Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I | Page 7

So they fled in spirit or in flesh into unfamiliar scenes, and vanished
from society, because society was not sufficiently social.
[Footnote 3: Morison's Life of St. Bernard, p. 68 (2d edit.)]
The feeling was abnormal, and the method was fundamentally artificial.
A sentimentalism arose, which is in art what the metaphysical method
is in philosophy. Yet a literature was born of it, whose freshness, force,
elevation, and, above all, a self-assertion and peculiar aspiring freedom
that have never been surpassed, still exert an irresistible attraction, even

over minds that are furthest removed from the moral storm and disorder,
and the confused intellectual convictions, of that extraordinary group.
Perhaps the fact that their active force is spent, and that men find in
them now only a charm and no longer a gospel, explains the difference
between the admiration which some of us permit ourselves to feel for
them, and the impatient dislike which they stirred in our fathers. Then
they were a danger, because they were a force, misleading amiable and
high-minded people into blind paths. Now this is at an end, and, apart
from their historic interest, the permanent elements of beauty draw us
to them with a delight that does not diminish, as we recede further and
further from the impotence of the aspirations which thus married
themselves to lofty and stirring words. To say nothing of Rousseau, the
father and founder of the nature-worship, which is the nearest approach
to a positive side that the Revolution has ever possessed, how much
fine colour and freshness of feeling there is in Réné, what a sense of air
and space in Paul and Virginia, and what must they have been to a
generation that had just emerged from the close parlours of Richardson,
the best of the sentimentalists of the pre-revolutionary type? May we
not say, too, in parenthesis, that the man is the votary, not of wisdom,
but of a bald and shapeless asceticism, who is so excessively penetrated
with the reality, the duties, the claims, and the constant hazards of
civilisation, as to find in himself no chord responsive to that sombre
pensiveness into which Obermann's unfathomable melancholy and
impotence of will deepened, as he meditated on the mean shadows
which men are content to chase for happiness, and on all the pigmy
progeny of giant effort? 'C'est peu de chose,' says Obermann, 'de n'être
point comme le vulgaire des hommes; mais c'est avoir fait un pas vers
la sagesse, que de n'être plus comme le vulgaire des sages.' This
penetrating remark hits the difference between De Senancourt himself
and most of the school. He is absolutely free from the vulgarity of
wisdom, and breathes the air of higher peaks, taking us through
mysterious and fragrant pine-woods, where more than he may find
meditative repose amid the heat and stress of that practical day, of
which he and his school can never bear the burden.
In that vulgaire des sages, of which De Senancourt had none, Byron
abounded. His work is in much the glorification of revolutionary

commonplace. Melodramatic individualism reaches its climax in that
long series of Laras, Conrads, Manfreds, Harolds, who present the fatal
trilogy, in which crime is middle term between debauch and satiety,
that forms the natural development of an anti-social doctrine in a
full-blooded temperament. It was this temperament which, blending
with his gifts of intellect, gave Byron the amazing copiousness and
force that makes him the dazzling master of revolutionary emotion,
because it fills his work with such variety of figures, such free change
of incident, such diversity of passion, such a constant movement and
agitation. It was this never-ceasing stir, coupled with a striking
concreteness and an unfailing directness, which rather than any
markedly correct or wide intellectual apprehension of things, made him
so much more than any one else an effective interpreter of the moral
tumult of the epoch. If we look for psychological delicacy, for subtle
moral traits, for opening glimpses into unobserved depths of character,
behold, none of these things are there. These were no gifts of his, any
more than the divine gift of music was his. There are some writers
whose words but half express the indefinable thoughts that inspired
them, and to whom we have to surrender our whole minds with a
peculiar loyalty and fulness, independent of the letter and printed
phrase, if we would liquefy the frozen speech and recover some portion
of its imprisoned essence. This is seldom a necessity with Byron. His
words tell us all that he means to say, and do not merely hint nor
suggest. The matter with which he deals is gigantic, and he paints with
violent colours and sweeping pencil.
* * * * *
Yet he is free from that declamation with which some of the