Shelley's life of ideals and visions. His was a motor temperament, and activity, movement, sensation, ¡¡ passion, were the breath of his nostrils. "You don't like my 'restless' doctrines," he writes to Miss Milbanke in 1813; “I should be very sorry if you did; but I can't stagnate nevertheless. If I must sail let it be on the ocean no matter how stormy-anything but a dull cruise on a land lake without ever losing sight of the same insipid shores by which it is surrounded." And again: "The great object of life is sensationto feel that we exist, even though in pain. It is this 'craving void' which drives us to gaming, to battle, to travel, to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of any description, whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment." So, in the "Deformed Transformed," he writes: "From the star To the winding worm, all life is motion; and Of life." Animation, he says somewhere, is the chief secret of woman's beauty. And in 1818, after describing a Venetian girl whom he admired,—“ with large black eyes, a face like Faustina's, and the figure of a Juno; tall and energetic as a Pythoness, with eyes flashing, and her dark hair streaming in the moonlight,”—he goes on to add: "I like this kind of animal, and am sure that I should have preferred Medea to any woman that ever breathed." His temperament was active and pugnacious. "In the words of the tragedian Liston, 'I love a row, The grandson of a famous admiral and the descendant of Norman warriors and of cavalier knights, it was in his blood to delight in struggle and passion and the active life. His poetry he says. he chiefly valued for himself as an outlet to the seething springs of emotion within his breast. "I by no means rank poetry or poets high in the scale of intel. lect," he writes to Miss Milbanke in a very significant passage only recently published. "This may look like affectation, but it is my real opinion. It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.' They say poets never or rarely go mad. Cowper and Collins are instances to the contrary (but Cowper was no poet). It is, however, to be remarked that they rarely do, but are generally so near it that I cannot help thinking rhyme is so far useful in anticipating and preventing the disorder. I prefer the talents of action-of war, or the senate, or even of science, to all the speculations of these mere dreamers of another existence (I don't mean religiously, but fancifully) and spectators of this apathy. Disgust and perhaps incapacity have rendered me now a mere spectator; but I have occasionally mixed in the active and tumultuous departments of existence, and in these alone my recollection rests with any satisfaction, though not the best parts of it." In a certain sense Byron's poetry was the overflow of his feelings and a transcript of his life. In this sense at least Byron was a great lyrical poet; for, although the singing quality and the musical element in his verse are often defective, seldom has the subjective and personal element in lyric poetry received more complete and powerful expression than in Byron's poetry. Byron's own generation made the mistake of supposing the invention and the detail of his poetry to be quite as much a transcript of his life as the ~ Similarly he writes to Moore in 1821 concerning the writing of poetry."... It comes over me in a kind of rage every now and then, and then, if I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.... I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain." ... 7 motives and the moods and the ideals. Everything in Byron's verse, it is true, is_centered in the portraiture of an ideal hero, and there is something of Byron in all of these heroes; but rather the ideal of Byron than the facts of Byron. And the likeness usually flatters his worser traits. No lyrical poetry of any great sort can be a literal transcript of the poet's lite. Experience must be transmuted and idealized before it is fit material for verse. This Byron understood well enough, although in some of his verse the idealizing imagination is less in evidence than in other. Thus, "almost all Don Juan,' Byron tells us, "is real life, either my own, or from people I knew.” And elsewhere: "I could not write upon anything, without some personal experience and foundation.' But in another place he writes of the charge that he is responsible for the opinions which he puts into the mouths of his characters: "My ideas of a character may run away with me: like all imaginative men I of course embody myself with the character while I draw it, but not a moment after the pen is from off the paper."1 The peculiar thing about Byron, however, is what has been called "his strange incontinence of language. He has no reticence, and the cacoëthes scribendi too often appears to be in him a disease. Byron is frank, but at times we would prefer not to be admitted so freely into his confidence. This doubtless Moore and his committee felt when they destroyed Byron's posthumous - prose autobiography. On the other hand, although he may equivocate, we know. 1 Cf. his letter to Murray of Aug. 9, 1819. that he conceals nothing of his mind from us, but is sure to blab in the end. At the same time also, in his effort to express everything, he expresses more than himself, more than his real mind. The exaggerations and audacities of his poetry are often not the real Byron, but a factitious and portentous Byron whose image the poet is trying to impose upon us. The real Byron is more human, and is not so terrible and so wicked after all. Byron's effective conception of the nature and function of poetry, in spite of his paradoxical worship of Pope, was essentially that of his period. His practice exemplified Wordsworth's theory that "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," and that it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity; the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind." Or again as Wordsworth wrote, "The poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings as are produced in him in that manner.' Byron's range of emotions was very different from Wordsworth's, but the poetic process seems to have been the same. "As for poesy," he says, mine is the dream of the sleeping passions; when they are awake I cannot speak their 1 Cf. Byron's remark: ". My first impressions are always strong and confused, and my memory selects and reduces them to order, like distance in the landscape. . . . ' " language." The abstracting and visionary power was very strong in Byron's temperament. For Byron poetry was a matter of inspiration, as for most of the Romantics, and not mainly an art or a trade of life. "A man's poetry," he writes, "is a distinct faculty, or Soul, and has no more to do with the every-day individual than the inspiration with the Pythoness when removed from her tripod." he holds, should be creative and Promethean. "For what is poesy but to create From overfeeling good or ill; and aim And be the new Prometheus of new men, The form which their creations may essay, Poetry, The operation of poetry he has exactly described in a famous stanza in Childe Harold": "'Tis to create, and in creating live A being more intense, that we endow With form our fancy, gaining as we give The life we image, even as I do now. 1 Cf. similarly Byron in Trelawny's "Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author," 22. "The Prophecy of Dante," Canto IV. |