Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I | Page 8

French
poets of the same age, and representing a portion of the same
movement, blow out their cheeks. An angel of reasonableness seems to
watch over him, even when he comes most dangerously near to an
extravagance. He is equally free from a strained antithesis, which
would have been inconsistent, not only with the breadth of effect
required by Byron's art, but also with the peculiarly direct and forcible
quality of his genius. In the preface to Marino Faliero, a composition
that abounds in noble passages, and rests on a fine and original

conception of character, he mentions his 'desire of preserving a nearer
approach to unity, than the irregularity which is the reproach of the
English theatre.' And this sound view of the importance of form, and of
the barbarism to which our English genius is prone, from Goody Blake
and Harry Gill up to the clownish savagery which occasionally defaces
even plays attributed to Shakespeare, is collateral proof of the sanity
and balance which marked the foundations of his character, and which
at no point of his work ever entirely failed him. Byron's admiration for
Pope was no mere eccentricity.
We may value this self-control the more, by remembering the nature of
his subjects. We look out upon a wild revolutionary welter, of
vehement activity without a purpose, boundless discontent without a
hope, futile interrogation of nature in questions for which nature can
have no answer, unbridled passion, despairing satiety, impotence. It is
too easy, as the history of English opinion about Byron's poetic merit
abundantly proves, to underrate the genius which mastered so
tremendous a conflict, and rendered that amazing scene with the flow
and energy and mingled tempest and forlorn calm which belonged to
the original reality. The essential futility of the many moods which
went to make up all this, ought not to blind us to the enormous power
that was needed for the reproduction of a turbulent and not quite
aimless chaos of the soul, in which man seemed to be divorced alike
from his brother-men in the present, and from all the long succession
and endeavour of men in the past. It was no small feat to rise to a
height that should command so much, and to exhibit with all the force
of life a world that had broken loose from its moorings.
It is idle to vituperate this anarchy, either from the point of view of a
sour and precise Puritanism, or the more elevated point of a rational
and large faith in progress. Wise men are like Burke, who did not know
how to draw an indictment against a whole nation. They do not know
how to think nothing but ill of a whole generation, that lifted up its
voice in heartfelt complaint and wailing against the conceptions, forms,
and rulers, human and divine, of a society that the inward faith had
abandoned, but which clung to every outward ordinance; which only
remembered that man had property, and forgot that he had a spirit. This

is the complaint that rings through Byron's verse. It was this complaint
that lay deep at the bottom of the Revolution, and took form in every
possible kind of protest, from a dishevelled neckcloth up to a
profession of atheism. Byron elaborated the common emotion, as the
earliest modern poets elaborated the common speech. He gave it
inflections, and distinguished its moods, and threw over it an air of
system and coherency, and a certain goodly and far-reaching
sonorousness. This is the usual function of the spiritual leader, who
leaves in bulk no more in the minds of those whom he attracts than he
found, but he leaves it articulate with many sounds, and vivid with the
consciousness of a multitude of defined impressions.
That the whole movement, in spite of its energy, was crude,
unscientific, virtually abortive, is most true. That it was presided over
by a false conception of nature as a benign and purifying power, while
she is in truth a stern force to be tamed and mastered, if society is to
hold together, cannot be denied of the revolutionary movement then,
any more than it can be denied of its sequels now. Nor need we
overlook its fundamental error of tracing half the misfortunes and woes
of the race to that social union, to which we are really indebted for all
the happiness we know, including even this dignifying sensibility of the
woes of the race; and the other half to a fictitious entity styled destiny,
placed among the nethermost gods, which would be more rightly
regarded as the infinitely modifiable influence exercised by one
generation of ourselves upon those that follow.
Every one of these faults of thought is justly chargeable to Byron. They
were deeply inherent in the Revolution. They coloured