, Portugal, Epirus, Acarnania, and Greece. There, for the present, the poem stops: its reception will determine whether the author may venture to conduct his readers to the capital of the East, through Ionia and Phrygia these two cantos are merely experimental. A fictitious character is introduced for the sake of giving some connection to the piece; which, however, makes no pretension to regularity. It has been suggested to me by friends, on whose opinions I set a high value, that in this fictitious character, Childe Harold, I may incur the suspicion of having intended some real personage: this I beg leave, once for all, to disclaim Harold is the child of imagination, for the purpose I have stated. In some very trivial particulars, and those merely local, there might be grounds for such a notion; but in the main points, I should hope, none what ever. It is almost superfluous to mention that the appellation Childe,' as 'Childe Waters,' 'Childe Childers,' etc., is used as more consonant with the old structure of versification which I have adopted. The 'Good Night,' |