Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I | Page 6

heads, but which may now be easily seen through, and
counted off for as much as they are worth, Byron possessed a bottom of
plain sincerity and rational sobriety which kept him substantially
straight, real, and human, and made him the genuine exponent of that
immense social movement which we sum up as the Revolution. If

Keats's whole soul was absorbed by sensuous impressions of the outer
world, and his art was the splendid and exquisite reproduction of these;
if Shelley on the other hand distilled from the fine impressions of the
senses by process of inmost meditation some thrice ethereal essence,
'the viewless spirit of a lovely sound;' we may say of Byron that, even
in the moods when the mightiness and wonder of nature had most
effectually possessed themselves of his imagination, his mind never
moved for very long on these remote heights, apart from the busy
world of men, but returned again like the fabled dove from the desolate
void of waters to the ark of mortal stress and human passion. Nature, in
her most dazzling aspects or stupendous parts, is but the background
and theatre of the tragedy of man.
We may find a secondary proof of this in the fewness of those fine
descriptive strokes and subtle indirect touches of colour or sound which
arise with incessant spontaneity, where a mastering passion for nature
steeps the mind in vigilant, accurate, yet half-unconscious, observation.
It is amazing through how long a catalogue of natural objects Byron
sometimes takes us, without affixing to one of them any but the most
conventional term, or a single epithet which might show that in passing
through his mind it had yielded to him a beauty or a savour that had
been kept a secret from the common troop. Byron is certainly not
wanting in commanding image, as when Manfred likens the lines of
foaming light flung along from the Alpine cataract to 'the pale courser's
tail, the giant steed, to be bestrode by Death.' But imaginative power of
this kind is not the same thing as that susceptibility to the minutest
properties and unseen qualities of natural objects which reveals itself in
chance epithet of telling felicity, or phrase that opens to us hidden
lights. Our generation is more likely to think too much than too little of
this; for its favourite poet, however narrow in subject and feeble in
moral treatment, is without any peer in the exquisitely original, varied,
and imaginative art of his landscape touches.
This treatment of nature was in exact harmony with the method of
revolutionary thought, which, from the time of Rousseau downwards,
had appealed in its profound weariness of an existing social state to the
solitude and seeming freedom of mountain and forest and ocean, as

though the only cure for the woes of civilisation lay in annihilating it.
This was an appeal less to nature than from man, just as we have said
that Byron's was, and hence it was distinct from the single-eyed
appreciation and love of nature for her own sake, for her beauty and
terror and unnumbered moods, which has made of her the mistress and
the consoler of many men in these times. In the days of old faith while
the catholic gods sat yet firm upon their thrones, the loveliness of the
universe shone to blind eyes. Saint Bernard in the twelfth century could
ride for a whole day along the shore of the Lake of Geneva, and yet
when in the evening his comrades spoke some word about the lake, he
inquired: 'What lake?'[3] It was not mere difference of temperament
that made the preacher of one age pass by in this marvellous
unconsciousness, and the singer of another burst forth into that tender
invocation of 'clear placid Leman,' whose 'contrasted lake with the wild
world he dwelt in' moved him to the very depths. To Saint Bernard the
world was as wild and confused as it was to Byron; but then he had
gods many and saints many, and a holy church in this world, and a
kingdom of heaven awaiting resplendent in the world to come. All this
filled his soul with a settled certitude, too absorbing to leave any space
for other than religious emotion. The seven centuries that flowed
between the spiritual mind of Europe when Saint Bernard was its
spokesman, and the spiritual mind of which Byron was the interpreter,
had gradually dissolved these certitudes, and the faint lines of new
belief and a more durable order were still invisible. The assurance of
science was not yet rooted, nor had men as yet learned to turn back to
the history of their own kind, to the long chronicle of its manifold
experiences, for an adequate system of life and an inspiring social faith.