Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I | Page 9

thoughts about
government, about laws, about morals. They effected a transformation
of religion, but, resting on no basis of philosophical acceptance of
history, the transformation was only temporary. They spread a fantastic
passion of which Byron was himself an example and a victim, for
extraordinary outbreaks of a peculiar kind of material activity, that met
the exigences of an imperious will, while it had not the irksomeness of
the self-control which would have exercised the will to more permanent
profit. They destroyed faith in order, natural or social, actual or
potential, and substituted for it an enthusiastic assertion of the claims of

the individual to make his passions, aspirations, and convictions, a final
and decisive law.
Such was the moral state which Byron had to render and interpret. His
relation to it was a relation of exact sympathy. He felt the force of each
of the many currents that united in one destructive stream, wildly
overflowing the fixed banks, and then, when it had overflowed, often, it
must be confessed, stagnating in lazy brackish pools, while new
tributaries began to flow in together from far other quarters. The list of
his poems is the catalogue of the elements of the revolutionary spirit.
For of what manner is this spirit? Is it not a masterful and impatient
yearning after many good things, unsubdued and uninformed either by
a just knowledge of the time, and the means which are needed to bring
to men the fruits of their hope, or by a fit appreciation of orderly and
tranquil activity for the common service, as the normal type of the
individual life? And this is precisely the temper and the spirit of Byron.
Nowhere else do we see drawn in such traits that colossal figure, which
has haunted Europe these fourscore years and more, with its new-born
passion, its half-controlled will, its constant cry for a multitude of
unknown blessings under the single name of Freedom, the one known
and unadulterated word of blessing. If only Truth, which alone of
words is essentially divine and sacrosanct, had been the chief talisman
of the Revolution, the movement would have been very different from
that which we know. But to claim this or that in the name of truth,
would have been to borrow the language which priests and presbyters,
Dominic and Calvin, had covered thick with hateful associations.
Freedom, after all, was the next best thing, for it is an indispensable
condition of the best of all; but it could not lead men until the spirit of
truth, which means science in the intellectual order, and justice in the
social order, had joined company with it.
So there was violent action in politics, and violent and excessive
stimulation in literature, the positive effects of the force moved in each
sphere being deplorably small in proportion to the intense moral energy
which gave the impulse. In literature the straining for mental liberty
was the more futile of the two, because it expressed the ardent and
hopeless longing of the individual for a life which we may perhaps best

call life unconditioned. And this unconditioned life, which the Byronic
hero vainly seeks, and not finding, he fills the world with stormy
complaint, is least of all likely to offer itself in any approximate form to
men penetrated with gross and egotistical passions to their inmost core.
The Byronic hero went to clasp repose in a frenzy. All crimson and
aflame with passion, he groaned for evening stillness. He insisted on
being free, in the corroding fetters of resentment and scorn for men.
Conrad sought balm for disappointment of spirit in vehement activity
of body. Manfred represents the confusion common to the type,
between thirst for the highest knowledge and proud violence of
unbridled will. Harold is held in a middle way of poetic melancholy,
equally far from a speechless despair and from gay and reckless licence,
by contemplation of the loveliness of external nature, and the great
exploits and perishing monuments of man in the past; but he, equally
with the others, embodies the paradoxical hope that angry isolation and
fretful estrangement from mankind are equivalent to emancipation from
their pettiness, instead of being its very climax and demonstration. As
if freedom of soul could exist without orderly relations of intelligence
and partial acceptance between a man and the sum of surrounding
circumstances. That universal protest which rings through Byron's
work with a plangent resonance, very different from the whimperings
of punier men, is a proof that so far from being free, one's whole being
is invaded and laid waste. It is no ignoble mood, and it was a most
inevitable product of the mental and social conditions of Western
Europe at the close of the eighteenth century. Everlasting protest,
impetuous energy of will, melancholy and despondent reaction;--this